Lukas Seel: 0:00

This is episode 32 of Helios Horizons. We're joined in just a second by Tony Plasencia. That is the co-founder of Griffin, and we have a pretty interesting conversation because things have been rather crazy. Tony has been in this space for a bit, but everything's blown up and it's going to be quite interesting to talk about it. But, unlike other episodes, we don't have a full hour because Tony's schedule is so packed that he doesn't have a full hour. Something else came in I can't tell you what it is came in. I can't tell you what it is, so we're only going to do 30 minutes with Tony. Let him go and then have a conversation on everything that we talked about between the three of us. So I see Tony came in here, so we'll get him up to speak and get the show on the road. Let's see.

Tony Plasencia: 1:14

Tony, let's get him up. Lucas, check, check, lucas, my beautiful mustache man, how are you? How are you, tony? Good to see you. I'm alive, man. I'm so sorry that I had to cut it by 30 minutes. I had Forbes hit me up last minute and wanted to hop on a chat, so unfortunately I do have to do that. But I'm glad that we can make the time to chat, because I always love chatting with my mustache brothers.

Lukas Seel: 1:36

Things are happening. I was just in the conversation before telling people I couldn't talk about what you were doing and why you weren't available for 30 minutes. But here it is.

Tony Plasencia: 1:47

I was like, oh yeah, no, I just I realized I said it on Jakey's stream like a couple minutes ago, so I was like, fuck it, I might as well just say it here as well.

Lukas Seel: 1:57

It just slips out.

Tony Plasencia: 1:57

man, Sometimes you get so excited and things slip out.

Lukas Seel: 2:01

And this is really, I think, what I want to talk about today, because we only have a brief period of time. Things have been so crazy and I think it's worth exploring, kind of what happens when things like this happen, like out of the blue, within a few months, things go from zero to insane, but quickly. I kind of want to intro you and let you talk about you know, just kind of your true, wow, I can't speak the path that brought you here and how you, how things led to, yeah, how All Paths led to Solana, griffin, underdog and eventually, yeah, to this space.

Tony Plasencia: 2:51

Yeah, of course, of course, Thank you. So yeah, I was born and raised here in the Bay Area. I do competitive jiu-jitsu. I enjoy Arsenal. The North London Derby is today, so I will be watching that. Yeah, let's see, I'm a mama's boy. I love my mom. If you don't love your mom, I don't like you. Just joking.

Tony Plasencia: 3:13

But yeah, I was at Uber from 2016 to 2018, did supply acquisitions, so I pretty much was in charge of onboarding drivers offline, so at mall kiosks and events in San Francisco. And then I wrote playbooks to scale that program out to like Phoenix, toronto, chicago and LA. And then I went to a food tech company called ritualco where I did market expansion. I grew San Francisco from like a 100 merchants to 300 merchants and then launched Oakland and San Jose here in California and then went to Thumbtack, which is a big property tech company, and built a CPG product a consumer packaged, good product with nationwide insurance and sold that to their policyholders. That was like six years of my life insurance and sold that to their policyholders.

Tony Plasencia: 4:06

That was like six years of my life, really focused on growing marketplaces, doing business development and creating partnership ecosystems and then for around I guess now five years, built around four startups. So my first one was a SaaS company. We had a partnership with Stanford Health where we aggregated all of the information small businesses needed to stay COVID compliant. And then I built a creator economy startup. And then I built Underdog, which NFT API on Solana, won a Solana hackathon, worked with Solana Mobile, worked with Solana, worked with Superte, worked with Jupiter and then reached profitability last year.

Tony Plasencia: 4:49

We did about $1.3 million in revenue with Underdog last year and I think, like November, me and my co-founder were like you know what Using crypto is still really hard. We think we should try to create something like the chat GPT effect, where you put in a couple words and it gives you in sentences your answer and you should be able to say you want a couple things done on chain and then AI helps you do it and that's how Griffin came along. I would say November something like first week of November is when Griffin came along, so it's been a long. I would say November something like first week of November is when Griffin came along, so it's been a long. I would say eight, nine years of working and learning and meeting people before we got to Griffin, you got into it.

Tony Plasencia: 5:38

And I grew my mustache when I was like 12. So I don't know.

Lukas Seel: 5:41

Hopefully that's good context. Yeah, this is very important context. What I want to kind of touch on just for a moment is like I mean you were just talking about how difficult I think still the average user experience is in Web3, even on very developed ecosystems as Solana. Was this something you experienced when you first got into the space? Was there, like you know, at some point, some aha effect where you were like, oh, this is how it's supposed to be, but it's it's too rare, or it's something that's obviously something you worked on with with Underdog too. What was your first like touch point and how did that inform Griffin?

Tony Plasencia: 6:18

Yeah, yeah yeah, totally no. That's a great question, lucas. I think, like on the, how did it influence Griffin? We were at we did Art Basel for Solana and I was working with like I was at the convention center like onboarding these like 60, 70 year old art collectors and it took, on average, around 35 to 45 seconds to connect your email Oops, sorry, connect your email, wait, click and then do all of this and by then I'm a pretty.

Tony Plasencia: 6:50

I like to have conversation, I can talk, but these people were so checked out and like they just wanted to head out that I was like, fuck man, this is just way too hard, it takes too much time, and I think that experience is one of the nearest ones that I remember where, like, yeah, you know, I think something like Griffin makes a lot of sense.

Tony Plasencia: 7:08

But even going back to when I got started on Solana, when you're an early adopter, you jump through hoops in order to get things done, and I think that was the state where I was for a long time. But the more that crypto became part of my life and part of my business, I wanted to show people what I was doing and it became a lot to try to onboard these individuals. Right, they had to come to my house. I had to sit them down. Teach them all these different websites, tell them all this different information, show them how to like so, show them what a phantom wallet is, how to download it, where to write all this stuff. It's like this is too fucking much. It's never going to scale. And I think those two pieces like number one on the the, the art Basel side and then number two on kind of this, like long experience of wanting to onboard individuals, I realized the user experience is too complicated even for the smartest person.

Lukas Seel: 8:05

Yeah, and I think that's super interesting how you leverage that then into creating not only one bot that does something, but specialized agents that do different things. So I want to you know, like, when did that, what was the first sort of drive to come up with Griffin, what was the first initial idea and how has that developed since?

Tony Plasencia: 8:30

Yeah for sure, okay, sorry, Um, this thing wasn't turning off giving me my yeah, hey, relax, relax, uh, yeah, so, um, yeah, so I would say this it really started in August. My dad's an immigrant from Mexico. He got his green card recently and a lot of my family is still trying to get a lot of these different social services extended family, family, friends and I'd been hacking around with Claude and Chad GPT and I was like you know what? And my mom works at a clinic helping people with all of these different services and she would tell me her problems like it takes a lot of time. I have to translate documents, people have to upload them, they have to go from department to department, and I was like man, this is too much for a human. I feel like AI should be able to do this. So I got to working on something on Claude, which was essentially a welfare assistant that would help people apply for social welfare and get approved quicker. So I tried that with the clinic for a while and that was kind of my first foray into building an AI product.

Tony Plasencia: 9:44

I was just playing around, it was a side project and that insight of like look, crypto is still way too hard to use really hit me and Kevin or my co founder, and we went into the Agentic hackathon here in San Francisco that was sponsored by OpenAI, robinhood and Solana, and our thought was we can create an agentic wealth front. Wealth front is an automated investor for you in Web2. And we're like look, if we can have agents manage people's portfolios, then we think we've done a good job. And going back to the learning of crypto is still too hard for a lot of people, even for the smartest person. We realized that trading is only one part of crypto, but also the last part of the workflow, that if you want to trade something, you actually have to do a lot of research, you have to talk to a lot of different people and in order to do that, like I said earlier, you have to sit someone down, teach them the right news sources, teach them the right people to follow. And we were like actually there is a product here that enables you to simplify crypto. Simplify crypto to the point of just typing.

Tony Plasencia: 10:55

And so Griffin evolved really into two things. Number one is the personalized agent. The personalized agent can help you do what you'd like on chain, and these specialized agents are special agents that are trained on a specific protocol and can help you get jobs done through them. And so the approach there is like look, people are going to want agents that do specific things for them, but we also know that if we want jobs to be done across Solana, there needs to be agents that are trained specifically on these protocols on Helio, staking, on Lulo, on Acidash, on Riposa Because if they are, they will be more helpful for users who end up using Griffin. Let me know if I answered the question. By the way, I feel like I may have steered in different directions there.

Lukas Seel: 11:42

No, I think that's super interesting. They have steered in different directions there. No, I think that's super interesting and on point, which is this idea like onboarding people is hard. The smartest person can't really leverage Web3 to the degree that it should be appropriate for the smartest person to be able to do so, and there's way too much to learn and way too much to specialize in to actually get good at enough stuff in a short period of time. So, like these agents, and especially this agent that kind of controls other agents which I think is a super great idea this ecosystem of agents that can actually communicate, collaborate and get shit done together, I think that's such a leap. Was that the idea from the beginning or did kind of like hit any roadblocks that that made that a necessary development?

Tony Plasencia: 12:28

No, I think that was the, the, the intention from the beginning, right? Like we call this, the, the agent engine, for a reason. And the agent engine is an agent that delegates to other specialized agents in order to help you get jobs done across Solana and across crypto. So, very, very intentional to begin with. And that's where things like SAIMP, the Solana AI messaging protocol, come in, where what we want is your personalized agent, your Griffin agent, your personalized agent, to be able to communicate with all of the other agents on our network in order to get jobs done for you.

Lukas Seel: 13:07

Yeah, I mean super great. And let's talk about the ad store First of all. I think that name is brilliant. What is the ad?

Tony Plasencia: 13:15

store. I wish I could take credit, but, as you know, I said this in our chat earlier. But the other half is definitely the star of the show as well.

Lukas Seel: 13:24

Yeah, I want to talk about tiny, tiny founder teams and like the first billion dollar two person company in a second. But let's, let's get to the app store and the idea sort of where Griffin is currently heading toward and what your sort of short term midterm roadmap is and kind of how things are going to work.

Tony Plasencia: 13:44

Yeah for sure. So I think number one is we want to get 10 to 15 white label apps in the app store. The app store is going to be I don't want to speak too much on what the app store is going to be because there's a lot that we haven't announced yet that's in there, but the idea is you'll be able to find apps, experiences, that are aggregated on Griffin across Solana. They may be personalized agents from people who are on the network, they may be from specific projects and protocols, but the app store is a lot like what the app store is to the iPhone it's the aggregator of experiences. So that's the app store. Does that make sense?

Lukas Seel: 14:29

It does and I want to talk about in this case too, which is like early access is happening right now. So this is, I believe, across the Solana, mobile users and some invite codes, et cetera. Is there like a specific element which is interesting in Web3,? Is this like, let's say, collaboration between developers, teams and the community, kind of doing stuff together? You mentioned this idea of like. Basically, you know, I could perhaps write my own agent or create my own agent and have it in the ad store, maybe even monetize it. Is this something you guys are specifically sort of encouraging or looking at? Is that, at the moment, more of a distraction? How are you handling this sort of community feedback that's coming from the, from the early users, and how's it going? You?

Tony Plasencia: 15:13

know, I think, I think I'm like on the yeah, so so I?

Tony Plasencia: 15:16

There's like three questions in there. I'll make this one. Yeah, like on the on the ad store side, shut up, lucas. Um you, I think it's a really exciting experiment and I think a lot of people are very excited about how do I create my on-chain assistant and then give it the ability to help others. I think that's a really cool experience that I personally want to dive into deeper.

Tony Plasencia: 15:41

But to answer your question, feedback know, feedback feedback has been been missed and and this is coming from from a place of truth, right, like, I think, agent force, which is Salesforce, agent network, ui path, which is a really large enterprise automation company, these, these, they have like 50, 60% reliability rates when it comes to their agents being successful. So if Lucas wants to go to agent forces agents, it's only going to do the job correctly 60% of the time and you know, that's where I think the mixed, the mixed reviews come from. Is, sometimes these agents can be idiotic savants and they they sometimes misinterpret what you say or they don't understand what you say and won't do anything. So definitely been mixed reviews. I think, on the negative side, it's going to be us focusing on creating a reliable product and having interesting experiences for people to log on and experience agentically. I think on the great side is, like you know, we've had customer stories where people have gone from 0.1 soul to you know, $25,000, a hundred dollars to $25,000 using using some of our agents.

Tony Plasencia: 16:54

We've seen people turn their personalized agents into, into hedge funds, right, whether they're managing under a million dollars. We've seen people um, buy underwear under a million dollars. We've seen people buy underwear, buy phones, buy underwear, buy phones, using Griffin. So there's a lot of good and there's a lot of bad. But I think everything that we have to do has to come back to listening to our users and building with the community, and one big part of that has been support, and my support email is open. I'm looking through them pretty much every hour support at griffincom. So if you have any emails or any thoughts, just shoot in my way. But it's a mixed bag and the only thing that we want to do as a for users. It's a mixed bag for the market it's always great, but what we want to do is create a reliable product and we want to make sure our community feels empowered, and those are the two things that I think, regardless of what people are saying, we have to focus on.

Lukas Seel: 17:53

Yeah, and I want to kind of use that as a seg to talk about something that's very important in this moment which is, like you personally and your, you know this insane. You know workload, attention, all of this that comes with a product. So suddenly you know taking off and capturing all of this mindshare which is, like you know, you still read the support emails I think you're a team of two, correct me if I'm wrong Like, how has that? You know, like Underdog was very successful by, you know, reasonable metrics was very successful by reasonable metrics.

Lukas Seel: 18:27

But now all of a sudden, you're sitting on a token with a market cap of over 500 million, everything like. I see Zoe down there like even your dog has its own shout out. Zoe has its own token. That is going berserk. What does that do and how quickly did that happen? And you know, like, how are you coping with this, both like professionally and personally?

Tony Plasencia: 18:50

Yeah, for sure. Thank you for caring, lucas. I appreciate that question. I think Jakey asked me the same question today, so that's the well.

Tony Plasencia: 18:57

First of all, zoe. Zoe loves the attention. Zoe is my sweetheart. I love this dog with all my heart and right now I wish you guys could see her, but she's on the couch absorbing her son. So as I'm like walking around in the living room, I'm like blocking the sun from her and she's just looking at me, pissed off. So, zoe, I think you know she just she's just like this is my dad. He snores in his sleep, he takes the blankets for me, me, he puts my feet on it, he puts his feet on my stomach when he's asleep. So I think she's coping with it just fine in terms of me, yeah, like I told Jakey, right, like Lucas, you know this too I don't think my personality or what I've said or how I said things has changed from underdog to griffin.

Tony Plasencia: 19:39

I feel the comfort, I feel comfortable getting the positive reception from the community and me being myself. So I think that helps me cope a lot where, like, look, tony, you don't have to be someone that you're not, just go out and be yourself, and people have been enjoying it and have been enjoying listening to your insights, so I think that's been one really big part. In terms of momentum, you know they say that there's like a you want momentum at your back when you're building a company and you don't want momentum pushing towards you. Um, because what you're doing when you're building a company is rolling a boulder up a gigantic hill, um, and either you can have momentum with you pushing it up the hill or you can have momentum going onto that rock pushing you down and for underdog, more often than not it felt like that rock was pushing down versus the rock pushing up. And so with Griffin, we have a ton of momentum and that momentum turns into distribution, which then just turns into more momentum, and it's exciting. It's really, really exciting because this is the type of stuff that not just web three founders look for, but Web2 founders look for. Founders who build companies want this type of distribution. They dream about it, they would die for it and we're at the. We have it. And it makes me really happy because the community sees the vision that we have for the world and we've been executed.

Tony Plasencia: 21:02

How I've been coping with it. I mean I go to jujitsu pretty much like two to three times a week. Um, I'm in there for like an hour and a half, two hours. I'm usually like five to 7 PM PST. So if you notice, I'm not tweeting during that time, that's what I'm doing. Um, that really has helped me a lot. Um just kind of go in there, choke some people, um get choked, um learn a lot and just get into flow.

Lukas Seel: 21:30

Um, what else has helped me? Um, man eating, eating, well, you eating.

Tony Plasencia: 21:32

Sure, yeah, I'm eating well, I, I, I have gotten into the habit of eating until like 4 PM, which has been bad, but, um, yeah, I mean like jujitsu really is one of those things that you know has broken my body but has definitely saved my mind and has been a lot of fun building Griffin, because, like I said, the momentum that we have right now is something that founders dream of.

Lukas Seel: 21:56

Are you guys looking into expanding the team pretty aggressively? What's the sort of kind of business plan that you guys are following?

Tony Plasencia: 22:04

Yeah, we aren't. We aren't actually, so this is a two-person team. Like I mentioned before, we built a million dollar business last year on Solana. I won't speak too much to the revenue that we've generated with Griffin, but it is a pretty heavy amount as well. So we're pretty confident in what we can do. My co-founder has worked at large hedge funds in the past large tech startups. I've also done growth and product at startups, so we feel pretty confident with the skills that we have. But once we start to get more demand and more users, I think it might be time to start to bring people on and hire the team. But we'll cross that bridge when it comes towards us.

Lukas Seel: 22:47

And we touched on it briefly. But how long do you expect for this first phase, like the private, closed beta testing, to last until you actually have a product you're satisfied enough with?

Tony Plasencia: 23:04

I didn't even finish this part. Thank you so much, lucas, for bringing that back up. So, yeah, like 10 to um ads in the ad store that we want to have, um mobile, uh release on the solana seeker, um and then opening up the network, I think are the three big things that we want to do um on the uh for the rest of the year at least. Going into into q3, um q3 is when uh griffin will be integrated completely into AssetDash. But the question was, how long are we going to keep this closed until we open it up? Yeah, so our thinking is we want to keep it closed for two reasons for as long as possible for two reasons there's a feedback loop. It's feedback loop and also quality of network.

Tony Plasencia: 23:54

And I think we're getting to a good point where we're ironing out what a feedback loop can look like. So I expect for us to start opening up the network, or at least some of the agents, to free capability or maybe some other type of capability in the next quarter where you'll be able to interact with parts of Griffin Not the entire network, but possibly parts of it. So we're thinking in the next quarter or two we will start opening it up, but until then, you'll start to see a lot more invites and be able to find more invites from people For what it's worth. Every post, as well, has an invite code, so you just have to scroll until the end of the post to find the invite code.

Lukas Seel: 24:40

Oh, I had no idea I would have gotten my code earlier.

Tony Plasencia: 24:44

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of people just need to scroll and read.

Lukas Seel: 24:47

Amazing. Yeah, that's always a problem in this space. I want to be the one person that's mindful of your time, so we have about three minutes left here before you have to jump on the other call and I can't let you go without having a little bit of a word on sort of the broader perspective AI, changing Web3 or interacting with Web3, what you kind of think your take overall is, on the macro level, where this is going and also, of course, then how you see Griffin fitting in there.

Tony Plasencia: 25:15

Yeah, one of my really, really, really good friends was the former head of Siri at Apple, so he built all things Siri at Apple for a couple of years. He left Apple about eight months ago to build a startup specifically using crypto as the financial rails for the agent. So I'll just zoom out a little bit and kind of observe there If the head of Siri from Apple is using crypto to build an AI company, I think that tells you where we're going to head. Where we're going to head is these agents are going to be taking action for you across the web. In order for them to take action for you and create transactions and execute transactions and sign things for you, they're going to need a wallet, and where that wallet is going to be, in our opinion, is going to be on Solana, and where those agents are going to be interacting with the web for you is going to be Griffin. So it's not a meta Constantly I'll chat with my friends here in San Francisco and they're working on AI, they're working on crypto, they're working on Web2, saas, but the reality that they realize is these AI agents.

Tony Plasencia: 26:29

This AI will need crypto in order to transact and interact for you on the web or with each other, and I just think people need to zoom out and look at stuff outside of Web3, because you know a company like 11xai. 11xai is creating digital workers that automate SDRs, sales development representatives for SaaS companies, and they've saved some companies upwards of a million dollars because a human doesn't have to prospect or research or send an outbound email anymore. It's all done through an agent. So look outside of crypto. A lot of stuff is already happening using AI.

Lukas Seel: 27:10

Yeah, and I think that's such an interesting point that I think people in the crypto bubble forget there's so much that has been going on in that specific realm already. We're adopting it here and, like you were saying, I think I'm not sure if you published that manifesto yet, but basically giving agents a body which is the blockchain right, that is such an important step and it's going to be the native way of AI actually being able to interact with humans, with each other and with products, and I think, yeah, such an interesting thing. Tony, again, I want to be mindful of your time so I will let you go, but maybe some closing thoughts on you know what's next, or anything you're particularly excited about in particular, and then actually we'll go into a little panel discussion here afterwards and discuss you and AI and everything else.

Tony Plasencia: 28:03

You're going to talk about me behind my goddamn back.

Lukas Seel: 28:07

It's all recorded.

Tony Plasencia: 28:09

I know I'm sorry, guys. I am really sad that I couldn't stay longer than the 30 minutes. This thing got put on my fucking schedule last minute. Lucas, I really am sorry, but I appreciate you being so flexible.

Lukas Seel: 28:21

No worries at all.

Tony Plasencia: 28:23

The thing that I'm really excited about is the Raposa Coffee agent, raposa Coffee Co. If everyone here can follow them, that would mean a lot to me. They're an awesome team. They're Solana native, they're a CPG brand. They have a roastery, I think in the States. They have a Shopify store that does like six figures worth of digital sales. They're at like every Solana event.

Tony Plasencia: 28:47

I'm really excited about what we're going to do with them. You know, imagine a world where you forgot your. I'm really excited about what we're going to do with them. Imagine a world where your partner forgot to order your coffee and you're able to go on the Griffin mobile app and order your coffee. All that is deducted through your wallet. And I love their coffee. It's in my fridge consistently. My partner loves the coffee as well, zoe loves the coffee as well, so I would say that's the one that I'm really excited about the Raposa coffee agent, shopify agent in smaller words. But yeah, that's what I got. I got to hop off, lucas. I appreciate you, my mustache brother, and I hope everyone here has a great day. Just drink some water, try to get outside and get some sun and remember to be grateful for being alive and healthy. So we'll chat soon, everyone.

Lukas Seel: 29:31

Do some jujitsu. Thank you so much, Tommy.

Tony Plasencia: 29:34

Yeah, today I definitely will train. I appreciate you, bye-bye.

Lukas Seel: 29:36

Have a good one, bye-bye. All right. Welcoming to the stage Kevin. Also behind the Helios account is John. What's up, guys, just saying hello for a moment. What up? What up? Hey, just saying hello for a moment Word up, what up?

Lukas Seel: 29:52

Hey man, that was very insightful, that was very enjoyable to listen to A fast one, but I think it's an actual interesting format just doing a 30-second sort of lightning round of everything and that's kind of an interesting format there. So main takeaways for you guys Like talked about AI perhaps as this not just a meta thing, um, but but something that's really there to stay.

Kevin Lydon: 30:20

We have a lot of um feedback main takeaways for me is is, as always, is that you know you shouldn't be looking to just crypto and blockchain to be developing and all that sort of stuff, right With the world evolving and AI and stuff. Like he was talking about that 11, 11 X or whatever these guys who are doing, you know, sales agents for companies and like that's a that's a huge, huge, huge market. And I think what's important here is that, like, with the adoption of AI and everything, not everything's going to be just blockchain, not everything's going to be just AI. It's going to be these hybrid things and web too, and I think the message there, one of the big messages here, is that bringing everything together is what's going to bring the next wave of adoption. And I was very appreciative to hear that about him. John, you might want to mute yourself while you're not talking. There you go, but yeah, so that's basically what I took away from most of it. I mean the other stuff, like I mean, the speed at which he's growing is just insane. So it's kind of cool to hear about that and just ask him how he's doing, because I don't think many people do. And especially, it just goes to show that when you have a good product and you've worked hard enough and and it starts to kick up steam and you know you have a community behind you. How fast things can happen.

Kevin Lydon: 31:51

I mean, this guy was supposed to be with us for an hour today and then, you know, forbes called. He was on mario just before us, you know what I mean. And then in between he got us and it's like so like we're lucky just to have him, um, but like the fact is, is that like, it's like just you know, at new year's, lucas goes to me. He's like, oh, kev, you gotta check out griffin. And no, no, no, no, it was like new year's eve, and and uh, and I'm like, oh, I was too busy doing, um, doing perp trades for the new year's bounce that usually happens and and uh, which did uh, by the way, but I I didn't even think about it. And then he goes to me. He's like, oh, yeah, griffin's like gone five, six, x. Then I'm like, oh, what you know? And uh, and it was, it was just this thing.

Kevin Lydon: 32:31

And then, all of a sudden, you know, it's all like the, the community, and and crypto, soul and and and all this stuff and and and and press is is getting a hold of this guy and and it's just happening for him so quick and so fast that you know it's coming at him in every which direction. So it was nice to hear, um, how he's handling that and that sort of stuff. Um, and and I I think it's coming at him in every which direction. So it was nice to hear how he's handling that and that sort of stuff. And I think it's important that people understand out there that if you work hard at something and you put your time in and build your community, when things ignite, they ignite.

Kevin Lydon: 33:07

I think Snoop Dogg once said he's like once I turned 18, everything just blew up for me. From then he's like it was weird. He's like it was like it was like on his 18th birthday, within days he was, he was dre, was contacted and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then he was snoop within like months and and that's how fast it happens. You know it's like the, the whole m&m thing. You know when opportunity knocks, you got one chance, you know open the door and it just all happens. So you know it just.

JB Carthy: 33:35

It's a good, inspirational story and uh, about working hard and becoming uh, what you uh deserve to be on your take and yeah, no for sure, like Snoop Dogg might have waited till he's 18, but like I'm nearly 33 and I'm still waiting for things to happen. But yeah, the conversation was super interesting and for me there was three points about AI. So, first of all, the barriers to building being lowered. So now the space between idea and execution is a lot narrower and people can speak the language of code without actually coding. It's like having a translator that speaks English to computers. And now people who have great ideas that may previously have been restricted by not being able to get coders or people to execute them and bring them to life, now can speak a normal language to AI and AI will be able to help build them and bring them to life.

JB Carthy: 34:29

Then the second thing obviously, the repose coffee barista and in terms of bringing e-commerce and on chain ai, being able to operate as a sales agent means, like the barriers to doing things on chain are even being lowered. So not only building things on chain, but interacting on chain. In terms of like one of the things we always talk about is like abstract abstraction and complexity and trying to lower it. How how much simpler can it get than like speaking the language you speak on the daily and typing a message in or speaking a message in and getting this, can I just say I love.

Lukas Seel: 35:04

I love that the inspiration there actually came from, from this immigration center and being like, okay, there's all this stuff, like that humans really can't compute. There's so much translation literally translation between languages that needs to be done, documents to be sifted through, and this is what agents are for right, this is where they can really do the heavy lifting and go through so much, so much, faster. And I think, exactly like this, this idea of translating Web3 into words and language, that's, that's so important. But sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. Third point John.

JB Carthy: 35:41

Oh, 100 percent. Like that's exactly far more eloquently than I could have put it, but just like it's far easier. These agents are making it way easier for people who know less about blockchain and less about crypto to start leveraging and experiencing the power of the technology and what it can offer, and technical barriers are no longer as significant. And probably the third is, like when he talked about the guy from Siri, or like when I say guy from Siri, he's talking about a person who's responsible for developing Siri for Apple and is looking at developing, like at the intersection of ai and crypto, and I suppose when you see people who are far smarter than I am and getting involved in the space, it gives me confidence that it's probably a good. It's a good direction to start exploring and learning more about.

JB Carthy: 36:25

You know, and like kevin was talking about, kevin was talking about the when lucas was explaining griffin, the and the griffin token to us and it went like 6x. And like I also faded um griffin, the griffin token, but I'm not too late to buy griffin's dog. It's like there's a never. There's a never-ending um supply of derivatives. I wonder when it will end. When will, when will?

JB Carthy: 36:49

there be a token for, like Griffin's dogs, puppies On a serious note no, super interesting conversation.

Lukas Seel: 37:00

What do you guys think? I mean throwing this to Kevin first. I think there's this interesting development towards something where it's like fewer and fewer people can generate more and more value and have like very interesting like companies and things that are actually doing a lot of work in the real world, but your staff is just minimal. We already see like all of the layoffs happening all over the place, obviously because humans are being replaced by ai. But how do you see this, this like sort of development? Have you, if you looked into any project that kind of um take full advantage of this? And how long? I'm not actually sure any company has yet um reached a billion dollar market cap with just one person, but like we're surely getting there. How do you see that development playing out at the moment?

Kevin Lydon: 37:46

yeah, maybe not a billion with one person, but a good example, just a macro level example, is, you know, elon going into Twitter and was like all these people were just pointless, right, and he's like he realized he could run it on a skeleton, crew driven and experts in their field who aren't being held back by managers, who aren't being held back by supervisors, who aren't being held back by strategy documents, and they're allowed to breathe and do their own thing. Experts exceed, that's why they're experts. And I think this whole idea of these one-person team or two-people team, in actuality they're not actually. They might be, on paper, a one to two person team, but they have ai helping them, they probably have contractors, so they never really are a one person team. Uh, on paper, there are.

Kevin Lydon: 38:42

Technically, helios is a one person team, if you want to talk about that in that way. Right. So helios, the only real employee of helios is me and I only pay myself the very minimum at which I have to pay myself within the Dutch regulations. The rest John Lucas, mark, lawyers, accountants are all contracted out and so, technically, on paper, if I go, if, if, if, if, if I were to go to sell, we have two, two other founders, that's Mark and Michael, but if that was a case study, I could say I was a one-person team, because I am the only true employee to Helios Staking, so you've got to look at it that way too, right, and not that that is what's happening in this situation, I think, because of AI and what Griffin are doing in there, what a three-person team or a two-person team? Two, yeah, so Kevin, and so it's just me really. But, yeah, kevin and Tony, but they've definitely got some legal help, they've definitely got some accounting help, and so what I'm trying to get at here is one person can run a company if they know who they need to do things that they don't know how to do, and instead of paying them $100,000, $200,000 a year to sit on their ass and you only pick up the phone like, legal, I only need maybe twice a year Accounting, I only need every quarter, right?

Kevin Lydon: 40:08

So I don't have this guy sitting in an office. I'm like well, what are you doing, you know? Oh well, can you just like? Like, for accounting is a good example, right, like? So I hire an accountant internally.

Kevin Lydon: 40:19

Guy sits down, he starts, but he has nothing to do. So what do I get him to do. Oh, you know what? Look for trends, look for this, look where we can save money, look where we can do this, and really it's all just busy work until the quarterly returns or payrolls come, or dividends or annual returns, right.

Kevin Lydon: 40:34

And so right now I'm paying, you know, about five grand a year on accounting, or I could pay you know, 80 maybe for a good accountant to sit on their ass and probably give me not much more value, right? So a good person, tony and Kevin and the likes of people like us, know how to extract maximum value by finding experts out there who are running their own companies, right. So Lucas, for example, he's got his hands in a bunch of things. John has his hands in a bunch of things. Lucas, for example, he's got his hands in a bunch of things. John has his hands in a bunch of things and they're out there thriving but are also providing value back to Helios, right, and together we move as a unit and aren't kind of beat down by the traditional corporate structure. So I think that's more what's happening here.

Lukas Seel: 41:29

Yeah, I think super interesting because this is a case study and I think we're living in a bunch of case studies where companies have turned into these collectives of individuals that are somewhat transient but are providing a lot of value in their field of expertise not necessarily full-time, not really all day, but they, you know, have this great expertise that is enriched by bringing it to different companies by.

Lukas Seel: 41:58

You know, for example, john is obviously doing content not just for Helios but for several other companies and you know, like there's all of these and again, like what you were saying about Tony and Kevin from Griffin, doing this, like with the help of others, who can really develop a skill in a certain area and be really good at it and really effective at it in a short period of time, that is much cheaper as a cost for a company, provides a lot of value and a lot of value that can be extracted in the short period of time while they go and provide this value in different companies. And then, you know, it's very interesting and this, enhanced and coupled with something that is an AI agent or an army of AI agents that then even contribute even more in different areas where humans are certainly falling behind in terms of effectiveness is a very, very interesting glimpse, I guess, into the future, of what these industries, and especially tech industry, will look like.

Kevin Lydon: 43:06

I don't know yeah, I mean it's it's. It's it's exciting because it it creates empowerment in the individual and these experts right, and it's it's it's whether or not people at the top give that power to these people to go right. So john, for example I'll use john as one of the good examples is he came to me and and and he was, uh, he was working in a fitness company, a fitness place, working early mornings, but wanted to do content and kept on me about wanting to do content. How can I help? How can I help? And eventually he wore me down because he doesn't quit, but I said you know what?

Tony Plasencia: 43:46

No, I don't.

Kevin Lydon: 43:50

So I said to him you know what, let's give you a chance with some some, some writing and maybe do some twitter. And and he started to do a good job and then and I was like, okay, this kind of works, you know. And then, and then you know, he kept saying like I kept saying to him like you know, you know, like there's more time here, but you know, I kind of gave him like the basically just telling him about you know, know how I started my web two company, how you know you could turn this into a business, but you can't be working in a fitness, at a fitness place, but also get all these new clients. So he got his first, he got, uh, galileo, I think, was his next client, and then, and then Levana, and then then I kind of really said to him like, look, you need to stop with the fitness and full focus in into this business and and and and what it did was is. I think what it did is is is empowered.

Kevin Lydon: 44:42

Empowered, john, to become more of an expert and more of an authority on, you know, uh, evergreen content and communication, uh. And he's been picked up by another, uh, another company, I believe. Now I think you're at four or maybe even five now, I don't know. But like he has quite a bit of uh of stuff, but he's becoming, you know, very much so an expert at at a very specific thing and that's consistency and and and and and content and and it and it's probably one of the most important things with communication is just consistency, and that's why people are flocking to him and what it's done is it's empowered him to not be another cog in a machine. I could have taken him in as an employee and then he just would have been in there as a cog and potentially got bored, and then whatever, this brings him more excitement. So I think that's kind of the big thing. Lucas is looking at me right now we're in the same room right now with his hand up, so I think that means he wants to say something.

Lukas Seel: 45:49

Yeah, this is funny, there's a slight delay between us in this stream so I can't even look at him because it's async. But yeah, I wanted to bring in something which is this idea that you were kind of mentioning there, which is this balls-to-the-walls founder kind of mode, which is really like taking your own destiny into your own hand. And it's very interesting because this technology or this space really empowers that. But you need to dare, and you need to dare greatly and at some point you need to leave behind other stuff that you were doing and really commit to something. And you know, maybe bringing John into this conversation just as like an experience, like how was that for you? You know, like jumping into something you were interested in and then really kind of quitting the old job, getting into the new one and now like finding some success here.

JB Carthy: 46:39

Yeah, and I appreciate, first of all, like kind words from Kevin and I appreciate like all the help you've given me over the years, like first of all, and I would say probably the learning point is similar. And I would say probably the learning point is similar. We were talking about how AI allows people to get greater leverage over their time, do things they thought previously were unscalable or impossible. Technology has kind of allowed people to transcend and eliminate like geographical constraints, which has kind of opened up new avenues for value. But like I would say, like working with Kevin, getting the opportunity to speak to him, and like him teaching me and helping with his experience, taught me that um, essentially that value is not always directly related to time, and like to value outputs more than time, if that makes sense. And I think that's where AI is really coming in.

JB Carthy: 47:29

Um, I look at now around and you go like okay, people can generate like podcasts, people can generate videos, people can generate all sorts of um creative expressions that they previously that were previously thought impossible to scale or impossible to create without um, without human effort, and so really now it's moving to a point of the strategy the vision, the output is more valuable than the amount of time that went into the output and obviously I don't know ultimately where this all leads in the end, like where we're going to be in like two, three years.

JB Carthy: 48:01

The ultimate impact AI is going to have on the world Like I wish I did. I wish I could predict the future, but I do think it's going to be a really interesting time for people who are creative, have vision, have perseverance and they have all these new technologies that they can explore and that they can use to like bring value on a greater scale than ever before and do do things on a scale that were previously thought um impossible or unscalable, and if that makes sense and I think one keyword here is actually agency.

Lukas Seel: 48:31

Right, I mean, it's funny that we're talking about agents and all of this stuff, but it's something where it's like okay, we're at a point where you can really take responsibility for what you're doing, figure out great outcomes, kind of figure out a path for yourself and where you can really provide value and then kind of work back to bringing that to the world.

Lukas Seel: 48:51

And I think that's super interesting. Kevin and I talked about some automations and things that he did early on in his career and maybe, kevin, you want to touch on that in a second. But I think this is so interesting, like really finding things like okay, here is either a business opportunity or an opportunity where I, with my particular skill set, can really provide some great value and I can enhance this value with all of these new tools that includes AI very crucially at this point and bring this to the world. And I think, like you know, kevin went from, you know, an internet business or like figuring out how to do some stuff on the internet to really building businesses and just it's about seeing opportunity and then seizing. And this is where agents and agency probably comes in very heavily in the future, including AI, for sure.

Kevin Lydon: 49:44

I think something to say there is.

Kevin Lydon: 49:45

You know, those who can't do teach right and so.

Kevin Lydon: 49:50

But before I move forward with the automation stuff and that stuff, I think it's really important that if you're going to run a company, do you want someone who's got the skin in the game to be helping you or do you want to just hire someone who's looking for a job? Right Chances are, if you hire someone who's looking for a job, they they're too afraid because they can't do what they've learned. They just want to be put into a machine and be told what to do. Someone who's got skin in the game owns their own business. They're trying and they're canning let's say those who can you know. So they're not teaching, they're actually becoming that. So I think it's important just to be aware of that before I move forward. So on the automation thing so I come from like the early days of web and I still actually don't use AI, because I do use AI here or there. But I built so many automations, like so many through Zapier and scripts and like all this stuff, and I have so many things that just work already and it was all manual. But when something came in that I didn't know the answer to, I'd get flagged and then I'd write automation for that Right. So instead of now, where AI will just figure it out for you back then, what you do is you write, basically you know there's a bunch of different programs you can use, but you basically have a workflow and that workflow would have a desired entry goal. And let's just talk about like lead automation, because that's basically what I used it for the most, and even now it's like email automation, stuff like that. But a lead would come in and then I wanted to tell that lead one thank you for the message. But then I wanted to know who that lead was, and so I built personas. Maybe there was a checkbox on the lead form that put them into a thing, and then I'd have another little thing. But then they'd ask me a question and I'd analyze that question and say, okay, well, I always answer this to this question. So then I'd create a new workflow, so another branch that would answer someone who asked this question. But then someone would ask me a question I didn't know, so I'd answer that and then I'd make a new branch, then I'd make a new branch and I'd make a new branch, and so forth Until my workflows had so much automation that to recreate it would just be insane.

Kevin Lydon: 52:25

And then, analyzing all this data, you had to take this data into spreadsheets and then put it into Power BI, which Power BI which is a Microsoft product, I believe yeah, that was part of Excel was visualized, everything and you could ask. So I worked for a company called Nesta for a really long time and and it was a self storage company you could say you could say to it do people buy self storage units when it's raining? And power BI, if you put all the data in, it would say no, it's not. It's not that common for people to buy units on days that it's raining, right, and this was business intelligence. They didn't call it AI because you still had to get. You still had to compile the data because pile the spreadsheets, but then through automations, using Zapier, you could automatically bring that data into the spreadsheets. That would automatically go into Power BI. But you had to do this all manually or with scripts and all that sort of stuff. So now with AI, you just say, hey, I can do this, and then within a few hours maybe even less you probably get all this data. So like it'll just analyze your data for you and tell you what you want it to know because it's just so powerful, which you know kind of pisses me off, to be honest, because the amount of nights I spent awake learning how to do this stuff Like I remember, I had to like pass a course to become certified to do this one job for this massive insurance company, who I can't name, but I did automate and build the intranet for one of the biggest insurance companies in the world and I did it actually with a team of two and I did it all through.

Kevin Lydon: 53:50

But I had become certified in this iso for automation. I had to take this course and I I was up so late trying to figure it out, banging my head against the wall. It was the most painful thing. But after I did it, I had this like product that was worth so much money that people were just lining up to get it. But now, you know, come ai and I'm like motherfucker, that's like samuel l jackson comment. Um, I'm like motherfucker, that's my Samuel L Jackson comment. I'm like you mean that doesn't work. I'm like this sucks, but I mean I'm stronger because I learned how to do it myself and I don't think I'll ever regret that. So Lucas has his hands up again.

Lukas Seel: 54:27

I mean, this is actually an interesting thing, right? I think AI can do a lot of great stuff if you know how to use it, and can also make you shit at everything you actually should be able to do. Right, there's so much that I think it can do. If you're a good writer, with AI, ai can help you. If you're a shitty writer, you're going to turn into some like GPT output.

Lukas Seel: 54:51

That sounds awful, and I think there's so much skill still to be learned. And it's not just handling AI, it's really skill, like you know, learning how to automate things, just kind of grasping the general logic of like, okay, this flow needs to happen for an AI to convert, like a lead into a conversion, right, and I think there's a lot of skill there to be had. But I think you know what a great example of how powerful AI is like nights and weekends and you know months, however long you spend on these tools and developing and really going down all these decision trees and paths and really going down all these decision trees and paths and programming everything and now you can literally just say, hey, ai, when something like this these scenarios happen, then you can do this.

Kevin Lydon: 55:44

Yeah, well for sure. So the thing is is you're already seeing. So back then there used to be like, oh, learn how to make money from dropshipping, and you still see this stuff all the time. It's like, oh, learn how to make money from dropshipping, and you still see this stuff all the time. It's like, oh, learn how to make $5,000 a month residually through dropshipping. But now you're seeing people say, oh, I created an AI program that does everything for me and earns me $5,000 a month. Find out here now.

Kevin Lydon: 56:08

And 99% of the people will not be able to make this work, and usually it's after the fact. So all these people who are selling you this idea are actually selling you something that's already been saturated, and now they're just trying to squeeze the last bit of money out of the education, like the ai agents for, like um, trading bots and managing hedge, hedge funds and all that sort of stuff. All that's really powerful because if you know your trading parameters and managing hedge funds and all that sort of stuff, all that's really powerful because if you know your trading parameters and stuff, you can tell it what to do right, and if you have a certain way of trading for example, I trade based on MACD trends and the Bollinger Bands, and I buy when it's below average and it's below the zero point on MACD. And then I I that's that's how I, that's how I do swing trading, short-term trading, and I just set it to do that. And then it can do that for you.

Kevin Lydon: 57:02

Yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly. There's a lot of things I can do it, but like grid. It's basically grid trading in a way too Right, but like, but like. You still know what, need to know how to input it. And there were bots back before AI that did trading one that I used, that was really good, but you still didn't know what to input. And then people were selling, were selling templates, right. So now that's what you're starting to see. You're starting to see people starting to sell the prompts in order to make bots that will quote unquote, make you money.

Kevin Lydon: 57:33

But once there's too many of them, if everyone's's doing the same thing, then it's not going to work, because if everyone's trading in the same way, then you get this cluster, cluster, fuck, it's swear. This is the most swearing on ever, ever on any horizons but you get these people all doing the same thing, then it doesn't work anymore. And at the same time, because it's all prompt the same. So you gotta like it's. It's kind of like what lucas said.

Kevin Lydon: 57:54

Like you know, I think anyone if they were stuck in in a jungle, could, with no shoes, could probably make themselves some kind of foot protection, right, but not everyone's gonna have great foot protection, there's gonna be one person who has this like crazy, awesome shoe, that's like how the hell did you make that? And then that one person is gonna have to make it for everybody else, right, and and if you don't know how to prompt and know what to say and have unique ideas, doesn't matter. Like ai is not going to save you, like that's the thing. Like ai is not going to save your business, but you need to know how to use it, and I think that's the point point Lucas was really getting at there.

Lukas Seel: 58:32

Yeah, yeah, yeah, perfectly neat, we hit the one hour mark. I think this is some some great stuff to kind of end on yeah, john, any any last thoughts on on this wide ranging topic.

JB Carthy: 58:46

No, I think you, you guys, have covered a lot, but I suppose, following on from what kevin said, you know, um, like ai may change, like the methods of delivery, the methods of implementation. It may change, like just how things are, our work, how things work, but the principles behind why those things are needed will rarely change. Sorry, I'm actually I'm actually in london at the moment, like trying to find a place to call from, so like, apologies for the motorbikes in the background. Um, but um, yeah, so it's like ai may change the methods of how people deliver, marketing, deliver sales and but essentially, the principles of why those things are necessary and needed and the understanding of how, of why they work will be important, and how people implement the technology. So there's like a saying it's like methods, many principles do.

JB Carthy: 59:31

Methods change, principles never do. And though ai will probably change how we work and like how things are delivered, the core reasons of the core values and principles as to why these things are necessary will rarely change. All humans, like as tony said earlier, like, still need to eat, still need to drink water, still need to touch grass, still need to exercise and have relationships, and, like AI is going to make things possible that previously thought were impossible. But the job of humans will still just to be be humans and be good people and to, like, help each other through life, you know.

Lukas Seel: 1:00:04

That's a very touchy note to end on. Let's let's cut it here. Want to thank Tony obviously for coming on, even though he's not here anymore. Kevin and John, thank you so much for your thoughts on this. Quite interesting what awaits and what's in the future here. So this was Helios Horizons, episode 32, with Griffin co-founder Tony Plasencia. Some very interesting thoughts on what's happening and how this will impact the future, and just like what kind of happens when you go from zero to $500 million market cap and an idea from November to January just reaches this kind of mindshare. Quite mind-boggling and very, very interesting. So thank you everybody for listening, thank you for tuning in, um, and we'll see you next week with another episode. Um, bye, bye for now. Cheers guys.