Episode 35: Tamer | Egos Paradise - NFT Gated Communities for Entrepreneurs, Dreamers, & Creatives
Newsletter Copy?
Status
EGOS PARADISE
Timestamps
00:00 - 01:14 - Intro
01:14 - 04:40 - Guest Introduction
04:40 - 08:16 - Importing Culture
08:16 - 09:53 - Web3 as a philosophy
09:53 - 12:17 - Early days of the Egos Paradise project
13:16 - 15:22 - Ego's paradises NFT Membership Club
15:22 - 17:27 - The Idea of NFT Membership
17:27 - 21:37 - What does entrepreneur mean to you?
21:37 - 23:55 - Regenerative Economics
23:55 - 25:59 - Importance of life hack perks to the project
25:59 -26:42 - What stage is Ego’s Paradise?
26:42 - 28:17 - Partnership Roles in Web3 projects
28:17 - 29:15 - Future of Egos Paradise
29:53 - 30:33 - Outro
TRANSCRIPT
Humpty Calderon: Welcome to Crypto Sapiens, a show that hosts lively discussions with innovative web3 builders to help you learn about decentralised money systems, including Ethereum, Bitcoin and Defi. The podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only, and it is not financial advice.
Crypto Sapiens is presented in partnership with BanklessDAO, a movement for pioneers seeking freedom from the limitations of the traditional financial system.
BanklessDAO will help the world go bankless by creating user-friendly on-ramps for people to discover decentralised financial technologies through education, media, and culture
Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Crypto Sapiens. Today we welcome Tamer, co-founder of Streetwear brand, Jobedu, and artist behind the NFT community project, Egos Paradise. We talk with them about building authentic, multicultural communities, what it means to be an entrepreneur in Web3, and applying regenerative economics to digital and physical projects. There's lots to unpack in this episode. So without further ado, let's get started.
Tamer: I guess it's the question of "when Web3". I starts when you start building your moral compass, really when you start knowing why are you, what are you doing, what are you giving back and what are you building? And that question for me has always been at the back of my head. And starting in 2007 ,my high school friend and I, we wanted to create a brand, an energetic brand that youth in the region can relate to. We like, just to, give you a little background, I'm from the Middle East. For the most part we've been importing culture. And which is natural with Hollywood and the merchandising of Hollywood and Superman and Batman and all that. So in the 70's and the 80's we grew up with Western culture to the extent where we didn't pay much attention to our own and that was disconnect. That created a very big disconnect between people in the region and where they live, the culture, the grass was always greener on the other side.
So we came up with the idea of Jobedu, which manifested in t-shirts but it was really an expression of local pop culture. And that's where our movement started really in 2007 in a street market. And with $4,000, we made 600 t-shirts which carrying six designs and nobody knew us, nobody knew what we stood for, but they could relate to the messages on the T-shirt and it was, it was one of the first time Arabic was on merchandise. It's very hard to think of it from other cultural perspectives, you know, like how come there wasn't any, there was no reason it wasn't a social barrier, it was just never done because it was easier to sell no fear T-shirts or Metallica T-shirts. And that's where our journey started. I would say it’s, Web3 was kind of the driving element even though it didn't exist. But we set out Jobedu to build a community and that's where our slogan came from “Join the tribe”. In this part of the world, being part of a tribe means a lot . It means that you belong to a certain, I understand the easiest way to say it, it could be a class. So a lot of people are born tribeless, really. They're not really part of a big tribe. So we were the tribe that anybody could belong to. And you just needed to share an affinity to just what we call the veil of ignorance back then, and just without knowing which is a concept that we've borrowed from a very established philosopher. The concept is how would you act in a community if you did not know anything about the person you're dealing with, neither their gender nor their race, their social, how would you just deal with them as humans? And that's pretty much how we built the brand. It was the human element is extremely at the center of Jobedu. And if you talk to most people in the region, they'd say they feel Jobedu is that friend. So the concept of Web3, when I came across it from Moham and Shammy and Ken, it was like a eureka moment because it just, it's a tech tool that builds on all the disconnected elements that we were doing in building a community, whether it's on Twitter, blah, blah, blah. But there was no single membership. There's no single validated ID that we could build this whole community around. And that was what was super exciting about building a gated community with Egos Paradise.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah. Wow. You've mentioned so much there that I wanna unpack. So you talked about the importing culture, which I think is really interesting because we see even some of that happening in Web3.
Tamer: Mm-hmm.
Humpty Calderon: Where there is like culture that's borrowed from other projects to kind of lean into that culture to try to drive some success. You know, you also see even some conversations, to be honest, in terms of like the types of representation that is happening in certain projects that will potentially give it a little bit more validation just because there's a culture associated to that, right. The creators of a project might say, Oh, if we lean into that culture, even though it's not our culture, we are more likely to have success with this project because that group of individuals, that community really shows up strong, right?
Tamer: I wanna be an entrepreneur but I'm not gonna come up with an idea. So let me just get a franchise and I'll run a business based on your manual that you created which is fine, I guess. A lot of people didn't get a chance to enter the other projects, but then they still have the formal, and it would be nice to see all these communities how like different communities of a similar archetype merge or something.
Humpty Calderon: Sorry. It's interesting you say that. I want, before you get too far away from that, I did want to kind of just share recent experience because you're talking about the franchise model, right? And you're talking about how you borrow from someone else's successful model and then you monetize that. There could be problems with that.
One, you know, there could be no alignment between you,
Tamer: Oh yeah
Humpty: Yourself, founders of a project and that model that you are imitating
Tamer: 100.
Humpty Calderon: Right? Which, it could be dangerous ground to tread because then there's inconsistencies with, you know, the people who develop this project and what they intend to represent. They're not necessarily one and the same.
The other is, you know, if you are monetizing off someone else's model, if there are similarities that are, well, a little too close both in terms of design, aesthetic, whatever.
Tamer: Oh yeah, definitely.
Humpty Calderon: There could be issues where someone's like, Oh, you know, honestly you're, because I'm thinking of like the funks, for example, right? The crypto funks. That was one example.
The other would be like the reversed or mirrored punk or board ape where they were kind of facing the other way right? But you know, that there may be models where they're not necessarily kind of either paying back or recognizing those projects beyond that.
Tamer: To be honest as much as it pissed me off throughout the years, everybody who copied our designs and fit, like we've been working with designers for the, ever since we started, and that's the whole point is every designer comes with different flavors that can showcase the same culture just from a different lens. Our work got stolen quite a bit and it pissed me off every time. But It also made the community stronger. If I look back, you know every time someone stole our art, it was always the community that went after them saying this is the work of x,y,z and they all rallied around this and you'd feel that they had felt more ownership of the brand and every brand gets ripped off.
Humpty Calderon: That's interesting you say that. Yeah
Tamer:And every brand gets ripped off, but it's part of the Value. Supreme, a knock-off supreme walking around is just as equally, it's creating as much PR as a real one, and that's why a lot of brands kind of allow some, some counterfeit to happen.
Humpty Calderon: That's interesting. I don't necessarily know if that's true, but I'm gonna just accept that for the fact that you're right, there's something to be said about just propagating the idea of that culture and the desire to want to be a part of that community.
Tamer: Exactly. Exactly. And so, the whole ecosystem feeds off it and the holders of the originals will benefit.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah. So the other thing that you were talking about that I really kind of wanted to dive into before we just get so completely into the project that you were talking about Web3 as a philosophy right? How you were implementing some of these ideals of Web3 without necessarily having a Web3 project, right? with Jobedu right?
Tell me a little bit about that and what that means to you in terms of Web3 as a philosophy and like what were some of the things that you were implementing in your project, and then how did that scale to the point that you got into Web3.
Tamer: The concept of rewarding a community has always been in the back of our head,so we have a loyalty program, we have all sorts of things that it's all 'cause really we always say this, we founded Jobedu, but we don't own Jobedu. The second we went public and it became part of the culture, we are just the caretakers of Jobedu. We're here to represent what the people have entrusted this brand to be and that's always been the driving philosophy on how we conducted our business anyways, Is how do we put the community first? How do we build on it? That's why we had the crowd sourcing model for designs. That's how we built our ambassador network. That's how we, it's always about how do we give more to the community.
Web3 is all about connecting ownership and actually rewarding engagement. And to me that was looking at all the tools that are already out there, i felt that this was something that where we could build something extremely unique based on our experience, how do we reward a community on IRL or digitally with Web2
Humpty Calderon: Yeah, that's wonderful. So walk me through the early days of your new project and you know kind of what the idea was behind that and kind of how thus previous experience may have informed some of it too.
Tamer: I was approached by Amir, a long time friend of mine and listener right now, and he was telling me, Hey, listen, you draw right? I said Yeah, I draw. And I was visiting them in the states, visiting my family in the States and he is like, listen, we'll buy you a Wacom from Amazon while you're here, doodle something, if we like it, we can release a BoredApe and Shammy, he trades, let's do something together. They've already been trading and working on blockchain projects before I came into the picture. And naturally the idea naturally became, what do I draw really? You know what I mean? And I wanted it to be a very personal experience, so in a way, Ego is me, but it's really a lot of people. It's just every, it represented my period, my point, the point in time that I was in at the time, which is the need to have a support community to support me in not being alone as an entrepreneur I don't know if that describes it well for now.
Humpty Calderon: I like the word you used there. The words you used were “Ego is me” right? Like, I think that that's something that I believed in my heart from the very beginning in terms of NFT as a model, was the idea of NFTs as our identity. There's a certain reflection
Tamer: 100% 100%
Humpty: I think that happens when we buy into NFT projects, It's one of the reasons why I like the art to your project, because I think that it's representative of people, of a culture that can propagate those ideals and spread the, you know, the kind of this Web3 ethos across a wider community, not necessarily kind of duplicating the same kind of art and design and aesthetics because you know what? Around the world, we all look and sound different. You know, we're all human. At the end of the day when we look and sound different, we wanna identify with something that that we can reflect on and say this is a little bit of me right? Yeah. So I really like that idea of “Ego is me” and how that maybe some of the design of it.
Tamer: So, they like the doodles and they're like, build on it. You can get to keep your Wacom, which was super exciting for me. And I started to draw all these renditions and variations and I wanted to understand the space more as I was drawing. So I was reading all these articles and it's so great and it's amazing how fast the space is evolving. As I was drawing with Ego, like and we were talking about this as a team, the whole strategy for NFT communities kind of changed four times in the past six months, seven months, different kinds of projects, different kinds of strategies and people exploring. And with every project, I go back to the drawing board and kind of infuse all those learnings into the variations that I'm drawing, and at the same time bring some of the personal experience that I have as an entrepreneur into the drawings themselves. So in one way or the other, like they're not directly there, but I can tell you in every iteration of Ego, there's a piece of me.
Humpty: Tell me a little bit about the model then. So we got a good sense, I think, of where you came from, kind of how that may have informed some of it certainly there's a piece of the identity to speak to there. Tell me a little bit about the project I see here in my notes. Ego's Paradises NFT Membership Club for Community Shapers to connect and benefit from the collective rewards of supporting each other. What does that mean?
Tamer: All right, so there was a lot of times where I needed to make a very big decision, and as many people as I talk to in my close immediate circle, you'll always get some kind of mixed answer because everybody has a different vested interest or , they're kind of sick of hearing it. But there were times where I'd be travelling somewhere and I'd be all alone in a hotel room and I have a huge pitch the next day and I really needed to vet it with someone that I could trust and feel, and that someone needs to be someone who's been in the same kind of situation that they can talk to me and kind of guide me through it 'cause they've been through it and then the next day they realise what they should have been thinking of. And I think the best people to do this are people who have already been in such a situation. And that's what this community is gonna be striving for and how people benefit from each other, the kind of people that we're attracting and like, and I'm bringing in my Rolodex into Ego's Paradise and I'm sure all like, and Ken and Shammy were all doing it because, throughout the years, we've surrounded ourselves with really informed people, and if these people can be a call away or a message away for a collection of entrepreneurs that really don't need to go through a lot of the stress alone regardless of what the topic is, whether it is legal registration or what jurisdiction should I sign in, what, any kind of problem that they feel they need to figure it out alone. They really don't need to figure it out alone, We're there to make whatever path they've chosen to deliver whatever dream they want, whatever community they've decided to solve a problem for that much easier for them to do.
Humpty Calderon: So walk me through the idea of NFTs as membership. Cause I know this is something that I hear from a lot of different projects. But you know, and I think that different projects are looking at membership very differently and I think that there's probably even some areas of membership that are yet to be explored.
Tamer: Yeah
Humpty: So tell me, what are your thoughts on NFTs as a membership and, you know, maybe what does that, how does that, I guess, work within your process?
Tamer: So the way we look at membership is it's pretty much exactly like a gym. The only thing is that we believe that every time you go to the gym, the value of the gym goes up by the act of simply you going to use the gym and validating that it's a gym that you wanna go to. The only difference is that you can, the value of your membership does not appreciate and if you could sell it, you cannot gain from whatever sweat equity you've put, literally sweat equity you've put into the gym. And that's the model we want to put into our membership. It's, you're a member of this community, whatever effort you put in, you're gonna see it in the value of your membership itself. And if you feel like you've reaped all the value you can get, and you wanna pass on the baton to someone else, and you can do that and you know you've been rewarded.
Humpty Calderon: That's interesting. So you're saying that the NFTs capture a certain value and that value is portable? across different holders?
Tamer: Yes, the holders are gonna be the beneficiary. Whoever the holder is, is the beneficiary of being part of the community, and all the perks that we bring to the community and the roadmap that we want to build together with the community. The collective work that we're all gonna be putting in by just just being present in the community and discussing and mentoring each other and building that value. This is a membership that you can pass on. I'm part of a few WhatsApp groups for entrepreneurs that are amazing. They're impeccable. We ask each other questions. We solve so many problems for each other on a whim, you know because we know that's the kind of support we need. But at the end of the day, it is a WhatsApp group. What this is adding more, it's legitimizing that there is more value happening from being part of this group.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah, I hear you using the word entrepreneur quite a few times. What does that mean to you? And in terms of like, you know, I guess how does that fit into your, you know, your thought process for creating projects and what do you think is missing for maybe more entrepreneurs to make a leap similar to yours?
Tamer: So I'm pretty loose with the word entrepreneur. I've met entrepreneurs of all walks of life. I don't believe an entrepreneur is someone who founds a company and gets funding. That is, someone who opened a supermarket around the corner is an entrepreneur. Anyone creating value for customers or a community is an entrepreneur. Activists are entrepreneurs. Anyone that challenges the standard status quo is an entrepreneur. They see everybody else is going through the same motions and they're not accepting those motions on behalf of a community and doing something about it. And that road is extremely, extremely lonely. Even if you have a team and you have all these supporters, at the end of the day it is your own hero's journey. We find entrepreneurs inside companies, we call them entrepreneurs because we'd wanna differentiate, but they're really entrepreneurs that are just sticking around because they believe in the cause. They believe that they're making a difference where they are. Those are the people that we want, people who are making a difference where they are.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah, it's funny when you were just talking right now about entrepreneurship and you know, the description of it, you know, I was also kind of pulling up a new tab on my computer and doing a quick search because to be honest, while I, myself I'm an entrepreneur too, I don't think I've actually ever looked up the definition of what it is.
So I was curious and I was like, well, you know, I've asked this question and, you know, you're putting in so much thought into, you know, kind of defining that. Let me actually do the work and go out there and look what it is. And a lot of what you said was actually repeated there, but it's interesting that there's a little word here that I, it, it just kind of stands out. And I wanna ask you a question about this because as someone who is an entrepreneur and someone who's thinking about entrepreneurship in this space, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Here's what I'm reading, it says, Entrepreneurship is the creation of extraction, Excuse me, the creation or extraction of economic value. And it goes on to continue describing things, right? So I'm curious about your thoughts, right? Because I think you're right. I think a lot of us here in the Web3 space are entrepreneurs because a lot of us who are in this space, whether we are investing or not, we are creating value just really through our activity, through our contributions, through our participation in Web3 projects right ?
Now, are we capturing some of that value? Maybe, maybe not, depending on the, you know, the model of the DAO or the project in terms of how incentives are creating for their projects or for their, excuse me, for their community. So the one word that to me is kind of tricky here, and I'd love to hear your thoughts, is the word extraction of value, right? I think. Personally, and I'll just kind of give my 2 cents here, my two Gwei before I kind of open it up to you is that what Web3 allows is for the retention of value, right? Versus the extraction of value. And I'm, because I guess I'm talking about from a community member standpoint in terms of what they can do within a...
Tamer: Entrepreneurship's not just economic value. It is about social change, It is about community advancement, It is about enhancing human life, It doesn't have to have economic gains with it. I know a friend of mine who I would qualify as an entrepreneur, he started a project behind a mall. There was an empty plot of land and he brought in the community and filled it with wheat and the community, 11 month, 9 months later, harvested the wheat, made flour and gave it to, it was a year's worth of supply to four families. He did not make any economic gain. Four families got the utility for one year they had flour to make bread. He wasn't paid, He didn't own the land. It was just a plot of land that he put there, to me, he's an entrepreneur.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah, certainly he created value for individuals and retained none of it, right? It really was about social...
Tamer: It is about retaining value within a community.
Humpty Calderon: You know, I don't know how familiar you are with this, some of this vocabulary, but there's a word that gets thrown around more and more here in the Web3 space that I'm a huge fan of and I think there's projects, some projects that really kind of represent the ideals of this, and that's regenerative economics or just regenerative behaviour.
Regenerative would be the antithesis of degenerative. Right? So I think for the most part, I, we may be more familiar with the shortened version of that degenerative, and that's degen, right? There's a lot of degen behaviour and I think the degen behaviour in Web3 is influenced by the opportunity to make money Right? So there are things that we may do that are done because we see the opportunity for economic gain, but there are things such as public goods, right? So some of the projects that I would put up there in terms of like being representative of this would be like Giveth and Gitcoin, and some would say even Ethereum would be a public good. Where these services and projects are facilitating the development of these goods that are available to everyone in the community that aren't necessarily built with the idea of economic gain, but really for like the progress of like the community as a whole, right?. The advancement of the community and the technology as a whole.
So the regenerative behaviour, I think aligns a little bit to what you were saying with in terms of like being an entrepreneur and building for social impact. And less so by the extraction of economic value.
Tamer: 100%. But it's more about the people we're attracting, not entrepreneurs, because we want them to get economic gain. It's because really it is a very, you as an entrepreneur yourself, you know, the risk you're taking, you know how you've rolled the dice and that journey in by itself having mentored so many entrepreneurs along the way, there's a lot of economic waste that happens because people feel they're alone. We want, like ideally, Topian Egos Paradise community is a community that knows that they have a bat phone that they can reach the people they need to reach and they got the perks and we've taken away a load of stuff that they don't need to worry about, and focus on creating value to their communities.
Humpty Calderon: So tell me a little bit about these perks, cuz I'm again looking at my notes here and I see that there's a couple of things that you've written out in terms of life hack perks. Tell me a little bit about them and why that's important to the project.
Tamer: Okay, I'll actually use a recent story if you allow me. So I just came back from a five day all inclusive retreat. And the concept of all inclusive, I was introduced to it in Punta Cana and it was brilliant. It was brilliant, brilliant, brilliant because I've gone to a lot of trips to kind of get away from the stress and they've never really worked because the second, let's say I want to go to Vienna the second I take out my wallet for any transaction, I'm reminded of all the stress that I've left back home, the salaries I need to pay the project where it is, how, where am I on funding and blah, blah, blah you know, it all comes back to you super fast, whether you want it or not. It’s just, it is a super heavyweight. Being away, on an all inclusive retreat, whether it is a wellness retreat, a yoga retreat, or any kind of retreat where you're not thinking of anything for five days, you will come back focused and ready to hit any project with the right mindset. And that's what the kind of perks we wanna bring in. What kind of perks can we offer our community that would put them in the right mindset to succeed? Whether it is weekly meditations or yoga retreats. These are all IRL. We want to do peer to peer support online. Any kind of concierge discounts that we can bring them, whether it is they're going to a country where they need, where they don't know anyone, but there's someone there. That has been a life saver for me and all the countries that I've tried to expand my startup in, and having that kind of base where the people can introduce you to people and get you where you need to go much smoother is priceless.
Humpty Calderon: No, there's something to be said about having the right thing to make this experience much more enjoyable and safe at the same time
Tamer: Yes
Humpty: So what stage is Ego's Paradise currently? Like what are you all working on? You know, over at the project?
Tamer: We're done with the drop, we've done a lot of amazing work with Bankless, Bankless hearts all over how you, this heart is, this heart goes out to bankless, to decide themes in the team for bringing us this far. We've done with a smart contract, we're finalising all the technical bits where we have some, a nice education program because part of what we wanna do is we want to, we do wanna onboard a lot of people onto Web3 who want to understand it with more familiar terms. And that's part of our education agenda as Egos Paradise.
Humpty Calderon: Wonderful. You know, you're bringing up something that I'm curious if you wouldn't mind kind of diving into it and exploring it, just a tad and that is partnerships in this space.
Tamer: Yeah
Humpty: I think that obviously I think there's value to that. What are your thoughts in terms of like, you know, what role partnerships play to the success of Web3 projects and you know what are maybe some of the things that you should be mindful of as you set out to build a project and start developing some of these relationships with other projects?
Tamer: So development ,so relations with other projects is very interesting. That's something like just putting my international affairs hat, having it would be the same as a foreign relations for a community, and I think it's essential that we do not go into, we're building a new economy here, whether it's individually or collectively, and going into more redundancy won't help anyone.
So maybe if there are communities like clinic, I was just checking them out the clinic and they're doing this, they're doing something very similar to empower women founders and entrepreneurs and so Partnerships with like-minded communities is a must if we're gonna be building a robust sustainable ecosystem instead of just competing with the same people about the same perks. So yes, we are gonna be building , hopefully working on building a lot of partnerships with existing projects and collectively as a community, we are, we would be beneficial to a lot of these to a lot of existing Web2 platforms who are targeting entrepreneur wellness and are targeting people wellness? Well, mental wellness as a whole. So yes, partnership is gonna be a huge part of what we do.
Humpty Calderon: Tamer, if you wouldn't mind kind of going through a little bit of maybe your thoughts of how you hope to see the project continue to grow and expand and into the future.
Tamer: Egos Paradise is the first project for Nova Jacks, which is the company that is building Egos Paradise. And within Egos Paradise are a lot of personas. And the way we're looking at these personas they're gonna be the seed for future projects that we build around cause, and what we have in the pipeline are a lot of really cool projects for all, for different sub communities. So basically Egos Paradise is the launchpad.
Humpty Calderon: Ah, that's wonderful man. It's good to hear, you know, again, how some of these projects that are being developed within another project, right? So like Bankless Consulting seeks out and engages projects like Egos Paradise, and how we can together and create a rich thriving ecosystem with that type of, you know positive sum you know, and a collaborative mentality.
And I guess if there were some final words here as we get close to the top of the hour, are there any final words that you would like to talk about? You know either Egos paradise or anything else that's in line with the discussion that we've had today?
Tamer: Again, Egos Paradise is a place for people like us, people that were on this call right now. So please join us on Twitter. The community doesn't really, actually the community built itself but it takes, it's the community participation. So please let us know anything that you'd like to see us do. Any thoughts that would make this project much better? This is what the project's for. It's for you guys.
Humpty Calderon: And that's a wrap. I enjoyed my chat with Tamer, and I hope you did too. If you'd like to learn more about Egos Paradise, follow them on Twitter @EgosParadiseNFT, or go to their website Egosparadise.com
Thanks for listening to Crypto Sapiens. Please give us a follow, like and a five star review wherever you enjoy your podcast. And stay tuned for our next discussion.