Welcome to Marketing School, the only podcast that provides daily top level marketing tips and strategies from entrepreneurs that practice what they preach and live what they teach. Let's start leveling up your marketing knowledge with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Sue. All Right, everybody, today, We've got Robbie Ferguson. He is one of the co founders of Immutable, and I'm gonna let him explain what Immutable is in a second. But I've coming from a past life of gaming myself. Obviously I am. I'm a fan and actually they're a client of our ad agency, Single Grain. So yeah, there's a lot of synergies here. Glad to have Robbie on the pod. So Robbie first and foremost, welcome to the show. How are you doing well? Eric, thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for being here. So you guys have been described. I mean, we'll just say you're an Australian based company, You're you're a market leader in blockchain gaming. You can say you're a lot of different things that are tied to it, right, you guys are like signing partnerships with GameStop and all that. But in your own words. How would you describe immutable to a five year old? Yeah, well, to a five year old, i'd probably say play video game like Fortnite or like Minecraft. The majority of what you spend money on is not downloading Fortnite, it's free. It's spending your money on cosmetics, outfits, skins, weapons inside of that game. But because you can't touch that stuff versus everything you buy in the real world, we do not allow you to sell that later on. And so the two hundred billion US dollars spent on in game items every year is completely exploitative, where players get zero property rights for it after they've purchased it. Our mission is to take digital ownership via the infrastructure of an NFT and allow anyone to own and trade their in game items, and to align the incentives between player and publishers and create a much fairer ecosystem for building games great. And so, like those of you that are listening for Marketing Squad, I don't want your eyes to glaze over this NFT stuff. Oh my god, Eric's talking about NFTs again. I think what's important to understand is that the business that Robbie's building, and then how he's building for the future, which we'll talk about, and then we'll also talk about some of the things the cool things that he's doing from a marketing and partnerships perspective. Robbie, what about your gaming background, because my understanding is you have a gaming background. Did you sell anything in games before? Like tell us like a story there? Yeah, so, I mean I grew up playing games. I was obsessed with anything with an economy. I have a few thousand hours in RuneScape, in League of Legends. I actually played the Neopets as one of the first games ever as a child. And I remember playing RuneScape and I was playing on my brother's acount. We used share account against the temps of services, and I was one day going into the wilderness and I took his full dragon armor set. I think it was thirty million gold roughly back in that time, probably much more now worth of armor. And I got skulled, which basically means I attacked someone, and that means I'm vulnerable to losing everything, and I lost all of my gear. I felt so bad because this is my brother's account. He had done most of the work. I was not as good at RuneScape as him. I did not grind as hard that that day I went and purchased with my pocket money off a gold farming website goal to purchase all that on the back, and then a week later the account got banned for real world trading the spending money on in game items. Six months later, RuneScape rolled out RuneScape bonds, where you could legally spend money on that game and redeem in game items, but of course you can't catch them out ever. And so I think for a very long time, the world of gaming, just because it's run on centralized servers, just because you can't touch it, has been regarded with complete impunity by these gaming companies. It's been in a model where they can extract one hundred percent of value they don't have to back or give anything back to sort of the end consumers and traders. But most importantly, it leads to very divorced incentives between the game creator and the end player. If my incentive is to extra revenue rather than to build the lifetime value of the assets that I've sold, the economy that I've built, it's very different too. For instance, a publisher who makes their money off making economy valuable over time, or making a set of assets or a gaming experience better and better over time. So this is something I was quite passionate about from a young age, but I didn't really know how to fix this until the first ever primitive of an NFT came out in twenty seventeen, and I realized, you've got a broad audience. So maybe I'll kind of flag up front to us we should never be saying the word NFT to our end consumers. It is not about the technology of NFTs. What it is about is creating a game that people want to play for fun, but they have far more rights in than the existing model that is ten times more valuable to those end consumers and end players than the current model. For doing our job right, we should never have to say the word NFT in any lifetime of the user experience playing these games. I think it's just sort of inside our industry term anology. And another really important thing is that we actually never focused on profile picture projects or collectibles or kind of speculative and FTY assets for us. The thing that's really interesting is things like God's Unchained, which is our trading card game, where the average trading price of a card is between fifty cents and a buck. People are coming in here and they're spending money that otherwise spend on digital magic, the Gathering cards or half Stone cards. But now at the end of their lifetime they can sell those if they want to enter exit the ecosystem. Someone else can build a third party marketplace and start to make fees of building a better experience. This is really about how do we have everyday objects that are not super expensive become ownable and tradeable and create real economies out of it. So I think empowerment and making this driven by utility is fundamental to our mission. Yeah, I mean this is exciting because I remember in the eighth grade I played a game called ever Request, So I think I'm a little older than you. But we went on to read and then we killed this dragon and then I ended up selling that helmet for eight thousand dollars in eighth grade and a helmet. I didn't even sell the character. I was like whoa, And then I end up selling the character later for like a couple of thousand dollars. But like it's just that was just like a piece of it, right, So it's this whole like you know, you deserve to if you're gonna put time into it, like that character. By the way, if you're you're like, oh my god, he made so much wainy, No, I didn't on an hourly basis. I spent three thousand hours on that character. So I was making like a couple cents I think an hour or whatever it is. But like I think, to your point, you're gonna be able to what the future is not only just in gaming, but we're gonna be able to capture way more value as kind of the user correct. Precisely, even if you look at the billions if dollars spent on marketing every year, that is now a spend which can be redirected towards giving players value, and customer acquisition will occur because of the ability to give players items for playing your game, their increase retention where they come and play your game. All of these things is going to shift kind of value spend on Facebook ads, Google ads towards the economy itself. Got it. Yeah, So I want to talk about marketing a second, but I have your tweet pulled up. Period. One of your top tweet tiers. Gaming is bigger than music, movies, and TV combined. It's compounding ten percent year on year. The one hundred billion dollar year spent renting a quote unquote items is going to turn into a trillion dollar onable economy. All of it will be built on web three. Do you want to elaborate on that at all. Yeah. So, I think something people don't understand about gaming is it is by far the fastest growing category in really the world. I mean, you have two hundred billion US dollars spent every year now on in game items. It's growing at a ten percent compounding rate. But also it is the final category. If you look at where film is going to go, if you look at where TV is going to go, it's all going to be subsumed by interactive entertainment. Kids will go to concerts in digital environments. Gaming is to encompass the vast majority of how we spend our hours in the future. When you work in VR or augmented reality in fifteen years from now, that will essentially constitute a game. We'll live in digital landscapes and environments, and that means we need digital assets. And so I think the most important thing is that when we enter that universe, we don't suddenly strip away all the property rights that people have been given because of physics in the real world. You know, I often refer to the example that your ownership of stuff in the real world is guaranteed by like the fundamental laws of the universe. Atoms says, when you have possession of something, you keep it in Possession is nine tenths of the law. Just because we store and create things intangibly, we've suddenly taken that away. And I think that the future of a lot of ownership, but more importantly, the future of sort of financial empowerment, will come through Web three. And so that's something I'm very passionate about. I think that gaming is clearly the first category where this is going to be proven out, and it is a massive category, got it? Yeah, I love it. I believe it. I think we'll talk about the practical use cases a little more because everyone's like, oh, not everyone, but a lot of people listening might be like, oh, I don't play any games, but like, gaming is what a lot of people do growing up now. But you guys have reased I believe a couple hundred million dollars, So I guess, I guess I'll ask about the business structure in a moment, But like, what have you guys been doing from a creative kind of marketing and partnership standpoint. Honestly, our marketing team is reasonably small. I think most of what we've built today has been on the strength of our product and the strength of our partnerships that we've kind of built. I think that's the most effective marketing in the space where we're sort of our goal is to win over a pretty small number of meaningful games, and so I think some of the bigger partnerships have done have been really impactful, things like powering TikTok's first ever NFTs, I think was a really big validation of the security infrastructure that we've built. If you're an enterprise company and you're entrusting your brand towards projects like web three, you can't afford to have an FTX crisis. You can't afford to have something like a polling network bridge hack. You have to ensure that your user's assets are going to be secure, going to be safe, and the user experience really good. So I think TikTok choosing us for that was a sort of really sick if you can partnership. Same thing with game Stop, where you know they have one of the largest digital armies in the world. I think they really catalyzed what it means to have an online community that are fervent evangelists of a company's brand and a company's mission, and that mission being power to the players. So I mean, you know, part of the reason we did that partnership and they ended up working with us is a where the right platform to build their technology ambitions on, which is an FT marketplace and a place for game is to trade. But b because we really understand the value of those millions of fans and how that can actually form a really effective source of value for every game building on immutable. A game comes and launchers on US now and they instantly have two million fans from GameStop audience, And I think that's a community driven marketing strategy that has only really been formalized in the last three years, probably through crypto, because you have the idea of tokens, which is effectively programmatic equity. The reason tokens are so powerful is not necessarily because they're decentralized and here I'm talking about fundable tokens as in Bitcoin etherym iMX. It's because it's effectively a programmatic way to allow people to be collective owners of whatever thing you're building. So now if you are building a two sided marketplace and your problem is a cold start problem, you could say, well, cool, I'll give ten percent of this equity programmatically to people who provide value to the platform, and that could be given away over the first two years. It's the most powerful marketing invention of like really the last few decades. Yeah, it's so I have this bust over. It does Warren Buffett, but on the side it's Charlie Munger, right, So you know he always says, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. And when you give people kind of as pseudo equity, it incentivizes them to talk about it more, which is why I guess you saw all these pumps with the NFT stuff. But that aside, it doesn't change human behavior. Human behavior is still human behavior. And like, it makes a lot of sense what you're saying, So let me just ask this. Then it sounds like you guys, I mean, you guys are developing some of your own games, but you guys are also recruiting a lot of developers in right, and then your kind of value prop for these gaming developers or game developers. Is that, Hey, we're going to a We're going to share our community with you, so you guys can grow a lot faster. But be like, we're also going to help you Web three. We're gonna make it easy for you to on ramp too to Web three. Is that correct? Yeah, So we're really a full stack platform. Our goal is if you're a game and you have a successful game or sort of ability to make a game, we can take you from being a Web two experience to being a Web three experience. We can help you create a sustainable economy. We can help to all of the Web three technology aspects. So we use ZK rollups or a layer to one ethereum if you're technical and you're listening right now, which basically means that instead of five NFT transactions per second, which is possible on Ethereum layer one, we can do million, ten thousand, and we do all of that carbon neutrally and for zero dollars in transaction fees for these games. We also make it ridiculously easy to build. You don't have to touch smart contracts or blockchain technology. You're using stripe like Web two. APIs the reason that is so significant is if this is going to go main stam, we have to make this ridiculously easy to build upon. And I think that's the thing that's done porous by our peers in the marketplace today by other blockchains, because they're all investing in you know, better programming infrastructure or guides. And I think at the end of the day, it just has to be hey, tap into our APIs and you don't have to actually understand anything about blockchain in order to build only successful Yeah. I was watching some of your what are your other interviews, and I think so for example, let's say you know Heartstone or let's use magic the gathering, Right, it sounds like the move here is like you get one of these big players and then you know, the dominoes will fall and then all of them would just start to come on, right. And I think in the last interview you weren't really able to reveal any names. Are there that's that was like four or five months ago. Are there any names that you revealed recently that people might know of. Yeah, so one of the big ones, imboo im for you has millions of monthly active players. They just hit a million wallets on Immutable. So I mean they're basically a legacy Web two title that it's been around for nearly, you know, two decades now, and has built a gray marketplace economy where they monetize by taking clips off trades, a single kind of trade in this it's a it's a social kind of diverse, similar to say Second Life. And the key thing they're doing is they're just updating that so now their players can earn their assets and they can have a much more aligned business model, and you know, they're blowing the user stats of other games out of the water. So I think that's a really kind of significant one. We have Alluvium, which is probably the largest Web three game in the world today. They sold seventy two million dollars in a weekend last year. I'm in the middle of the bean market as well. So this is not really bull run stuff. This is people who fundamentally believe in the game and massive audiences millions of people coming to try it out. Got it? Yeah, So I guess ad that's very exciting. Congratulations on that. B you guys are I think you're valid at two point five billion right now if I'm not mistaken, correct, How do you guys take it to the next level. So I think that the move is pretty clear to me. It's like focus on you know, getting you know, top games, you know, top communities in Is that kind of the is that trajectory or is there something else there? Our goal is get as many awesome quality games building on the platform as possible. Last year we went from five to over one hundred and twenty fifth to first in terms of relative market share. The stat that just came out as games building on a mutable received over eight billion dollars US in funding last year. This is the most out of any competing L one or L two in the world, including Solana, Polyon, Binance, ap Doos, Sui, et cetera. Yeah, so that's a really exciting start for us. I think it shows the quality of kind of the games that we've won and what kind of brand we're trying to build as well. Ultimately, our vision is all of the world's unique value will turn into NFTs. This won't just be gaming assets. It will be when you buy a term deposit at the bank that should be tradable, When you buy an insurance contract that should be a digital asset. When you buy a house, and the simplest reason for this is not digital ownership. Digital ownership actually does not matter outside of objects that are inherently digital, because if I have true digital ownership of a house that exists in the real world, the local property title system can always say, actually, that doesn't matter, and the value of my digital NFT ownership ends there. What will be the significant catalyst for most of the world's value will be superior liquidity and utility, aka you can trade things for cheaper prices or things you couldn't previously trade, or on the utility side, you have better access to cheaper financial services. The example I always give here is imagine you live in a region where local banks are immature, and the cheapest mortgage you can get to buy a house is eight percent. And now imagine DeFi gets so efficient that there is online competition for appraisals of any house that's an NFT, such as you can get a mortgage for six percent anywhere in the world. It'll be slow, it'll take time for t fight to get more efficient than local financial service providers, but once it does, ninety percent of the home in any region where you can get a two hundred big superior interest rate in those homes will be overnight tokenized into an FTS hundreds of billions of dollars of value. And what we're going to see is this shift is the biggest pressure for any vertical kind of shift is financial pressure because you only have a limited number of customers who have to make the switch. It's it's kind of like vendors and business driven, and we're going to see a pretty monumental shift, but thin it will take some time. I think it will take five to fifteen years, depending on the vertical, but the world will end up tokenized and for the most part kind of securitized. I love that. And here's the thing. So your name alone, the fact that your name is immutable also means that you can literally, like you can switch just from gaming and the like. You can build a platform from all this stuff, Like is that the long long term vision? Well, if you're building a platform that can allow anyone to build a tradable real economy with hundreds of billions of assets, and that's what we're talking about with a single game alone. If you look at RuneScape, like millions of players, each of them would own thousands of ass you are easily into nearly a trillion assets over the lifetime of that gamer economy. If you're bringing liquidity to all of that, if you're solving user experience for that, solving like the tens of billions of financial assets or like the single digit billions of homes around the world is a trivial problem. I mean, so the infrastructure that we're building for gaming actually solves pretty much every other vertical because it's the hardest use case of unique value to solve for and to create liquidity for. I mean, it sounds like a sounds like a trillion dollar plus company. Man, that's that's the goal. Cool, Okay, So, I mean obviously the business has been scaling, the space has been scaling. You guys went to five to one hundred plus games or so, you guys. You guys also have a couple hundred people now, so how how have you been scaling? As a leader? Yeah, I mean, I think you have to hire well is pretty much the most important thing. So last year we build our exec team. We now have a full bench. It's really exciting. We've bought on phenomenal people, and the finance director of Facebook running a seventy billion dollar PNL became our CFO, and so now governance and financial transparency is one of our key strengths, which is an incredibly important thing I think in a post FTX world, in a post lunar world. We brought on after Pays, chief information security officer at Lastian's had a product management, safety, cultures and entry COO one of Australia's most successful startup CEOs, Jill Finlay. I think Justin Hulog, who ran Biode Games Asia, is leading our studio efforts. So we've been able to pull on some really phenomenal people over the last year. That is ultimately the most important kind of thing we can do to scale ourselves and scale the company. I think the second thing is just it requires probably a I think you can't really be a successful I always i'm confused about this because I think it's very difficult to be a successful entrepreneur with a high ego, because I think you require so many changes to yourself to be successful over the maturity of the company that you kind of have to accept it. You just have to make fundamental changes. At times. When you start out you're doing everything, you're an individual contributor. Suddenly you're a manager, suddenly you're a man mature of managers, and suddenly you're trying to steer this big ship and trying to steal culture and trying to stick a strategy through you know, a sizeable number of people. So I think it just requires a good degree of self awareness, reading a lot of books, and just being obsessed with learning how you can do the next stage better. So, I mean that's what we focus a lot on. We read a lot of books. A shout out to Matt Mocery who wrote The Great CEO Within. I think that was a very significant book for us to read early on. That kind of gave us a head start. And recently we've been pretty obsessed with scaling Up, which is kind of a you know, a business building book. Yep, Yeah, scaling up is great. I saw on one of your previous injuries you had the Hard Thing About Hard Things Matt Marker's book. These are all good. So I guess, so is this the Have you had businesses before this or is this the first one? We've done? Startups? Definitely, nothing of this scale. So we previously built my brother and I, you know, a league of legend bedding platform. You can bet on your own matches. We built a machine learning driven Shopify competitor where you could automatically optimize your store from pricing and copy. So, you know, we've always kind of been very keen to build technology products that make a difference, and particularly kind of in gaming or e commerce. But this is the first one that you know, had significant scale to it. Got it. I'm gonna come back to that one in a second. But like what I've learned over the years, it's you know, my friends and I we we started small. We were at these conferences and we'd always talk about, oh my god, what's the newest marketing tactic, what's the newest strategy? No, da da da da, And then you grow, and then you grow past a certain point and it's like I still host the events right now or whenever we see each other, and now was like, we don't talk about tactics anymore, we talk about strategy, We don't talk about the how anymore. We just talked about who are we going to hire? Who are we going to hire? And literally like it's the same thing for you, but for you, like do you do you expect this to happen because it sounds like this is a niche situation where the market is just pulling you. That's where you know you have product market fit, right, So was that intentional? Did you know this is going to happen like what happened there? I think yes. I think push versus pool is an apt analogy. I think from day one we were pulled. I mean we were barely keeping up during the first couple of years, one hundred plus hour weeks every single week. I think that's when you know you've where you just kind of have to kind of set afloat. That's when you know you've found something really meaningful, or there's there's a lot of external pulls on your time and demand. Yeah, I mean I don't think we were particularly good at marketing. I think we kind of just understood our audience and the products we were building and kind of thankfully in Web three in Crypto, that is marketing. It's having authority on your product and kind of understanding the space and the partnerships that emerge from that were significant signals. But I think we probably didn't do it too formally, especially early on. That makes sense. And here's the other thing. I think you guys picked a great spot to start into because you coming from a gaming background. Same for me. It's gamers are rabid fans, right, it were just it's such a crazy community and they're so engaged. And if you look at like the daily active users with the top games, like they're just locked in and they're spending to the top people spending in those games are spending like a million dollars plus, right, So I think that kind of has its own little you create your own little viral loop there. So smart, I wanted to talk about the future of Web three. So what are you excited about in particular because we're recording this right now where people are still like, you know, down about everything. You know, the whole FTX thing is still going on. So what are you excited about in the future of Web three. I would be remiss to say I'm excited for the first few mainstream games. I think they will be the most significant catalyst of mainstream adoption. If you look at the total active users in crypto today, it's probably hoppering around thirty million. One mainstream game will triple that, and it will be incredibly impactful because people won't even know they're using Web three under the hood. And I think that's when we start to reach maturity in Web three, we stop referring to things as denominated by its Web three characteristics, but instead it starts to transform the category that it's being applied to. We're not going to refer to it as DeFi. We're going to refer to it as like finance in the future, or like loan infrastructure. We're not going to refer to it as Web three gaming. It will simply be gaming. And the expectation is that you get your property rights and the same way that you know when you go and play your favorite desktop game, you don't say this is a desktop for you to play game. These are categories that are kind of become alided by the overall usefulness that the product has and when it reach is ubiquity. That's the thing I'm most excited for. I think I'm excited to see the bear run shakeouts and probably immature or insecure products that shouldn't be there. I think we're going to see a reversion to ethereum. We've already seen a little bit of this. I think in a world where people become more understanding of the value that high level of consensus security and sort of a high level of diligence on all the infrastructure that's been invested in ethereum today comes to fruition. I also think we're going to see a shift away from custodial products and an emphasis on sort of solutions that don't have that centralization risk factor. And you what's an example of that just for the audience. So, I mean, our product is completely self custodial. You could always own your own keys, You can use it through different wallets if you like, and some of those maybe sort of castodial, but the protocol itself is self custodial. The reason that's so important is it avoids things like a bridge hack, where there's been a four point two billion dollars of user funds lost because of bridge hacks. So every side chain sometimes you hear this is referred to as kind of L two's is basically just a blockchain with the centralized bridge with theoryum itself, and there's a very high vulnerability factor for those. So I think people being more aware of the risks evolved in products like that, and investors as well, is a good shift for the industry. Got it? You know? In this downmarket right now? Are you guys? Look at any m and a opportunities you guys look at scooping anything. Yeah, I think we're opportunistically always a kind of looking. I think the position we're in is a really fortunate one. Post ar Rays got a two hundred million US in cash in the bank, plus a significant amount of tokens hundreds of millions of dollars, and the foundation has a nearly a billion dollar war chest for going and helping people build Web three games. So I think we're at a fortunate position from there. Obviously, Macro is tough right now, and we want to ensure that we have a really long runway. But I think we're sort of in a fortuneate opposition. Fascinating, So I'll just throw this out to the audience. I mean, like, you know, potentially, what Robbie might do is wait for the market to take a little more look for really strong communities out there, really strong gaming communities that just aren't doing that well, and he can scoop them up for pennies on adult I'm not saying that's what he's going to do, but trying to get you guys to think that way. One more question about so I remember I go to a lot of these web three, crypto conferences, whatever whatever you want to call them. And I would see immutable sponsoring a lot of these, right, how has that strategy you worked out for you? Like would you say it's really good or like you know, may whatever, Because I'm always curious about these. I mean, I think if you're not doing dead in marketing while you're spending money, I'm very big on funnels and understanding ROI aligned to business outcomes. It's always hard with brand and awareness. So I think a few of these things you have to try, and I think the effectiveness of the ROI comes from the campaigns you build around it. Okay, you sponsored the conference, but then it's about how many news stories that into how many meaningful interactions when you're meeting customers and they see your brand above them while they're talking to you, what'sing preest conversion chants of that deal being one? So it's it is a trickier way to measure the effectiveness of a kind of emotional spend there. I'm definitely personally, I'm a big fan of like viral loops and products that inherently grow, like building virality and marketing into the product. I think you cannot have too many ways to share a product. I'm a big fan of sort of using tokens to incentivize adoption and virality, and a big fan of performance marketing and sort of very specific ROI driven spent love it. We're speaking the same language here, so you know, you strike me as a guide that is always trying to get better, always reading a lot. I mean, is there anything in particular, like any sources you go to, or like, what's the most interesting thing that you've read recently? Big fan of through secory. I listen to a few podcasts, you know, all in Tim Ferriss when I can, basically based on the people who are coming and speaking, I try. I probably think reading is the biggest one, so I try and read quite a lot of business books. I can't read them during the weekday or I can't sleep, so I keep those to the weekends or holidays. But you know, I'm not going home and reading for four hours. I think there's it's kind of a balance and you can have it definitely too much noise, so I try and keep my input saying and kind of focus on I'll often reread books because I think the value of the book is not the knowledge inside of it. It is the change in behavior and the emotional conviction it gives you over the importance of those behaviors. What's the most reread book for you? Probably either Radical Canda or The Great CEO Within got it for you. Like you're I'm thinking back to my gaming days or my poker day's habits where I'd stay up to like four or five am, go get some fast food in the morning and all that very not conducive to running a business. And earlier you mentioned kind of health and fitness and all that, so I'm just curious, like, how do you run the business now? Are you go go go the whole time until you burnout, or like how do you structure that? Yeah, look, I haven't found that. I think having an excellent team that you want to you know, kind of deliver to every every week, I actually think really meaningful because the mission is exciting. I'm obsessed with what we can build in the future. But having day to day and week to week people that you kind of want to show up for but you really enjoy working with just makes it very fun. I'm a big fan of kind of bringing fun to work, making it playful. I think, especially a kind of this level of scale, it's really just about making one or two decisions per week that will have a chance to add billions onto the company's value or help you hit our goal of empowering hundreds of millions of players faster. It's not really about trying to do as many small things as one So I think it's about creating the environment where that's really sustainable and then raising your blue line imperative. So when you spend an hour, what is the value of that hour and having a very good internal model of that. Final question for you, Robbie, we talked about team billing earlier, and I would be remiss if I didn't ask you this question. How did you go about finding all these great people, whether it's from Facebook or write games and all that. Did you do it yourself? Recruiter? What was the move here? A lot? So everything. We have a big internal TA team. They have been amazing and have helped hire a lot. We put a lot of effort into our senior hires because they will hire everyone else. I mean, they bring a network if you're hiring someone really senior, like most of our exec team members bought substantial numbers of people with them, people who are excellent and really well vetted. We use a lot of network based hires, so referrals, we source people personally. I will ask my network if a hire is particularly important. We have very high hiring standards. I think it's the most important thing. And an A all round team or an A plus team will deliver far more results a third of the size than the significantly poorer quality team. And there's nothing more demoralizing than working with someone that you know is not kind of living up to the standards or expectations of the company. So I think it's the biggest gift we can give company, and company culture is maintaining and continuing to raise those standards over time. And you guys are remote, right or in the office. We're remote first, but we have a sizable amount of people in Sydney and a lot of the EXAC team kind of comes in every day, et cetera. Got it all right, Great, well, Robbie, this has been great. What's the best way for people to find you and Immutable online? I'm zero x FERG on Twitter. That's probably the best way, and Immutable is immutable on Twitter. All right, everyone go check out Immutable it's going to be the future trillion dollar company. I'm calling it, Robbie. Thanks so much for doing this. Thanks so much, Eric, We appreciate you joining us for this session of Marketing School. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit marketingschool dot io for more resources based on today's topic, as well as access to more episodes that will help you find true marketing success. That's marketingschool dot io until next time. Class dismissed

Welcome to Marketing School, the only podcast that provides daily top level marketing tips and strategies from entrepreneurs that practice what they preach and live what they teach. Let's start leveling up your marketing knowledge with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Sue. All Right, everybody, today, We've got Robbie Ferguson. He is one of the co founders of Immutable, and I'm gonna let him explain what Immutable is in a second. But I've coming from a past life of gaming myself. Obviously I am. I'm a fan and actually they're a client of our ad agency, Single Grain. So yeah, there's a lot of synergies here. Glad to have Robbie on the pod. So Robbie first and foremost, welcome to the show. How are you doing well? Eric, thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for being here. So you guys have been described. I mean, we'll just say you're an Australian based company, You're you're a market leader in blockchain gaming. You can say you're a lot of different things that are tied to it, right, you guys are like signing partnerships with GameStop and all that. But in your own words. How would you describe immutable to a five year old? Yeah, well, to a five year old, i'd probably say play video game like Fortnite or like Minecraft. The majority of what you spend money on is not downloading Fortnite, it's free. It's spending your money on cosmetics, outfits, skins, weapons inside of that game. But because you can't touch that stuff versus everything you buy in the real world, we do not allow you to sell that later on. And so the two hundred billion US dollars spent on in game items every year is completely exploitative, where players get zero property rights for it after they've purchased it. Our mission is to take digital ownership via the infrastructure of an NFT and allow anyone to own and trade their in game items, and to align the incentives between player and publishers and create a much fairer ecosystem for building games great. And so, like those of you that are listening for Marketing Squad, I don't want your eyes to glaze over this NFT stuff. Oh my god, Eric's talking about NFTs again. I think what's important to understand is that the business that Robbie's building, and then how he's building for the future, which we'll talk about, and then we'll also talk about some of the things the cool things that he's doing from a marketing and partnerships perspective. Robbie, what about your gaming background, because my understanding is you have a gaming background. Did you sell anything in games before? Like tell us like a story there? Yeah, so, I mean I grew up playing games. I was obsessed with anything with an economy. I have a few thousand hours in RuneScape, in League of Legends. I actually played the Neopets as one of the first games ever as a child. And I remember playing RuneScape and I was playing on my brother's acount. We used share account against the temps of services, and I was one day going into the wilderness and I took his full dragon armor set. I think it was thirty million gold roughly back in that time, probably much more now worth of armor. And I got skulled, which basically means I attacked someone, and that means I'm vulnerable to losing everything, and I lost all of my gear. I felt so bad because this is my brother's account. He had done most of the work. I was not as good at RuneScape as him. I did not grind as hard that that day I went and purchased with my pocket money off a gold farming website goal to purchase all that on the back, and then a week later the account got banned for real world trading the spending money on in game items. Six months later, RuneScape rolled out RuneScape bonds, where you could legally spend money on that game and redeem in game items, but of course you can't catch them out ever. And so I think for a very long time, the world of gaming, just because it's run on centralized servers, just because you can't touch it, has been regarded with complete impunity by these gaming companies. It's been in a model where they can extract one hundred percent of value they don't have to back or give anything back to sort of the end consumers and traders. But most importantly, it leads to very divorced incentives between the game creator and the end player. If my incentive is to extra revenue rather than to build the lifetime value of the assets that I've sold, the economy that I've built, it's very different too. For instance, a publisher who makes their money off making economy valuable over time, or making a set of assets or a gaming experience better and better over time. So this is something I was quite passionate about from a young age, but I didn't really know how to fix this until the first ever primitive of an NFT came out in twenty seventeen, and I realized, you've got a broad audience. So maybe I'll kind of flag up front to us we should never be saying the word NFT to our end consumers. It is not about the technology of NFTs. What it is about is creating a game that people want to play for fun, but they have far more rights in than the existing model that is ten times more valuable to those end consumers and end players than the current model. For doing our job right, we should never have to say the word NFT in any lifetime of the user experience playing these games. I think it's just sort of inside our industry term anology. And another really important thing is that we actually never focused on profile picture projects or collectibles or kind of speculative and FTY assets for us. The thing that's really interesting is things like God's Unchained, which is our trading card game, where the average trading price of a card is between fifty cents and a buck. People are coming in here and they're spending money that otherwise spend on digital magic, the Gathering cards or half Stone cards. But now at the end of their lifetime they can sell those if they want to enter exit the ecosystem. Someone else can build a third party marketplace and start to make fees of building a better experience. This is really about how do we have everyday objects that are not super expensive become ownable and tradeable and create real economies out of it. So I think empowerment and making this driven by utility is fundamental to our mission. Yeah, I mean this is exciting because I remember in the eighth grade I played a game called ever Request, So I think I'm a little older than you. But we went on to read and then we killed this dragon and then I ended up selling that helmet for eight thousand dollars in eighth grade and a helmet. I didn't even sell the character. I was like whoa, And then I end up selling the character later for like a couple of thousand dollars. But like it's just that was just like a piece of it, right, So it's this whole like you know, you deserve to if you're gonna put time into it, like that character. By the way, if you're you're like, oh my god, he made so much wainy, No, I didn't on an hourly basis. I spent three thousand hours on that character. So I was making like a couple cents I think an hour or whatever it is. But like I think, to your point, you're gonna be able to what the future is not only just in gaming, but we're gonna be able to capture way more value as kind of the user correct. Precisely, even if you look at the billions if dollars spent on marketing every year, that is now a spend which can be redirected towards giving players value, and customer acquisition will occur because of the ability to give players items for playing your game, their increase retention where they come and play your game. All of these things is going to shift kind of value spend on Facebook ads, Google ads towards the economy itself. Got it. Yeah, So I want to talk about marketing a second, but I have your tweet pulled up. Period. One of your top tweet tiers. Gaming is bigger than music, movies, and TV combined. It's compounding ten percent year on year. The one hundred billion dollar year spent renting a quote unquote items is going to turn into a trillion dollar onable economy. All of it will be built on web three. Do you want to elaborate on that at all. Yeah. So, I think something people don't understand about gaming is it is by far the fastest growing category in really the world. I mean, you have two hundred billion US dollars spent every year now on in game items. It's growing at a ten percent compounding rate. But also it is the final category. If you look at where film is going to go, if you look at where TV is going to go, it's all going to be subsumed by interactive entertainment. Kids will go to concerts in digital environments. Gaming is to encompass the vast majority of how we spend our hours in the future. When you work in VR or augmented reality in fifteen years from now, that will essentially constitute a game. We'll live in digital landscapes and environments, and that means we need digital assets. And so I think the most important thing is that when we enter that universe, we don't suddenly strip away all the property rights that people have been given because of physics in the real world. You know, I often refer to the example that your ownership of stuff in the real world is guaranteed by like the fundamental laws of the universe. Atoms says, when you have possession of something, you keep it in Possession is nine tenths of the law. Just because we store and create things intangibly, we've suddenly taken that away. And I think that the future of a lot of ownership, but more importantly, the future of sort of financial empowerment, will come through Web three. And so that's something I'm very passionate about. I think that gaming is clearly the first category where this is going to be proven out, and it is a massive category, got it? Yeah, I love it. I believe it. I think we'll talk about the practical use cases a little more because everyone's like, oh, not everyone, but a lot of people listening might be like, oh, I don't play any games, but like, gaming is what a lot of people do growing up now. But you guys have reased I believe a couple hundred million dollars, So I guess, I guess I'll ask about the business structure in a moment, But like, what have you guys been doing from a creative kind of marketing and partnership standpoint. Honestly, our marketing team is reasonably small. I think most of what we've built today has been on the strength of our product and the strength of our partnerships that we've kind of built. I think that's the most effective marketing in the space where we're sort of our goal is to win over a pretty small number of meaningful games, and so I think some of the bigger partnerships have done have been really impactful, things like powering TikTok's first ever NFTs, I think was a really big validation of the security infrastructure that we've built. If you're an enterprise company and you're entrusting your brand towards projects like web three, you can't afford to have an FTX crisis. You can't afford to have something like a polling network bridge hack. You have to ensure that your user's assets are going to be secure, going to be safe, and the user experience really good. So I think TikTok choosing us for that was a sort of really sick if you can partnership. Same thing with game Stop, where you know they have one of the largest digital armies in the world. I think they really catalyzed what it means to have an online community that are fervent evangelists of a company's brand and a company's mission, and that mission being power to the players. So I mean, you know, part of the reason we did that partnership and they ended up working with us is a where the right platform to build their technology ambitions on, which is an FT marketplace and a place for game is to trade. But b because we really understand the value of those millions of fans and how that can actually form a really effective source of value for every game building on immutable. A game comes and launchers on US now and they instantly have two million fans from GameStop audience, And I think that's a community driven marketing strategy that has only really been formalized in the last three years, probably through crypto, because you have the idea of tokens, which is effectively programmatic equity. The reason tokens are so powerful is not necessarily because they're decentralized and here I'm talking about fundable tokens as in Bitcoin etherym iMX. It's because it's effectively a programmatic way to allow people to be collective owners of whatever thing you're building. So now if you are building a two sided marketplace and your problem is a cold start problem, you could say, well, cool, I'll give ten percent of this equity programmatically to people who provide value to the platform, and that could be given away over the first two years. It's the most powerful marketing invention of like really the last few decades. Yeah, it's so I have this bust over. It does Warren Buffett, but on the side it's Charlie Munger, right, So you know he always says, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. And when you give people kind of as pseudo equity, it incentivizes them to talk about it more, which is why I guess you saw all these pumps with the NFT stuff. But that aside, it doesn't change human behavior. Human behavior is still human behavior. And like, it makes a lot of sense what you're saying, So let me just ask this. Then it sounds like you guys, I mean, you guys are developing some of your own games, but you guys are also recruiting a lot of developers in right, and then your kind of value prop for these gaming developers or game developers. Is that, Hey, we're going to a We're going to share our community with you, so you guys can grow a lot faster. But be like, we're also going to help you Web three. We're gonna make it easy for you to on ramp too to Web three. Is that correct? Yeah, So we're really a full stack platform. Our goal is if you're a game and you have a successful game or sort of ability to make a game, we can take you from being a Web two experience to being a Web three experience. We can help you create a sustainable economy. We can help to all of the Web three technology aspects. So we use ZK rollups or a layer to one ethereum if you're technical and you're listening right now, which basically means that instead of five NFT transactions per second, which is possible on Ethereum layer one, we can do million, ten thousand, and we do all of that carbon neutrally and for zero dollars in transaction fees for these games. We also make it ridiculously easy to build. You don't have to touch smart contracts or blockchain technology. You're using stripe like Web two. APIs the reason that is so significant is if this is going to go main stam, we have to make this ridiculously easy to build upon. And I think that's the thing that's done porous by our peers in the marketplace today by other blockchains, because they're all investing in you know, better programming infrastructure or guides. And I think at the end of the day, it just has to be hey, tap into our APIs and you don't have to actually understand anything about blockchain in order to build only successful Yeah. I was watching some of your what are your other interviews, and I think so for example, let's say you know Heartstone or let's use magic the gathering, Right, it sounds like the move here is like you get one of these big players and then you know, the dominoes will fall and then all of them would just start to come on, right. And I think in the last interview you weren't really able to reveal any names. Are there that's that was like four or five months ago. Are there any names that you revealed recently that people might know of. Yeah, so one of the big ones, imboo im for you has millions of monthly active players. They just hit a million wallets on Immutable. So I mean they're basically a legacy Web two title that it's been around for nearly, you know, two decades now, and has built a gray marketplace economy where they monetize by taking clips off trades, a single kind of trade in this it's a it's a social kind of diverse, similar to say Second Life. And the key thing they're doing is they're just updating that so now their players can earn their assets and they can have a much more aligned business model, and you know, they're blowing the user stats of other games out of the water. So I think that's a really kind of significant one. We have Alluvium, which is probably the largest Web three game in the world today. They sold seventy two million dollars in a weekend last year. I'm in the middle of the bean market as well. So this is not really bull run stuff. This is people who fundamentally believe in the game and massive audiences millions of people coming to try it out. Got it? Yeah, So I guess ad that's very exciting. Congratulations on that. B you guys are I think you're valid at two point five billion right now if I'm not mistaken, correct, How do you guys take it to the next level. So I think that the move is pretty clear to me. It's like focus on you know, getting you know, top games, you know, top communities in Is that kind of the is that trajectory or is there something else there? Our goal is get as many awesome quality games building on the platform as possible. Last year we went from five to over one hundred and twenty fifth to first in terms of relative market share. The stat that just came out as games building on a mutable received over eight billion dollars US in funding last year. This is the most out of any competing L one or L two in the world, including Solana, Polyon, Binance, ap Doos, Sui, et cetera. Yeah, so that's a really exciting start for us. I think it shows the quality of kind of the games that we've won and what kind of brand we're trying to build as well. Ultimately, our vision is all of the world's unique value will turn into NFTs. This won't just be gaming assets. It will be when you buy a term deposit at the bank that should be tradable, When you buy an insurance contract that should be a digital asset. When you buy a house, and the simplest reason for this is not digital ownership. Digital ownership actually does not matter outside of objects that are inherently digital, because if I have true digital ownership of a house that exists in the real world, the local property title system can always say, actually, that doesn't matter, and the value of my digital NFT ownership ends there. What will be the significant catalyst for most of the world's value will be superior liquidity and utility, aka you can trade things for cheaper prices or things you couldn't previously trade, or on the utility side, you have better access to cheaper financial services. The example I always give here is imagine you live in a region where local banks are immature, and the cheapest mortgage you can get to buy a house is eight percent. And now imagine DeFi gets so efficient that there is online competition for appraisals of any house that's an NFT, such as you can get a mortgage for six percent anywhere in the world. It'll be slow, it'll take time for t fight to get more efficient than local financial service providers, but once it does, ninety percent of the home in any region where you can get a two hundred big superior interest rate in those homes will be overnight tokenized into an FTS hundreds of billions of dollars of value. And what we're going to see is this shift is the biggest pressure for any vertical kind of shift is financial pressure because you only have a limited number of customers who have to make the switch. It's it's kind of like vendors and business driven, and we're going to see a pretty monumental shift, but thin it will take some time. I think it will take five to fifteen years, depending on the vertical, but the world will end up tokenized and for the most part kind of securitized. I love that. And here's the thing. So your name alone, the fact that your name is immutable also means that you can literally, like you can switch just from gaming and the like. You can build a platform from all this stuff, Like is that the long long term vision? Well, if you're building a platform that can allow anyone to build a tradable real economy with hundreds of billions of assets, and that's what we're talking about with a single game alone. If you look at RuneScape, like millions of players, each of them would own thousands of ass you are easily into nearly a trillion assets over the lifetime of that gamer economy. If you're bringing liquidity to all of that, if you're solving user experience for that, solving like the tens of billions of financial assets or like the single digit billions of homes around the world is a trivial problem. I mean, so the infrastructure that we're building for gaming actually solves pretty much every other vertical because it's the hardest use case of unique value to solve for and to create liquidity for. I mean, it sounds like a sounds like a trillion dollar plus company. Man, that's that's the goal. Cool, Okay, So, I mean obviously the business has been scaling, the space has been scaling. You guys went to five to one hundred plus games or so, you guys. You guys also have a couple hundred people now, so how how have you been scaling? As a leader? Yeah, I mean, I think you have to hire well is pretty much the most important thing. So last year we build our exec team. We now have a full bench. It's really exciting. We've bought on phenomenal people, and the finance director of Facebook running a seventy billion dollar PNL became our CFO, and so now governance and financial transparency is one of our key strengths, which is an incredibly important thing I think in a post FTX world, in a post lunar world. We brought on after Pays, chief information security officer at Lastian's had a product management, safety, cultures and entry COO one of Australia's most successful startup CEOs, Jill Finlay. I think Justin Hulog, who ran Biode Games Asia, is leading our studio efforts. So we've been able to pull on some really phenomenal people over the last year. That is ultimately the most important kind of thing we can do to scale ourselves and scale the company. I think the second thing is just it requires probably a I think you can't really be a successful I always i'm confused about this because I think it's very difficult to be a successful entrepreneur with a high ego, because I think you require so many changes to yourself to be successful over the maturity of the company that you kind of have to accept it. You just have to make fundamental changes. At times. When you start out you're doing everything, you're an individual contributor. Suddenly you're a manager, suddenly you're a man mature of managers, and suddenly you're trying to steer this big ship and trying to steal culture and trying to stick a strategy through you know, a sizeable number of people. So I think it just requires a good degree of self awareness, reading a lot of books, and just being obsessed with learning how you can do the next stage better. So, I mean that's what we focus a lot on. We read a lot of books. A shout out to Matt Mocery who wrote The Great CEO Within. I think that was a very significant book for us to read early on. That kind of gave us a head start. And recently we've been pretty obsessed with scaling Up, which is kind of a you know, a business building book. Yep, Yeah, scaling up is great. I saw on one of your previous injuries you had the Hard Thing About Hard Things Matt Marker's book. These are all good. So I guess, so is this the Have you had businesses before this or is this the first one? We've done? Startups? Definitely, nothing of this scale. So we previously built my brother and I, you know, a league of legend bedding platform. You can bet on your own matches. We built a machine learning driven Shopify competitor where you could automatically optimize your store from pricing and copy. So, you know, we've always kind of been very keen to build technology products that make a difference, and particularly kind of in gaming or e commerce. But this is the first one that you know, had significant scale to it. Got it. I'm gonna come back to that one in a second. But like what I've learned over the years, it's you know, my friends and I we we started small. We were at these conferences and we'd always talk about, oh my god, what's the newest marketing tactic, what's the newest strategy? No, da da da da, And then you grow, and then you grow past a certain point and it's like I still host the events right now or whenever we see each other, and now was like, we don't talk about tactics anymore, we talk about strategy, We don't talk about the how anymore. We just talked about who are we going to hire? Who are we going to hire? And literally like it's the same thing for you, but for you, like do you do you expect this to happen because it sounds like this is a niche situation where the market is just pulling you. That's where you know you have product market fit, right, So was that intentional? Did you know this is going to happen like what happened there? I think yes. I think push versus pool is an apt analogy. I think from day one we were pulled. I mean we were barely keeping up during the first couple of years, one hundred plus hour weeks every single week. I think that's when you know you've where you just kind of have to kind of set afloat. That's when you know you've found something really meaningful, or there's there's a lot of external pulls on your time and demand. Yeah, I mean I don't think we were particularly good at marketing. I think we kind of just understood our audience and the products we were building and kind of thankfully in Web three in Crypto, that is marketing. It's having authority on your product and kind of understanding the space and the partnerships that emerge from that were significant signals. But I think we probably didn't do it too formally, especially early on. That makes sense. And here's the other thing. I think you guys picked a great spot to start into because you coming from a gaming background. Same for me. It's gamers are rabid fans, right, it were just it's such a crazy community and they're so engaged. And if you look at like the daily active users with the top games, like they're just locked in and they're spending to the top people spending in those games are spending like a million dollars plus, right, So I think that kind of has its own little you create your own little viral loop there. So smart, I wanted to talk about the future of Web three. So what are you excited about in particular because we're recording this right now where people are still like, you know, down about everything. You know, the whole FTX thing is still going on. So what are you excited about in the future of Web three. I would be remiss to say I'm excited for the first few mainstream games. I think they will be the most significant catalyst of mainstream adoption. If you look at the total active users in crypto today, it's probably hoppering around thirty million. One mainstream game will triple that, and it will be incredibly impactful because people won't even know they're using Web three under the hood. And I think that's when we start to reach maturity in Web three, we stop referring to things as denominated by its Web three characteristics, but instead it starts to transform the category that it's being applied to. We're not going to refer to it as DeFi. We're going to refer to it as like finance in the future, or like loan infrastructure. We're not going to refer to it as Web three gaming. It will simply be gaming. And the expectation is that you get your property rights and the same way that you know when you go and play your favorite desktop game, you don't say this is a desktop for you to play game. These are categories that are kind of become alided by the overall usefulness that the product has and when it reach is ubiquity. That's the thing I'm most excited for. I think I'm excited to see the bear run shakeouts and probably immature or insecure products that shouldn't be there. I think we're going to see a reversion to ethereum. We've already seen a little bit of this. I think in a world where people become more understanding of the value that high level of consensus security and sort of a high level of diligence on all the infrastructure that's been invested in ethereum today comes to fruition. I also think we're going to see a shift away from custodial products and an emphasis on sort of solutions that don't have that centralization risk factor. And you what's an example of that just for the audience. So, I mean, our product is completely self custodial. You could always own your own keys, You can use it through different wallets if you like, and some of those maybe sort of castodial, but the protocol itself is self custodial. The reason that's so important is it avoids things like a bridge hack, where there's been a four point two billion dollars of user funds lost because of bridge hacks. So every side chain sometimes you hear this is referred to as kind of L two's is basically just a blockchain with the centralized bridge with theoryum itself, and there's a very high vulnerability factor for those. So I think people being more aware of the risks evolved in products like that, and investors as well, is a good shift for the industry. Got it? You know? In this downmarket right now? Are you guys? Look at any m and a opportunities you guys look at scooping anything. Yeah, I think we're opportunistically always a kind of looking. I think the position we're in is a really fortunate one. Post ar Rays got a two hundred million US in cash in the bank, plus a significant amount of tokens hundreds of millions of dollars, and the foundation has a nearly a billion dollar war chest for going and helping people build Web three games. So I think we're at a fortunate position from there. Obviously, Macro is tough right now, and we want to ensure that we have a really long runway. But I think we're sort of in a fortuneate opposition. Fascinating, So I'll just throw this out to the audience. I mean, like, you know, potentially, what Robbie might do is wait for the market to take a little more look for really strong communities out there, really strong gaming communities that just aren't doing that well, and he can scoop them up for pennies on adult I'm not saying that's what he's going to do, but trying to get you guys to think that way. One more question about so I remember I go to a lot of these web three, crypto conferences, whatever whatever you want to call them. And I would see immutable sponsoring a lot of these, right, how has that strategy you worked out for you? Like would you say it's really good or like you know, may whatever, Because I'm always curious about these. I mean, I think if you're not doing dead in marketing while you're spending money, I'm very big on funnels and understanding ROI aligned to business outcomes. It's always hard with brand and awareness. So I think a few of these things you have to try, and I think the effectiveness of the ROI comes from the campaigns you build around it. Okay, you sponsored the conference, but then it's about how many news stories that into how many meaningful interactions when you're meeting customers and they see your brand above them while they're talking to you, what'sing preest conversion chants of that deal being one? So it's it is a trickier way to measure the effectiveness of a kind of emotional spend there. I'm definitely personally, I'm a big fan of like viral loops and products that inherently grow, like building virality and marketing into the product. I think you cannot have too many ways to share a product. I'm a big fan of sort of using tokens to incentivize adoption and virality, and a big fan of performance marketing and sort of very specific ROI driven spent love it. We're speaking the same language here, so you know, you strike me as a guide that is always trying to get better, always reading a lot. I mean, is there anything in particular, like any sources you go to, or like, what's the most interesting thing that you've read recently? Big fan of through secory. I listen to a few podcasts, you know, all in Tim Ferriss when I can, basically based on the people who are coming and speaking, I try. I probably think reading is the biggest one, so I try and read quite a lot of business books. I can't read them during the weekday or I can't sleep, so I keep those to the weekends or holidays. But you know, I'm not going home and reading for four hours. I think there's it's kind of a balance and you can have it definitely too much noise, so I try and keep my input saying and kind of focus on I'll often reread books because I think the value of the book is not the knowledge inside of it. It is the change in behavior and the emotional conviction it gives you over the importance of those behaviors. What's the most reread book for you? Probably either Radical Canda or The Great CEO Within got it for you. Like you're I'm thinking back to my gaming days or my poker day's habits where I'd stay up to like four or five am, go get some fast food in the morning and all that very not conducive to running a business. And earlier you mentioned kind of health and fitness and all that, so I'm just curious, like, how do you run the business now? Are you go go go the whole time until you burnout, or like how do you structure that? Yeah, look, I haven't found that. I think having an excellent team that you want to you know, kind of deliver to every every week, I actually think really meaningful because the mission is exciting. I'm obsessed with what we can build in the future. But having day to day and week to week people that you kind of want to show up for but you really enjoy working with just makes it very fun. I'm a big fan of kind of bringing fun to work, making it playful. I think, especially a kind of this level of scale, it's really just about making one or two decisions per week that will have a chance to add billions onto the company's value or help you hit our goal of empowering hundreds of millions of players faster. It's not really about trying to do as many small things as one So I think it's about creating the environment where that's really sustainable and then raising your blue line imperative. So when you spend an hour, what is the value of that hour and having a very good internal model of that. Final question for you, Robbie, we talked about team billing earlier, and I would be remiss if I didn't ask you this question. How did you go about finding all these great people, whether it's from Facebook or write games and all that. Did you do it yourself? Recruiter? What was the move here? A lot? So everything. We have a big internal TA team. They have been amazing and have helped hire a lot. We put a lot of effort into our senior hires because they will hire everyone else. I mean, they bring a network if you're hiring someone really senior, like most of our exec team members bought substantial numbers of people with them, people who are excellent and really well vetted. We use a lot of network based hires, so referrals, we source people personally. I will ask my network if a hire is particularly important. We have very high hiring standards. I think it's the most important thing. And an A all round team or an A plus team will deliver far more results a third of the size than the significantly poorer quality team. And there's nothing more demoralizing than working with someone that you know is not kind of living up to the standards or expectations of the company. So I think it's the biggest gift we can give company, and company culture is maintaining and continuing to raise those standards over time. And you guys are remote, right or in the office. We're remote first, but we have a sizable amount of people in Sydney and a lot of the EXAC team kind of comes in every day, et cetera. Got it all right, Great, well, Robbie, this has been great. What's the best way for people to find you and Immutable online? I'm zero x FERG on Twitter. That's probably the best way, and Immutable is immutable on Twitter. All right, everyone go check out Immutable it's going to be the future trillion dollar company. I'm calling it, Robbie. Thanks so much for doing this. Thanks so much, Eric, We appreciate you joining us for this session of Marketing School. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit marketingschool dot io for more resources based on today's topic, as well as access to more episodes that will help you find true marketing success. That's marketingschool dot io until next time. Class dismissed