Back in 2008, before Bitcoin had any real adoption, @kmikeym turned himself into a publicly traded person. Shareholders could literally vote on his major life decisions, from career moves to his romantic relationships(!)
Mike is basically the OG creator token.
When I launched $ALEX years later, my goal was to crowdfund my move to San Francisco through an income-sharing agreement and become a founder. It worked and changed my life.
The attention around $ALEX opened doors, and I eventually began experimenting with other ideas inspired by Mike, including my “Control My Life” experiment during COVID with @austingriffith, when people voted for me to run 3 miles daily for a month.
We represent two sides of the same coin (lol) from two different tech eras: Mike uses Stripe credits while I use Ethereum.
Yet the internet still hasn’t figured out how to make humans investable, and crypto remains deeply confused about the category.
@jessepollak has said creator tokens were the wrong bet for Base, while @blknoiz06’s $ANSEM has been crushing it—the fact his audience is both large and deeply crypto-native gives him the largest runway of any creator so far to experiment using the fees generated by the token ($200M market cap).
@lmrankhan thinks the category will come back, while @hosseeb has said it may be time to give up on it.
I’m optimistic about $ANSEM because he’s already famous enough to bootstrap his market, while still having enough room to grow significantly. @jessewldn had a similar thesis years ago.
If you want to reach Ansem’s audience, you can simply airdrop to his holders. It could be next-gen D2C advertising.
Mike pioneered the publicly traded person. $ALEX brought the idea onchain. Now I’m hopeful $ANSEM can take it to MrBeast scale.
Great meeting you Mike!
