Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.

Rob McNealy
Today I’m talking alright. Today I’m talking to Darryll DiPietro, he is the founder and CEO of Coincierge Club. How are you today, Darrell? doing? Well, Rob, how are you doing? I’m glad we finally got to connect here because we’ve been hanging out for a while now. And it’s glad that you know, I’m glad you’ve taken the time because I’ve been trying to get you on the show for a while now. So before we jump into some of the hot topics of the day, and trust me, I think we got a lot of fun stuff to cover today. For the people who are not familiar with you, which I can’t believe there’s anybody that’s not familiar with you. Who are you? And what are you doing?

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
I am Darryll DiPietro. I am the founder and CEO of coin Sierra Club, and we built a mobile private key wallet with 30,000 different digital assets on it and a point of sale which allows users to use those assets, very simple to use. And we’re just here to try to help the crypto industry and kind of bring a bunch of different projects together along the way.

Rob McNealy
Wow. Hello. got that down. I guess you’ve been practicing your elevator pitch. So how did you get so good at your elevator pitch

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
up pitch to at least 200 250 times already. I’ve pitched from, you know, just anybody that wants to hear me talk to some of the biggest VCs in the valley. And they get the same pitch every single time.

Rob McNealy
So the valley, so I know that you’ve been doing a lot of entrepreneurial education kind of stuff. Tell me a little bit about kind of the stuff you’ve been working on to help grow what you’ve been doing.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Yeah. So in about two years ago, we started our journey in Silicon Valley. It started off with a Google event called Startup Grind. They have it in Redwood City. And that’s when we started meeting VCs and finding out that there is a way to get funding if you fit in a certain mold that these venture capitalists are looking for. They want to see revenue, they want to see growth, they want to see percentages, and they want statistics. They don’t care about height. They don’t care who’s backing your project. They only care about the actual fundamentals of the project numbers, employees growth, things like that. So we started this journey. We are You know, ended up going to Martha’s Vineyard did some stuff out there with some other VCs but brought back to the valley for launch 2018. And that’s when we really started to focus on how to build this brand in the way that a venture capitalist wants to see it. We’ve done a bunch of deal clubs. We did a deal club in New York became partners with Rob Charles and Goldfinger, which is a cryptocurrency back deal club on Wall Street. We did got six, seven months in New York, beginning of 2019. And then we came back around to San Francisco through an event at the end of June out there I was moderately successful, but it allowed us to establish a brand up there and then we got into a VC accelerator program in Santa Clara. And that was eight weeks of non stop work. We produced over 80 documents during that time. Things like we just talked about the elevator pitch or hone. Our pitch deck was honed our business plan was honed all these things that we maybe had but no one professional that ever sat down and said hey, you know what? This is okay. But it could be great or this is not okay. But it needs to be great. And so We went through and we developed all these items we develop, you know, fleshed out, our business plan fleshed out our five year, you know, goals, three year goals, HR plans, fundraising goals, where we’re going. And then at the end, they helped us build the perfect pitch deck, which we’ve been able to go out and pitch to a few different VCs in multiple locations, including Silicon Valley. We also pitch to an accelerator out here in Nevada. And so that’s really where we’re at. We’re trying to be that actual crypto company that follows legitimate rules. We’re trying to follow the way that you would build any other type of tech company. Whereas if you had a social media platform that has nothing to do with crypto, if you had the next Airbnb, the next Uber, these guys all went through the exact same programs, the exact same training and got the exact same, you know, feedback and built the same pitch decks just relevant to their own projects. And that’s what we’re lacking in the crypto space right now is you know, in the beginning or right around the time that I got into It, it seemed as if it was anybody with a white paper could raise 510 20 $40 million. And most of those projects have gone to the wayside was a lack of knowledge in the industry. So as we watched this happen, we said, you know what we’ve always wanted to be on the ethical side of everything that we do. So we’re going to follow traditional VC funding, a lot of people don’t believe in it. A lot of people think that we’re dealing with the enemy in you know, the people that have the money shouldn’t have access to the crypto, but in the end, these are the guys that are funding unicorn companies. And I think that that’s everyone’s goal in this space is to have a highly profitable business and we know that that’s the way we need to go. So we’re doing a lot of stuff up there.

Rob McNealy
So why didn’t you do an Ico that and why didn’t you try to fundraise just by selling off your own coins?

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Well, it’s interesting. We actually did have a small raise less than $10,000 less than what the SEC would have any concern about and it wasn’t about getting rich, like a lot of these projects did where they just raised a bunch of money and didn’t know what to do with it. We had a set set of goals we needed to be Build a server, we needed to build out our mobile applications. And we needed development funds. And so we did, we raised enough money to build a server to get a static IP and to be able to actually host this application. And we hired my friend Michael hue, who is a subcontractor for the US God to come in and build out these two nearly bulletproof applications. And that’s what we needed the funding for. But we never asked for anything more. We never tried to raise money that you know, we just go into our pockets or pay for lambos or, you know, these expensive parties or some of these crazy things that we saw in late 2017, early 2018.

Rob McNealy
No, so you don’t have a Lambo. So what you’re telling me, I’m kind of bummed. I bummed by that.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
I’ve got an Acura. Everybody’s seen it. It’s

Rob McNealy
$200 a month. So what exactly specifically is what problem is your, your product? What are you trying to solve? What are you trying to do with your project?

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
It’s interesting that you asked me that because if you’d asked me that about a year ago I would have given you a different answer. And the reason for that is the industry has evolved. So currently, right now we’re trying to help liquidate coins that have no value. But the overall idea and what I would have answered a year ago is we’re trying to bring everybody to one wallet. We’re trying to get everybody with all these multiple different chains and multiple different coins in different wallets, with with their own private keys are not only in their own private keys, and we’re trying to get everybody to move towards a mobile private key wallet where users hold their keys. And they have a vendor network where they can spend this crypto, because if you’re not spending crypto, then what the heck is the point? Most of these coins, the values been lost? Most of these projects have dissolved and people hold this value in these one off wallets. Why can’t you spend that at the gas station? Why can you spend that at the grocery store? So we looked at that problem. But the issue we ran into instantly was like I said, there is no value on some of these coins and people aren’t willing to take that hit. So we looked at kind of modifying it into a coupon style liquidation of these all coin values where users get tangible value in tourism. And it seems to be working well, you know, we’ve thrown a bunch of events where people have come in and spent different all coins on different things. You’ve been a few of them, or at least one of them. And so, you know, we’re trying to, we’re trying to evolve with the industry as the industry evolves. But the underlying technology has really not changed in two years. It’s a mobile privacy wallet, a point of sale, users hold our own keys, there’s no information that gets sent to the devices. It’s built by us due to subcontractors. So the security is number one. But again, you know, it’s it’s difficult to stay relevant in this industry. So you constantly have to look for new ways to reinvent your product to stay relevant.

Rob McNealy
So, you’re saying that you’re basically taking existing tokens from dead projects and then recycling them into something that has value?

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
That’s right.

Rob McNealy
How?

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
By knowing how they hosp..exactly by knowing hospitality industry works and attacking the soft costs associated with that. So for example, out here in Las Vegas, we get complimentary bottle service that bottle service does not cost us anything the venue comps it out. Why can’t we tip in cryptocurrency? Why can’t we tip the door guy that lets our people in in cryptocurrency Why can’t we pay for that complimentary beer that we get at the bar and cryptocurrency and so a light bulb went off and said wait a minute, this this whole industry of really its cash its cash driven industry right now that is undocumented. There is no you know, record of you throwing the door Guy 100 bucks, or the door Guy $20 or the cocktail server $50. Why can’t they accept crypto?

Rob McNealy
Well, I think they can, I guess the I understand

Unknown Speaker
No, because their venues the venues won’t allow it. And gaming won’t allow it. And so that’s when we come in and we circumvent the gaming laws that prevent them from doing so and allow these users the Your businesses to accept these coins.

Rob McNealy
Right? And I understand I’m gonna I’m gonna play hardball with you because I’m trying I don’t understand it like I understand. If you create your own brand, your own coin that works on your own platform and integrate that that makes those economics I can understand. I don’t understand the economics of taking other people’s dead projects that may not be traded that may not have value, how you using them in some way creates value with them where they’re already considered dead or not really being used. That’s the part I just don’t understand. Why would you Why do you want to take these other coins that are out there are tokens that are dead? Why not just work with your own token?

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
I’ve got the perfect answer for you. So that is on CMC that has a dead project, like a verge or something like that.

Rob McNealy
Verge actually got a pretty robust community so I wouldn’t say Verge.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
I’m just naming names name a coin on there that

Rob McNealy
SALT.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Great SALT

Rob McNealy
SALT, Pac Coin.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Either one doesn’t matter will take SALT because it’s the first one you said. So salt is on CMC and you can see what their market cap is. And you can see what one coin is trading at not having that knowledge in front of me. I’m assuming you’re maybe googling that right now. But let’s just call let’s just say one salt coin goes for $5 a coin. Okay?

Rob McNealy
Six cents.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Okay, even better. Okay, so six cents a coin. So in order to have $6, that’s 100 coins of salt coin. Correct. Correct. So if you take 100 coins and you go to one of our vendors and you buy a $6 beer, you now got $6 worth of that coin. You weren’t able to sell it on an exchange because there really isn’t anybody banging at the door to get salt right now. The vendor who did not pay for that beer gives you that beer and also gets $6 worth of salt, which may or may not be worth something down the road. So are the arbitrage value here is actually reestablishing a value for these dead tokens connected Physical tangible assets that users can hold. So you’d say are you taking their coins and then converting them to your own token and then on your platform, you’re basically doing the trading with your own coin or token, we don’t do any trading for the we don’t do any, we literally have a hands off approach to this. So, the vendors that we work with hold these coins, we can show them how to liquidate them through the waves decks or through other means, but we do not liquidate to feeha we don’t exchange the currency errs. This is simply they they would normally not be getting anything for this competition value. Now they’re getting something that could potentially worth a lot more.

Rob McNealy
So I get so I download your wallet. And I go in there and do I just have to then buy on that on through your wallet. I have to buy whatever the whatever these tokens that I want, or do I just buy

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Most of the time users already have the tokens on other platforms and they just migrate them over remember, we have 30,000 digital assets on that platform. So there’s except for the big except for a lot of the ERC 2720 tokens, we can onboard those coins. And if there is a coin that isn’t on boarded or a platform TUSC, we can make that, yeah, we can make that happen in about 15 minutes. So it’s not a hard process. And it doesn’t mean that it’s not like we’re sitting here being like, Oh, you have to buy $20 $100 $200 of our coin to use our platform. You literally don’t, you literally have to have at least one Coincierge Club coin trading at about two cents right now in order to try to do the transaction.

Rob McNealy
It’s interesting, I need to wrap my head about it, to be honest.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Understand we make money off the transactions. That’s how we make our money. We’re very clear about that. We have a premium SAS model for our vendors, which they pay us also monthly. So for the user, it’s exceptionally cheap and it’s just The traditional type of transaction you’re used to sending in crypto, where you pay user generated fee.

Rob McNealy
So how So basically, at this point, then you didn’t do an Ico but you did do a small raise. Where are you on the funding of it right now?

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
We’ve raised $72,000, traditionally through convertible note, and equity swaps. We started off doing equity, then we incorporated in March of 18. Switch to a convertible note offering. We’re doing a late seed round raise right now, which I don’t think the SEC would like me to say what the amount is or how that is, but if you’re interested in finding out privately reach out to us and have this conversations, we try to make sure that we follow the law. It’s kind of interesting that this space was bred out of the opposite of that, but uh, we try to make sure we follow up.

Rob McNealy
You know, I think that a lot of people got into crypto not because they necessarily wanted to get around the law. I think, well, there’s some people that are just straight up criminals, but I think a lot of people Got into this space because they didn’t like the existing power brokers that are being very centralized. And I think there’s a nuance there, right. Like, I don’t want to break the law. And before we even launched with our own token two years ago, you know, we spent a lot of time talking to attorneys. I personally talked to the SEC attorneys about securities offerings and and understanding that I didn’t want to launch any legal security. And here’s the thing, not that I really care that much about laws and government, everybody who knows me knows I’m pretty, I can be pretty political at times. But the thing is, to me, if you’re launching a project, you know, in the startup, and you understand this, because you’re going through this accelerator stuff this whole, you know, regulatory risk is what it’s called right? To me. If you’re a startup founder, and you’re not out there hardcore, trying to understand what risks your startup faces and then having plans to mitigate those risks and regulatory risk is a huge piece of that, then your friends as a founder, you’re a moron. And you’re probably going to lose people’s money if you don’t care about regulatory risk. Now, you can say you hate the government all you want, that doesn’t mean that they’re still not relevant to what you’re doing. Right?

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Exactly. You have to make sure you stay on the correct side of the law. And it’s difficult because like you said, a lot of these people I know, you know, you have a token that is for sorry, coin, that’s for the Second Amendment. And a lot of people will look at that and say, Oh, he must be anti government. No, I mean, the second amendment is part of the government. It actually is one of the like, founding principles of what makes our government work. And so you have to look at stuff like that. You can’t just be this rogue person out there in the space trying to, you know, change. I know, disruption is something that they connect with the centralization and the blockchain, but the FinTech side of it is highly regulated. And if you want to play in this game, I mean, you’re playing with the people that have all the money in the world. For example, you know, I’m sure You saw that we signed with Wilson Sonsini. That’s one of the biggest law firms in Silicon Valley. They handle everything from a pre seed to an IPO. So for our next round of raising like we’re in, we’re in the process of onboarding. We’re going to be moving our cap table over to kartha. We’re going to be doing the things that the Draper’s do, we’re going to be doing the things that Erik Voorhees does, we’re going to be doing the things that the VCs that are in our space are looking for so that we can scale this thing the correct way.

Rob McNealy
So what is the correct way? What is your kind of long term goal for your project?

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
We’re, we thought we were ready for a series A after going through this accelerator, we realized we weren’t quite there yet. We need to find a product market fit. That’s our next goal. So we have about 600 or so wallets on the system. We saw 14% uptick last month and we’re doing about 1000 transactions a month on the coin. So we just seem to do a lot of AV testing. It’s probably going to take us maybe about another six months of AV testing for product market. Fit To find out how to get this thing to scale. And so that’s why we’re doing the smaller raise of that. And then we’re going to go after a traditional series a raise, we see this thing through, we see this thing growing and scaling through a series C, we’ve talked to a few different firms that have given us, you know, verbal commitments on Series B. So we know what we need to do to get to that point. We have specific, you know, metric intervals that we need to hit. But, you know, there’s, there’s really realistically The sky’s the limit, because there’s not a lot of people that are building multiple chain wallets right now. And there’s a few and we’ve outlined those as competition in our business plan. But realistically, cold people are still trying to figure out how to launch coins on their own wallets. And the ones that are out there that hold multiple chains, hold the users private keys.

Rob McNealy
And you’re doing it without holding their private keys. Correct?

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Correct. We never not only do we not see your private key, we can’t even reset your password.

Rob McNealy
Well do the other ones reset your password?

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Yeah. I mean, if you look at the competition without trying to throw shade on anybody that’s out there. What will Coinbase for example, Coinbase has how many coins on there that six or seven. I haven’t been a coin base in a minute, but I know they have the GD x as well. And they’ve got a lot of different tokens on there, but they hold your keys if there is a DDoS attack on that platform that’s gone. And people think that’s a wallet. And people have confidence in it. And they say, Oh, I have FDIC insurance. No, you don’t. You have FDIC insurance on your US dollars, not on your Bitcoin that’s in there. A lot of the exchanges that are out there that people are using like a crack in, although we do like those guys who met those guys up and walk out Wyoming. They hold your private keys, these wallets or exchanges, hold your private keys. And anytime a hacker wants to go in there and walk around they can and they can take that money out of your account. And there’s literally nothing you can do about that.

Rob McNealy
You got me kind of stressed out to be honest.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Why is that? Don’t you

Rob McNealy
Now I actually naturally don’t. You would not believe I’m not the one in charge of that though. So the the wife is the she’s the keeper when it comes down to cracking the whip on the detail stuff like that I’m not allowed to touch the money, you know, so, but she’s much smarter than I am. So it’s okay. I don’t even know where the private key actually I know where all the private keys are. But we, we have a workflow per for our own personal finances. And we’re very, I guess you would say where we have a lot of redundancy plans for, you know, it’s really, you know, it will look how many people are dying out there and then they, you know, they don’t need their their spouses don’t even know where their keys are, they lose millions of dollars. I mean, it’s ridiculous. I actually think that’s a problem with crypto that needs to be addressed.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Not only about like, third party custody, I mean, obviously, I was looking into doing something with that children and trying to leave some sort of like, you know, will or some sort of crypto Trust Fund, if you will, and the only thing I could really come up with is low the private key on a USB drive, put the USB drive into a security box at a bank, and then a studio that has access to that. And that’s not the answer.

Rob McNealy
I actually think it absolutely could be an answer. In fact, there’s private safe deposit vaults that are out there that are Safe Haven Vaults is a new franchise. Vegas.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
I didn’t think about that until you said it.

Rob McNealy
Yeah. And so like for safe haven, for instance, there’s no AML KYC because they’re not a bank. And they have full biometrics, they don’t know who you are. And unlike a bank, who does know who you are, so there’s a lot of privacy that’s being retained. And then what happens is, you have a customer you have like a next of line, basically data card that you put on top of your box inside their box, so that if you they ever have to drill your box out, your box is still locked, but now they have the person to call Say, Hey, your contents are here. So they got a good solution for that. And I think that’s an excellent, you know, something to look at out there for that besides just normal personal handling, I don’t have an issue if you want to, you know, put information on jump drive, and that’s encrypted, and then someone else has the key for that. But you need to have backups. And I think that you see a lot out there that you know, the husband is the one who does all the finances and there’s no instructions on how to deal with it and he dies and the wife’s you know, the widow was left in the dust and, and that’s a problem. But we have a problem with that now, even with bank accounts and things like that, that’s why there’s 10s of millions of dollars and hundreds of millions of dollars in lost funds that different states hold right because that exact problem they forgot about bank accounts and things like that. But I think that’s that I think that going forward is something that’s going to have to be fixed because the public the I think right now the public isn’t ready for crypto because it’s so because of its unforgiving nature.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Yeah, it’s very, you know, finite When it comes to those keys, I mean, if you do not have them well, on the platforms that would like we’re building and what other you know, our competitors are building. It’s very finite when it comes to that.

Rob McNealy
Well, I will absolutely i mean, i, we’ve even have, you know, we’re an open project that we have lots of volunteer dabs, and we’ve had developers lose their keys. And you’re like, you’re the developer, and you, you know, misplace your keys. Yeah. And we had one of the early developers that was working with us when we were still in ERC 20 token, he put his private keys on a text file on his hard drive, and his hard drive failed, and he couldn’t recover it and lost a lot of money. And there was nothing we could do. There was just nothing we could do about it. And I felt bad but and it led to him leaving the project because he didn’t have any and he didn’t have any skin in the game at that point, which just kind of sucks and to me,

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
it’s completely cannot recover from that hard drive the totally fried out the hard drive?

Rob McNealy
Yeah, I don’t understand it was a platter failure. Something.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
I fried a hard drive on a MacBook and I hired a nerd to come in and he was able to recover everything.

Rob McNealy
Yeah. And I understand that I’m just he said he did everything he couldn’t he couldn’t do it. So I don’t understand that. But I know that it didn’t, his tokens didn’t make the swap. So he didn’t he was not able to recover them before we became a coin and did our swap. Because at this point, it doesn’t matter anymore because we’re not a token anymore. So wherever we have our own coin, on our own chain.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Could you just create those tokens for him, and then I guess, because you guys never recovered the coins that were on his hard drive, you couldn’t issue.

Rob McNealy
What we ended up doing is there was some coins that we knew that were lost that were recovered and they were put back into the worker proposal fund for costs. So the ones that we could valid verify that did not make the swap, because when we swapped we had to create a supply of TUSC to accommodate The supply of OCC.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
We’re doing something similar with ERC 20 Coincierge, so..

Rob McNealy
Yeah so so we had to create enough in that when we did the Genesis block for our block chain. We had to create 50 billion coins to match the hundred billion OCC because we swapped it a 2:1 ratio because we brought her we shrunk our supply a little bit. Half you know so we’re up and then when we created the blockchain we had to initially essentially pre mine those 50 billion so..

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
What happened to my question, excuse me think what happened to my OCC coins that were on? What’s that game you walk around the Pokemon

Rob McNealy
AirCoins?

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Yeah. I haven’t even looked.

Rob McNealy
Yep, they are TUSC. So we we work with. So we work with Aircoins on that. So how it worked with air coins was the same way. Because of our swap. Our swap was a manual process. We created a dap where you had to manually move your OCC tokens. You had to create a task account. Yeah, then You had to manually on your own dime, move your OCC tokens to an Omega address, and then a tab, basically attach your account name and then your account credit. And then you had to download your own keys. And then when we launched, essentially, your account was created and credited with the correct number of OCC.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
And it worked in the background, or did you automate that process?

Rob McNealy
Or no, it was completely manual process. We made a Dappthat you had to it was a website, essentially.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
That’s why I’m asking because we’ve got I

Rob McNealy
We’ll talk I could I’ll tell you everything we did offline. Yeah. Essentially, yes, we did create a system that worked and worked very well. And it was a very slick system, actually, because we researched a lot of swap, right. This isn’t for interoperability, or there’s no OCC.

I really well, I don’t know if it would be the best way to do it ongoing because I’m not a developer. But I know that we spent a lot of time in our dev team spent a lot of time looking at There, you know all the major Icos that did the same thing. Most of them did a really bad job. Some Icos, even some big ones literally had your own private key.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
I know and its EOS will never work. And that’s why Ethereum will never work because there’s half of that EOS are part of the EOS network stuck on a theory I’m still and well in that

Rob McNealy
Yeah, so we actually made it so you had to login with meta mask. Okay, so you so you controlled your wall, we didn’t control any of it. And there’s a little trick I’m not going to tell you what they did. But our our guys figured it out. And they figured out a brilliant I’m work with our swap went almost flawlessly. And you guys watch like two days ago, right? Or? Yes, no, not yesterday, like couple days ago, right?

So we did the swap ended in October. So we did the swap in October. And then we just brought the gooey wallet and the gooey block explore online and brought our block producers in this last week. So we went through the whole process this week. So we are now Live real boy. And our first exchange listing will happen within the next couple days. They’re working. He’s working on. Thank you. I’ll tell you his work in the integration as we speak. So we’re it’s been an interesting process, but I’ll tell you, we’ll talk a little bit later about, you know how we did the the swap, but we spent a lot of time trying to figure that out in a way that was secure that we didn’t control keys. And that was a big thing that I said, I don’t want to be responsible for their keys. But I’ll tell you this. So even now, people that went and swap their OCC for Costco have already lost their tuskys it’s unforgiving. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Like we I mean, we put I mean, when we did the swap, we went through and we created a whole lot of videos and instructions and say copy this, copy this, do not lose this, do not lose this blah, blah, blah, you will lose all your access to friends. And we’ve had several people already come into the group and say they lost their keys.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Well, my heated how many times you download somebody else’s wallet at like a conference and they go download our wallet and you’re like, Okay, okay, okay, okay. Okay, and they want you to backup the keys, you know, you’re really getting like $5 with a Bitcoin from them for downloaded the wallets. You’re like, All right, I’m not gonna use this wallet again. I mean, I can only assume that that happens to some people sometimes, but they’re just so excited, or in just such a rush to get through the process of setting up a wallet that they don’t factor in. I’ll never forget this password. It’s my password that I use for everything, or it’s, you know, in a significant thing for me. And then a week later, you’re like, password.

Rob McNealy
Yeah, it’s bad. And I think this is going to be an impediment to adoption. But I think it’s, it’s something that can be fixed. I think it’s something that can be created or corrected and dealt with. But at this point, it’s scary when even the people that are like the developers in this space are having the same problem, right? I’m like, I mean, can you imagine Grandma, who has a little bit dementia has, you know, a million dollars in crypto which is equivalent, her life savings. And then she, you know, delete off her one letter from her private key hash. And now she can’t access that ever. I mean, this if anybody who thinks that system is going to work for mass adoptions insane, right, it’s just not going to work. Something has to be done there needs to be a recoverability things. And and with our project, and maybe with viewers as well, we’re already looking long term, how we’re going to have to correct that and deal with that issue, because I know it’s an issue. And technologically we need to fix that. And so we’re working on some ideas. I’m not gonna save because I can tell you what our secret sauce is yet, but we got some ideas that we’re going to be working on. It just takes time.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Most of that because it’s interesting to see what you guys come up with. I know you guys have a pretty solid team and what you guys have been able to produce so far, it’s been pretty impressive.

Rob McNealy
So well. Well. Thank you. Um, so the latest news we were talking about this the other day, the crypto media purge. Have you been you know, it is

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
So Christmas came early for me. You know, we’ve seen a lot of people posting online recently that there’s been a crypto purge, especially on YouTube over the past couple of days. And, you know, I think that we share the same sentiment where it’s, you know, a lot of these guys were pushing projects that were shady sketchy, you know, ponzis, multi level marketing, affiliate links, or blatantly taking endorsement money from projects that shouldn’t have been endorsed and seeing this purge. I know it hurts people. I know, it’s the wrong time of the year. I know we should, you know, want everybody to succeed. But some of these guys, they have zero technical skill, zero technical ability, and they’re making money off of projects that myself and yourself and other people in our positions have worked hard, and sometimes they’re making more money off of promoting the projects that we’re making off of the projects. I saw somebody post something about like, Oh, this is a somebody’s like, Oh, this is freedom of speech. And then someone came back to him which I retweeted very similar thing, which was like that’s not freedom of speech. So third party company, you don’t have the right to freedom of speech on YouTube. And then the guy was like, I beg to differ. And then the guy was like, Oh, why don’t you build your own? You have a problem with censorship on social media platforms, build your own, and I was thinking to myself, because this guy has no technical skills, because he has zero technical ability. And you know, if you do have technical ability, and you’re an influencer, like my friend, Kingsley, and Aaron have built float, and I know you just follow me on float, not to give like some random shout out, but here’s the thing. Just give a shout out. Float is a platform for you. Float is a platform that’s not going to censor you. Flow is also been VC backed by Draper. You’re not Draper University, boost VC, which is Adam Draper’s, you know VC fund, and they built something they’ve come out and said, we’re not just content people. We’re not just native In the space that talk about crypto, we’re going to build a platform and they believe they have over 1000 users on there right now. And I can only imagine that they saw a huge uptick over the last couple of days. But if your sole basis of your channel is to interview people to make money off of that off of paid content, or sponsorships, and you’ve got some, you know, robot logo for your, you know, newest wallet promotion, it’s, it’s time for you to go, it’s time for you to you know, just hold your Bitcoin and go to the conferences and be that person, but you don’t need to keep profiting largely off of our hard work.

Rob McNealy
Well, I think one of the I think the two problems that I see here and having been a project in this space for two years now I’ve run into this a few times, right? And you have to I’m going to bet one, there’s a the guys that are being purged right now, are not just any old I’m a nice, honest to goodness Jerry analyst in crypto world YouTuber, these are guys that are pitching scams. These are guys that have been pitching bit Connect. These are guys that I’m pitching, literally full blown ponzis and not really adding a lot of value. By the way, it’s funny, I don’t even know a lot of these people. It’s kind of funny. They’re not even they’re not even as big as they were before. Like, now it’s like, a lot of the crypto guys these people aren’t even that great anymore. But these guys literally were pitching criminal fraudsters and unrepentantly. When these you know, fraudsters are out there. So I think one, this isn’t some wholesale, you know, attack for YouTube. Again, it’s all crypto. That’s nonsense. And I know lots of people that try to do good content out there that aren’t blantant

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Did your YouTube channel get purged or not?

Rob McNealy
Not a single Not a single problem, not even a notification. Not even a notification. I haven’t had any problems with crypto or I’m sorry, my crypto related content. In fact, I put out I uploaded a video today and it’s already, you know, ranking in Google and it’s about got crypto in it so so it’s not just all crypto that somehow it’s it’s the scammers are the least. scam enablers, and I don’t and honestly no folks are given, I don’t really care that these guys that are making money off costing people their life savings on the shit they were recommending. They are part of the problem. And if people are getting all defensive like Oh, poor crypto me, dude, and you’re part of the problem too. If you think that those kind of guys getting pulled out of the ecosystem is a bad thing.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
It’s like this man. If you’re a sports reporter, are you really part of the sports team? No, and we need to get more. There needs to be more work and more effort done on the projects to kind of regulate this thing. Like we can’t sit here and say say, oh, we’re gonna let you know, we’ll let this guy post about this, let this guy post about that we got to start calling these projects out. And I know you know that I have a whatever with with Nathan Hawkman. But I’m going to say this right now on this put on this podcast, he posted something brilliant. I don’t know if it was yesterday or the day before, but it literally was what we just said it was no fucks given sorry, but not sorry. Like all these guys that all they’re all they do is go out there and talk about other people’s projects. And it’s not about the code. It’s not about the security. It’s about how much money you’re making and shout out to this sponsor and shout out to that sponsor, and he ripped up and I don’t remember verbatim what it was, but I remember reading it and being like, yep, I agree. I didn’t like it because you know, me and him were we had a bit of a falling out but respect to that post. I just had to say it was spot on and it it was the overall sentiment. I kind of cooled off over those two days of Christmas because I was doing the Christmas thing. But today hit it hard and I was like, You know what, it’s time for It’s time for these guys that are crying about their product of crime on their YouTube channels getting censored or crying about their social media getting censored that has zero technical skills that are literally out there just going to the conferences to party and just going around and doing all these crazy videos about nothing to be purged. It doesn’t help guys like you, it doesn’t help guys like me. We’ve had influencers in our circle for a little while we had some of the bigger names wearing our stuff, it doesn’t help our brand. It actually hurts your brand when somebody is wearing a T shirt and then they’re running around Vegas eating mushrooms on video. It’s not good for your company. And so these are the guys that need to see the purge. I don’t know if you’re are you pulling up that tweet?

Rob McNealy
No, I’m not. I’m just I’m just listening because I couldn’t agree more. I’m to be honest.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Well, I mean, yes, it’s going to pull up that tweet because I think it’s worth being mentioned. What do you What were you? What are your thoughts on all that?

Rob McNealy
My thoughts are that there are still a lot of quote unquote influencers in the space that are in violation of US law and are taking commissions to promote people and they’re not disclosing it. And they’re recommending things and I think personally, I think that’s unethical. And and the federal government, you know, established this years ago Not that I care about the fads and not a bootlicker. But the fact is, not only is it unethical, but because you’re misleading or potentially misleading your your audience by your own moral hazard and conflict of influence, or conflict of interest. With some of these recommendations. You’re not telling people you’re being paid. And to me, I have an issue with that. And because you’re not necessarily you’re going to be biased. You’re not evaluating them based on what you really feel you’re you’re evaluating them and promoting them based on how much they’re paying you and you’re not telling your audience this, and to me, it’s disingenuous, and there’s still people around them are still active influencers that still go to world crypto con and, and everything else and they’re not telling people they’re getting paid. And you know, I’ve run into these and I got my own, you know, I’m not going to sit there and bad mouth people necessarily because they, you know, I don’t necessarily have a dog in that fight. But there’s still a bunch of them out there. And until the crypto world comes to terms that this is bad for the industry, and this is bad for mass adoption. I think it’s still going to hurt us as an industry.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
You know, that’s what I liked about elevate. There wasn’t any influencers there. There weren’t any, you know, media boosters, like what two, maybe one? I think there was one that was for the event and then one that was like a crypto PR something like that. But realistically, there was some pretty solid projects. There’s some pretty solid names block watch. I’ve seen it for different conferences in the last two months. And that’s what I like but I’m gonna I’m gonna read this tweet because it deserves to be read. In 15 hours ago, he goes I don’t consume media related to cc so cryptocurrency or blockchain, many of you know that I see influencers as an unnecessary byproduct of the lack of advertising platforms. I couldn’t be happier about the YouTube purge, your accumulated viewership is less than many make up in video applications or makeup application vids. I couldn’t agree more. And I know that there’s hundreds of people that have projects that have literally sat there and go, you want what first for a shout out, you want us to pay you how much and that’s, like I said, part of the major problem in this space is that for us, we we took a status, we’ve taken a very interesting approach to sponsorships. And it’s helped and hurt us along the way. And we haven’t gotten as much traction as we could have. Because we didn’t do one thing that these guys all want us to do. And that’s paying us dollars. They all want US dollars. They’re crypto influencers who want to get paid in something that they can liquidate to US dollars or get paid directly in US dollars. And we don’t do that we only pay and our coin from the reserve of the profits that we’ve made off of transactions and You don’t want to do that, then that’s fine. We just don’t work with you. But you know, world crypto con did. We paid him 50 K to speak at their event, Brock Pierce and Justin Wu and Jeremy Gardner did. And that’s how we were able to secure our speaking spot at the NASDAQ, I think was like 25,000 or 30,000 that we paid them. But we paid him in Queens Sierra Club coin. And what does that do? That gets our small little brand exposure on a major stage, it gets our circulation of our coins into the hands of people that are influential. And it gives them a little bit of knowledge about a product that they might not have had any interest in but now their token holders and I can say the spillover from that is I’d be I’d become you know, closer or friends I acquaintances or however you want to put it with Justin. We’ve seen each other at multiple events. we’ve hung out at multiple events. He’s done a panel for us pro bono, and it’s because he sees the hard work and he has a connection to the project and if more people that want to take sponsorship money, or want to take you payment for services started working with projects for their own native currency. And that would actually help the industry. But it’s when you say no, it has to be Can I liquidate that what we your coffers? Well, I remember one conferences like, Oh, I can’t liquidate it. We don’t have room for you. But you were a last minute call for sponsors, meaning you already secured your location, you’ve already paid your people, you, you’ve read paper, I mean, everything’s been paid for it. So week before the conference, why do you need more money from us? That’s liquid. And that’s the problem that I have. And that’s one of the things we stood by.

Rob McNealy
Well, that’s one of the same things with exchanges too. And the more established, you know, more legit exchanges don’t even have a listing fee, because they’re picky about who they have coming on their platform. And they they only allow products on the platform that they believe they will be able to have enough of a community to actually make money on the transactions on their trading on their platform. Most exchanges out there have listing fees and they don’t even take listing fees in your own native token. Virtually either. And those exchanges are also the ones that tend to be the ones that are faking their volume. And it’s because their actual marketing or that sorry, their actual revenue model isn’t transaction fees on their trading because they’re trading volumes fake. It’s the listing fees from the actual projects. And since they themselves don’t even give a crap about your project or have any faith in it, they only want you know, Bitcoin cash or a theorem. And so that’s the that’s kind of the problem you have with, you know, being a project as well. And you know, this as well as I do is that you’re having to deal with this is like, Okay, how do I establish a market value? And how do I get a more legitimate exchange to look at me and take a seriously, and I think that’s a tough one. And, you know, I think you guys are figuring it out. And I think we have a good plan to figure that out as well. But a lot of people out there don’t know that that’s what’s happening. Right? They think, Oh, this this exchange has this big number. It’s tracked by coin market cap and coin Gecko, so they must be a legit exchange and this coins on their exchange and has all this volume. So it must be a legit project. And unfortunately, a lot of that’s all bad. It’s all nonsense. It’s all fraud. And so the end users, the investors out there are the people that are interested in the project. They don’t know how to make good decisions, because they don’t have good information. And then you have all these pimps, I call them pimps, right? You got these crypto pimps out there, going out and pushing these projects. And it’s all fraud. The whole chain is fraud. And that’s why I give a hat off to, you know, Google or YouTube, however you want to look at the hierarchy.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
You know, I don’t know if you know this, or maybe you do, I used to take phone calls for the Google Play Store. And I worked on Google operations for the Playstore third party applications and all of the verticals. And so people will call in from all over the place. It will call in from different countries they would call in and I think what We’re seeing right now is people are realizing that, yes, YouTube and Google are US based companies. But these companies follow the law of multiple, multiple nations, there’s a multinational company. And so you have to really kind of realize you’re dealing on a bigger scale than what we know here in the United States, which is, you know, quote, unquote, these quotes because the land of the free, but as we find out more information, how free Are we really and that’s a whole nother conversation. But you know, people need to realize that you’re playing ball with something that isn’t in your backyard. And or it’s like you’re playing chess with somebody via, you know, male, whereas you’re dealing with other rules, other regulations, other cultures, and your videos are viewable in those countries, and they have to be able to follow those guidelines. And you know, one of the biggest things to think of is Where are all the Samsung phones made, are made in, you know, Google is the big Google puts their software and Samsung phones. So if They want to make sure that the manufacturing stays low and on the pixels and and all the other devices on the Android system, of course, they’re going to follow laws that are more relevant to that if we opened up the largest Android manufacturing plant in the world in the United States, then we might see a trend might see a difference. But yeah, it’s it’s interesting, man. These guys are just just sitting back here with my popcorn like, okay, maybe you should have skill.

Rob McNealy
And you know, if it was a complete ban on the word crypto and blockchain Yeah, I can understand that. I mean, and you know, this like, what the focus of our product task is, you know, the, the lawful firearms industry is kind of, you know, our main market that we’re working in, and they’re not allowed to advertise on Twitter, Facebook or Google. Already you and they’ve been completely de platforming and be monetizing the gun industry for over the last year and a half, two years now. And these companies don’t even have the ability to To market other than

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
NRA is like a dirty word in the United States.

Rob McNealy
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Especially, you know, in Silicon Valley, and it’s interesting. Instagram just announced in the last week and a half that they’re going to like banned gun influencers off Instagram. And what’s happening there is that because the gun industry didn’t have any they really are locked out of like pay per click and things like that. They’re just not allowed to market that way. What they were doing is they were paying social media influencers to then promote their projects. And now Instagram is going to cut that off. So now the crypto people are like getting all pissy but the fact is, there’s other industries not only just conservatives but the gun industry and some other industries, the cannabis industry, they’ve been completely locked out of these you know, different.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
You know, when they did the Facebook blanket ban, it wasn’t actually a blanket ban. We are approved. We have been approved for the last year. half, almost instantly after they made the marks we submitted, we had approved, we had to take a line of code, we had to put it in the header of our website. We have been able to advertise and Chris star, you know, some of them get flagged, but not all of them. We’ve been able to advertise on that platform since. And my business partner, Chris is the one that handles all that. But, you know, it’s interesting, because even when Facebook said no more crypto advertising, if you did the right thing, if you had a legitimate project, if you were able to answer their questions when they asked you, how do you deal with this? How do you deal with that? Then they go, Okay, here you go. Take this line of code, put it in your header, once you do that, come back to our platform, hit a button, if that can ping back and forth. And it’s legitimate. You get the green light, and then you can advertise again on the platform.

Rob McNealy
Yeah, we’re still waiting for our approvals for our conference. from Facebook. We never got it. Conference even though I mean, because it’s because it’s partially crypto, they wouldn’t let us advertise the conference on Facebook. And yeah, So I mean, it’s it’s goofy. I mean, you know how it is. It’s just playing goofy out there.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Well, yeah, I got booted, we got booted off MailChimp, for that exact reason. We had like an 800 person mailing list, we had sent out a happy Thanksgiving outfit, we started to do a collection form, and all of a sudden, it’s like, you are dealing with content that’s not allowed. And then I looked at their CEOs. And their CEOs had like nine things that they didn’t allow. But then at the bottom, there was an asterisk that said any crypto related products, like it wasn’t even part of the list of things like you can’t promote. It was just an add on to their to us.

Rob McNealy
It dropped I have my own issues with the politics out of Silicon Valley and the tech industry.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
You said actually hold on. You said that a second ago and I want to kind of touch on this really quick. I just want to make a point as liberal and anti gun. And you know, socialist as California is. Just remember, Silicon Valley. Those guys are capitalist. Those guys are for capital. ism, those guys want money. And so if it makes money, it makes sense in Silicon Valley. And so it’s an anomaly out there because yes, you’ve got snowflake them all up and down the coast. And I’ve been, you know, in the California lifestyle since 2003, you know, on and off and living out there and then traveling back and forth. But then when you start to talk to some of these fund managers, these guys got guns. These guys have branches, these guys have, you know, Jackson Hole retreats, and then if you think about that, that’s another one that’s right near you, you know, and that’s right up there and in gun country. So just, you know, Silicon Valley is part of the bigger part of California, but the people that are investing in these projects, you know, Peter teal, a, you know, big time Trump supporter, you know, so you’ve got these guys that are out there that are labeled one way, but realistically, when you get into the nuts and bolts of it are the complete opposite. And that’s, well no, you know, you know, think about I know somebody that runs an accelerator in Santa Clara and you would think again, liberal socialist. Nope. Got a pot farm with us just on the other side of the valley in Santa Cruz.

Rob McNealy
Nice. Yeah.

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
That’s that’s venture capitalism right there.

Rob McNealy
Well, people like to make money and definitely, money just definitely makes the people change their politics and their values probably faster than anything else next to alcohol. So, Darryl, this has been really quick. It seems like you and I can jabber on hours and hours and hours. And I can’t wait to talk with you more about wonton soup. Next time we get together. Where can people find out more?

Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Yeah, so right now, you can go onto Twitter. I’m at Daryl D. We’re really helping out float. So if you want to go to float, backslash Darryl Darryll D. What we did if you have a project or you’re a VC and you want to get deal flow, join our pay channel $5 a month. We’ve already got three or four projects that have launched on there. We’re doing a fun thing where, you know, my being so into the VC world, I’m giving you the Twitter channels to follow. I’m giving you the people that you want to follow. I’m bringing in the right VCs for deal flow. We’ve got, you know, sports analytics companies, and we’ve got fake news aggregator companies, and we’ve got stuff that’s important. That needs to be spotlit in there. And so we’re really focusing on that also quite serious club on YouTube, for any of our up to date pitches. You can see us on This Week in Startups. with Jason Calacanis on there, we’ve done probably probably about 40 videos on there, not a single one that got flagged. But yeah, that’s you know that Daryl D on Twitter, flowed at their LD. Or you can find me on Facebook at Facebook.com/Darryll.LasVegas. Coincierge.Club, website, all that stuff, all that fun stuff. I’m sure you’ll drop a bunch of links in the bottom on post.

Rob McNealy
Yeah, all those links will be up at Rob McNealy calm when we post this and Darryll, thank you so much for coming out today. I do appreciate Your time and we’ll talk to you soon.

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