EXPLORING WEB3 004
james werk
Watch: Youtube
On this episode of Exploring Web3, host Devin speaks with James Werk who shares their journey from pharmaceutical sales rep to Twitch streamer and beyond. They discuss how they found success in building gaming communities and how those skills translated to the Web Three industry. James emphasizes the importance of finding what one loves doing and optimizing time while surrounding oneself with like-minded individuals. They also delve into the significance of soft skills such as networking, building relationships, and listening to others. Plus, they offer advice on identifying employable skills and transitioning into a career in Web Three. Don't miss it!
james werk
timestamps
[00:04:04] Pharma rep develops skills, applies everywhere.
[00:07:41] Work smarter and harder to get ahead.
[00:13:44] Optimize time and work with others.
[00:17:08] Sales skills improve all social interactions.
[00:23:46] Pharmaceutical rep turned full-time Twitch streamer.
[00:30:05] Twitch streamer generates sales, lands job.
[00:36:21] Gaming and Web Three worlds converge.
[00:43:16] Gaming exhaustion led to outdoor crypto earning.
[00:46:58] Ambassador still works with FSL, founded F5 Dow.
[00:52:58] Consulting led to chief product officer role
[01:01:31] Find career paths aligned to hobbies.
[01:06:31] Finding patterns and making connections.
[01:11:03] Charity streams unite audience for good cause.
[01:16:48] Skills in coding, marketing, finance, and more.
[01:21:36] New NFT collection with casino revenue share.
transcript
Devin
Hello, everyone. Thanks for tuning in to the Exploring Web Three podcast today. Super delighted to have James here with us. How's it going, James?
Jameswerk
Going great. Good to see you.
Devin
Yeah, good to see you. Just to keep it brief. Everyone. The podcast is about interviewing interesting people on web three and hearing about their journey, about how they eventually got into the job that they are now, as well as after breaking that, after going through that, breaking down what advice they would give to you if you seek also a job in web three. So, James, it's really good to have you here, and I think we're just going to open up with how's your day? Any equal plans for the weekend?
Jameswerk
Yes. So I grew up as a kid with the Daytona 500 being a big part of what my family always did.
Devin
Nice.
Jameswerk
So yesterday was actually the qualifying races, the dual qualifying races. Tonight is the Truck Series race and the Xfinity race on Saturday and the Big 500 on Sunday. So I'll be participating in a lot of those festivities.
Devin
That's amazing.
Jameswerk
Cool.
Devin
I love to see that. Just being completely honest, that wouldn't have been for me. I'm from the south. I'm from Texas. So it's like football and baseball were kind of like the me. But yeah, I always appreciate something that the whole family can get around every week.
Jameswerk
Those are my two favorites, probably college football and NASCAR.
Devin
I love that.
Jameswerk
Cool.
Devin
Well, James, you told me a little bit about you've watched the Pod before and you got a little bit of a sense of what we do here. Like I mentioned in the intro, the goal here is to give our listeners a journey about where it started and how you got into what you're doing now. So I think the best way to do that is to get a complete picture. So maybe the easiest way for us to get into is where it all got started. It doesn't have to be where you were born and where that was, but maybe the question that I ask that often goes well is what kind of person you're in high school for the listeners to kind of get a picture.
Jameswerk
So I was a bit of a nerd probably in high school. I was the guy that took four years of Russian in high school and four years of Russian in college and went to the honors program in college and I was premed biology. I was going to be a physician and then got recruited out of college to go into pharmaceutical sales and kind of went that direction. So was always athletic and was always participating in a million different sports and constantly going to practices and that kind of stuff at the same time, but definitely was always a learner and was always trying to study and learn and kind of be on the cutting edge of whatever was new, especially when it came to tech and video games. And always a gamer from very, very early days. And I think that's probably part of why I found Web Three so early because it was like this new exciting technology to dig into.
Devin
That's amazing. And I see a little bit of similarities here. Just as a point out, though, you said you were kind of a nerd, but from what I saw, from what you explained, you're definitely well rounded. I don't think you're a complete nerd if you're into sports, into the new things and trying out new things all the time. So that's awesome. Also, premed track was definitely me too, and around the end of my undergrad, I was like, okay, I don't know if this is for me, but I do like the newness, let's try out tech. And it kind of is a story that got rid of itself from there. Just so before we get into everything that happened there maybe some key moments from kind of your earlier life that led you into where you are now. Maybe just give the audience a sense for what it is you do right now. Just a background so they can get a sense everything and yeah, we can go from there.
Jameswerk
Cool. So I'm kind of a dinosaur in web three. I've had multiple careers that I've kind of retired from and kind of moved on to the next career. I was 20 years in Pharma, that first gig. Worked for Pfizer, one of the top reps in the entire country. Moved up in their program to be training the other reps and going to initial sales training and training the speakers and going through all of that. And I think I learned a ton about personalities and how to read people, how to communicate with people, how to adjust your communication style depending on who it was you were talking to, how to manage, how to motivate people. Adult learning, right. When you're doing a training program to a bunch of other adults, a bunch of other professionals, that's a little different than what you know from school or from college, right? Very different. And I think I've taken all of those skills and brought them throughout the rest of my careers in consulting and everything that I'm doing now, because it's so much of the same thing. Learning how to make a cold call. And how do you get somebody to respond to a DM when it's on Twitter? Because if it's a form letter, they're just not going to respond to it. Right. And how do you have a conversation with somebody and build a relationship and network through them to other people? And these are all things that work just as well in pharmaceutical sales as they did in ecommerce sales as they do now in Web Three. So it's a lot of the same skill sets that I actually spend a lot of time training and teaching other people how to do these things.
Devin
That's amazing. And I think a core theme pretty much through all of our interviews we've had so far have been communication and getting that skill down and how far it takes you. I know it's kind of a cliche now, but one of the most important things like Warren Buffett actually says is important is public speaking. His Toastmasters class was one of the most important things to really help him be the person that he is now, even though some say how good he is at public speaking has little to do with the successes he's gotten.
Jameswerk
I love toastmasters. I went to him for years. It was great.
Devin
That's amazing. And whether it's community managers or whether it's CMOS or whether it's kind of what you're doing now, james, they've all said communication to a customer, to their employees, to anyone even more of like a brainstorming session, that communication is a key thread that really propels everything forward.
Jameswerk
Yeah, and it's lacking in so much of Web Three. And so when you see good communication, it stands out so much above everyone else that it's so much easier to get started and make those relationships when you put a little effort into it. It drives me crazy when I mentioned the form letters. But when you get these emails that are clear, lazy form letter and you get these Twitter DMs that are just, you know, they just spammed it to a million people, those don't get a reply. And it's so easy to just say, hey, how you doing? I just saw you on your latest podcast. Love to book a meeting with you. You're so much more likely to get a response to that than the form letter that you get a million times that you just ignore because you just assume it's a scam.
Devin
I completely agree, and I think you've already talked a little bit about how those lessons were learned through your career, but let's go into it a little bit more. Maybe we'll stay on this theme of communication for now, but we'll use it in a lens to focus on. Okay. Post college you got right into pharmaceutical sales, and I'm sure through that job you really had to cultivate a skill of communication. Is there anything else in that early, I guess that early career life that else stood out as maybe skills you cultivated or key moments that happened along the way?
Jameswerk
Yeah, there was a definite theme in pharmaceutical sales of your competitors being the other reps you're competing against that have other projects, other drugs, other products. But then also you're competing amongst your own team, right? Because you want to be number one in your company and you want to get the biggest rewards and go on the award trips and all that stuff. And there was a lot of this work smarter, not harder. And a lot of people in this world are that 80% that don't want to put in the effort, right? And so 20% of people do 80% of the work and 80% want to do the least amount possible to get by. And kind of something I learned early on is that if you could take the things that the lazy people are doing to work smarter, right, and whatever it is, right, they're finding these shortcuts and all these things. If you can do that and then also wake up earlier than everybody else, start sooner than they do, make more calls than what everybody else does, and that applies to everything, right? That's web three, cold calls, that's spending time in discord servers, that's doing more podcast, whatever. So if you can work smarter and work harder, it's so much easier to get ahead because now you're kind of playing both sides of the equation, right? And I've always been one of those that kind of almost gets obsessed with whatever it is I'm doing in the moment, right? You live in web three and you spend all day long watching podcasts about web three, communicating with communities in web three, making cold calls in web three, building relationships in web three, sleeping, dreaming about web three. And so having that kind of personality to dig into something, if you can work smarter and work harder at the same time, that's how you can get ahead.
Devin
I love to stay on that topic because I guess this idea, this concept that you're talking about gets talked to multiple areas. There's a lot of very important things that go on and gets talked to in business that dances around this topic. So maybe we can attack it from a few angles. One of the things you mentioned was Pareto's Law, which is the 80 20 principle. I guess that's really important. Richard Kosh wrote a book called the 80 20 Principle and I feel like that kind of shaped it and brought it into the mainstream beyond just science and actually more pretty much how life is actually the fundamentals of life and how that works out. You also mentioned that that 80 20 principle can apply, be applied to being like an 80 20 type of employee. So not being the 80%, but being the 20% and how that can get you so far. And then you also hear this other idea about that whenever you're trying to do something what you find the most success or the most successful type of people are the ones that almost exhibit this seemingly obsessive type quality towards getting good at whatever it is skill or whatever it is like role that it is that they're trying to get good at. How do you process that? Is that all kind of the same thing or is it a little more nuanced than that?
Jameswerk
No, once you get into management, you start to really appreciate how this works, right? So a good manager, in my opinion, a good leader, looks at all the people that are working under them or working with them, right, even their peers. And you try to find those things that everybody around you excels at, right? What do they love doing, what do they really enjoy? And there's a lot of managers out there that will try to find that thing that's your weakness, that you're not good at, that you hate doing and make you focus on that thing in order to get better at it. And I don't know that that's always the best strategy, right? Certainly you want people to be well rounded and so if they're having an issue with communication or whatever it is, you can improve certain things to be up to a certain level. But if you can find that one thing, maybe for you, Devin, maybe it's podcasting and having these conversations and finding these stories. If I can find that thing in you, I'm going to give you every opportunity possible to have these kind of conversations, to do these podcasts, to introduce you to people that can let you have these conversations. Because if you love it, if you're motivated by it, you're going to be that much more excited to come to work every day and to do your job right? And then once you're at that leadership level where you're trying to then lift people up that kind of have that similar mindset to surround themselves with experts that are knowledgeable, that love doing what they're doing. They can pick out those hidden gems, right, those diamonds in the rough. Now all of a sudden you're looking for new employees that you can hire and bring into the system, that can be passionate, that can be almost obsessive about something that you know, can benefit the company that you're working for, that can really focus on that thing and love doing what they're doing. And it's almost like the hobby becomes the job. The thing that you love to do every day, that you love to research or love to have those conversations or love to do whatever, if that can be the job, all of a sudden it's not going to work. You wake up in the morning and you're excited to go do that thing, right, that then is benefiting everybody else around you. And if you can surround yourself with people like that, sky's the limit, you can achieve anything.
Devin
I love that. And I'm fortunate enough to have a little bit more information on you, on where we're going to go with the conversation beyond just this pharmaceutical sales role that you've talked about, but just hearing what you've said so far and not looking ahead. One of the things that I picked up on was really this quality that you found within yourself to really get good at what you do, whether it's for the sake of being good at it as a skill or because you think the characteristics that you're going to get in getting good at this is something that's going to serve you farther beyond the next chapter of what you're doing. But what I found was finding that within yourself was the beginning. And as you managed from what it sounded like, as you manage more people under you, it was finding that quality within other people now, not just yourself. Am I right there? Or maybe along those lines? Is that really what management is? How would you explain that?
Jameswerk
Yeah. To me, when you try to excel and when you try to get to the top and you want to be number one at whatever it is you're doing, you quickly realize that your biggest limiting factor is time. There's only so much time in the day. Right. And certain personalities certainly will try to work 24/7, but that's only going to work for so many days before you burn yourself out. So what you have to do is you have to figure out how I can optimize that time. Right. And if I can surround myself with other people that can help me work better right. And we can synergize and work together so that they're providing me leads and I'm closing the sales, whatever it is. Right. I can make the analogy to any kind of business into web three, into whatever. That's where you can get the most successful. So when you find those things in yourself that motivated you and made you want to work more than that 8 hours a day, wake up first thing in the morning and know you love doing what you're doing and you go right to it, at the end of the day, you're not watching the clock at 05:00. I can't wait to clock out. You're working till 1011 o'clock. You're like, oh my God, where's the time go? Because you lose yourself in what you love doing. Right. And so if you can then find other people around you that share that same mindset and then pick out and find those things for them that they love doing, that they excel at, that they can lose themselves in, now all of a sudden you can steer them to those positions where everybody is just having a blast. And all of a sudden going to work and working with your colleagues is now fun. It's hanging out with your friends. I know we're going to move into gaming eventually, but part of what I transitioned into was playing video games for a living on Twitch. I became a twitch partner. I've been on Twitch over seven years, a partner for over six, and so much of what I learned and I used to develop adults, right in their journey of professional development. Transitioned so perfectly into Twitch and Twitch communities. And Twitch streamers and building these communities that are very similar to Web three communities. Even though I don't know that we fully realize that yet. And then finding what is it that people love doing all day long every day. If somebody loves playing video games, right, that works perfect as a Twitch streamer. But if they don't love building community, then they need to find that community manager that can run their gaming discord server. Same thing in web three. So it's finding those people to then motivate and surround yourself with and giving them the right positions to where they love doing what they're doing.
Devin
I love that. And let's go ahead and go into Twitch. I think I really appreciate that and think it's going to be important. But another callback that I like to have was in pretty much any sales job, it is very much a person to person activity. You building relationships with whoever you're talking to and that relationship is leading to value in the future that your business or product can provide for people. What's interesting is you from going from that to Twitch is the same type of relationship. You making content that people can enjoy and that community that's built under that can find friends and enjoy each other's company. And so but sales takes it person to person in a verbal activity and Twitch brings it to digital over text, sometimes not even seeing the other person. So I'd love to hear your opinion on what's different there or is it the same thing because I haven't experienced that myself. So I've heard bits and pieces from other interviewers and just people, my friends. But I'd love to hear your take on that.
Jameswerk
I think most sales professionals will tell you that anytime we go to one of these sales training classes, so many of the skills that we learn in sales training then become something that we can use in every other part of our life. We use it with our spouse, we use it with our kids, we use it with our friends, we use it with new acquaintances that are within clubs and organizations and sports. And so much about selling skills is just building a relationship. And so if you learn how to listen better, right, a big thing that I think people struggle with is they'll be having a conversation like you and I are having right now. In the entire time the other person's talking, they're thinking about what they want to say next instead of really tuning in and listening to what the other person's saying. And I can tell that you're listening to me because you're coming back with things that are based on what I just said, not based on the next topic you want to get to. And so I'll turn into a Twitter space and it's this very robotic question answer and then the next question has nothing to do with the answer whatsoever. And you know that that host had no listening skills whatsoever. And it's so much more entertaining if they actually listened to what the person said to their previous question and then asked a follow up based on it because that's a lot of what the audience is probably thinking, right? And so those skills that you learn in sales, whether it's making the initial cold call or trying to get past the gatekeeper and talk to whoever it is you're trying to sell, building a relationship with them and not making them feel like they're being used and being sold, that they actually have a need. You're trying to find out what their need is and then you're matching your product to their needs to solve a problem for them. It was the same thing when Twitch, right, you start your Twitch channel, you have one viewer that's Nightbot, right, that's your bot and you have no real people. And your first instinct is, okay, I'm going to go to other Twitch channels and I'm going to spam my link and I'm going to get their viewers to come watch me. Well, they all hate you because they don't want you to do that. It's the same thing in Web Three when somebody's shilling, right, and another server and a telegram or wherever. It's the same thing. Same thing when I walked into a doctor's office and then nurse or the office manager was trying to prevent me from wasting that doctor's time. It's all people skills. It's learning how to show some kind of authenticity. I actually want to get to know you. I want to build a relationship with you. I want to find out what your needs are in life and maybe I have some skill, some product, some something that can fit your need, right? And so networking in Twitch was almost a dirty word because all the other Twitch streamers and communities saw networking as well. You just want to steal the viewers or you just want to push or whatever. And they'd almost get mad at you if you had a checkmark beside your name as a Twitch partner because then it's like you were bragging that you were a partner to steal or if you used your own emotes because Twitch partners have our own emotes. And so you had to learn these soft people skills of how to relate to other people and show them that you're actually there for them, right, and ask a question about their channel and their content and build the relationship first and then use that to network.
Devin
That's amazing. So there's so many places I could go here. I want to stay on Twitch for sure, but I want to give you and the audience one type of insight that I took from that really resonates with what you just mentioned. The point that a real conversation and something that gets interesting not only for each person having the conversation, but if other people are listening, is really that key skill of taking whatever it is that was talked about and going deeper in it. Not just rambling off like question after question. If it was preordained. Where that goes to in my head is this sentence that I got from Mike Maples Jr. He's the founder at Floodgate VC Fund. Pretty popular. He says building a startup which actually relates to an interview in some crazy way. Building a startup is like being in a jazz band, not a marching band, in that a marching band is rehearsed the heck out of you know exactly what to do. It happens in this much time and it's the same every time. Jazz band is very much spur of the moment. There's a dance involved in it where you don't know what's going to happen, but you kind of take a leap and go in your own direction in the sense that it is this kind of have to stay on. The toes of your feet and kind of just act based on what's in front of you. That makes it so real and so entertaining in the moment. And that is what I feel like a good interview is. It's not just a spur of questions that of course are the same throughout. They're going deeper on the interesting topics and figuring out where to go next based on what happens previously.
Jameswerk
That's just a great analogy too, because a marching band has all the pieces, right? Almost every marching band has all the same pieces where jazz band has limited pieces. So the jazz band is the startup because a startup doesn't have all the CFO and CTO and CMO and COO and like all the positions filled with all the experts. It's usually a limited group that has to be very small and nimble and agile and you have to adjust and sometimes everybody's kind of doing multiple jobs and then over time, as that startup grows, then you have the ability to kind of fill in these additional pieces. That's exactly what a jazz band is, right? Jazz bands don't have everything that the marching band has. They start smaller and they kind of have to adapt and fill in and be a little bit more nimble and then they kind of grow up to be something bigger. It's fun to work in a startup environment for those that have only worked in corporate culture, that have never worked for a startup. It's invigorating, it's tough, right? It's crazy hours and you end up doing a lot of things that you weren't hired for, but there's an excitement that comes with it at the same time.
Devin
Yeah, I guess I can say blessed to only have been in startup culture right out of college I wouldn't have it in any other way, because, like you mentioned, this newness, this search for being on the edge of technology and just learning new things that I think are going to take me farther in life. That's really at the core of it, what I think, what drives me. So startups are a place to learn that. But getting back to Twitch, there was this transition where you went from 20 years in pharmaceutical sales, and I'm not sure if it was you kind of just went straight in afterwards, or there was a blend towards the end of that career and the start of another. But you've been a streamer for the last seven years, and you've been six years a Twitch partner. So maybe, like you mentioned, playing games for an audience. How did that come about? Because at first they may be completely different from each other, but I'm sure within your story, it's actually connected much more.
Jameswerk
Oh, absolutely. So my average day as a pharmaceutical rep was using a territory that was many hours wide and many hours tall. So I'd be up at 04:00 A.m. On the road by five, drive two and a half hours to my farthest away office to do a breakfast at 730, right. Work all day, do a lunch, work all day, do a dinner, get home late. And my wife and I ended up having a couple of kids. Right. And as my kids were growing up, I was trying to spend as much time with them as possible, right, and being the Cub Scout dad and doing different stuff, helping with the PTA. But I was also so motivated to be the top rep at my pharmaceutical company that sometimes those would clash. So after a certain number of years, I had provided a pretty healthy income and stock options and all that stuff. And so I decided to transition to something that would be more close to the kids as they were going through that kind of middle school and high school age and learning how to drive and driving to school every day. And my wife had gone into a full time job as an HR director. And so I had always had this love of gaming, even as a pharmaceutical rep for Pfizer mobile games like Niantic had Ingress, which was the game kind of built on Google Maps. It was owned by Google initially. So you'd go around and there was the red portals and the blue portals, and you'd take it over and you'd collect the stuff. And so as I was driving around to all these different towns and cities and hospitals and doctors offices, I could hit this stuff in and out of the different hospitals and in and out of the different offices, and became one of the top English players in the country. Gaming was something that's always come with me from my early days of Atari and Nintendo and Sega and PlayStation and all. The way up through. And I got really into a video game called Destiny. Destiny was first on PlayStation and then on Xbox and then on PC. And so I started playing Destiny with my friends and getting into the hardest six player content, the raids, and kind of became a bit of a Raid sherpa. And so kind of nights and weekends when I wasn't working, I would do raids and stream them on Twitch so that my friends could come in and hang out and watch while they were working and doing other things. And then so that I could post these LFG groups, when you're looking for other players to come play these hardest difficulty activities with you and say, hey, I'm streaming this live on Twitch. If you want help getting this boss fight done or getting this loot out of the game, come join. And it kind of built up this Twitch channel, organically streaming directly from PlayStation initially. Then my community bought me the Xbox, then my community bought me the PC and transitioned to streaming full time. When I retired from the pharmaceutical sales and being able to be home with my kids, where I could have breakfast with him in the morning, I could jump in the car with my son and let him drive me to high school when he was 15. And then I'd drive the car back home and drive it back up there when he was going to get off and let him drive back home and was there for breakfast and lunches and dinners and weekends and everything, which was wonderful. And then kind of after the years went on and both my kids got into college, then I was ready to kind of transition to something bigger from Twitch to what we'll get into later. But so many of the things that I loved about pharmaceutical sales and building relationships with the physicians and then training the sales representatives and training the speakers, then transitioned into me training my fellow Destiny players and how to get through the Raid. So I was teaching adults both sides, right? Just a different style.
Devin
I love that. Actually, what's interesting is the two other co founders at Orcdaw were Destiny advocates. They played all the time. I never got into it because I've been always more of like an MMO type player. But I can totally understand the Raid mechanic in terms of how it works in Destiny because I've seen it before and how they're very especially at the high level, I'm sure not very friendly for people who are just getting into the game. So having that person almost like a guild and an MMO who take you.
Jameswerk
To Raid very similar, I would build.
Devin
A community around it, yeah.
Jameswerk
And it can be really tough for a player that's not part of a guild, part of a clan, part of a community in order to find other people to raid with, because you have to build up the character. You have to have the right weapons and armor. It has to be set up the right way. And then you have to be able to communicate with other adults in a way that if I need you to hold down this position and be able to handle these call outs and tell us what you're seeing, you have to be able to communicate. So typical LFG groups that are built into like some kind of a message board server on a discord or on a website, it's hard to get picked up to get help with those things. So you see a lot of Twitch streamers that will help with the high end PvP content and the high end PvE content. Almost a streaming as a service to give people a way to have a community to play with.
Devin
I like that, streaming as a service, I never thought of it that way. But it makes so much sense now.
Jameswerk
Yeah, we call it service streamers. And the crazy part is you cap out. Most service streamers can only get up to about 150 concurrent viewers. So over the eight hour stream you may have 5000, 10,000, 15,000 tune in, but only maybe 100 and 2150 max. Because once you get above a number at which people think they can actually get on and play with you, they don't watch. Right? Because it's not as entertaining. So you have to go from service streaming and then to entertainment streaming in order to kind of grow up to be bigger than that.
Devin
Wow, this is cool. I've never had a deep dive into Twitch, but my game of choice that I watch on Twitch is like League. So I never realized that. But that makes so much sense because I play Jungle, which is a very technical role. It requires more long term strategic thinking versus very macro. Move your mouse in this pattern and do these things for damage and stuff like that. And the smaller streamers who are junglers, they literally just train other people and that's their stream. Whereas the big streamers actually they don't.
Jameswerk
Usually play with viewers, do they?
Devin
Entertainers.
Jameswerk
Yeah.
Devin
Wow, that's so cool. And much I'd love to stay here, if you think there's any key points that you learned from Twitch that you brought on to what you do today or maybe what comes next, but if not, maybe just transitioning into what came after Twitch would be a great idea.
Jameswerk
Yeah, kind of with that same theme, with being a service streamer, I realized I couldn't grow any bigger and I still had that fire within my belly to be the number one and grow and be bigger and better at everything that I did. So part of what you do as a Twitch streamer is you bring on partners, right? You bring on companies that want to advertise through your channel. So one of the partners I brought on was an energy drink company. Ended up going to Twitch con and helping them with their booth. I generated more sales at their booth than all the other people that were there combined, brought in more new partners, and ended up being offered a job as a director of sales to help them kind of revamp their entire tech stack to integrate in Gorgeous, which allows you to do the little text chat that pops up on an ecommerce website where you can talk to a customer service rep live and have the phone calls and the emails and run your Instagram ads and your Twitter ads. And if you do a comment on the Instagram ad right, then that all dumps in. So I built the entire customer service team and then I built the entire partner management team and taught them how do you cold call, influencers, Twitch, streamers, Instagram, influencers, YouTubers, TikTokers, it doesn't matter. But how do you write that message on a discord DM or a Twitter DM or get a hold of their manager and actually get a response? And then once you get into a meeting, how do you build that relationship with that person and convince them that your product is one that they can consider right? Convince them that, hey, let me send you some free samples, give it a try. We're looking for that really authentic organic type of promotion. I don't want to pay you ten grand to mention at once. I want you to actually use this in your day to day life because you like it. And then organically, your viewers are going to see you drinking this energy drink, ask you about it, and then you give them your discount code or give them your link. And I'm going to pay you performance where you can make more money selling my brand than any of these others that are just paying you for a spot where most of your viewers aren't even going to buy that thing. So all that stuff that I learned in pharmaceutical scales, right? And all the things that I would use to train those initial sales reps. Now, I was training the partner managers of the Ecommerce brand of how do you make the cold calls? How do you do all that stuff to then build up this energy drink, which was a blast. A lot of fun.
Devin
That's so cool. One of the things that I like to that I love focusing on whenever we're viewing how someone's career advancers is how as you learn skills throughout your career, they're not a linear relationship, it's multiplicative. Those skills are going to interrelate with each other and become a skill that is much more meaningful when you have five of them than when there's only two. So I really love how you mentioned that the sales skills that you got from pharmaceutical sales with the skills on kind of like building digital communities and being a streamer on Twitch whenever you are ready to move on. To your next thing. We're kind of put together in this ecommerce venture, and in a way that you previously may not have done before, but with your skill set, you were able to adapt to it pretty easily. So just because I'm familiar with it, before I started, worked out, sold two companies, one of them was an ecommerce brand. So completely familiar with Gorgeous and how it works. And most of the acquisition strategies you'd use are maybe paid ads, maybe influencer marketing, maybe some other things. It sounds like the ecommerce venture was that you had definitely focused a lot on influencer marketing. And even though that skill as a concept you may not have actually done per se before you actually had these overlapping, these skills that were so adjacent to influencer marketing, picking it up actually was very easy for you because you had both sides of what it took, the interpersonal skills, but also kind of the sales skills.
Jameswerk
Yeah, but then as you do it, you begin to realize that we would build these stream teams on Twitch, right. And so streamers would then team up with other streamers and other broadcasters. And sometimes it was almost in a sense that there was the bigger streamer that had all these smaller streamers that were looking up to them and they wanted to get partnered on Twitch, right. They want to be able to get that checkmark and get their own emotes and whatever. So you create this stream team where you're coaching them and elevating them. You're sharing viewers, you're hosting them and rating them after your streams, whatever. So we build these discord servers of streamers that would need to learn what webcam do I need to use and how do I upgrade my stream and how do I use the streaming software better, what microphone do I need to use, how do I network with other people. That was almost where my consulting career began, was on Twitch, working with these other broadcasters. And then as I transitioned into the ecommerce director of sales and building a partner management program, that same thing that I would use to invite people onto the stream team and lift them up, all of a sudden I was using those same skills to invite them on as a partner to promote my brand. And then same thing, I would want to go and find those small diamond in the rough broadcasters that I could see had that twinkle in their eye and they were going to be something big. And if I could be the first brand that they ever promoted and then I could coach them and elevate them and teach them through the stream team of this brand, right. All the same stuff that I was doing on Twitch with the stream team I was now doing with the brand. So I could make their webcam better, I could make their stream better, I could get other people to host and rate them that also present our products, all of a sudden now they're getting more viewers, they generate more sales. And so you're using all the same networking skills, all the same coaching skills, all the same everything throughout each of them. And I think that's so much of what we were talking about at the beginning, where you find that thing that you love doing. I love elevating other people. I love sharing these things and helping them. So I found my way to do that with the speakers, to train them right, with the new sales reps and train them with the other Twitch broadcasters and do that and then with the partners that I was bringing on board. And it's fun how you can find that thread, right, where it could seem like very different jobs, but you're doing something very similar.
Devin
I love that. And from Gamers Ups into what comes next is what would the transition like that look like?
Jameswerk
Without a doubt, the entire time that I was broadcasting on Twitch, there was always this hidden current of Web Three and crypto and what was going on, these crypto games. And most gamers hate crypto. They hate the thought of NFTs. And so you go into a typical gamer discord server and you mention NFT and they're just ready to revolt. And if their game studio says that they're going to make a game, that's, that they'll go in and review, bomb it on Steam and destroy the game because they don't want to have anything to do with it, right? But there's that Djen culture that's in gaming too, where you're up all night, you're playing games and you're doing these 24 hours streaming sessions and whatever. So there's this small percentage that's into whatever it is that's the latest cutting edge thing. And crypto and crypto games and playing to earn and all these things were always there. So as I was Director of Sales for Gamers Ups, I was also figuring out ways that we could have a Shaker Cup that was a bitcoin Shaker Cup. And so I was making cold calls out to all these Web Three content creators on Twitch and YouTube and all these different platforms. And when they would tell me that they got ten grand to just mention a product, I was like, holy crap, this is such a different world to what most people that are mentioning an energy drink on a gaming stream do, right? And so I started playing Axio Infinity and I started digging into cardano and all the different blockchains and all the different stuff and I started using it as a way to motivate my employees, right? We were giving them NFTs, and we were giving them cryptocurrency, and we were talking about on the side. And it was an exciting thing in between our calls of these twitch partners, right, and these YouTubers and Instagram influencers talk about, oh, that this NFT is getting ready to launch. Let's all go in there. And so it made our day fun as we were hanging out in the discord server, doing our daily job and getting people to work 1215 hours a day instead of eight, and love doing what they were doing. And I quickly learned that this Web Three world is very similar in so many ways to this gaming world. An NFT project has their community in a Discord server. A twitch streamer has their community in a discord server. The community manager in Web Three is the same thing as the moderator. So everything that I learned to coach the gamers on of how to build up their community and build these successful networking systems, it was all the same thing that these Web Three companies needed. So I could take those skills that I was coaching everybody on those stream teams of how to be a better streamer and build a better community. And I could take those immediately over to these Web Three companies that were trying to launch a new NFT project, and I could tell them, how do you cold call all these influencers and get them to respond? How do you set up a Discord server? How do you get it partnered? How do you get your vanity link? How do you get that community manager to come on board and the moderators and have real conversations in Discord Server? So it's not GM GMGM, they're asking you questions about your project and you're actually talking in there. The consulting kind of started at Twitch streaming with the Stream team, and then it kind of went through the ecommerce. But then that same thing were all skills that I could consult to these Web Three companies as well.
Devin
That's amazing. So going from gamer subs to being just a consultant, that to me, strikes me a little bit different because unless I'm wrong, we can explain if it is. This goes from kind of being, I'm sure, maybe in the leadership position for, I guess, a company to being more of a self employed type business consultant. So could you speak about that and maybe about what the differences are and then maybe what made you or what led you to take the jump?
Jameswerk
Yeah, I think once you get any kind of a C suite position, right, director of Sales is like a C suite position. Chief Operations Officer, Chief Technology Officer, you get to that C level, it's hard then to step down to a role where you're not at that same level. Right. But I quickly realized that the time that I was in Ecommerce was also the time that everything was going on with COVID and Ecommerce brands just exploded. And they were so huge and there was such opportunity there, but you could see that ecommerce, shopify, stores, all that were going to have a tail end of that and they were going to drop off. And at the same time, I kind of felt like Web Three was taking off where ecommerce was dropping off. And so I wanted to be able to transition from a c suite type position in ecommerce into something similar in crypto. But I knew I couldn't immediately jump onto one of these projects and get hired as a CTO or CMO, or maybe I could, but I wanted to build up my resume, right? And so consulting to me and helping projects at X amount of money per hour and jumping in and being a part of projects, kind of build that skill set on that, even those relationships to network through to the point at which now I've got a position in crypto that's at that same level I was at in Ecommerce. But I earned my way to it. I built my confidence up in it. Maybe I could have got that title quicker, but I did it the way that felt best to me. So I felt very informed in the space before I tried to take that kind of a slot.
Devin
That's awesome. So I guess because it's so easy to kind of grasp on for anyone in that position, whether a c suite executive or kind of around that lane that you mentioned, what would you tell them to look for or how confident do you think they need to be to kind of take a leap similar to you?
Jameswerk
Boy, I don't know. I feel like crypto needs that experience. There's so many of the crypto companies that I've interacted with that tend to hire and promote people that don't have management experience. They don't know what to do in HR situations. They don't know how to motivate the people that are underneath them, how to lift them up, how to find those diamonds in the rough and see what it is. That would be something that that person would love doing. They tend to come from more of that startup culture where they've never worked for the big corporation. I think that the most successful entities in web three over time, the ones that can survive these bear markets and continue to build and be the most successful, you're going to have a mix of both. I think you need some of that management experience, you need some of that corporate culture to then mix in with some of that startup culture to have that Djen attitude, but then also be able to handle an HR issue when it comes up right. Not just scream at somebody because they didn't do what you wanted them to do.
Devin
Exactly. Cool. And as we keep going here, we have a couple of really awesome things that we can cover. I'd love to kind of see where you want to take it. After kind of going out and doing web three as a business consultant, what in the journey came next.
Jameswerk
So I found stepping and after Axio Infinity that I didn't like playing the game, but I wanted to be a part of it because I saw there was something special happening there. I had my multiple axes and I bred my axes and I elevated my three and I would play them. But to sit there and grind Axe Infinity for 8 hours a day, it bored me to tears, right. And I didn't want to be some kind of a guild leader and have scholars that I was renting my axes out to. So I was looking for that game like Ingress, right, that came from Google and Niantic where you could be out in the real world and you could have the blue and the red portals. And I found this step in game and I'm like, holy crap, I can actually go out and walk and jog and run and take a hike. And one of the things I love doing was hiking on the beach or going up into the mountains and hiking on the Appalachian Trail. And if I could do that and breed my sneakers, right, and get these higher rarity sneakers, now all of a sudden I'm earning this cryptocurrency and I'm exchanging this cryptocurrency from their native Tokens into Salana and then into B and B and then into Ethereum. And that kind of opened up this whole world for me that once I found that game, I just dug into the depth of Minting strategies and found myself making content on it. And all of a sudden I'm starting a podcast, the Stepping Community podcast that becomes the number one podcast in all of Stepping. I'm streaming live on Twitch and Twitter at the same time. I'm recording the broadcast and throwing it up on Spotify and Apple podcast and Google podcast and everywhere else has more viewers and more listeners than any other stepping podcast in the world, and it's popping up like number one. In all these countries and just having a blast with it, bringing people on and end up becoming an ambassador. For fine. Satoshi labs for stepping. That then kind of takes me back into that direction of how do you help other people with this through it? How do you create guides? How do you take that stuff where I was teaching the people in the raid? Now, all of a sudden, I'm teaching the people how to mint and how to enhance and how to level up their sneaker and how to earn the most cryptocurrency playing this game so it ends up becoming those same things over and over, right?
Devin
Yeah. That drive in, you never really left and I would venture to guess it probably still hasn't.
Jameswerk
No, that's awesome. Cool.
Devin
So a community ambassador for Step in and then I believe now we get into some other interesting things. So in terms of what came next for you after stepin maybe where yeah, let's talk about how that transition happened. Is that still going on in the stepping community? Where are things kind of there and what came next if it did, or what's kind of the next phase find.
Jameswerk
Satoshi Labs, which is stepping, then launch their own marketplace and launch pad more. They've got several projects. They got their own decks. They have their own anti cheat. They've got their own social project coming that they think will end up some point being like the Twitter of web three. And so I got very deep into More. And how do you become an ambassador for a magic Eden type launch pad or an open sea type marketplace? And part of that dug me into how do you go cold call these projects and convince them to launch on your launch pad? Right? And then got me into that feeling of, well, what would it be like to build a team no different than the team that I built in Ecommerce, where all of a sudden, what if I'm running a dow and I'm going out and I'm finding the artists and I'm finding the CTO and I'm finding the CFO and I'm building a team where we can launch our own NFT projects and our own websites and our own dow and our own everything?
Devin
Got it? And is that still under more, or are we getting into our next phase?
Jameswerk
Yes, I'm still an ambassador with stepping. I'm still an ambassador with More, so I still work with FSL. But at the same time, in addition to that, I've founded, along with four other people, five of us total the F five Dow. And so the F five dow has expanded from the five of us that all came from that ambassador type role to then adding in a blockchain dev. That's our CTO, adding in a lead artist. We've already launched one NFT project. We went out and recruited another NFT project and brought it under our umbrella. We're getting ready to launch a third NFT project. And the F five dow is kind of three businesses in one. We all do consulting, so we go out and we find other projects, and we consult with them, and we teach them how to do all these things. How do you build a discord server, right? How do you cold call influencers? How do you set up the art? How do you do the blockchain stuff? Whatever it is, everything that comes with either starting a project or growing a project, we can help consult on that. We're creating these utilities and these tools and these games is almost a demo of what our blockchain dev is able to do that can work for our project. But then we can provide those tools very similar to, like, a famous fox federation where you can go on there and you can see where FFF has they have staking and they have the ability to exchange tokens and all these things. So our project has all that that we can then share with other projects. So even though we created that under F five dial for Gingermore, you go to the ducks Vegas website and you can see they're using our staking and they're using our spinner and they're using all the tools that we did. And then our newest project is called bet bats, where it's actually an NFT project with these really cute little cartoony hanging upside down bats that then is going to have an entire casino website built around it on salana. So the owners of the NFT can come in, use the casino like all the other casinos that are on salana, earn some revenue share from everybody that comes in and uses that casino. But then the similar theme to what we're doing with building these utilities and tools that we can share with other projects we're consulting with and helping with that entire casino then can be branded for us under our bat win domain. But then somebody else can come in and go, hey, I've got this NFT project. We're trying to figure out utility, how do we make it work? We can reband it to be a bear casino, or it could be a duck casino, or it could be whatever. And so you're now generating revenue from the consulting, you're generating revenue from the utilities and tools and games that you're building. But then also from this casino website, you can rebrand other ways. And so f five dow has kind of, kind of become multiple things all at the same time. And it allows me to then go out and find these employees that I can bring in and motivate and be a part of the team in very similar ways to what I did before.
Devin
I love that. And I love it because it wasn't first order thinking, it was second order thinking. Most people would think f five dow, if you get started, it's a group of people that share a common goal. We are business consultants and we have web three connections that we could use to help projects launch their ido, their INO, whatever this big event is. The second order, which comes after that is how can we add even more value than just that? And I think that's where you're coming in with really forming a deeper partnership with each of these projects that come into the dow and actually use it to give utility to any other projects that come later on. This interoperability of having this salonic casino being able to be added to any other NFT project is awesome. And it just goes to show that as you keep building these things, thinking about it in a much deeper, much more open kind of way, kind of emboldening and using crypto values can take us to the next step. So I appreciate that as a crypto advocate, but kind of just hearing you explain it, it's super inspirational. I think that's awesome.
Jameswerk
And it pairs perfectly with being an ambassador for fine satoshi labs because they have this more launch pad. They have seasons, so they have 13 season one projects. They're getting ready to have season two. And we don't know how many total projects will end up being accepted, but so many of those projects come from these new artists that don't have utilities, don't know how to do any of these things. So now all of a sudden, F Five Dow comes along. And even in my capacity as an ambassador, I'm taking consulting meetings with each of these projects and I'm teaching them how to do with Twitter space. Right. And that you can't talk on a Twitter space from your desktop. You have to dial in from your phone. And here's how you mute and unmute and kind of Twitter space etiquette, right. And having the Twitter account of the project join the space and maybe it stays muted as co host. And then you have the artists join under the person account, maybe the community manager join under their personal account so that people see them talking under that name. And let's create these ghost accounts that have zero followers and let's go practice the Twitter space and see how this works so you get comfortable with it before you do. The first big one on this stage right now, all of a sudden you need utilities and you need tools. Well, we've got a team here that can help consult on maybe you need a way to do staking. We can show you how to do that or consult on it and teach you how to do it. And so I'm kind of be able to help multiple levels at the same time. And that kind of brings me to my next position, where we're also consulting with these bigger companies out there. And so I've got a new role that I've just taken on because I have so much extra time in the day and I'm helping out Arena Games. And that's how I met you guys at workdown.
Devin
Exactly. I was just going to bring it there and I was going to make the assumption that everything that you're doing with F Five Dow is also being done with Arena Games, as you know, or maybe the listeners won't know, but I'll enlighten them. Now, Arena Games is one of our clients at workdow, and James is the chief product officer there. And that's kind of how we got connected and why we're both here on the Pod today. So maybe we can discuss kind of how that happened and how that got to, I'm assuming, is pretty close to present time in the journey of James.
Jameswerk
Yeah, definitely, without a doubt. So the Arena Games platform was something that was new to me that actually came in through one of the other members of the F Five Dow. He was consulting. And so we all have these consulting gigs that we're working on. And one of the big things that we try to do is that if one of us gets found within the team and consults on a project, we always can mention our other teammates. So if they need help from the artist, we can bring our artist teammate in to help with an addition. And so our graphic designer on our team that's amazing in the stuff that he does was helping out Arena Games with some of the stuff that they were doing. And he knew that they were going to be beta testing this new mobile game and that they were building out this Discord server and getting ready to launch an NFT and all this other stuff. And they said, if you want gaming advice, I know this guy that was a twitch partner. He knows gaming. He's beta tested tons of games. He's helped launch NFT projects, he's done all this stuff. He'd be a great person to talk to. And I got to meet with the founders of Arena Games, and we very quickly hit it off and realized that there was some stuff that I could benefit the team with that would probably be above and beyond just a consulting type role. So it kind of started as a consulting gig and built from that to them offering me this chief product officer role to be able to help them get their stuff launched. And the first game that they've got to beta test is Arena Master. It's fun. It's an addictive fun. Create the profile@arenabs.com, you're downloading it instantly on iOS or Android. You can play it for free. You only have to connect a wallet. And it's one of those games that you can just at any given time, pick up your phone and play and just have a blast with. So I've been able to help beta test and give them really good suggestions of leaderboard and how to set it up and how to attract gamers in and how to get past that whole gamer crypto thing and very similar to what Orcdow is doing with them. How do you build that Discord server? We had a big meeting with Orcdow earlier today. We were talking about as we get ready to launch the NFT that's going to come along with this platform, how do you encourage people to have those real conversations inside the Discord Server? Maybe we want them to rank up to level five and invite three friends. And if you're level five and have three friends in, then you get a whitelist spot to be able to get into that private sale for the NFT and all these things that we've done with these other projects. How do you then integrate it in to where they've got this first game and then the second game, and all of a sudden they've got five games and there was a lot of places that there was synergy between everything I've done before and what they're trying to do now.
Devin
Wow, that's amazing. I guess now would be the type of the time of the podcast where we kind of transition into thinking about, okay, now for all the listeners out there who may have heard a couple of things that were interested in maybe doing things similar to you. What advice would you give them? I kind of want to follow those things, but I had a couple of questions that I want to kind of ask before we get to the specific. I guess one final note before we get in there is james, even though you have plenty of life to live later on, I'm sure you're still a young guy doing great things. You've definitely in this story shared that you have an eclectic life and you've lived range or there is a wide range of things that you've done, whether it's starting in sales, coming all the way to Web Three and really showing what it's like. A lot of people, maybe it's not a huge sentiment, but I've heard oftentimes people think that it's really hard to be a crypto founder or to be a core contributor of a crypto project if they're nontechnical, if they don't know how to code. Unless you know anything, it's kind of like not you can't be very useful. I think what you've shown is media and content is just as important and training others and building communities is just as important. Because if there is no product or experience to share things with, no value can actually be created at all. So I think that's kind of the key thing that I've learned from this. After hearing everything.
Jameswerk
Yeah, it's communications, right? It's relationships. No successful crypto project that I've ever been a part of is run by one single person that does all the art, all the blockchain, all the everything, right? And so you find the thing that you love doing and then go out and make friends with people that do those other parts. A lot of projects won't hire somebody on the team that's the artist. They'll maybe just get an artist that does it as a side thing that they don't actually become a part of the team. And you can do that as well. But the best projects, I think, are the ones that can find that artist that can then live within that project and can do some really cool stuff on the website and the NFT art itself and the GM little graphic that you're sending out on Twitter. Same thing with getting somebody that can actually design a website and do some blockchain development and whatever. If you can get one of those on the team, all of a sudden now you've got somebody that can be your business development piece that's making relationships and talking to other projects and coordinating somebody that's that community manager role that can build discord servers and go in there and regularly have conversations. Now you've got a four or five member team and you've got this startup that can do anything because they've all got these different skill sets. They can come together and brainstorm and share different ideas from different perspectives and then not have put your ego out of the way. Right. The best leaders are those that can surround themselves with people that then know things they don't know. And you're not intimidated by it. You want to surround yourself with that knowledge and experience because it's through that that you can lift each other up.
Devin
I love that. One of the, I guess, very notable speakers in the space of business is Naval Ravicon. And one idea that he poses that gets a little bit of controversy because it sounds so crazy, is that the future of work is going to be like an Oceans Eleven movie. Like, hey guys, we got a job. And you formulate this special team of the guy who unlocks these crazy safes, the person who does parkour that's like the surveillance, and they do all these crazy things that come together to do this really big, awesome thing. You kind of, in your own way, just explained how F five dow is like that, and it's really like formulating. What are the key skills to bring together to provide value in the marketplace and to kind of bring something that really helps projects that you're passionate about become or reach higher potentials than than are they they are now.
Jameswerk
And if you build the team right, there's no reason that team couldn't be successful business consulting in ecommerce, business consulting in sales, business consulting in Web three, or anywhere, because there's so many of these same things that, as we've demonstrated, apply to all of them. And then once you can consult on all those things, well, then certainly you can do all those things yourself and even demo to other projects that you're consulting with. Here's the example of what we did, even if it was just a demo, and I think about some of the most successful companies in the world. Look at Epic games with Fortnite. I don't think they ever intended Fortnite to be a successful video game. I think it was supposed to be a demo of what Unreal Engine could do and all of a sudden exploded into being this multibillion dollar franchise that then they can still use it to bring all these other people in. But it was really that demo of what Unreal Engine is capable of and what it can do in real time and how it could be on PlayStation and Xbox and PC and Apple and Android and all at the same time. I think we're trying to build the same thing, something that can adapt and consult and demo and build, and all of us can just have fun doing it.
Devin
Exactly. And James, now I want to go into the question section where after knowing our listeners and kind of knowing what questions they may have about your story, we can get into those things. And starting at the most basic level. One of the very first things that you talked about was through what seems to me as a very young age, you really understood that helping others learn things or training or coaching or really just taking the strengths in people and identifying it and helping them know that this is something you're good at. Is one of your key strengths something that you would like to magnify within others and then find higher and higher leverage opportunities to perform that skill? My question is, that is your story. How would you instruct others to find that that skill that they may feel just as passionate about as you do with yours?
Jameswerk
Yeah, I think we have to look at our hobbies, right? For each of us, we know what we like to do in our spare time. If you've got a weekend off and you're not working, you're not doing your nine to five job, what is it you love to do? Right? I think there's a lot of us that we find these hobbies that we can become obsessed about, and we can do them all day Saturday and have 18 hours disappear away and we can convince ourselves it's a waste of time. I'm just playing video games for 18 hours, and it doesn't mean anything, and there's no way that this could ever apply to a career. But what is it you like about what you're doing when you're playing that video game? Right? What is it you like about hanging out in the discord server and chatting with your friends? What is it you like about going on Reddit and reading through all these posts and then creating your own Reddit thread about whatever? What is it that you like about going on to Twitter and shit, posting and making fun of other people? We all have these things that we just naturally gravitate to and we love to do. And I think that many of us, probably very late in our careers before we fully realize this is what's natural to me. This is what I love doing. For me, I love coaching and training and teaching other people, and I just love it. And so certainly that's a hard thing to probably identify when you're 17 and go, okay, I want to be a coach and I want to be a manager. I'm just going to start at the top and manage other people. But within that, there were things that I was doing, even entry level positions, that then transitioned up through. And so my biggest advice is listen to yourself. Think about what it is you do in your day to day that you love to do. Pick those things out and then find those jobs, find those career paths, find those managers that you can work under that will then appreciate that skill and that thing that you love. And if what you love doing is writing Reddit articles, what you love doing is going on Twitter and searching through and seeing all the other stuff. There are jobs in Web Three that cater to that, right? There are people that we need right now in Web three, that all they do is they go around and they read Twitter posts all day long, and they figure out who all these other projects are and what projects are doing well. And you could be an alpha caller. You could be somebody that's setting up cold calls and building relationships. And DMs, you could be writing articles using chat GPT that can then be used for Twitter BIOS. There's so many things that people do that they think isn't a skill that is already the bud and the hint of what a skill could be, and it just has to be transitioned into the next level of what makes that employable.
Devin
Oh, wow. Okay, I have two directions that we can go from that. One is more of, like, giving my own personal example of why that makes sense, and the other is more of a question about your answer and how we can dig deeper into it. So I'll give the statement for the audience, and then we'll go into the question. The statement here is, using my own personal experience on how to find something from the very earlier age, actually super similar to you, James. I was very drawn to science out of all the categories, so I was on the premed track. I have a bachelor's in biochemistry, and I thought science was the reason. And science was the category that I was attracted to because I wanted to perform and work professionally in the science field. I wanted to be a doctor. I started shadowing doctors, and then I found out that once I understood what a doctor was, they specialize in something. Not all the time, but most of the time they specialize in something, and then they do it over and over again forever, almost.
Jameswerk
Miserable. That's one of the first things I learned as a pharmaceutical rep. My plan was to go on and go on to medical school after a couple of years in big pharma. Right. And I very quickly realized the physicians I was calling on did not like their jobs and what they were doing day to day. Seeing a different patient every three to four minutes wasn't fun for them. And I was having more fun being the pharma rep, calling on them, using the same science skills that I was learning to be a doctor, to be able to present the information to them oftentimes. I think you're exactly right. I had the same thing, your perception of, I love the science, I'm going to be a doctor, and then you realize what that job actually was. It didn't fit my expectation, and it wasn't something I actually wanted to do.
Devin
And whenever you're subjected to that perspective, like, okay, I thought, I like science, but now I see this and I don't. What's going on that forced you? Now go into my question to get introspective and figure out, okay, what about the science? Did I like if I see it differently now. And that's when I was drawn to the newness, the chaos, the having to think on your feet and learn new things and try on different hats and all of that thing where you're learning biology and then chemistry and then physics, and then organic chemistry and inorganic chemistry. That newness is much like business, too, where there's so many things you can learn, you can't do everything. And it's that spontaneity in the day of always having something else to do. That was the actual thing that I was drawn to. So, yeah, that's kind of the personal example. I don't know if you have any comments, and then I'll ask my question.
Jameswerk
For me, it was spotting patterns, right? And so science, to me, I can remember a cell biology class I took in college where it might have been the very first class, where I'd actually read the chapter before the lecture. And then you'd go to the lecture, and instead of having to as fast as you could write down every note of everything the professor said, instead you could actually listen to what they were saying and only write down the thing that makes sense because you'd already read the chapter in advance. So then you could ask the right questions and actually engage where in most classes, you'd be writing so fast, you wouldn't be thinking about what you're writing down. And you'd almost have to go back and reread the notes to think about it and then read the chapter. And what I loved about cell biology was that the stuff fit in my mind. It was like fitting these complex patterns together, and it made sense, right? And so sometimes all of us, I think, have those moments where things click. And so for me, the science and the medicine and the drugs and explaining how that worked to doctors clicked in my mind. And then teaching the other representatives how to do the relationship stuff. It was taking these complex patterns of how do you personality profile somebody and look and say, okay, you're an analytical, so I need to talk to you about facts and figures, or you're a driver, I can't waste your time. I need to get to the point. Or you're an amiable. If I don't learn about your wife and your kids and your family, you're not going to listen to me, right? Or you're an expressive and you're talking with your hands. And then, how do I become a chameleon and adjust my selling pitch, my selling style to your personality type so that I can get past that barrier to then present to you, right? And so how do you take these complex patterns and make it work? It's fun if you can find that thing, right? And then you can actually analyze it and understand that it's not just the science. It was what was it about the science that appealed to you as opposed to math or history or something else.
Devin
Yeah. Okay. So now we get to the question here, taking kind of that first question that I did as we went to the other segment. Your answer was, you really have to pay attention to your hobbies and find out what you like about them. And in my head, when I try to simplify that, it's be introspective. And through being introspective, you'll find the answer of what you're passionate about. We're going down a rabbit hole here, so hopefully we don't stay here too long. But the other thing that comes about when I think about that idea is how do you teach someone to be introspective? Is society the way that it's constructed now, making that hard for people to do? So maybe just adding a little bit of advice on how you would do that would, I think, help go a long way.
Jameswerk
It's an age thing, too. Right. I think the older you get, the easier it is to be introspective. Having kids, my gosh, you start to realize what's important to you, to communicate to the kids and how you want them to see you and your life changes. I think at a younger age, you probably need friends to help with it, because sometimes a friend who knows you right, and it can be an online friend, it could be a gaming friend that you've hung out with for hours in a discord server playing a game together. They might be able to tell you what it is that makes you tick more than you're even able to communicate to yourself yet. Right. I think having those transparent conversations with people for some could help. It really depends on your personality style. Right. There's some that are probably introspective at a very young age and can tell you exactly who they are, what their sexuality is, what everything is at very young age. And there's others that might be in their 50s or 60s before it finally dawns on them that, holy crap, I lived this whole life and never even dawned on me that this is what it is, different for everybody. But my advice would be that if you can't see that for yourself, if your thoughts get in your own way and you can't figure it out, what makes you tick and what really motivates you and what you're great at, ask your closest friends and you might be surprised at the answer they give.
Devin
I love that going on. Another note, that's completely different than what we tried before or than what we asked before. There was one thing that I left out that you touched a little bit in kind of the journey that we went through that I wanted to zoom in a little bit more on. And that was, from what I understood, a little bit different than everything. It was the charity aspect. One of the things that you mentioned was that you raised over a million dollars for charities. I guess we can go into why did you want to do that, but maybe more importantly, what did you learn for this experience?
Jameswerk
Yeah. So in twitch. And as you grow up as a twitch partner and as you evolve from a service streamer where you're trying to build a community because you're helping them do something to being an entertainment streamer, one of the things that we all grapple with is what kind of content can we make that'll draw in a wide audience? Right? Should we do a subathon and stay up 24 hours a day and every time somebody subs it adds another two minutes to the timer and you can't end the stream? Or should we do some kind of a charity stream where you're raising money for charity or are we doing a one year partner anniversary or are we doing whatever craziness? And for me, the thing that resonated for me was that anytime I would try to even think about begging for donations or tips or asking people to subscribe, I almost wanted to tell people, don't sub to my channel because half that money goes to Amazon. I only get half. If you really want to help me, send all of it to me as a tip. But I didn't want to ask for the tip because I knew I didn't need the money. I wasn't doing it for the money. I'd already had my career and retired and had my stock options and I was doing it because I loved doing it. And I was kind of exploring a new skill set that I later learned was a very similar skill set. But it felt new to me to be broadcasting instead of standing toe to toe with somebody and doing a charity stream made me feel good because the audience wanted to support me. But I could communicate to them about these kids St. Jude's that are going to this little hospital in Tennessee. And St. Jude's is able to fly in the family and provide the food and provide the housing and all the studies and all the research and all the stuff that they do, they give away to everybody else for free. And you could show a picture of this kid at St. Jude's and show them a tour of the hospital and do some cool stuff on screen with the graphics and whatever. And now all of sudden I wasn't trying to convince them to give me a tip or give me a sub. I was trying to convince them to support this good goal. And then you got more and more viewers coming in and you're having fun. And I evolved from being a service streamer that was teaching people how to play the game into almost a game show host where I was. Bringing on other streamers and now all of a sudden we were playing a battle royale type game where we were asking them about the game and what was going on in the game and depending on who answered the questions best, the audience would vote people off of the stream. Why? They're giving donations to the charity. And then all of a sudden you whittle your way down where there's only one left, and then that one gets the big host and all the people go to their channel. And it became this game show where we were raising money for charity. And so much of what was close to my heart was my own kids. And that's kind of why I rotated from farm into the other so to raise money for kids. And I had all that hospital experience so I could introduce them to physicians that I knew and tour hospitals and my local hospital, that was a Children's Miracle Network hospital in St. Jude's. It was a natural fit for me that I just had a blast with, was good at, was able to go to some of these big Comic Con type conventions, the local, regional ones and some of the bigger ones, and so we could actually do the charity streams on Twitch from the convention. And all of a sudden, I've now got the cast of Harry Potter coming on screen and signing things and sending out the people that give a donation to St. Jude's. And I've got Captain Kirk coming on, and he's got his bottle of liquor, and he's signing the bottle, and we're sending it out now, meeting these celebrities and doing these podcast charity streams live at these conventions and working with the convention in advance. Because now all of a sudden, that convention wants their celebrities, that they're coming in to stand at the table and do the autographs to be able to raise money for the charity because now the convention can brag. We raised all this money for charity, that I was facilitating the whole thing with the live stream and think things morph and have fun, and I was just having a blast with it.
Devin
I love that. And after hearing about that, my first impression went to, okay, this amount of charity was raised in the more traditional sense of reaching out to people and doing it kind of using your other experience. I would have never thought after hearing you explain it, that it was done almost in this game show style thing. So I think that's amazing. And it goes to show kind of the flexibility and kind of how we can build skill sets to do things that seemingly aren't connected or seemingly don't have a stepping stone to get to, but when you just work at something hard enough, it's really hard to explain.
Jameswerk
Yeah. And you find the things that you're good at, and then you figure out how to climb that mountain using the skill that you know how to do right. And then when you get into management, you figure out when I lack at the skill in order to don't beat yourself. Up that you're not good at that thing, find somebody you can team up with that can do that part for you.
Devin
Right on. So, James, as we close out, maybe one of the last places we can go to is if you have any questions for me.
Jameswerk
Oh, yeah. What you guys are building with Orcdao, I think is really cool in a lot of ways. I find the consulting business that I'm doing doing the same things that you are, but you're creating the manpower to go along with it. Right. So you're doing the consulting piece where you're coaching and you're educating and you're helping the projects do this stuff. Right. You're doing the podcast piece very similar to what I did too. But then you're also building this army that can come in and help these projects. So for you, how did it transition from from that leadership business side to building the army of people that can then support it through Orcdow?
Devin
Yeah, I guess it's kind of like you mentioned. Where I would go from is It's a stacking of skill sets that if you were to ask me if this is where I'd be five years previous, I'd say, doesn't make any sense. There's no way. So where I got into the scene was teaching myself how to code, and then that went into learning about algorithms and then online marketing, and then that went into ecommerce and learning how a brand works. And then after going from being like an online marketer for other brands into owning my own brand, it's not just marketing. There's other parts of the business. There's operations, there's finance and admin stuff, there's division, there's operations, if I haven't already said that, and so on and so forth. So you just learn how to I guess I always call it, not be a one legged table. You learn how to put the other legs on the table of a functional business. Right. So that's where we built rainmaker games. Rainmaker Games is the first crypto project that I got started with. Still going, still co founder. It's doing really well. One of the most notable things that I took from my previous experience into Rainmaker Games was the promotions and the campaigns that led to our first public fundraise. December 2021, we raised 6.5 million privately, but then we raised 21.6 million publicly through a copper launch. And there were a lot of effort that went into that, whether it's the KOLs, whether it's partnerships with other games, with Marketplaces, with other people, with exchanges, with launch pads, and all of that. Summed up, I think, gave me a pretty good skill set when it was learning how the marketing works and building a team to actually execute on that post raise going into 2022. The team that I put together and to actually do those functions were actually spun off into Orcdow, and that's when we started servicing other clients. And really, that is where it all came from. Building that core team that could do this for other clients and then building co founders who had their own skills that could do other things, really is going to keep us on the front end from like a client side, almost like a growth agency, but on the back end, a Dow, which our students actually learn how to get these jobs. Web three. So that's kind of the I almost look at this podcast as top of funnel, whereas we're teaching content on how other people get jobs in Web Three with our own skill set that we think we're pretty good at. We teach people within our Dow actually how to do those jobs and then we connect them with the jobs to our clients and potentially other people after they may graduate or want to do their own thing. So that's how it works.
Jameswerk
Yeah. One of the things I did at Gamers Ups was to build out the customer service team that could then run the Gorgeous platform. And so we worked with a company out of California called Talent Pop that then would recruit customer service reps out of the Philippines that were used to having to drive into the city and work these shifts for Microsoft and all the biggest companies. And so many of them became reps that could then use Gorgeous and use these other platforms. Right. And I very quickly learned that these were some of the hardest working individuals I'd ever come across. And I could set them up on three eight hour shifts and many of them would be working multiple jobs at the same time. So why they were a customer service rep for me, they were also playing Axio Infinity, they were also working and to be able to stay at home where their family is and not have to have that commute to the city and the commute home and be away, they were so grateful. And I would hang out with them in these Discord servers as they were doing their shifts and be talking to them about the product and helping them with the triage, the tough customer service problems and train them right. I wrote the whole SOP and brought them all on board and the whole thing. And so interviewing them and picking out the right people from the group out of that area and bringing them on board and then promoting them up to be managers in customer service. And they bring in their friends to be these other reps and what I see you doing with a very similar group of people that then help do the very same thing I was doing in customer service. Now those same people are doing those in the Discord servers for these NFD communities where all of a sudden there's tickets coming in. And these tickets are no different than a Gorgeous ticket. It's just a ticket on Discord and people want to do a collaboration or they want to ask about how you get on the whitelist and it's the same thing. And it's so crazy to me how you start seeing the same stuff happen over and over and over in what seems like a very different industry, but it's not. It's the same stuff over and over.
Devin
Yeah. All full circle. It's all back to communication.
Jameswerk
Wild. I have a feeling we'll interact a lot over the next coming years. We have too much in common not to.
Devin
Exactly. I'm looking forward to it. So, as we close out, James, I'd love to ask you if there's anything you'd like to shout out or any other closing thoughts that you'd like to mention.
Jameswerk
Yeah, absolutely. So, on the 21st of this month, only a few short days away, season two of the more Mo A R launch pad is coming up. And so f five dow is launching bet bats. And so we'll have voting opening up. This is a collection on Salana. It's going to be 2222 NFTs. It's going to get you access to our casino website on Salanabat win and also get you a revenue share from all the money that's generated. I think we're going to have a lot of success with this project. I'm looking forward to it. So if you want to dig in and find some new project to have fun with, that might be one to look into. Certainly do your own research. No financial advice, but check it out. I think you might enjoy. See?
Devin
Right on. Well, everyone, I'm definitely going to check it out. Follow up after you listen to this or whenever you hear it, to tune in for yourself and follow along. James, it was really awesome to have you here. I'm sure we'll be chatting a lot more in the future.
Jameswerk
Sounds good. Thank you, Devin.
Devin
No worries. I'll catch you later.
