It was once said that the internet would allow anyone with 1,000 fans to make a living, but Li Jin believes that in the age of the NFTs, one or two serious supporters might be enough.

Jin is a standard-bearer of the “passion economy,” which she describes as an economic system that enables and encourages people to make money while pursuing their passions. For Jin, NFTs are a new tool that helps creators in the passion economy reach their “true fans” and build lasting relationships with them.

Through her venture company Atelier, Jin invests in “platforms that lower the barriers to entrepreneurship and expand the way to work”. With her past in venture capital, she is well positioned to change the way we think about work.

Bring back the passion

“It was my dream to live in Paris, so I’m just hanging out here for now,” Jin tells the magazine towards the end of the interview, which takes place after the highly anticipated Ethereum Community Conference, also known as EthCC, that closes took place in the city. Despite admitting that she “doesn’t quite understand why people are working on DeFi,” which drew conference attendees’ attention, Jin organized “a lunch for people working at the intersection of crypto and creator economies.”

The current travel difficulties are a good reason to enjoy every bit of a new city, but hanging out in a new place is not something the average worker can do “for the time being” as they tend to be chained to cumbersome things like physical offices and chained scheduled, mandatory face-to-face meetings. However, this is not the case with many YouTubers – especially with those in the Passion Economy.

After all, why do we work? When you ask a child what they’d like to do when they grow up, the answer is often – hopefully – full of playfulness and passion. When asked why they chose a particular profession, the answer rarely revolves around salary, job security, or benefits. As they grow up, many seem to give up on these core motivations and instead seek a livelihood by fitting into a corporate structure or mindlessly doing freelance assignments.

According to Jin, the passion seems to be coming back. There is a “shift from gig marketplaces built around truly standardized services and products to more flexible, creative marketplaces that would actually allow people to generate income from the things they really love,” explains they are optimistic.

This is at the core of the Passion Economy, which is “a new type of work that is completely separate from a traditional employer-employee relationship”. This means that a passionate “worker”, if you can call him that, is neither responsible for bosses in a corporate structure nor as an interchangeable – or fungible – freelancer à la Fiverr or Uber. Instead, they just do their thing – and customers / subscribers pay for the privilege of being part of the journey.

Jin’s first NFT sold for $ 25,000.

In a sense, the result of any creative worker – be it written, designed, or painted – is in fact an unreproducible, unjustifiable “mark” of his or her endeavors. This article is indeed an off-blockchain NFT created by me – sold to the magazine but forever attached to me. The work performance of non-creative workers such as security guards or Uber drivers is decidedly less like a unique NFT, but more like a standardized, unrestricted “work hours” token with a clear market value.

The relationship between NFTs and creative work is far more than just an associative play on words as technology enables creatives to shape their work on the blockchain and capitalize on their sales and resales.

“This year, many creators became aware of crypto and what it could do for them to generate income in ways that were not possible before.”

Venture capitalist

Jin is from Beijing and her academically minded parents immigrated to Pittsburgh in the early 1990s. She describes how she grew up “very poor” in her early years in America, which led her parents to push her into a safe career.

She enrolled at Harvard University in 2008, but her parents were dissatisfied with her major in English literature and told her that she was doomed to become a starving writer and that her decision would “bring shame to the family.” To appease her parents, Jin switched to statistics.

For her first job, she worked as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where she “was sent to report on the G20 conference when she was 19”. In 2011 she worked in Mergers & Acquisitions at Blackstone during her studies and later worked for several years as a strategy associate at Capital One and product manager at Shopkick. a mobile shopping startup in Silicon Valley.

When Shopkick was acquired, Jin “wasn’t sure I was going to have my next role in technology” and followed the path of her peers, starting a Masters in Business Administration from Wharton in 2016, but continued to apply for jobs “If you want to stay “In technology, you might want to try venture capital – it’s a really great way to get a bird’s-eye view of the entire industry,” advised one mentor.

It broke off two weeks after receiving an offer from Andressen Horowitz, the famous venture capital company also known as a16z. “I didn’t really want to go to business school,” she recalls.

As a deal partner, Jin was responsible for “meeting with startups all day, talking to founders, taking pitches, helping with the due diligence process,” and often sat on company boards as an observer for her employer. Many of these companies have been what Jin calls “consumer creator platforms,” like Imgur, Patreon, and Substack.

For Jin, these companies signal a “shift from the gig economy to the passion economy, where new platforms allow people to make a living what they love and monetize their individuality”. Little by little, the tools that enable a thriving creative middle class are being released. In her article “100 True Fans” from February 2020 ” lays a formula that enables creatives to make a mid-range income of $ 100,000 per year with just 100 real fans, each contributing an average of $ 83 per month.

Today, much of the “middle class” of creatives that Jin featured remains digital farmers “who probably upload millions – hundreds of millions – of pictures to Instagram every day and receive no share of advertising revenue.”

“Instagram does a lot of advertising, but YouTubers don’t see any of it – I see that as 100 percent taxation.”

Artists receive no material benefit even when millions look at their profiles. Instagram, on the other hand, has earned “billions in equity” through the work of its posters – why shouldn’t content creators demand a share of the cheese? Beeple posted nearly 5,000 works of art before finally cashing in tens of millions with the NFT boom.

1,000 vs. 100 real fans in comparison. Source: a16z

In July 2020, Jin decided it was time to practice what she was preaching and “build an entire company dedicated to this particular emerging category, and I did – and I felt like the best too The way to understand something and to evaluate it means to live it yourself. “

The result was Atelier, an investment firm with an initial portfolio of $ 13 million of platforms that enable Users to forge their own future.

“I founded Atelier to fund a certain vision of the world: a world where people can do what they love to earn a living and lead a fuller and more meaningful life.”

Crypto connection

Jin first encountered cryptocurrencies in 2017 when her employer, a16z, “became one of the earliest funds to set up its own crypto fund”. Although she often worked with people involved in the fund, she found the industry abstract as it “didn’t touch the everyday consumer yet”.

This year things have changed.

“There were a lot more interfaces with consumers and the creator economy, especially this year with NFTs.”

NFTs, Jin believes, take their idea of ​​100 real fans even further. “You could only have one real fan, or ideally like two real fans bidding against each other,” she explains. Although ultimately only one person would own any digital asset, “their content can still be freely available and go viral”, creating a chain reaction that makes it even more likely that true fans “who really appreciate the original and are willing to to pay for it ”. Version “is coming.

Atelier investment. Source: Atelier

To To write In an essay titled “The Case For Universal Creative Income,” Jin auctioned an NFT representing the item in April of this year for 5,6969 ETH – all of which were donated to the Yield Guild Games Sponsor A-Scholar Program. Although anyone can read the article for free, someone paid 5,6969 ETH for the original.

Jin believes that creatives should see crypto as a way to monetize their work in what she calls the third step of the creative industries funnel. The first step is “How do I build my audience – how do I get discovered?” The second step is “How do I involve my audience more deeply?”

A lesson from Jin’s course.

Although cryptocurrency and NFTs have tremendous potential as rocket fuel for the passion economy – a term Jin coined – their primary focus is on empowering creators to make the leap. She leads the “Building for the Creator Economy” course, which teaches the participants the specifics of their world for three weeks.

Earlier this year she also launched the Atelier Angels Pilot Program to help train 30 founders become angel investors – gaining additional sources of income and learning more about the business at the same time. For Jin and Atelier, the future belongs to the makers – so who better to invest in it?

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