Patrick Lee, co-founder of Rotten Tomatoes, was interviewed by Joanne Z. Tan on the “Interviews of Notables and Influencers” podcast, video and blog series, where Patrick talked about these topics:
A LOT of insights! Thank you Patrick Lee!
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Joanne Tan 0:00
Welcome, Patrick Lee, former co founder of Rotten Tomatoes, a serial entrepreneur, and someone with great advice and insights about Silicon Valley about startups. So I have a lot of questions for you today. Thank you so much. I am Joanne Tan, CEO branding expert at 10 Plus Brand, a digital marketing, content creation leader in the digital marketing industry.
So the first question for you, in light of Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos trial, what do you think about the Silicon Valley culture? Because it’s pretty prevailing what she did: fake it till you make it, with unrealistic financial projections. What do you think of this whole saga?
Patrick Lee 0:58
I think it’s, you know, it’s, it is true that entrepreneurs generally are going to be pretty aggressive, they’re going to paint a great picture. For me, when I look at, you know, pitches as an investor, I don’t really worry so much about the projections in the future, I look at performance in the past a lot more, because pretty much everyone is going to try to have a slide that shows like a hockey stick, like, and you know, and that something that is like, big enough, that will be interesting to investors, but not necessarily series so big that they’ll think it’s, it’s, you know, unbelievable, and everyone has that slide. And I basically ignore it, because it looks the same for every single deck.
As far as Elizabeth Holmes, I mean, they were, they were straight up lying. So I, I think that’s a bit different. And I believe that there could have been a version where they were like, “This is our vision of what we want to do in the future. But this is where we are now. And, you know, every year we’re going to try to make things, you know, a bit smaller, like the machines a bit smaller, do the tests a bit faster, use a little bit less blood”, you know, something like that, and put in goals and milestones that are, would have been achievable, you know, with technology and other things over time. But where they said they were relative to where they actually were, I mean, that was the straight lie? And I think, have they shown the big vision, but had more realistic steps to get there over time, I think they still would have raised a lot of money. And they would have been, you know, telling the truth, rather than what they actually did.
Joanne Tan 3:01
Yeah. You know, you can dream, whatever the future vision. But if she was not realistic and not honest with her past and the present with the numbers, then that’s a different issue. Fake it till you make it, what do you think of that?
Patrick Lee 3:24
When I think about that, I think it’s less about faking, and more about trying to find something that people want, as quickly as possible. So at least to me, I think about things like maybe the technology isn’t there yet. But you know, you know, for example, we were going to have this website to sell cars, I think they did this in like the 90s. And they didn’t have the cars, they didn’t build the whole inventory system, they didn’t hold inventory, any of that stuff. They just put up a website to sell cars and see if people would actually buy a car online without actually having to go and drive it and all that kind of stuff.
And then when people actually bought the car, they just actually bought the car and have it shipped over and took a loss. But in that situation, I mean, you could say like, the system itself was fake, but people could still buy cars from there. But what was more important was they could see, did someone actually willing to buy a car online, in the 90s without actually having to test drive it? And I think that to me makes a lot of sense. Plenty of folks are doing that, where the technology is not fully built out, but it’s more about experimenting and testing demand.
I’m not one for faking numbers, all that kind of stuff. And like I said, I don’t believe in a lot of protections, and so I tend to look much more at what they’ve done, either themselves what they’ve accomplished in their previous companies or jobs or education, and where they are with the company, how much progress have they made, even with little to no funding, that kind of stuff.
Joanne Tan 5:18
And last thing about her trial, her attorney said it in the beginning and the closing, that she basically sank with the ship, she did not sell any of her stocks. Well, that doesn’t seem to matter to the jury. They indicted her on the accounts of defrauding investors, if there’s sufficient evidence showing that she had an intention to defraud investors, whether she went down the ship without selling her shares, is not relevant. What do you think of that?
Patrick Lee 5:57
I haven’t followed the case super closely or anything, but I think had she’d been trying to sell her shares, it would have probably been more obvious what she was doing. I think basically, what may have started as a very small lie just kept compounding and compounding, compounding till it was a huge lie. And at that point, I would imagine that she can’t do anything to get out, she has to just keep trying to keep pushing it to the point where it got very, very bad. I don’t I don’t think that matters.
Joanne Tan 6:36
Right. It’s other people’s money, and a lot of them. And, yes, so at the end of the day, she had to be held accountable for that. Okay, so the Silicon Valley culture, if you can summarize what Silicon Valley culture is, how would you summarize it?
Patrick Lee 6:57
I actually take a more positive view, I think, in most cases, you know, people are just trying to make the world a better place. And I’m in Silicon Valley, a lot of these folks, you know, come in with a dream, and they actually can change things in a massive, massive way. And a lot of times very, very quickly, they can create, you know, products that can touch, literally, billions of users touch the entire world to change the entire world. In years, maybe a decade or two.
Joanne Tan 7:31
Rotten Tomatoes – when you sold it, it was right after the stock market crash was a bad time to really make any profits for a lot of startups. So for you to be able to pull it through and eventually sold it was quite an accomplishment. But right now, looking at how successful Rotten Tomatoes has become, if you had the choice, would you rather wait until it becomes a beast it has become? Do you regret selling it at a low price? back then?
Patrick Lee 8:10
I mean, it’s really hard to time the market, and to know exactly when to sell, I think I didn’t do a good job as far as having enough of a network of folks who could be there to help give advice about these issues about when to sell, how to sell etc. I think had I had a better network like I do now. I would have probably been able to approach that better in terms of timing and stuff. Yeah, you know, had we waited even another year or two, it probably would have made a major difference.
But we are all just very happy that the company is still around, is still doing well. They are still growing. I would say overall, being able to have that freedom to have traveled around the world to do other startups to do other things has been good, had we kept running the company all the way until now. You know that that would have been a very, very long time. And I don’t I don’t think that would be the worst thing. But I also really did enjoy kind of the freedom to travel to do other things as well.
Joanne Tan 9:29
So what are you doing right now?
Patrick Lee 9:32
So right now I actually started an investment syndicate that kind of formed out of the tech founder group that I was running. And basically I have partnered with three friends from the group. So there’s myself. There’s Holly Liu. She was the co founder of Kabam, the mobile gaming startup. There’s Kun Gao. He was the co founder and founding CEO of Crunchyroll, the anime streaming service and Kevin Lin. He was a co founder of Twitch, and basically the four of us have created investments syndicate to invest at the intersection of technology and entertainment. And we started back in March of last year.
And since then we’ve invested into 28 companies, we raised over 25 million for those companies, across 350 investors. And these are just very value add, and strategic investors. And so at the intersection of technology, entertainment, we provide like a ton of value to founders. And that’s basically what I’ve been doing. We’ve been super busy reviewing new deals every day, and really trying to find really interesting and special companies at that intersection.
Joanne Tan 10:46
Can you be a little bit more specific? Exactly what kind of technology and how they intersect with entertainment? And what is the future of the movie industry? Or whatever the entertainment industry you met?
Patrick Lee 11:02
Yeah, so for us, I mean, we’re thinking of companies, you know, like, Rotten Tomatoes and Kabam and Crunchyroll and Twitch streaming video. Sometimes content in media, gaming and eSports. Web3, crypto, NFTs, blockchain, gaming, creator economy, Metaverse, VR AR, there’s a lot of these areas that we think are very interesting. And we have a I would say fairly wide definition of entertainment. Like, obviously, movies, music, games, sports is clearly entertainment. But I think for us, you know, things like education, fashion, a couple other categories of food are like kind of borderline on the entertainment side for us. And so we would actually still look in those spaces as well.
Joanne Tan 11:56
Okay. So I would like you to explain to the general public about NFT, Web3 Metaverse, because these things are sort of a novel concept for most Americans, and most Americans still don’t even know what NFT is. I had a conversation with you prior to this. I was fascinated about what you said, of the ownership, almost like creating your own economy with NFT in the future of arts and entertainment. I had a question after our conversation: What is the difference between so called crowd-funding and NFT ownership? Which is a kind of funding or fundraising, it’s selling the ownership of what could be the ownership of anything, is that right?
Patrick Lee 13:05
That’s a that’s a lot of questions. I’ll try to unpack it. Um, I mean, I wouldn’t say I’m like an expert on Web3, crypto, and NFTs, all that kind of stuff. Like To be honest, I was actually quite against or negative on on the blockchain, I didn’t hadn’t seen a very good use case at the time. And I was feeling like, pretty much everyone who’s in it is just there to get rich quick. For me, personally, my views changed. Back when I read an article about Axie Infinity, which is a blockchain game, written in the, in the newsletter, not boring. And in that article, they basically were saying that with Axie Infinity, the players were actually able to make money from playing the game. And you had, you know, players in the Philippines, in Latin America, in Vietnam, who are making multiple times their living wage, playing that game, versus what they were doing before. And so you had like grandma’s grandparents in the Philippines playing it. And I thought that was extremely interesting, because it changed a lot of the economics of gaming that we’re used to.
You know, when you look at web mobile gaming, free to play, or a lot of times they call it “pay-to-win” where the more you pay, the stronger you’ll be, and you’ll be able to, you know, be higher up on a leaderboard or something like that. When you pay all that money, you know, 100% of it goes to the mobile gaming company, you don’t own any of that. And they, the mobile game company is going to go and take, you know, 50% or more of that, to spend on marketing to try to get more players and they’re going to try to extract as much value out of their players as possible. And usually what they look for is really hardcore players are going to spend a lot of money, they call them whales.
With blockchain gaming, you know, when you look at something like Axie Infinity, it totally changes it and flips everything around, basically, almost all the value goes back to the players, they might extract a 10% on the transaction fees. But basically the other 90% is going back to players. And what’s happening is, yeah, you’re still gonna have hardcore players who’s gonna spend a lot of money in it. But one, I mean, these whales are actually investing, they’re actually, when they spend money in the game, they’re actually, you know, buying NFTs and other things, or tokens and which are increasing in value. But when all that money also that they’re spending and buying these things, is also being generated, a lot of times and earned, by these players in all these other countries who are “grinding” the game, to get these NFTs get these tokens that they can sell, and they can make money.
So this 90% of that money that’s coming from the whales is basically going back to these other players. And I think that is something that’s super interesting that, you know, I’ve never seen before up to this point. And, and that’s something that I think is applicable across, you know, a lot of areas within Web3, or within NFTs. NFTs, I mean, people should look it up. But it basically means like non fungible token versus a fungible token. And it means it’s basically something that’s unique, the NFT. And so like, even if you both hold an NFT in the same collection, they’re basically different, they’re unique, even if they like, look the same, they’re still different, like, I would have my copy, and you would have your copy of it. And, and one thing that can happen, that gets people I think, excited is is this idea of ownership.
You know, one example I had given you earlier, is if you look at, like the creator economy, right, the creators on YouTube and Twitch and other places, you know, the first way that they’ve always monetized, you know, the 1.0 way of monetizing was through brands and sponsorships. They would, you know, make money from the ads that ran on their YouTube videos or other places, they would have sponsored posts, or they would have sponsors pay them to do product placement inside of the video. Version two, the money was coming from users. So version two look like things like Patreon, Twitch donations, Cameo fans, Substack. Yeah, right. So it was coming from the users who are paying generally like subscriptions, or donations, or tipping or other things like that.
What Web3 and NFTs potentially can do is, you know, version three of creator monetization, which, you know, let’s take Patreon, for example, instead of every month, you’re paying, you’re paying some money to the creator, because you want to support them, and in exchange you get content. It could be every month, you’re buying an NFT,
Joanne Tan 18:28
As a supporter.
Patrick Lee 18:29
Yeah, for that month. And by holding the NFT, you get access to the content for that month. But what that also could be is the creator could then do things that give value to folks who are holding NFTs. They could say, hey, anyone who’s holding three or more NFTs, can get additional access or content, maybe can hop on a Zoom call with the creator, you know, it could be, hey, everyone who is holding an NFT from the past year, all 12 months, maybe they’ll do a meet-and-greet one time, like a live meet-and-greet, for example. And so there can be certain things that can make these NFTs potentially more valuable.
And so when people are buying these NFTs every month to support their creator, it could be the same amount of money that they’re putting into like Patreon, they still get access to the content. But potentially those tokens could actually increase in value, you know, and they might be able to resell it to other folks down the road. Maybe they can even buy more than one each month, you know, so that they could sell the extras or something like that. And so it changes things in interesting way where now they’re actually like, in a way investing in the creator, if they were supporting a creator really early on, and then the creator blew up. Well, you know what, those really early NFTs are probably going to be worth a whole lot more. Because there weren’t as many supporters supporting this creator maybe in the beginning.This creator is selling like 100 a month, and maybe when they really blew up, they’re selling like 10,000 a month? Well, if you’re one of those people holding one of those early ones, and there’s only like 100 of them out there, you know, it’s probably gonna be worth more. And so that’s something that’s really changes things for, for the users for who are supporting these creators or playing these games or things like that, that I think is very different.
And for me, personally, I think it’s more about that and the technology. I mean, you even look at the difference between, you know, the 1.0s and the 2.0s is in terms of monetization, both of those things, whether it’s coming from the brands, or it’s coming from the user’s technology wise, it wasn’t that much difference in my mind. But it’s more about the way of thinking and about the whole thing about like, who is your customer? Is it the brands? Or is it the users? And then the difference between 2 and 3 is that the users are just paying and supporting you, or are they actually like investing in you. So that’s kind of how I think about Web3 and NFTs and all that kind of stuff. And why I think it’s very interesting.
Joanne Tan 21:09
Okay, so NFT right now is pretty much limited to art, whatever pieces of art people would like to own. Do you perceive it can expand beyond the realm of collectibles, art, and music, and video, and paintings, objects of art? So do you think it can expand into, like, the commercial, and just basically anything?
Patrick Lee 21:40
I mean, I think it already has expanded way beyond those things. I mean, when you have NFTs that are the early versions, or like profile pictures, but then the next wave has been utility. So you’ll see ones that have been working games or by holding this NFT, you get access to this community, or you can have this NFT that works in this game, but you can still resell it outside of the game. Or, you know, it can give you access to a “skin” that you can take from this game, but you could actually bring it into this other virtual land or game or other things. You’re also seeing, potentially, where people can take either NFTs or traditional, like fungible tokens for like real estate for fractionalized ownership.
Joanne Tan 22:34
Real estate property?
Patrick Lee 22:35
Yeah, it’s like, we could buy a property and we could split it up and 100 people could own it. You know, there’s a lot of things like that. I mean, people were trying to put together a DAO to buy the Constitution. Like I even was trying to support that, because I thought it was kind of cool, you know, and they almost got it. I mean, they were down to the last two bidders. And so yeah, it’s gone already gone way beyond just art.
Joanne Tan 22:57
Now, what’s the relationship between NFT and crypto currency?
Patrick Lee 23:03
Cryptocurrency, again, I’m not like the expert on this. But I think when people think of cryptocurrency and NFT, they’re thinking of, like, fungible tokens where basically like one bitcoin is the same as any other Bitcoin, or like $1 is the same as any other dollar. But with NFTs, they’re non fungible, they’re unique. So if I hold this NFT and you hold an NFT, even if they’re like the, they look the same, they’re actually different copies of it. And so it’s sort of like if we each if if you had a CD and I had the same you know, album in CD form, they’re they’re actually separate things.
Joanne Tan 24:02
There are people who are diehard cynicists of cryptocurrency, NFT, and of Bitcoin, I just say Bitcoin, they call Bitcoin the Dutch tulip. They know it’s in their mind, it’s going to be vanished. They don’t see any intrinsic value. Okay so, from their mindset, if their cynicism about Bitcoin is at level 1 to 10, at 5, okay, is NFT in their mind, going to be seven, six above the Bitcoin? If they doubt Bitcoin, as Dutch tulips, are they going to doubt NFT as something like Dutch tulips times five or something? You know what I mean? Because they think the value you’re creating is all in your mind!
Patrick Lee 25:07
Are you done with question?
Joanne Tan 25:09
Yeah, so that’s a question. Because my audience have very enthusiastic endorsers and owners of NFT, and Bitcoins. And there are very severe doubt, Doubting Thomases, and those who, you know, categorize them as all Dutch tulips, speculatives?
Patrick Lee 25:35
Yeah, I mean, again, I’m not an expert on this, I’m relatively new to kind of believing at least some parts of it. And there are other folks out there who are probably much more able to kind of talk about the value of things. But I would say, if you look at almost any technology, you have doubters, what I would say is, there have been people who have doubted, like, you know, every technology, you go back, you’ll see, you can find very smart folks who, who doubted personal computers, you can see a lot of people who doubted the internet. And when things crashed hard, in the beginning of 2000, lots of folks were like I told you, so see, well, guess what, like, look what’s happened with both of those things. They’re huge.
I can’t guarantee that this can happen in this situation. But anytime you’re gonna have doubters, and even when it crashes, and I do think there will probably be a crash, or two or multiple crashes, they’re gonna come out and say: “see?”, but a lot of it is, if it works, you know, how big could this be? And if this is essentially like the next internet, in terms of how big it could be, then the people who did believe in it, who came in early, are going to be the next, you know, Facebook, and Google and Microsoft and Apple and those kinds of companies. That’s what happened every time. Microsoft and Apple came out of personal computers, Google, and Facebook came out of an Amazon, now the internet, you know, huge companies came out of mobile, huge companies are going to come out of like, AI.
Joanne Tan 27:32
Right, that’s true.
Patrick Lee 27:33
Huge companies, I mean, have already come out of like blockchain and Web3, and will continue to come out. And if this actually ends up where people, you know, the positive people think, then these companies may be, you know, really like the next giant companies, you know, controlling technology in the future.
Joanne Tan 28:00
Okay.
Patrick Lee 28:01
I think for people who are negative, it’s great. Let them be negative, to be honest, but you don’t really take any risk if you’re negative, and if you’re right, you’re right, but it doesn’t, doesn’t get you anywhere. If you’re right, when it’s when you’re positive about something and you’re willing to take that risk in that bet. And if you’re right, then then you can see a huge payoff.
Joanne Tan 28:25
Right. So NFT depends on cryptocurrencies for trading, right? I mean, just to mint an NFT, you need to be owning Aetherium. And then you however you do with the exchange from your wallet, and you got to pay the gas fee and whatever. In China, remember, the government just outlawed all cryptocurrencies, just like that. Now, once you pull the rug from under your feet, well, that’s, that’s the end of NFT. That’s the end of crypto. That’s the end of everything. So I don’t think the American government will ever do that. Is there any truth to the speculative nature to NFT and, and its foundation? That’s cryptocurrency? Can you call it this is 100% genie out of a bottle? It’s not going to go back? Or is there any chance that it is speculative?
Patrick Lee 29:41
Um, again, I really do think if you want to be asking so many questions around blockchain and NFTs and Web3, you’re really talking to the wrong person.
Joanne Tan 29:52
No, you should be putting on so much better…
Patrick Lee 29:54
Than that is, you know, like, I did Rotten Tomatoes. You know, generally people ask me about movies and things like that. So that would be my first comment. But I would say, you know, with China with these other things, I mean, I think it’s already out, it’s decentralized, you know, I don’t think it can be necessarily put back. And, again, when the internet was getting big, you had all these companies in the late 90s, who were going IPO, that were, you know, pretty crappy companies. And again, when it crashed, everyone’s like, hey, there’s, these are all scams, these are just companies with no revenue, etc. Right. And you’re seeing a lot of that now, with crypto and NFT, you’re seeing a lot of scammers. A lot of hackers like a crazy amount.
But it doesn’t mean that there isn’t some good being made out of it. Like one thing that happened in 2000, with the internet, when it crashed, all those books got out of there. You know, there wasn’t money to be easy money to be made anymore. They got rid of all the bad actors, and the ones that are actually quality companies at the time, like Amazon, for example, survived and, and thrived.
Joanne Tan 31:13
Right.
Patrick Lee 31:13
And I think the same thing is gonna happen, I do think there’ll be a crash or multiple crashes. And it will probably flush out a lot of the bad players, they will hopefully make people smarter, when they’re investing into companies in Web3, or buying NFTs are things to be smarter about what they’re putting money into, and not just throwing money anywhere speculating. So I think those things are still going to happen.
Joanne Tan 31:38
Right? I have an easier question for you. Okay. I wish I could say NFT utilizes the blockchain technology, but is not crypto dependent. But it is crypto dependent. So this survival and thriving of NFT does depend on the survival and thriving of cryptocurrency. Okay, so those go hand in hand. Now, I do want to, I would like you to answer some questions about the future of movie and entertainment in the context of metaverse. That’s AI, AR and VR. You are investing in the future of technology and entertainment. So could you spare some insights, some vision about the future of entertainment with technology?
Patrick Lee 32:41
Yeah, I mean, I think if you’re talking as far as Metaverse in the best case scenario, you know, people have already envisioned it. On screen, you know, you look at things like Ready Player One, or the even better case scenario of like, the Matrix. And that’s kind of like the ultimate version of of like a metaverse. But I would say, on a practical level, I have a very loose definition of Metaverse, which to me is, you know, almost anything, kind of digital, remote virtual, in some ways. With all of us these days, we’re not actually meeting physically in person. We’re doing things over Zoom. We’re interacting on social media on Instagram, and all these messaging apps on Facebook, on you, you know, watching each other on YouTube, on Twitch. And so I think already people are essentially in sort of like, the beta version of the metaverse. They’re playing games together. Many, many of the most popular games these days are synchronous multiplayer games, you’re playing with actual other human players. And so Metaverse is just something that potentially can tie it together even more closely.
You know, when you think about things like crypto and NFTs, the fact that maybe you will be able to have your character or your skins or some item in one game or one virtual world that you can pull to another place, you know, that you may have be able to have a persistent identity that you can kind of carry between different places. And so I think a lot more stuff will continue to move online. It’s already crazy. Like I barely buy anything in person, especially after COVID like almost everything is online through Amazon or delivered. Even my groceries are delivered, you know, and I think, again, this stuff is all moving that direction to me. Metaverse doesn’t have to be VR, AR you know, I think your phone like any thing with an internet connection, you know, is basically already kind of plugged into the Internet which is to me is like almost like a form of metaverse.
As far as entertainment and stuff goes, I think, one, you’re going to see a lot more AI playing a bigger and bigger part moving forward, whether it’s, you know, NPCs, non player characters in games, I think potentially, there could be versions where games and movies are going to potentially get closer and closer together, where maybe you might be able to, you know, even now you can, in VR, you can kind of watch short movies through the perspective of the main character, and potentially with AI, and other stuff. And as game technologies improve, you might be able to even be the main character in a movie, to actually be able to influence the movie in some way. And I think that kind of stuff will be incredibly interesting. You know, it’s probably still a bit far off, but I can definitely see that in the future.
Joanne Tan 35:56
Sounds very interesting. Now. That’s what you are going to continue to do for the next 10 years, 20 years? I mean, what’s your vision of your, I mean, you’re still very young. And I can see that you will be always in technology, innovation, and entertainment. So can you can you share with us what your envision your, your goal, your career, your life is going to be?
Patrick Lee 36:30
I mean, I think right now, with the transition of doing startups, I had done six startups over 23 years, and, you know, to be honest, got kind of burned out on that. Now, with this investment Syndicate, I’m investing into, like the future investing into the next wave of companies at the intersection of tech and entertainment. And I believe this is the likely direction, I will continue to go, you know, supporting these companies, through advice through connections through funding. And, and kind of helping to mentor them and shepherd them towards towards the future, I think that’s the likely path.
For me. Another area I believe, very strongly in that I think is incredibly important is around education. And, and that’s an area I also want to try and support. And I believe, you know, again, if we could somehow scale education to the point where, you know, everyone on the planet could get a high quality college level education, you know, for free, or even get paid to do so. Like, what the world would be a completely completely different place, if that were to happen. Right. And I believe that almost every problem that we have on the planet is due to a lack of education. Because lack of education is a lack of opportunities, lack of understanding, and these other things. And so that’s an area also that I believe very strongly in and want to try to figure out a way to support.
Joanne Tan 37:57
Do you see NFT Web3, Metaverse will contribute to that goal of advancing education globally?
Patrick Lee 38:09
Yeah, absolutely. I in two ways, one Metaverse, I think, ultimately, education is not going to be the traditional one teacher 30 students in a classroom kind of model. I think that doesn’t scale well to the whole world. I do think it’ll be something closer to Metaverse, or even now you see with internet, I mean, just between Wikipedia and YouTube alone, how much knowledge is there, you can look up almost anything already. And that’s two sites.
And if you take the top 100 sites in terms of content, and you look at things like Coursera, Masterclass, and other stuff, it’s like, off the charts in terms of how much info there is, a lot of it’s like organizing it, using AI to customize that for each individual student, each person and you don’t have to stop learning, when you’re a child, you can still learn as an adult, there’s still a lot of things that a lot of people don’t know. Right? And NFTs and Web3, I think also play a part, you look at things like Axie Infinity, their model is play to earn. And you have again, like these grandparents in the Philippines who are grinding a game that they probably don’t care anything about so they can make a living.
You know, what if you had learn-to-earn, where instead of grinding a game, they’re learning they’re studying. And, and by grinding, in that studying by basically doing that, those lessons and stuff, they’re actually earning a token or NFTs that can actually be converted into money. And ideally, you could get the rich people in the world to be paying the poor people to learn. Like, wouldn’t that fix a lot of things? These are things that potentially could be done through NFTs, through Web3, through Metaverse.
Joanne Tan 40:00
It has far reaching profound impact in revolutionising the education, the traditional way of education, and equalisation, you know, there’s going to be more equality, because once you really promote education, that’s the stepping stone to equality. And also charity, and how do you do charity? And you can intertwine that with gaming because education can be through gaming’s, you know, to some extent instead of just this top down traditional, you know, spoon feeding manner. So this is fascinating. There’s no end to this.
So I agree with you, as a matter of fact, okay, that the genie is out of the bottle, those countries, they shut down to new technology, eventually they’re going to be really behind. Okay, and crypto, NFT, digital currency, freedom, trust, and whatever the new wave of economy built on this, because after all, NFT is built on this blockchain crypto, you know, this technology is going to profoundly change our world for the better. On a pessimistic note, – okay, I always have to balance it, what are the dangers you envision with this technology?
Patrick Lee 41:33
I mean, I would say the biggest danger right now is it’s just in terms of scams, in terms of hackers, things like that. I mean, it’s pretty much a weekly basis, you hear about some, some service getting hacked, or, or people getting scammed and losing, you know, hundreds of 1000s millions of dollars, 10s of millions of dollars. And I think that is definitely something that’s going to be happening a lot. And so people have to be really careful again, when they’re investing or buying into cryptocurrencies or tokens, you have to make sure their stuff is properly protected. It’s even clicking a link can be dangerous, you had scams beforehand where people were doing it through phone and then through email scams, this is just the next iteration of it. I think in short term, that’s probably I think the biggest concerns.
Joanne Tan 42:26
Yes, yes. And blockchain hopefully will come to the rescue, for lack of a better word. Because blockchain is traceable, you know, it’s transparent. So, but that’s another… last question. So, last question about this area. Okay. So, to summarize, what does Patrick Lees’ brand stand for?
Patrick Lee 42:52
Um, I, I like to think about myself as someone who’s quite open to connecting with people try to be supportive, to help mentor and give advice around business or life or other things, and to try to just, you know, help everyone move in, like a positive direction.
Joanne Tan 43:14
Okay. So can I summarize it within less than five words? “Always for the better”.
Patrick Lee 43:24
Sure, yeah. That sounds that sounds good.
Joanne Tan 43:27
It’s your you believe the world will be better. So you do it always for the better. You’re not settled at current status quo. You always want to do it for the better. Okay, thank you. That’s my parting gift to you. Thank you so much. My great pleasure having you.
Patrick Lee 43:42
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Joanne. Really nice doing this interview with you. Thank you.
Joanne Tan 43:48
Okay. Thanks, talk to you later, Bye!
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