Original author: Meow, Steve Chen

Original translation: Peisen, BlockBeats

Editor's note:

Jupiter co-founder Meow and YouTube co-founder Steve Chen had a conversation around the concept of UGM (user-generated money), exploring in depth how technology has gradually transformed from the initial innovation stage to a service that is popular around the world, and the importance of the community in this process.

Steve Chen co-founded YouTube with Chad Hurley in 2005, and helped lead the company to be acquired by Google for $1.65 billion less than a year after the site was launched. Prior to joining YouTube, Steve was one of the first product engineers at PayPal. He led development efforts and served as an engineering manager on several key projects.

During the conversation, Steve said that he and Meow have many common friends in Silicon Valley, but they got to know each other because of the meme coin PAJAMAS and its crypto community. Also out of love for meme coins, Meow is curious about Steve's experience in joining Web3 from a community member, and believes that the UGC concept in the Web2 era and the UGM concept in the Web3 era have something in common.

TL;DR

· Steve Chen believes that the current Web3 technology is mature enough and has been proven to be effective, but Web3 is extremely lacking in trust, so how to further promote its widespread application is a difficult problem.

· Meow believes that the community is the core of creating value, technology and investment are just tools, and the real driving force lies in the participation and construction of the community. The decentralization and creativity of the crypto community are the key to promoting the development of this field.

· Steve Chen believes that the current encryption technology and community building are similar to the early development stage of YouTube and are full of potential.

· Meow compares user-generated content (UGC) on YouTube with user-generated currency (UGM) in DeFi, and believes that everyone may create their own cryptocurrency in the future.

· Steve Chen joined Web3 because of the meme coin named after his cat, and compared the fun of joining the meme community to the success of YouTube. He said that what he saw and heard in the crypto community was much more advanced than anything he saw among the billions of users of Web2.

· Meow once again emphasized that the future of crypto is the PPP community, and believed that the success of this field lies in long-term sustainable development and win-win for the community, rather than short-term profit acquisition.

Steve Chen:Welcome here. It's an honor to talk to you, but I think we should first explain how we started this conversation. Because just 72 hours ago, I didn't expect us to meet, let alone see you here. This is really a bit crazy. This also explains what the world looks like to me after I entered the entire Web3 ecosystem.

Meow： Yeah, it was really interesting because we had only met for less than 70 hours, and then we started talking and found that we actually had a lot of common connections. Maybe we knew some mutual friends before, but we met in a completely random global network.

Steve Chen： We had actually been communicating online for a few weeks before this. But even so, it still felt like a completely different world. I've been in Silicon Valley for 20 years and I'm in frequent contact with some people there, especially in the Web3 field, even including the co-founders of the company I founded before. It's incredible that we met completely randomly.

Do UGC on YouTube, do "UGM" in Web3

The real value of YouTube is created by users

Meow: What we are talking about now, I think, is very representative of how the crypto world works. It's more about finding opportunities for cooperation and then exploring along these clues.Both of us have been in Silicon Valley for a while, and people in Silicon Valley feel that the atmosphere there is already very informal, especially compared to traditional Fortune 500 companies. But if you look at the crypto world, it's even more informal. We've even made multi-million dollar deals and established relationships through Telegram chats, and we discuss things on Spaces.

Crypto has really democratized the creation of money, and the creation of assets as well.You no longer need a government to make money, you no longer need a stock exchange to create an asset, and you no longer need the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) to make it a tradable commodity. You can create all of these things as long as you have a group of people willing to support it. What's even crazier is that it doesn't even need to be a huge community, just a few hundred people, an AMM pool, and an asset is born.

Steve Chen:I have three months of experience in Web3, although I'm still a novice, but 15 years ago, when we started creating things like YouTube, we were talking about democratizing content, democratizing content creation, and democratizing content distribution. Anyone who has talent, whether you have Hollywood connections or whether you have access to distribution networks, as long as you have good content, you can upload it to YouTube, and the content is completely democratized. The audience will go to watch it themselves, and if they like your content, they will share it with more people.

Meow:You just said something very interesting, you mentioned that the value of YouTube is not created by you, but by the users.

Steve Chen:That is indeed interesting, and I say this without modesty, if you put yourself in my position, you will find that those well-known content creators who have millions of subscribers on YouTube, they have their own channels and content. These are their full-time jobs, which is to create content.

Meow:Work is an expression of passion, and full-time jobs are part of life.

Steve Chen:Yes, we should indeed be grateful to these creators. They may feel that without YouTube, they would not be able to pursue the content creation they love and make money from it. But the reverse is also true, without these content creators, YouTube is just a bunch of servers. No one will go to that domain, because these creators continue to renew their subscribers and provide more and more content, which creates value. There are also third parties and advertisers who actually pay for this content. YouTube would not be able to function sustainably without this ecosystem.

Meow:That's really interesting because you're obviously one of the pioneers of UGC (user-generated content). And in crypto, I call it UGM (user-generated currency). In user-generated content, the value comes from the user. Similarly, in blockchain or cryptocurrency, the value is created by the user. We went from an era where big studios created content and they profited from that content. And what you've done is democratize that process and give users the opportunity to incentivize themselves to create content, promote content, and get value from it.

If you're Netflix, you not only create content, you promote it yourself, and this is true globally. No matter where you are in the world, you see Netflix ads, which is crazy. But when we talk about these things, the real core is that users themselves promote their content. Similarly, in the crypto world, users are also creating currency, promoting currency, and deriving value from it.

Of course, there are some nuances to this, which I'll talk about later. But overall, I think it's very fascinating. Because we are at the next evolution of UGC and UGM.

Steve Chen:I think it depends on who the audience is. If they were there at the time, there were not a lot of people using YouTube in 2000, or even 2005. At that time, you said you were democratizing content, which would have been a great slogan. But when you actually compare what you see on subscription cable networks, satellite TV, HBO channels, you feel that user-generated content cannot reach this level.

Because back then it was two to four minute videos, and before iPhones, people were just shooting, editing, uploading, and sharing them. But now there are whole teams behind it. In 2024, you’re really seeing user-generated content (UGC).

I think as this democratization spreads, talent from all over the world will be able to participate, and you don’t need to live in Hollywood to make this content. I think that’s what I’m attracted to the Web3 world, although you also mentioned that there are still a lot of pitfalls and problems along the way. It’s not perfect, it’s not as simple as going to a bank to open an account, because banking has been working for hundreds of years. We’re at the beginning of the user-generated content world now, and we’re going to see it catch up.

Meow: It will catch up, and that’s how all democratization happens when you make things easy and fun, even reading. I bet some people are like, "Oh, are you sure you want to let those civilians read it?" I'm sure that's the same thing with writing right now. What if they start reading it and have these ideas?

When you enable people to publish their own stuff, when you enable all kinds of people to do things, the world becomes a much messier place. There's more chaos in terms of what to produce or how to make money, and there's more, like, Samsung webinars, but I think it's all part of making it easier to create.

Those big studios you just mentioned, think about it, who used to print money? In the past, only governments could print money, now anyone can start creating money. As long as you can create something, and the technical barriers are very low, you can get enough support behind it, like those tokens worth billions.

Back in the early days of user-generated content, you did need something like Bitcoin or DeFi. But now, you don't even need those things, you just need an idea, which is a little crazy.

Steve Chen:I think this keeps refreshing my memory because I think there are still a lot of obstacles that have not been encountered in the user-generated content world. For example, in order for content creators and market makers to really turn the market into an actual market, you need to start making money. And to make money, you first need to solve something that no one has been used to before.

There was a $1 billion lawsuit where Viacom sued YouTube because someone uploaded a video from Comedy Central. You also had to deal with disputes with Universal Music, EMI, Sony BMG, because people didn't know they didn't have the distribution rights to certain CDs, so they put the music in the video. I think these are just some of the obstacles that content creation encounters when it makes the generational leap.

pajamas is your ticket to Web3

Meow:It's amazing because all of this is for work, and every time there's a big development, there's always this inevitable conflict between the old ideas and the new ideas. Take you, when YouTube first started, all this content was produced by these big studios, and then people uploaded it. The Web3 world is very similar, like Pajamas.

Steve Chen:Yeah, Pajamas is my ticket to the Web3 world. Pajamas means two things to me. One is that it's both the name of a meme token and the name of a cat that I have. On the other hand, this is the first cat video uploaded to YouTube, and it’s now the 15th anniversary of that upload.

Pajamas in the first YouTube video uploaded by Steve Chen

And most importantly, I was invited to speak at cat conferences around the world because this video created a huge community of pet lovers who kept uploading videos and paying homage to this first cat video, even if it wasn't a very good cat video.

Then suddenly one day, people started talking about Pajamas on Twitter, and it also mentioned things about Web3 and the meme space, which got me interested. Although I was not the actual token creator, this cat that I uploaded 15 years ago is the reason I got into this space.

Meow:We live in a world where anyone can tokenize an idea, and there is no so-called "permission". Just like there are countless Trump tokens, you don't need special permission. The tokenized world is like this, no one entity has complete control over an idea. So, with Pajamas, your cat was the OG cat 15 years ago. I was fascinated by this story. Someone created a token, and then a CTO or a community pushed behind it, and you had no involvement at all, and they didn't need your involvement.

Steve Chen:This is something new that I learned about after I joined. But for me, it's just a fun thing named after my cat. And what a great way to learn something new through something that's named after my cat.

Meow:I love that you found something that's meaningful to you. It's a way to learn that a lot of people don't have enough initiative to understand the truth. You approached this with an open mind and a modern mindset, and I think you learned a lot from it.

Steve Chen:Even so, I still had to go online and watch videos in the middle of the night to convince people. Because in the Web3 space, I learned that there is a lot of distrust. When I said, "I'm Steve Chen, the co-founder of YouTube, and I want to know the story behind the Pajamas token," no one believed me. No one thought the founder of YouTube would be interested in this.

When I responded on Twitter, my account wasn't verified yet, so they thought I was just one of many "impostors." Once I got into this space, I started to think seriously, and from my perspective, in the early stages of YouTube, I didn't just see it as an amateur video site, I thought it had the potential to change the way people consume and create media on a global scale. I did see that, and I just wanted to understand it more deeply.

Bitcoin and memecoin are both user-generated currencies

Meow:Brother, you've democratized video content, and now currency. You've got to do it, I mean it. Anyway, you played a big role on YouTube. I think you're right, we're really in the very early stages of user-generated content and user-generated markets.

Steve Chen:Interestingly, the reason I met Chad, the co-founder of YouTube, was because I first moved to Silicon Valley in 1999 to join another startup, which was called Paypal. Even at that time, Paypal was trying to "democratize" your wallet and democratize how you pay your friends back. But I feel like that's a leap from what Web3 is today. All of these things are coming full circle, and this has always been an area of interest to me.

Meow：When something first starts happening, people often don’t see its potential, and they often judge that it’s impossible to catch up to the current level. Let me give you two examples now. Recently, on Instagram and YouTube, there have been a lot of short videos, and the quality is very good. Someone said in the comments, "This SNL stuff is so bad now, the budget has been cut, you should take over the show." I think this is really interesting, the quality of these short video creators is much better than SNL, more culturally relevant, more interesting, more influential, and more viewed.

Steve Chen：This is democratization, and ultimately everything will depend on the number of views and the votes of the audience, and it will also depend on who is watching.

Meow：What you mentioned is very important, the audience should resonate. Imagine going back to the early days of cryptocurrency. To me, I think of cryptocurrency as a user-generated currency (UGM) category. I think both Bitcoin and meme coins can be considered user-generated currencies because they are not generated by the government.

Some people might say that fiat currencies are better than Bitcoin. But I don't think that's how things work, let's look at two examples. Let's say we compare the US dollar and Bitcoin. Obviously, the US dollar has a longer circulation history, and you could say that the US dollar has a stronger monetary acceleration effect. Look at the Zimbabwean dollar or the North Korean won. Would you rather hold the Zimbabwean dollar, the North Korean won, or Bitcoin? Obviously Bitcoin, and the same is true in many turbulent environments.

So, whether it's fiat or Bitcoin or other asset classes like gold, they all fall into the category of money. There's a more liberal perspective on how to look at them. So, that's how I think we can appreciate Hollywood content, and we can appreciate a random video made by someone. If you can appreciate all the content out there, then we can also launch other forms of money. But in a way, money is more confusing than content. Money is not money, it's something else. So how do you think about this?

The use case for cryptocurrency is to create new types of money

Steve Chen:I agree with you because in some ways, when I left PayPal, we had already achieved the ultimate goal. I think the technology and the product itself does have real utility. But even if you create a payment service like PayPal, you still need to give people a reason to adopt it. For PayPal, the reason was eBay.

Steve works as a programmer at Paypal. Image source: emigrantslife

Back in 1999 and 2000, when you won an auction on eBay, you still mailed a paper check. Forget about dollars. You had to withdraw money from your bank account and then mail a check. A week later, you received the check, and then someone cashed the check and finally completed the transaction. So at least this service made the payment process faster.

But this did not solve all the problems. There are still many variables that have not been resolved, many conflicts and challenges. But we solved one problem, which is to popularize PayPal as a payment service on a large scale through the eBay platform.

I think what's interesting about YouTube is that it really takes the pure entertainment value of media content and democratizes it. It's an upload button that anyone can use. What YouTube has shown over the last 15 to 20 years is that before you might have watched a show on cable TV, and even if you had an idea you wanted to do, you needed to know the right people and go through a ton of hoops to get to the point where you could get on TV. Now you can hit the upload button yourself and within five minutes have the world see your talent.

So I think that's what's so great about it. Even if we're talking about just getting a device, getting an upload button, and getting a channel, that's been democratized. Now it all comes down to the pure talent of the individual. That's a bright spot for me in the Web3 world: where can we push this thing? I think there will still be obstacles and bumps along the way.

Meow:I think there's a strong parallel to what I mentioned earlier about UGC and UGM. Before, if you wanted to create money, you needed to raise an army, conquer territory, or convince everyone that this was the best money. Like Genghis Khan did a lot of hard things to create money. Or you needed to be a country and create a scarce resource. The funny thing is, if there was a Golden Goose, gold would be worthless. Sorry, I'm going off topic, but I think it's a very interesting analogy.

Steve Chen:You bring up a great point because I think Paypal kind of hit a critical point where it hit the finish line on payments, but it was still limited to the U.S. dollar. Despite that, we took a lot of extra steps to create Paypal.

Meow:I love the idea of meme coins, like Dogecoin. It really takes a lot of effort, it takes years to build infrastructure, build a team, create a community, set up those centers of attraction, all of that takes a lot of work to get to this point. But meme coins are different. You have an idea, and if enough people resonate with the idea and there is enough power behind it, it has the potential to become money.

I really think that this democratization of money creation is jaw-dropping. A lot of people say that cryptocurrencies have no use case, but I think the use case for cryptocurrencies is actually very obvious.The use case for cryptocurrencies is to create new types of money. This has always been the case, whether it's Bitcoin, Ethereum or meme coins, the essence of them is to create new types of money, money. Everything we see, whether it's the ability to transfer money or new things in the entire industry, is a derivative of this ability. Because cryptocurrency has the ability to create new types of currencies, and then we build everything on it.

The current Web3 atmosphere is like Silicon Valley

There is enough curiosity, but trust is also needed

Steve Chen:From the perspective of the target market, I think one of the biggest obstacles is still for people to trust and adopt this platform and really accept it.

Meow:Welcome, it's really about trust. We can talk about it, you can show everything you want, but it doesn't matter, it's about trust.

Steve Chen:Yeah, because I think that people who are in the Web3 world right now, you are all early adopters.

Meow:No, we are not. I mean this space has been around for a long time, we are just beginning to understand the potential of user-generated currency (UGM).

Steve Chen:The platform has shown what is possible, but it's still like going back to the early days of YouTube. You know you can upload videos, you know you can watch, and the technology is feasible. But to get people to actually spend an hour, two hours of their time creating content or watching content on this platform, that's a whole new thing, especially when you start to attract a large audience.

From my experience over the last two or three months, I like to think about this from the perspective of a potential user or consumer. People who aren't using this technology yet, how do you get them to adopt this technology? How do you make them feel trust in this technology?

Meow:My answer is that crypto offers a great direction to work towards. One of the things I like about crypto is that we all have a common goal, and I really don't see that in any other industry. We're an industry made up of people, and everyone is very interested.

Imagine when viewers see me and you talking to each other, they say, "Wow, the founder of YouTube is talking to Meow." And you're also the founder. We're talking about the early development of user-generated content (UGC) and how that reflects user-generated currencies (UGM). I think it's wonderful for people to see that.

I told you before that I think crypto is inevitable because it's like a two-by-two grid both globally and across the entire technology stack. Across the globe, across the entire technology stack. There are people in every area of the tech stack, marketing, finance, education, content, and regulation who are driving this progress. These people have extremely strong incentives and they are also very passionate.

When you have a lot of people who are highly ideologically aligned and highly economically aligned when it comes to driving progress. And because we now have real social networks, these people are also highly connected socially and form very solid social networks. Our entire reputation is built on this space. So it's all moving forward. The development of cryptocurrency now is precisely because we are moving forward as a whole. I don't see anything similar happening in other industries.

Steve Chen: I think 2024 is really the right time to enter this market because I think there is a lot of curiosity about this space right now. For me, as a practitioner in the Web 2.0 field in Silicon Valley for 15 years, I have seen what technology and the Internet can achieve, and it has proven to be successful in many ways.

Many of the Internet and mobile applications that we are accustomed to today were actually developed before some young people were born. A whole generation grew up in this technological environment. But in the field of Web 3.0, I still think it is the next major transformation area. It takes similar entrepreneurial spirit, innovative ideas, ICO solutions and startups to combine the two.

The effect of combining these elements will far exceed the simple sum of the parts. I'm very excited to meet you because I think we need to build more bridges to attract those who are interested in Web 3.0 but don't understand the market, and those who are already in the Web 3.0 field can also benefit from it and solve the problems they encounter through collaboration.

Meow:Can we stop looking at the world as separate? I think we are promoting democratization, and the democratization of money that we are talking about now is impossible without the deep democratization of content.We all participated in that crazy explosion, such as the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and even instant messaging tools. Before these applications, group chat was not a real concept. But now the entire industry almost relies on group chat, such as Telegram, WeChat, Twitter, which have become the foundation of the industry.

In a way, we have reached a point where mainstream adoption is about to happen. For me, I feel that mainstream adoption may happen in three or four years. I may be wrong, but I do feel a deep instinct and interest. What do you think about this?

Steve Chen：First comes curiosity, then trust. I think for many people, first it's about whether this is something I'm curious about, and then whether I want to invest in it. I think it's more of a community thing than an individual thing. And early pioneers will inspire others to join, see that the technology has been proven, and be able to move it forward.

It may sound a little silly, but I still use my family, especially my mother, as a measure of whether to accept a new technology. When talking to them about food delivery services, Amazon, YouTube, instant messaging and other technologies, they can quickly understand and accept them. But when I want to talk to them about how to change the way they do daily transactions, it's hard to convince them that there is another alternative based on new technology.

For me, it's like the atmosphere in Silicon Valley: surrounded by entrepreneurs and potential investors who are interested in technology and are willing to take risks to try and see if new technologies can solve these problems. That's why I'm interested in joining the Pajamas community and want to communicate and collaborate with you.

Meow:I'm also very interested in your story of joining us. Let me ask you a question, how did you start to believe in this thing in the beginning? Why didn't you think it was a scam, but instead became curious and invested in it?

Steve Chen:That's a good question. I have always been more willing to choose those riskier routes because I think only through such routes can I seize opportunities, and Web3 gives me an opportunity to explore possibilities. When I started to get interested in the Pajamas project, I felt that it was really changing the way the entire ecosystem operates. This experience allowed me to meet a large number of people with similar social networks as me.

Crypto community members are more dispersed than Silicon Valley

Meow：It's incredible that we know so many common friends, which also shows that our circle is very small. I admire you very much. You didn't enter this industry with the mentality of "I want to build the next trillion-dollar startup" or "I want to be an industry guru", but joined the Pajamas project as a community member with an open attitude to learn and explore. Many people in our community really appreciate your attitude.

Steve Chen：It's true. This is a very different world. Many people may ask, why don't you start a token project yourself, but spend so much time participating in it as a community member? For me, this is the first time I have been so interested in a project since YouTube. In the past three months, I have invested a lot of time in the Pajamas project, often working until three or four in the morning before realizing that it's time to rest.

Meow:What exactly is it that you find interesting? Because I find it interesting myself, but it's hard to describe that kind of fun, so I'm curious about what you find interesting.

Steve Chen:I would compare this fun to the success of YouTube. YouTube allows creative people to use their creativity to reach an audience, and even monetize and build a career through that creativity. When you go to give a speech to fifth graders, the best thing is to see them applaud enthusiastically and express their desire to become YouTubers when they grow up. This experience allows you to do what you love and make a career out of it, rather than following a career path that is predetermined for you.

To some extent, I see something similar happening in the pajamas community. When I was in the Telegram group, I had no idea where these people were from, but at the core of what brought us together was a shared passion for pajamas. Then you realize that these people are actually more decentralized than we previously thought. I thought Silicon Valley was decentralized enough, but in fact, this community has members from all over the world, in every time zone. And that's exactly what you're saying, it's much more advanced than anything I've seen in the billions of users in Web2.

Meow: I often see and participate in things like reaching millions of users through a group chat. We know the tight-knit relationships in Silicon Valley, and trust plays a key role in that. This trust is built on years of experience and the reputation of institutions, such as companies like Sequoia, who have established a certain level of trust and signaling that can sometimes be abused by individuals.

For the purposes of this conversation, though, let's focus on the positives. I think the reason Silicon Valley has been successful is because it has a very tight network that relies on private parties, social networks, etc., and this model is also reflected in the crypto space. However, the difference is that the network in the crypto space is spread all over the world, and it is no longer concentrated in one region like Silicon Valley. I like this very much because I think cryptocurrency has truly democratized fundraising and expertise.

Steve Chen: I agree with you, and this is actually our ultimate goal.

Steve Chen: I agree with you, and this is actually our ultimate goal. I think in this process, even in the past three months of the journey, it has not all been positive, but I use these negative experiences as learning opportunities. It's like the experience during the YouTube period, including not only those successful Silicon Valley startups, but also those failed projects, such as when we acquired Delicious from Yahoo, we thought we could revitalize this social bookmarking service, but it ultimately did not succeed.

However, I am still very grateful for that experience because it made me realize the gap between imagined results and actual results. One of the greatest contributions of the pajamas team is to give me such learning opportunities, not only when the market is rising, but also when the market is falling. This experience taught me that no matter what you do, the market can't always go up.

Value formation is not always smooth

Meow: One point I often hear is that the true value and personality of a community is formed in market downturns, not in market booms. Every time the market crashes, many people will question it as a scam, but those that survive are stronger each time. And it is in these troughs that a new generation of participants is formed because they will realize that they missed something and will not make the same mistake again next time.

I think that’s how we’re going to convince everybody in the end, and that’s why UGM is going to win in the end. Every time someone says, “I was wrong, this thing isn’t so fake,” we’re one step closer to winning.

Steve Chen:I totally agree that it’s not always smooth sailing in Silicon Valley along the way, there are always highs and lows.

Meow:People tend to get fascinated by this crazy idea and think that the value is like this, like a success story. In fact, the value is 90% to 99% failure. And that’s why I’m so optimistic, because people tend to only look at the failures and say, this is a scam. But if you look at the successful creative ecosystem, they’re actually constantly trying and recycling. As long as you fail in the right way, it’s fine, simple.

You and I both know who the best people in startups are? Those who don’t succeed in the end. They are the best because they have so much experience and talent, and they are humble enough. I mean, how do you find a new mentor, how do you let a newbie fail? You can't do that, just like in the crypto space, as long as someone fails in the right way, you can say that he did all the right things.

I feel like the crypto industry is like a global phenomenon, and to me, it really is a manifestation of global value because you can really feel the same dynamics and energy.

Steve Chen:That's what I see. Even though Silicon Valley shines in the spotlight, I feel a whole new level when I talk to people on Telegram who are really committed to the crypto community. In these Telegram conversations, the first sentence is usually "What time is it?" because people are from all over the world. It's very cool, and I think as long as the passion is there, these problems and obstacles will definitely be overcome.

Meow:This reminds me of another example of a good product. One of the big reasons why Silicon Valley is successful is that it attracts the best talent from all over the world. Why do they come to Silicon Valley? Because there are opportunities, talents, networks, and funds here. In the crypto field, the threshold is much lower. There is no O1 visa or H1 visa. All you need is a Telegram group chat. Jupiter, which I lead, is now one of the largest teams in the crypto field.

Steve Chen:I'm always thinking about how to continue to expand this space. Like, how do I get 10 of my friends to join? How do I get them to bring 10 more people? That's what keeps me up at night because I think all the right ingredients are there, and it's just a matter of finding a solution.

Meow:What if I say there are thousands of solutions, and everyone is solving the problem in their own way?

Steve Chen: Of course, I think there will be problems and challenges at every level, but it has been proven to be feasible.

Meow:I recently went to Ecuador in South America, and I was doing a service there that required an upfront payment of $300 to the service provider. You can't imagine, trying to pay for all the fees through Western Union was a nightmare. I tried to just swipe my credit card, and the fees were ridiculous and almost impossible to do. Even then, there was a huge distrust of cryptocurrencies at that company, but to me, cryptocurrencies completely solved this problem.

Meow:I recently went to Ecuador in South America, and I was doing a service there, and I had to pay the service provider $300 upfront. You can't imagine, trying to pay for all the fees through Western Union, it was a nightmare. I tried to just swipe my credit card, and the fees were ridiculous and almost impossible to do. Even then, there was a huge distrust of cryptocurrencies at that company, but to me, cryptocurrencies completely solved this problem.

Steve Chen： So, I want to ask, why hasn't it solved these problems yet?

Meow： It's about trust, infrastructure, liquidity, and social issues. Like, does anyone trust the system? If their friends don't trust it, then they won't trust it either. Then there's the liquidity issue, is there enough liquidity from A to B? There's also the transfer issue, and the acceptance issue. These are all problems. But once I show them how to do it, they think it's great. However, the exchange rate is still very expensive. So this is why stablecoins are so powerful.

Although they understand this, they may not know what a stablecoin is, and that's why I think there are a lot of things that need to be solved.I realized that it's almost impossible to solve these problems, you need a local team to really accept and drive these changes. You need people who speak the local language to drive these changes, I can promote and encourage this, but ultimately it's not my job.

Steve Chen： I think it's still important to talk about where you live. My family and I moved to Taiwan in 2019. The original plan was to stay for a year, but the epidemic came and the schools in Taiwan handled it very well, so we decided to stay in Taiwan, and it has been five years now. I found a lot of untapped potential in technology in Taiwan, especially in the field of semiconductors. And, I have been thinking about how to globalize the resources of Silicon Valley and bring it to the world.

Meow:The whole content and style of Silicon Valley is a very long topic, what are the main takeaways you get from it?

Steve Chen:The main takeaway I see is that cryptocurrencies create a huge foundation in terms of currency and financial transactions. The technology has been proven to work, and I sometimes trust it more than some central banks because I can see the source code and algorithms behind it. I think the technology has been proven to work, the key is how to make it more accessible to consumers.

The most interesting part for me is to record it, especially the problems mentioned earlier, such as the fraud problems encountered. By experiencing these problems firsthand, I am able to better understand the difficulties that new users and new technology adopters may face, so as to have a better experience.

Joining the meme community is more fun than starting a business in Web3

There is no "real token"

Meow:Any token launched now will have 5 fake versions. So, what is the real one? For example, "GOG" appeared the next day, or other similar names. Although there may be only one "GOG", it does not mean that other similar names are fake. You can say that there is only one "ABC letters" or only one "Facebook".

In the long-term development of decentralization and centralization, companies such as ByteDance are still the center of determining the rules. Take Binance as an example. There were many problems in cash transactions before. Centralized exchanges have the power to deal with these problems and can decide which are regular tokens and which are fake tokens. And in the decentralized world, because there is no real centralized institution, it is particularly important who defines the "real token".

Steve Chen: In fact, this has already happened successfully. When I was growing up, we only trusted proprietary software and hardware, but now we see the emergence of open source. If you start to disclose the code and details behind the hardware and software design, although there are some warnings and compromises, everyone can see the source code and algorithm, so that every transaction can be publicly reviewed, increasing the transparency of the network.

Meow：In theory, in cryptocurrency, due to the lack of identity, one person can create thousands of virtual wallets and conduct a large number of transactions, which is called the "water army problem". In this case, anyone can pretend to be a successful project with thousands of holders, but in fact it may be just a robot. Someone has created robots to generate a large number of accounts and perform various operations.

Steve Chen：I think these are the problems that any new technology will inevitably encounter in the process of adoption. As we have seen in Web1 and Web2, the solution of these problems will ultimately benefit the whole world. As entrepreneurs, we need to identify problems, optimize daily needs, and come up with solutions. If you can solve these problems, you will get greater adoption and ultimately convince more people to use this new technology.

I am still in this field because I think there are still many problems to be solved. This is not to say that everything has been solved and we can leave safely. We need to continue to work hard and find solutions.

Meow：I like this optimistic view of technology and evolution. Although things will become extinct in technological evolution, by trying new things, identifying problems and proposing real solutions, we can find a path to improvement. I believe that cryptocurrencies will also go through this evolution, screening out the best participants and optimizing technology and systems.

Steve Chen：This is part of evolution. Things will become extinct in the process of evolution, but trying new things, identifying problems and proposing solutions is our reason to move forward. I can't guarantee that all solutions will succeed, but I personally believe in it.

Meow：I personally like your involvement in the UGM (user-generated media) field as a pioneer of UGC (user-generated content). What are your thoughts? What are your plans?

Steve Chen：Honestly, it is a privilege for me to have the opportunity to meet and discuss core people at the forefront of the UGM field like this afternoon. Many people talk about how precious this opportunity is when they talk about communicating with you. I consider this communication to be the peak of my entry into this field. Although I am still new in this field, I can bring experiences learned from the Web2 world, which, although these experiences may not be completely applicable, still have certain value.

Meow: I think this makes a lot of sense, and our discussion feels like there are a lot of similarities. I am very excited about the future of UGM and UGC, life has indeed become very crazy. I don't know how to deal with these changes, but I am full of expectations for the future.

Steve Chen:It's important to keep an open mind, stay curious about new things, meet more people like you, and see if there are opportunities where I can play a role in this new space, just like I did in Web2.

What does "CTO" mean in the Meme world?

Meow:What do you find interesting about being a member of the community? In startups, people usually join the company for salary and equity. The equity is provided by the company, the role is clear, and it is a centralized incentive alignment. In the UGM space, the situation is completely different. People spend a lot of time and energy investing in it, and although they may eventually get a financial reward, it may not be clear. How do you think this incentive method works in the community?

Steve Chen:This is a great question because I am also trying to figure this out. I'm amazed at how driven and passionate the community is, how many talented people are contributing hours in their respective roles as if this is their startup project, no matter where in the world they are from. When we get together to discuss, even though everyone remains anonymous, you can feel the passion and the amount of work being put in. It's amazing because you see people from all over the world coming together around a common goal.

Meow:And the goal is so interesting because it's just an idea or a symbol. The incentives in Singapore are like this pure idea or symbol. It's amazing how an idea or a symbol alone can align people. Do you find this interesting?

Steve Chen:Yeah, I don't think this is too different from my experience as YouTube CTO. Every day I acknowledge that you have more than 20 years of experience as a system architect for the project, dealing with data center scaling and other things, you have much more experience than me. If you have ideas on how to scale YouTube's backend more effectively, I'll listen to you.

In discussions in the web community, I feel that I can provide my own feedback, but at the same time there are many people who are more experienced in this field than me, and I benefit a lot from their enthusiasm and experience. This kind of mutual exchange is similar to my experience in the Web2 era.

Meow:I find that there is a big difference in the distribution of talents. I have been involved in a lot of discussions recently, and it is surprising that the title of CTO means different things in different contexts. In a community-driven environment, the role of CTO is different from the traditional role in YouTube or other companies.

Steve Chen：CTO usually refers to Chief Technology Officer. In a community-driven environment, the role of CTO is different, and it may involve more community management and support.

Meow：Can you please explain the specific role of CTO in the community?

Steve Chen：In a community-driven environment, the founders and the original team may have long gone, and community members have taken over the management of the project. They have enough faith and commitment to the token, and work together to fill the gap left by the founders. This way of community taking over has given me a good learning experience.

Meow：The experience of being a founder and being a community member is very different. If you are a founder, you control all decisions and resources, while as a community member, your role is completely different.

Steve Chen：Gaining this experience is part of learning. Unlike traditional founder-driven companies, community-led projects present another model of cooperation and development.

Meow:It is indeed a big difference to go from a highly structured and founder-driven environment to this decentralized community environment. Traditional companies tend to emphasize the value of the founder or institution, while community-led projects focus more on individual and collective enthusiasm.

Steve Chen:Yes, traditional companies focus on meetings, schedules, and organizational structures, while in the community, the real value lies in the enthusiasm and participation of each member. It is an obvious fact that you can't buy enthusiasm with money.

Meow:Indeed, people can feel sincerity. The sincerity and enthusiasm in the community cannot be bought with money. You can only experience this feeling through real participation and investment.

Steve Chen:Even downloading an application or using a communication tool such as Telegram, this experience has taught me a lot. Although I use Telegram quite frequently now, it wasn't even on my computer a few months ago. Even so, I kept an open mind and was willing to communicate with new people, an attitude that paid off well after a few missteps.

Attention and capital are spinning fast

Meow:It's true that the democratization of finance has made money transfers more convenient, but it has also brought a lot of new challenges and risks. There are so many pitfalls and problems for new users that it's unsettling.

Steve Chen: In a way, being able to easily transfer $100,000 to someone is more convenient than ever before. However, this also means that we need to be aware of this and face it head-on. I think when something like this happens, I will immediately inform the community, the Pajamas team, and even my Twitter followers about the situation and tell about these problems. I don't want to hide or keep it secret, but to be public so that we can find solutions together with the community.

Meow:It's helpful to talk to you because I've been going through these things recently. Things like creating a wallet, determining the contract address, etc. are no longer a problem for me. But if you go back to the beginning, these are all very daunting things.

Steve Chen： But in fact, even the experience of this afternoon was valuable. None of this would have happened if we hadn't built some foundation of trust between us. It was a valuable experience that we were able to trust each other and be willing to take minimal risks to get rewards.

Meow： I think this is good advice for anyone who wants to enter this field, whether it is a trader, investor or leader. Be optimistic, but also be cautious. When entering any situation, be prepared for the worst, but also be cautious. Being too cautious may miss opportunities, but being completely careless may fail quickly.

As adults, we have experienced many potential dangers, such as falling off a cliff and being scalded by scalding water. We survived, and society and our parents have built enough protection for us. We gradually learn what is dangerous and what is safe. Society is like a child who has just started to learn the rules. We are also constantly learning and adapting in this new UGM world.

Steve Chen:Even though you are still active and are considered an iconic figure, you continue to come up with innovative approaches and solutions, which shows your commitment. Even though you may not be the one who came up with all the solutions, your belief in long-term solutions shows that you have not given up. This is similar to me. I am not 100% sure that what I am doing is right, but I am willing to invest time, which shows that I believe there is value in it and I am willing to keep working on it.

Meow： I like this point of view. People really appreciate that you didn't enter this field with a domineering attitude. You didn't show your token or claim to be an expert, but approached this field as a learner. Every time I thought I knew something, I was actually always wrong.

Like other rapidly changing industries, cryptocurrency is the only industry that changes almost every few weeks. For example, a certain token went up because Trump was assassinated, and then went down because Biden announced that he would not run again. These phenomena completely subvert our understanding because there is no direct relationship between these tokens and Biden or Trump, but they will have huge fluctuations due to these events.

Steve Chen: In the end, the market will determine the truth, and the market price is the key to determining whether the theory is correct. Therefore, some founders may think they have all the answers and try to adjust according to their own vision, while other founders are more adaptable and humble, willing to listen to opinions, and ready to admit that they may be completely wrong. This humble attitude is very important in this field.

Meow： This industry will quickly humble you. Whether you are a trader, investor, builder or speculator, you need to build a foundation of humility because this field changes very quickly. A few months ago, someone released a token address and was able to raise tens of millions of dollars. This phenomenon reflects the extremely fast rotation of capital and attention. The market's attention to certain tokens changes very quickly, and often overnight, you will see capital flow to new popular tokens.

Steve Chen： For me, being able to communicate with people like you and understand how you turn ideas into practical solutions is the real value. I hope to understand the difficulties and mistakes you encountered in the process, because these experiences are equally important to us.

PPP really brings applications to the market

Meow：The explosive growth of tokens has surprised me. It was difficult to get significant valuations before, but now tokens soar and then crash quickly every day. This kind of capital and attention rotates extremely fast, with new creators gaining attention every day and then disappearing quickly. The dynamics of this industry are incredible.

Steve Chen：We are now having a conversation from a Silicon Valley perspective, and although there is a lot of interest in technology, ultimately we have to focus on consumer adoption, that is, how to actually bring these applications to market. In my personal network, it is important to be able to talk about my interest in this field and see the potential in this field. I hope to better explain why I can attract more partners, especially those I have met in the past ten years of experience, to join this field.

Meow：Can I give you a really outrageous suggestion? I think what you should do is get more people who are already interested to join you, and then let your friends in Silicon Valley see how happy you are, and they will naturally follow you. It's more fun to just take action instead of trying to convince others. I really like your view on the connection between UGC and UGM. You are not coming from a technical perspective, nor from a trader's perspective.

If you push this thing from a technical perspective or a trader's perspective, you may miss the core. Imagine if you look at content from a server perspective, it is first bandwidth and data, which is not its essence. Similarly, the essence of this current movement is not technology, but people's deep desire to create assets, be part of a token, and move forward.

So I think it's important to enter this field, not from a technical perspective, but from a community perspective. Everyone is trying to create the next blockchain or something scalable, and trying to make the next breakthrough. But these are just the surface, starting from the core drivers of growth, from driving the deeper drivers, that's the key.That's why I think your perspective from the community perspective is the perfect starting point, because the community is where the value is created.

Steve Chen:In a way, I think the technology has reached a certain maturity, so I entered this field because I believe now is the best time to think about how to apply technology to actual services. The value of technology itself is one aspect, but the real value will be revealed when technology is adopted as the engine behind actual services.

Meow:Just like YouTube, initially because the technical infrastructure was not mature enough, we could only limit it to dating videos, but then we decided to open up the platform. Even when we were competing with Google Video at the time, we never expected that 20 years later my children would use it and it would become the most popular app.

Steve Chen：So, the key to YouTube's success in the early days was whether it was possible to get enough bandwidth, and the challenge afterwards was to find the right ideas to use these resources. UGC was possible because the technical infrastructure was mature, and the same is true for UGM. Although now we are talking about how to democratize the right to create money, in essence, this is very similar to the situation of creating videos.

Meow:How do your kids feel about watching YouTube? I'm curious now, what do you think?

Steve Chen:Sometimes it's a mixed bag. Because when I'm telling them to go to bed and put down their dad's phone, it's a mixed bag. I'm thinking, "Thank you for using this, but can you please put it down?" I think it's a little contradictory, but it's true.

Meow:It feels like the users who use it.

Steve Chen:It's really crazy, it's grown so fast. Nothing has made me as excited as interacting with you guys over the past 15 years, other than creating YouTube. I'm really enjoying being part of the community now.

Meow:One day you might say, "Hey, why don't you just ask them to send you money?" Not USD, but the money that dad makes, or you could ask, "What is the money that you create?"I'm serious, in the future everyone will have their own currency.We're going to have billions of currencies. Everyone can create currencies, and some are more valuable than others, and we're heading towards a world with billions of chains and tokens.

Steve Chen:I think the similarity is that while the technology is new, the ability to go from an idea to being widely accepted around the world is the core that drives everything.

Meow:That drive is really important. It's important for me to think in the mindset of a student and advocate and be as useful to this community as possible. That mindset is healthy because in this industry there's a lot of competition and a tendency to be abstract. I'll identify my role in the ecosystem, which I call PPP, similar to a PVP game.

PVP is adversarial, you choose other people. I feel like you can look at crypto in a PPP way, where you focus on how to play in a long-term framework. The last player in PVP loses, and in the context of PPP, the last player wins. My mission is to play the game, but if it's a PPP game, it's infinite because the last player always wins.

Crypto is a garden. If you have the right resources, like soil and sunlight, you can create beautiful things from it. I feel like this is the direction we can choose right now. We can take all the raw soil, sunlight, and resources and turn it into a beautiful garden. To me, it's an amazing thing to see how we can turn bits and bytes, and human energy, into something beautiful.

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