Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…I went and built Hodinkee for a few years and Hodinkee was kind of a proxy for what Proof might eventually become. We did a really in-depth editorial around mechanical timekeeping and watches. That attracted millions of people per month, it still does. There are 150 people that work at Hodinkee right now. It's a massive enterprise. Hodinkee has this unbelievable characteristic. I think you guys did this best in the entire world of using content to enrich the value of purchasable goods. It is half a content business, half a commerce business, and they are so wonderfully intertwined. More people should take a look at that. Hodinkee, they got that blend. Ben (the founder) and myself, when we sat down and we started planning out ecommerce—wanted to make sure there was a church and state line between editorial and ecommerce. Because it's very important to be able to have independent critical pieces written about watches that you may sell. We had to make sure and draw that line in the sand and let the brands know that we can be critical about your watches and talk about them. If we don't like the way that something is manufactured or you cut corners on some of your movements, it gets really geeky. For people that aren't into the watch world, think about the mechanical insides of the watch. Then think about the most hardcore vintage Porsche collector. They care about every little tiny detail inside of that machine. That is the engine inside of this watch. The geeks. That's partially why I'm attracted to it. Some of my favorite watches are not expensive showing-off watches. They’re watches that would never get any attention at a party in New York, but they're meaningful because of what's inside of them. You know when you go and you pick up an Omega that has a 321 movement—that was the exact internal engine, the exact movement that was taken to the moon. That is awesome. That's the kind of geekiness that got me excited about watches. That's what I want to bring to the NFT world. I want to talk and go deep with these artists and talk about what drives them and how they created some of the first. Especially when we're on the programmability of this stuff. It's going to be really fascinating. Eventually, when I have Dmitri on who created one of the most popular projects out there called Ringers, I want to see code snippets of the Ringers project and put that into the article and show. That's the geeky level I want to get to so that's where I'm hoping to take Proof.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.