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In this conversation, we chat with Dave Balter, Co-Founder and CEO of Flipside Crypto, which provides business intelligence to blockchain organizations. In addition to crypto, his experience spans media, marketing, and analytics.
Dave is a serial entrepreneur having built multiple companies that have been acquired. Mylestone and Smarterer, the latter of which was acquired in 2014 by Pluralsight. Post-acquisition, he led the mergers and acquisitions wing for Pluralsight. He also built and led BzzAgent, which was acquired in 2010 by Tesco PLC. After the Tesco acquisition, Dave worked for the company’s retail analytics firm dunnhumby, where he led M&A and developed the company’s fund, dunnhumby Ventures.
Dave has served on multiple executive teams for global organizations and previously invested in startups as a venture partner for Boston Seed. He’s an angel investor in companies spanning data science, edtech, software, and more.
1’23”: Dave’s foundational experiences & identifying some key threads that were formative to his experience
9’01”: The two elements that make startups difficult in general
13’22”: Flipside crypto: what it is, how it started, and how it all came together from a technical standpoint
16’46”: How difficult it is to collect high quality data in order to be successful and what the problems are along the way
22’43”: The importance of data and its supporting infrastructure is to Flipside and what the most repeatable use cases are in the market
26’01”: Segmenting out and positioning relative the competition such as: Coinmarketcap, Nansen, Messari, Glassnode, and Dune
28’30”: MetricsDAO: what it is, who is in it, and what the tokenomics are
32’06”: Replacing Excel with ChatGPT and on-chain smart contract data, and how to evaluate Web3 projects
35’21”: The vectors of growth for the protocol and the DAO, and examples of analytics that really made a difference
40’55”: The future of how the value chain stackson top of data and analytics to actually drive decisions and potentially drive automated decisions
42’40”: The channels used to connect with Dave & learn more about Flipside crypto and MetricsDAO
Sneak Peek:
Dave Balter: … the genesis actually came from a pretty public interaction between us and Dune. We had a Uniswap proposal that was at literally day of vote, had reached quorum of 40 million votes, and all the right folks were voting yes, et cetera. And Dune didn't seem to like that we were going to have this big relationship with Uniswap and launched this Twitter troll campaign. You can go look it up. It was an amazing day of violence, of Twitter violence, and people committing inproprieties. Anyway, it got killed. It actually, at the very end, the voting mechanism broke, which is another fascinating, funny part of the story. At the time, it wasn't that funny because we lost the thing. But we said, "Wow, that was really rude of Dune."
But more importantly, there's something wrong a little bit in ... We're like a Web2.5 business in a Web3 ecosystem. We charge blockchains, we're picks and shovels. It's not quite fully Web3. And so, what would be Web3 for our model? We're like, well, Web3 would be to take all this IP where we can run all these bounties and motivate people and we'd give it out to the market, we'd give it away. Genesis, everyone could use it. And so, in October of '21, we did that. We donated all of the IP of that to this DAO, MetricsDAO. And Genesis members were Andrew Hong from Mirror who's now at Dune. And Dr. ETH who is at RabbitHole and people from ZRX, people from the Graph. And we literally said, here's what's going to happen. This capability is now available to any data provider who wants to use it.
We're going to build a smart contract run system to have requesters look for insights to get developed and analysts to be able to earn return, earn capital, for solving those challenges. It can happen at any size. If you go to hire Flipside, we're a very…
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