Li Jin of Atelier – Cointelegraph Magazine

It was as soon as stated that the Internet would assist anybody with 1,000 followers make a dwelling, however Li Jin believes that within the age of NFT, one or two severe supporters could be sufficient.

Jin is a flagship for the “Passion Economy,” which she describes as an financial system that allows and encourages folks to earn cash whereas pursuing their passions. For Jin, NFT is a brand new device that helps creatives within the ardour economic system attain their “real fans” and construct lasting relationships with them.

Through her enterprise agency Atelier, Jin invests in “platforms that help remove barriers to entrepreneurship and expand commuting”. With her previous in enterprise capital, she’s going to assist change the best way we take into consideration work.

Bring again the eagerness

“It’s my dream to live in Paris, so I’m just hanging out here for now,” Jin informed the Journal on the finish of the interview that happened after the Ethereum Community Conference closed. anticipated, also referred to as EthCC, takes place in TP. Jin admitted that she “doesn’t quite understand why someone is working on DeFi,” which caught the eye of convention attendees, however “hosted lunch for people working on DeFi.” Jobs on the intersection of crypto and artistic industries . “

The current difficulty with commuting is a good reason to enjoy every little bit of a new city, but hanging out in a new place “for now” is not something a worker should be tied to do. annoying things like physical offices and scheduled face-to-face meetings. However, this is not the case with many creators – especially those in the geek economy.

After all, why do we work? If you ask a child what they would like to be, the answer is often – hopefully – full of playfulness and passion. When asked why they chose a particular profession, the answer rarely revolves around salary, job security, or benefits. Growing up, many people seem to give up on this core motivation and instead try to earn a living by fitting into a company structure or carelessly doing freelance work.

According to Jin, the passion seems to be coming back. She optimistically states that there is “a shift from gig markets based on truly standardized services and products to creative, flexible markets” that enable people to generate income by doing more of the things they do really love.

This is at the core of the Passion Economy, “which is a brand new kind of work that’s fully separate from the standard employer-worker relationship”. This means that a passionate “worker”, if we may call him that, neither reacts to bosses in the corporate structure, nor acts like freelancers, alternatively – or possibly alternatively – like Fiverr or Uber. Instead, they just do their thing – and customers / subscribers pay for the privilege of being part of the journey.

In a sense, the result of any creative worker – whether writing, designing, or painting – is essentially an inexplicable, unchangeable “mark” of their effort. In fact, this article is an off-chain NFT of my own manufacture – sold to The Journal, but forever tied to me. The results of the work of non-creative workers like security guards or Uber drivers are certainly not the same as a single NFT, but more like a standardized, unlimited “man hours” token with a clear market value.

The relationship between NFT and creative work is not just a play on words as technology enables advertisers to do their job on the blockchain and benefit from its sales and resales.

“This 12 months, many creators have realized about crypto and what it may well do for them in phrases of incomes revenue in ways in which weren’t doable earlier than.”

Risky investment

Jin from Beijing, with academic parents who emigrated to Pittsburgh in the early 1990s, describes growing up in her early years in the United States as “very poor,” which led her parents to push her into a safe career.

She enrolled at Harvard University in 2008, but her parents, dissatisfied with her major in English literature, told her that she was going to be a starving writer and that her choice would “carry success”. To appease her parents, Jin turned to statistics.

For her first job, she worked as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where she “was despatched when she was 19 to report on the G20 summit”. In 2011 she worked in Mergers & Acquisitions at Blackstone during her studies and then worked for several years as a Strategic Associate at Capital One and Chief Product Officer at Shopkick. a mobile shopping startup in Silicon Valley.

When Shopkick was acquired, Jin was “uncertain of her subsequent function in know-how” and followed in the footsteps of her peers, starting a Masters of Business Administration at Wharton Tech in 2009, so maybe you should try venture capital – it would be a really great opportunity to get a bigger picture of the whole world, ”advised a mentor.

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

As a deal partner, Jin is responsible for “meeting startups all day, talking to founders, doing pitches, assisting with due diligence”, and often sitting on the board of directors. Many of these companies are what Jin calls “consumer creator platforms,” like Imgur, Patreon, and Substack.

For Jin, these companies signal a “shift from the gig economic system to a ardour economic system by which new platforms allow folks to earn a dwelling and monetize their private lives”. Little by little, the tools that enable the creative middle class to thrive are being released. In her February 2020 article “100 True Fans”, she developed a formula that enables advertisers to earn an average income of 100,000 US dollars per year with just 100 people.

Today, much of Jin’s advertising “center class” is still made up of digital farmers who “perhaps add and never share tens of millions – a whole lot of tens of millions – of footage on Instagram every single day.” from advertising revenue.

“Instagram makes rather a lot of cash with promoting, however the makers do not see any of it – I feel it is 100% taxes.”

Artists receive no material benefit even if their profile has been viewed millions of times. Instagram, on the other hand, is raising “billion greenback fairness funding” by working on its posters – why shouldn’t content creators claim a piece of cheese? Beeple posted nearly 5,000 works of art before eventually making tens of millions with the NFT boom.

In July 2020, Jin decided it was time to practice her sermons and “build an entire company dedicated to this particular emerging category, and I have – and I believe this is the best way to to understand and appreciate something ”. is to live by yourself. “

The result’s Atelier, an funding agency with an preliminary portfolio of $ 13 million in platforms that enable customers to create their very own futures.

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

Connect cryptocurrency

Jin first received concerned with crypto in 2017 when her employer a16z “became one of the first funds to set up their own crypto fund”. Although she usually works with folks from the fund sector, she finds the trade moderately summary as a result of “it has not yet touched the everyday consumer”.

This 12 months all the pieces has modified.

“There was more overlap between the consumer and creative industries, especially this year with the NFT.”

NFTs, Jin believes, take their concept of ​​100 actual followers even additional. “You can only have one real fan, or ideally two real fans bidding against each other,” she explains. Even if just one individual in the end owns every digital asset, “their content is still freely accessible and can go viral”, which triggers a series response that makes it extra probably: Real followers who “actually admire the unique and are keen to just accept it pay”. Version “is coming.

After writing an essay titled “The Case for Common Creative Income” in April this 12 months, Jin auctioned the NFT representing the merchandise for five,6969 ETH – all of which had been donated to the House program. ..