The Chad and Cheese listeners know that Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning has taken center stage as the bright and shiny objects of the recruitment industry over the last year, but what about the entrance of Blockchain and Cryptocurrency?
What the Hell does Blockchain and Cryptocurrency have to do with RECRUITING?
We haven't a damned clue which is why we have Jeff Tennery the CEO of Moonlighting.com is on the podcast to answer questions like:
- Why do we need Blockchain Recruiting?
- What could cryptocurrency mean to the world talent economy?
- and.... Is Moonlighting backed by Bruce Willis?
Don't forget this edu-tainment is made possible by the gang over at Nexxt and in the spirit of saving some currency (in dollars) – YOU can receive 25% off your first Text2Hire campaign by visiting nexxt.com/chadandcheese25. You are recruiting with text messages... Aren't you?!?
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Chad: This is, the Chad and Cheese podcast brought to you in partnership with TA Tech. TA Tech the association for talent acquisition solutions. Visit Tatech.org.
Announer: Hide your kids, lock your doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, rash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast.
Joel: Alright everybody. This is Joel Cheesman, Chad and Cheese show, welcome. Today we have a really special, cool show that Chad and I are super psyched about. We have Jeff ...
Chad: So psyched.
Joel: We have Jeff Tennery of Moonlighting on the show. Jeff, welcome.
Jeff Tennery: Great to be here.
Joel: Great to have you. Look everybody if you're in the dark as much as Chad and I are about crypto whatever, ICO's, block chain, and what that means to employment. This is your show. We're gonna talk to Jeff, who's doing a lot of things around this space and get down to the bottom of what it means and is it really as much bullshit as
Chad and I think.
Jeff Tennery: There you go.
Joel: It's commercial time.
Chad: Okay Joel, quick question. What happens when your phone vibrates or your text alert goes off?
Joel: Dude I pretty much check it immediately. I bet everyone listening is reaching to check their phones right now.
Chad: Yeah I know. I call it Pavlovian dog reflex to text messaging.
Joel: Yeah, that's probably why text messaging has a fricking 97% open rate.
Chad: What?
Joel: Crazy high candidate response rate within the first hour alone.
Chad: Which are all great reasons why the Chad and Cheese podcast love Text to Hire from Nexxt.
Joel: Love it.
Chad: Yeah that's right. Next with the double X, not the triple X.
Joel: So if you're in talent acquisition, you want true engagement and great ROI, that stands for return on investment folks, and because this is the Chad and Cheese podcast, you can try your first Text to Hire campaign for just 25% off.
Chad: Wow. So how do you get this discount you're asking yourself right now.
Joel: Tell them Chad.
Chad: It's very simple. You go to chadcheese.com and you click on the Nexxt logo in the sponsor area.
Joel: Easy.
Chad: No long URL to remember, just go where you know. Chadcheese.com and Nexxt with two X's.
Chad: It's showtime!
Joel: Well lets hear a little bit about you and Moonlighting I guess to start off for those who don't know you.
Jeff Tennery: Yeah well Moonlighting is a three, almost three and a half year old company that is focused in on helping people generate and create their own form of income. So back in 2008 my colleagues and I and co-founders, we suffered through, like many the great recession and kind of the fall out of the market and found ourselves not quite unemployed but scared at the concept of being unemployed. So it took us a few years to kind of come up with the plan and the vision, but Moonlighting's been called the Craigslist without the creepiness, which is something we always giggle at. We focused in on mobile and speed by which we can get people connected and so it's a labor of love, we're very passionate and we've grown very quickly. We have over 600,000 people signed up to be a Moonlighter on our platform here in the states.
Jeff Tennery: Backed by the three largest news media companies in the US. Gannett, Tronc, and McClatchy and we're a top ten app in the app store for the past two years in the jobs' category. So we're definitely capturing people's attention and really focused in what we think is, instead of working for the man, we think you should be working for yourself and creating some form of independence, just in case, god forbid the market turns again from an employment perspective.
Joel: I know Chad's champing at the bit to ask a question, but I have to make a comment that, thank god you have a solid URL, because when I found out it was actually Moonlighting.com I about fell out of my seat, cause every URL today is go blank dot IO or go blank dot CA dot UK. So I just wanna say thank you for having a simple URL that I and everyone else can figure out.
Jeff Tennery: Well it took us a few years to get there. We had to raise some money and actually had to go buy that and thinking maybe that the old Bruce Willis, Sybil Shepherd show would somehow have a hold of that. It did not and so we were able to buy it, but we went through those iterations in the early days. That's sometimes the path by which you have to go.
Chad: And obviously you thought it was worth it because you stepped back and you had cash available and you went after a URL that you though was gonna make sense and it was a .com. You weren't playing the IO, IA game. Awesome.
Joel: Yes, thank you for that. And yes Chad is still trying to look like Bruce Willis to this day and he has a full head of hair, but he shaves it just to try to look like Bruce.
Chad: I'm actually more sexy than Bruce is.
Joel: A little hidden secret for the show, it's for the fans.
Chad: Okay so I gotta get into this. So it was funny that you started off by saying something about not being as creepy, especially with most of us kind of like on the outside of block chain and the BIT coin and the currency side of the house, because really that are of the quote unquote feeling like the dark web, has been crazy shady with Silkroad, all the crazy shady things that have been happening with Bit coin, Bit coin foundations. How do you separate yourself from that? Because everybody automatically starts seeing ICO, oh Bit coin and they start to really attach you to things that have happened in the past.
Joel: And what is an ICO? That might be a better place to start for some people.
Jeff Tennery: So an ICO is short for Initial Coin Offering, used very similar to an initial public offering, which most people and investors are familiar with and it's phenomena that's taken place over the last 18 months where smaller upstart companies are leveraging block chain and they're leveraging crypto currency to be able to raise funding for their companies, projects, very similar to crowd funding or crowdsourcing. But they're also doing it where they're finding a utility that can be used. So when you create a token, it's not just a token for the sake of tokens sake, but putting it out there so you can use it within your particular use case or solution, so in this case with Moonlighting we have a very strong use case, which is using the Moonbit, which is what we're calling the Moonbit for our coin, to be able to use it to make payments or receive payments and also to be able to buy services, premium services.
Jeff Tennery: So it's not unlike a lot of the gaming world when you think about a lot of the gaming that goes on, people buying digital weapons or digital coins or using currency for the Candy Crush of the world. So it's a phenomena that's given some leverage back to start ups instead of having to chase always after the venture money, which can be very challenging.
Chad: So back to the original question, how do you separate yourself from the shadiness that we've seen from Bit coin and some of the other Silkroads of the world in that arena? Because again the rest of the world, we're only seeing the bad stuff thus far and not the good stuff. What are you guys doing to be able to separate yourself?
Jeff Tennery: We've been around for three years, so unlike a lot of these ICO projects that are literally nothing more than PowerPoints or demonstrations of thought around a white paper, we have been around for three years so we've seen what has been working in the gig economy and what hasn't, what's been holding it back and the number one issue is trust. People don't know who they're hiring. If you think about Craigslist analogy, but even Uber, you don't know who your driver is. Yeah you're relying on maybe an $8 background check that Uber did to find the right person to drive you and the safe person to drive you. So what we're doing with Moonlighting is we've got 600,000 people signed up, so a very rich profile data.
Jeff Tennery: That data's great, but it's all user generated by the folks that have signed up and so we believe moving those profiles onto the block chain, makes it more authentic, makes it more real, and these are things like your recommendations, your reviews, your payment, transaction history, all those things on the block chain will bring more credibility to a freelancer, make it more trusted and so we're migrating over where some of the people on our platform won't make it over. They won't cut the mustard because they may not be operating in the best fashion or don't have the best reviews, so I think what will happen, specifically with Moonlighting is the cream will rise to the top, block chain profiles will be the new norm, and then also using crypto currency to exchange payments makes a lot of sense as we look to ... We're planning to go global towards the tail end of this year in Canada, UK, and Latin America.
Chad: And those are two entirely different subjects that I definitely wanna hit head on, but first the validation. The resume validation piece and also the background checks, which obviously is great for block chain or at least it seems like it is. But you said user generated and we're seeing and we've seen over the years that trying to get somebody to actually fill out a ton of information about themselves is really heard, which is why you see a ton of these organizations right now are going out to the web, they're scouring it and they're pulling data back about you to make your profile more full. Are you guys doing something like that or are you just really focused on the only data we're taking is directly from point A being the actual candidate themselves?
Jeff Tennery: Yeah. Every bit of data that you see on Moonlighting today has been generated by the actual user, which plays itself wonderfully into the block chain strategy for us. So we're not screen scraping, we're not going out there and pulling profiles, we're not grabbing everything from a LinkedIn profile or Facebook Connect, everything that you see in a profile from Moonlighting has actually been generated, which is really to your point, super hard and difficult and it's something we've been very good at and I think people wanna tell their stories about how they wanna work.
Chad: Yeah no question. So how do you engage them to get more rich data? Because that's the hardest part, right, is the engagement piece. Tell me more about yourself.
Jeff Tennery: Yeah so we have not done anything other than ask them, and this is kind not being cute, but we have just gone to the market with a message of just trying to take back your work career and pursue your passions. What we plan to do though with the block chain, with our ICO's, when we launch the token is a big part of the use of the Moonbit will be a rewards program. So for the first time we'll be able to actually reward the users on the platform that use it the most and do the most amount of business and engage it the most. So what we're excited ... And this is very similar to an app called Kick, if you're familiar with that, a messaging app that's very popular where rewarding the actual users will be what drives the platform forward and will help us expand.
Chad: Well that sounds interesting because Jobeum is doing that right now. I don't know if you're familiar with them or not. They've got the ...
Jeff Tennery: There are a host of them that are out there, but again don't get fooled by, okay a company announces ICO then they're doing this thing, they're decentralizing this or they're decentralizing that. What we've done is, we've got a three year track record with true transactions, with people operating on our platform, we're not just that white paper. A lot of folks and even Dataum and some of the other ones that are out that that have conducted very successful ICO's and have great block chain projects, they don't have any customers and so what I mean by that is what I thinks unique and why we've gotten so much attention, and I'm not trying to brag, is that we have real users and real data and everything's authentic and kind of homegrown organically and I think that's what makes, what will make our platform standout more uniquely and then our bigger, grander vision is to not just keep ...
Jeff Tennery: The world of keeping your data for yourself, like I think Facebook and some of those companies are gonna be under a lot of pressure because Facebook owns all the data, they control all the data, and they monetize all the data. What we plan on doing with the Moonlighting profile, the block chain profile is to make it available for our users to control where they want the profile to be and then to be compensated for that, where they do wanna share their data. So long story short, not to go down a rabbit hole, I think places like Facebook, Amazon, places where they wanna control the data and not share it, are gonna be the ones under the biggest duress, because marketplaces like Moonlighting that are on the block chain where you the user control the profile, that is where the market's heading and I think that's where the revolution of block chain really begins.
Joel: Jeff, help me, if we could back to ICO's for a little bit and block chain is making more sense to me now. So sort of the catalyst for this was, a story I did for area about Connect Job, a company over in Europe I believe that has raised over a million dollars in their initial coin offering. How does that actually work when you raise money? Do people say I'll buy it for ten bucks and then they get one Moonbit and then it becomes more valuable? And then my second question is, is having an ICO similar to almost like a country having their own currency? So will I be able to have Moonbits that I get from jobs I do on the site and then can I transfer that into Bit coin or can I transfer it to my Wells Fargo account into dollars? Talk about those two sort of issues please.
Jeff Tennery: Yeah, so all of these ICO's are using a platform called Ethereum and so it's kind of the second most popular crypto currency and so Ethereum was born out of what Bit coin wasn't doing. So Bit coin was used for payments, but mostly speculative trading right now, but Ethereum said, "Hey let's let other companies, let's let people build their tokens on top of our platform." So going back to your first part of the question, was everything that's created, a Moonbit that we're creating, a token that's being created is actually being done with an ERC 20 standard by which you could use Ethereum to get to that token and also back out of it, almost like a gateway. So you buy Ethereum and then turn around and buy Moonbit and then if you receive a Moonbit you can back into and Ethereum, which by the way all goes back to Fiat, which is basically the fancy word for US dollar, whatever currency of the country.
Jeff Tennery: So you go back to your then second part of your question, which is, is it like a form of being within a country? The answer is absolutely for solutions like Moonlighting. It's like being on the Moonlighting platform, we have a currency, you don't have to by the way, you can still use the US dollar or the pound, the Euro, to make transactions take place, but the benefits of the token, just like when you go to Chuckie Cheese, they can let you use all of the tokens. They can let you put your quarter in there, which that makes it easier for you to walk out of there and use it elsewhere or they can get you to buy the token, because that's what's going to drive the tickets and you can go buy the crappy gifts, all of that.
Jeff Tennery: So it's happening within an ecosystem and that's the way the token world will play out. Although some projects and some companies, like ours, is we're not gonna just relegate the Moonbit to just our marketplace, if there are other gig economy marketplaces that are out there that want to use it, we'll have API's available and that's again the idea of kind of giving yourself up to block chain and to the platform and let it be governed by the users and also be very open to sharing the technology, which is what makes it trusted.
Chad: I appreciate you using the Chuckie Cheese example there, cause that's just helps Joel understand this more.
Joel: It's my favorite restaurant, by the way.
Jeff Tennery: Fine dinging and cocktails included. I have five kids by the way, guys so I've spent a lot of time there.
Chad: Yeah you probably know a little bit about Chuckie Cheese. That's what Joel has to wake up to.
Joel: Yeah. So can I give you $10 and buy tokens? Is that how this works?
Jeff Tennery: What you'll do is you can basically go to an exchange and you could take your US dollar, you will buy Ethereum and then from Ethereum you can turn around and buy a Moonbit.
Joel: And then I can use my Moonbit with anyone who accepts Ethereum?
Jeff Tennery: You can use the Moonbit ... Yeah correct. If other people are using Moonbit and have accepted that, that is correct.
Chad: Okay, so say I'm using other bits or other coins, what have you, if they're all backed by Ethereum there's probably some exchange rate for the Moonbit versus these other coins. Is that also kind of like the same thing? Almost like the same kind of scenario we're looking at? The US dollar versus the Euro or what have you?
Jeff Tennery: And it's really crazy right now. So as we're planning for our ICO, our spreadsheets are changing by the minute, cause Ethereum's gone up, it's down, it's very volatile, so at the point when we do the ICO, that'll be the jump off point where one Moonbit will equal X Ethereum and that I won't be able to tell you till we get to the point of launching the ICO, but that's how that works is so it'll be tied back a value of Ethereum for you to be able to gauge it against the US dollar and really against other crypto currencies. You can turn around with Ethereum and buy Bit coin or Ripple or Lite Coin, all the other currencies.
Chad: So what about these background check companies that are out there today? It sounds like, and I could be entirely wrong, wouldn't be the first time, that really block chain could get rid of background checks in these background check companies, cause you've got all the data. It's all legitimate data that's been checked before and you can just continue to hit that data. So is there an issue, prospectively, for background companies and some of these validation organizations that are out there?
Jeff Tennery: I don't think so, cause I think the good ones that have good data, you're always gonna want good data and there's always a starting point cause remember starting from scratch ... Like we've been at this for three years and while 600,000 users is great it's still again a small fraction of the freelancers out there in the US and so I think that the background companies, the good ones, will figure out how to use block chain that then just leverage that data, make sure that it's authentic and that it's being ... What the beauty of all of this with block chain is that it's really democratizing you controlling your data, your business, whatever it may be and a background check is your data, it's what you want it to be and you can't just fudge it because over time most of these block chain marketplaces and background, anywhere, they're gonna let the real data that happens in real time, that's what gets put on the ledger, the distributed ledger and that's what basically sits there and becomes immutable, which the fancy word for saying you can't erase it, you can't get rid of it. And I think that that's where ...
Jeff Tennery: No I wouldn't say a background company at all has a very legitimate opportunity and should be moving to block chain just to take that data, they'll actually have a jump start on it. It's like, I think it's be interesting not to go back and make this a Facebook conversation or an Amazon conversation, but I think the bigger companies are the ones that ... That's why banks are so threatened and countries are being threatened. Large institutions where they have a control from a central point, are going to be disrupted and how they embrace this is going to be very interesting.
Joel: Jeff, how would you explain block chain to a sixth grader?
Jeff Tennery: How would I explain it to a sixth grader, block chain? I would describe it as, there's a ledger that has kind of your pros and cons, your minuses, your negatives and your positives and everything that happens from a coding perspective gets put on to this, making sure that it's balanced, that things net out to where the positive and the negative equal net zero. So what I would tell a sixth grader it's code, and most sixth graders by the way know far more about coding then, I'm a 49 year old entrepreneur, than myself or perhaps you gentlemen, but the sixth grader understands coding and IT and understand that it's basically code that you can't change once it's written. It becomes something that you have to ... The golden rule of you do what you say, you say what you do and it becomes something that, once you put it out there, something you gotta honor and there's a thing called loyalty and honor to what is being written and done.
Jeff Tennery: So I think that's how I would at least begin the conversation. From there the distributive part, I think is a little bit more complex for anyone even sixth graders to ... Basically if somebody wants to hack, which most sixth graders understand what hacking is, someone wants to hack the block chain, it's very difficult to do it because basically you're messing with everybody on the block chain and so if you try to break the block chain it kind of immediately breaks so nothing can happen. I shouldn't say it breaks, but it stops so you can't do anything because everything's distributed so that if you try to steal from one person, you're trying to really steal from many. Probably a horrible analogy on all parts, but that's how I would try to break it down for a sixth grader.
Joel: So I understand how it works with money a little bit. So the way it was explained to me if today, if I wanna give Chad $100 through my Chase bank account, it would go to Chase and then Chase would basically give it to Chad. Whereas today if I wanted to give Chad 100 Bit coin or whatever, I would basically tell the block chain, which is a large group of people keeping various ledgers and I would say, "I'm giving Chad 100 Bit coin." And then they would all basically take note of that and it would be record for everybody. There wouldn't be a central sort of monolithic thing kind of keeping the records of all that stuff. Would that be sort of correct and if it is, how does this pertain to my resume or searching for a job, because that's not necessarily money driven, it's data driven, or identity driven?
Jeff Tennery: I would say it's not even, to take the money piece aside as you just did, it's rules driven. So you still need to, regardless whether it's your resume, or a picture, like Kodak's doing their ICO now, which is very interesting, but yeah so whatever it is you're putting on the block chain, which by the way you can't store much on the block chain today from a technology perspective. It's very limited. It's why Bit coin's so slow and all these crypto currencies are so slow. But it's rules driven, so what I would say is kind of going back to your sixth grade analogy, what are the rules of engagement and whatever you are using that happens to be engaging for using block chain technology. So could be your school grades. So going back to your sixth grader, like if your school grades, once those grades go in, the principal or school can't change it, it's gotta be whatever the rules are written and the way you input grades.
Chad: And it's motivation too right? There's a ton of validation behind this, correct?
Jeff Tennery: Well it's validated ... I mean listen, there's gonna be pirate block chain. Everybody's making out block chain like it's gonna be the panacea for everything, but there'll be pirate ones and what I mean by pirates, so there's ones where the rules are just written to be disingenuous and other things of that nature, so really what it is at the end of the day, it's about making it non-changeable. And I think that's what the rules ... So when you're looking at different applications, that's why it's blowing people's minds, because it's not just about the financial markets or how to do financial transactions, it's about data and it's also just about rule, it's about the rules. It's almost the old if then. If you're writing code, it's like if you say that this is the case, then this happens and there's no subjectivity to it.
Chad: There's a ton of computing power that goes into this, right? Because validation and being able to actually go through validation for at least, and again this is on the currency side, it might be different on the recruiting side, but crypto money itself takes up almost as much power as the country of Greece. It's like 40 terawatts per hour. There's so much power that is taken because of all the validation that needs to happen and it doesn't seem like it's efficient, by any means right now.
Jeff Tennery: That's why the crypto market as a whole just even in buying and trading now is so difficult and it's just ... Like remember the dial up, go back to your dial up days and how long you would wait sometimes because there was a flood of people trying to get on the internet. Remember your ugly AOL disc driven days of signing on to AOL, that would be good analogy. So I do think those things work out in the wash as technology gets better. In fact, you're seeing I think rivals to Bit coin of people trying to come up with a speed solution, but I think that's the computing power, everything you're saying is no different when you're thinking about telephony. I know I came up through the wireless business in my past where you think about how many phone calls could have been made in the early 80's when mobile was coming. It wasn't that much capacity and then capacity kind of grew with demand. I think you'll see the same thing happen with block chain.
Chad: So really and what you're saying is, block chain or at least the internet when we first started off, not everybody was really bought into the internet. They thought, yeah this things gonna kind of go away, it's kind of shady, I don't know if I wanna get on this, but we saw what it did with our lives. Because it made our lives easier, we're able to access more information quickly, what you're saying is, this is really just the infancy of block chain and of crypto currency and it should be something that we're looking forward to in the future.
Jeff Tennery: Absolutely. And I think, I don't know if you followed the regulatory climates around doing ICO's, obviously you mentioned it earlier in the discussion, most ICO's have been set up for failure, poorly represented, overstating what the benefits of an ICO are, and so the regulatory commissions like the FCC and the CFDC are now starting to weigh in and even their notes last ... There was a Senate hearing last week, their notes last week were very encouraging because they're not just coming in like China and saying we're gonna ban all these ICO's, we're gonna ban all these crypto currencies, they're using a term called Do No Harm, which is what was used in the early internet days, which was ...
Jeff Tennery: I think the government realizes that this is a special technology and it's really about block chain and while there's a bunch of bad actors and apples out there that are ruining it for the bunch, that the technologies and what's happening is too important, especially to this next generation, the millennial generation and the Gen Z generation where this is gonna be the new norm for them. This is not ... Asking them whether Bit coin is worth $10,000 or worth zero or taking some of the statements that have been made by like Morgan Stanley's CEO and other such where people are making absolute comments about it, it's way too early, I do think that all of this means, what this means for people out there listening, is that crypto currency isn't going anywhere, not is block chain technology and really, now it's just a matter of siphoning through all the mayhem, which I think will become more and more clear by each quarter.
Joel: Jeff, I'll end my questions on this and you mentioned crypto's not going anywhere, block chain's not going anywhere, where is it gonna be in five years though? Will I be able to go into Target and buy paper towels with my Bit coin? Are we ten years, 20 years from that? Give me some context around where you think crypto currency's will be in say five years from now?
Jeff Tennery: I think it won't take five years to do what you just described and I'm not trying to make this to be like I'm some sage, but people are already, millennials are already buying and exchanging services and goods right now using Bit coin. It's just the Visas, the Master cards, the Amex's haven't caught up. Heck you're seeing some of the banks actually blocking your ability to use coin base today, to buy using your credit card, that's a lot of paranoia because they don't know what's taking place. There is some bad data associated with it, but the idea of you being able to use crypto currency to do everything is really gonna be no different than ... What do you care whether it says Visa or MasterCard or Amex on your card? Really when you think about it, when you go to the store.
Chad: And this goes back to how you're looking to pay freelancers though right? With the Bit coin, with the Moonbit, right? Is that part of the whole schema, is that look companies come on, you can be a freelancer and go work for somebody and then the exchange happens on the actual app itself and the currency is the Moonbit.
Jeff Tennery: It is, but what will happen with the Moonbit too, is you can quickly move the Moonbit into Ethereum and then quickly turn that into Bit coin, Bit coin cash, whatever you want it to be and that's the speed of currency and the movement of it and that's gonna be the complexity that takes place where somebody could literally be paying you one day in a Moonbit and you could determine whether or not that's worth cutting the lawn or designing a website and you can figure out whether that's something you wanna buy and hold, so it's this mixture of the utility of payments mixed with something that could value you could trade on. The point I always make too, kind of people who are ...
Jeff Tennery: Millennials aren't too keen to go to the stock market and buy Disney stock or Verizon stock or AT&T stock, largely because it's slow and arduous and millennials are for the most part inpatient. They're multi-taskers, ready to move forward. No hey listen, I've got a lot of millennials at home as well, but it's the idea that you the user have this flexibility in how you earn and receive money in crypto and then what could be exponential growth and this is by the way exponential loss.
Jeff Tennery: I don't make this out to be everything's up and to the right, is that you're giving people the power to come in and that's why this ICO market's so hot, is people can come in and look at these opportunities as being at the ground floor of a Facebook, of a Google, and by the way by no means as I saying that about Moonlighting, I'm saying that that's the way it's viewed by millennials who look at those projects and opportunities because it's decentralized and it's more fair, which is most millennials have been taught and brought up in that fashion of everything needs to be fair, that that's how they're gonna drive this forward and that's what the power of block chain will be in the next five years as they'll be using it at Whole Foods to buy groceries as much as they are to go to the movies or do anything else that's out in the retail world.
Joel: And remember kids, for every Amazon there was 100 pets.com.
Jeff Tennery: That's right. Amen. And that is exactly why this ICO market is so confusing to folks because I think people want to get in just like it was in the heat of the IPO markets in the 90's, the late 90's, is everybody wanted and they just were buying stock based on whether they had a cool URL like that. My advice to everyone is, look at the right projects, we're doing a very compliant ICO. We're working with Cooley, one of the top law firms in the US. We're taking our time, we're doing it right, we're doing actually the presale right now that we're letting people get in, get bonuses and tokens to get in early and so we're being thoughtful, we're trying to educate people along the way and make sure that people follow. And so is the SCC and the regulators, they just want people to be truthful and honest and transparent, all the problems you've seen regulatory wise are companies that mis-stepped by promising future returns that they could never ever promise, not sharing their financials, all the things that you just can't do if you want to be a credible company.
Joel: So I just thought of another question Chad, is that okay.
Chad: Yeah, hit it.
Joel: Will VC's be a thing of the past and will more ... Will companies more and more raise money through ICO's or is that just sort of a novelty and the VC firms don't have to worry?
Jeff Tennery: I think that the good VC's right now have already quietly made this move and they have to be careful cause they have all the limited partners. No different than I think there's a lot of publicly traded companies that are making moves but don't wanna alarm the public and don't wanna alarm their shareholders because it's so new and they're still getting their hands around it. So I think for sure VC's are just going to continue and their very nimble and their very agile, but you'll just see them start to move and it's like anything else, they're move a percentage of their portfolio into these opportunities. We're talking with some of the largest ones and most renowned ones that are out there that are actually quietly doing this because they don't want to tell people they're into it yet.
Joel: So I might have asked my question incorrectly. So if you're a startup today would you rather raise money through an ICO or would you rather raise money the traditional way?
Jeff Tennery: I think the answer is, not to be cute, a little bit of both, but I think what the ICO market has done, is that it now gives some leverage back to the startup because when you raise token, you sell tokens, it's a non-dilutive events. It's actually treated as if it's a revenue event or a big sale. And so you don't have the delusion. So what that does is now companies like mine could go to that market instead of going and essentially getting bent over by a venture capital firm that's looking to take a big chunk of your business. We've raised six and a half million dollars through traditional means over the last three years.
Jeff Tennery: So we've gone that path, we have institutional investors, we have strategic investors and that's great, but you hit a point in time where you don't wanna dilute yourself out of the business and so the ICO market, I think for sure gives power back to the entrepreneur or the startup and gives them an alternative, which is why VC's are taking notice. If you look at the inverse of last year in 2017, you could see where the ICO market blossomed and kind of exploded and you see VC investment has come down and I think what VC's are doing this year is they're regrouping, again they're trying to find the best projects and the best companies and I think you'll see that all settle out where you need a little bit of both.
Jeff Tennery: I don't know if you know this about crypto currency, but when you do an ICO you pick a finite amount of money that you put out there. So you put a fine out, so we're targeting a $25 million dollar token sale. So the thing about block chain, I can't decide to make it 26 or 27 million or 30 or 50, once we print, we mint those tokens, it's finite, so that's the beauty of not being like the governments of the world that are printing money and then deluding the value of that money. So I think that's something to keep into mind as entrepreneurs have to do what they say, say what they do, do what they do, they pick an amount that they think is fair, but if I need more money a year or two from now, which as we continue to scale venture capital will be a wonderful opportunity to do that.
Joel: Fascinating stuff and clearly the tip of the iceberg on this issue that we will continue to watch closely, I'm sure.
Jeff Tennery: Yeah.
Joel: Jeff, thanks for your time. If I wanna learn more about Moonlighting or your ICO, where should I go?
Jeff Tennery: Yeah well we have, as we talked about earlier, Moonlighting.com is our operating website. We're a top ten app in the app stores and then we have a site set up specifically for people that are interested in crypto currency and block chain, it's ICO.moonlighting.com.
Joel: Good enough.
Chad: So easy. One of the easiest URL's I think we've talked about.
Joel: Yeah, you need to put like a go or ask or get [crosstalk 00:36:33].
Jeff Tennery: We do have gomoonlighting.com, we just kind of not using it. We used it earlier in the early days.
Joel: Jeff, seriously thank you man and we appreciate your time.
Jeff Tennery: Thanks for having me. Best of luck.
Chad: Thanks Jeff.
Joel: We out.
Chad: We out.
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