Joe Zhou. He’s the founder and CEO of FirstBlood, an eSports startup that recently broke the speed record for crowdfunding, specifically in the crypto world. Prior to founding FirstBlood, Joe co-founded Alt-Options, a Boston based fintech or financial technology startup that built the first American style option trading platform for digital currencies. Joe holds a BSBA from Boston University Questrom School of Business and an entrepreneur residence at Babson College. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Lean Startup What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — Slack How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Joe wished he was less concerned about how he was perceived in school   Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:11 – Nathan introduces Joe to the show 03:00 – FirstBlood is a platform that allows players to play games, not just for fun but for money 03:23 – FirstBlood charges money for each game or tournament played 03:49 – FirstBlood was launched in April 2016 03:55 – Joe’s co-founder, Anik, is also a big gamer 04:08 – They were both fans of League of Legends 04:14 – They attended a Hackathon where they were challenged to build an application that has never existed before 05:00 – Joe co-founded Alt-Options while he was still in college 05:15 – The technology was built from scratch 05:18 – There were about 2K users during the testing phase 05:50 – It was bootstrapped and $50K was raised from families and friends 06:02 – There were a group people who wanted to get into the space and Joe worked with them as a consultant for half a year 06:44 – Joe decided to do the token issuance because of the support they were getting 06:55 – DAO was successful until hackers were able to get into it due to a bug 07:19 – FirstBlood was one of the most promising projects that was going to DAO 07:26 – DAO or Decentralized Autonomous Organization is like a decentralized venture capital firm; it was managed by every person who has a token in it 07:52 – FirstBlood was operating under Project Tron in the DAO community 08:15 – After the bug, FirstBlood started building what was needed to run a successful crowdfunding campaign 08:52 – Joe and Anik gave talks and presented multiple ethereum meetups regarding their project 09:37 – Joe came home with a budget of 3-5 years runway for the entire team 09:46 – They’ve raised $5M in funding 09:52 – Team had 6 people and now they have 15 people 11:14 – They’ve calculated the ethereum’s pricing and deployed the contract to the network 11:51 – FirstBlood raised the money in just the first four blocks and processed in just 7 minutes 12:41 – FirstBlood has sold 465,313 ether tokens 13:10 – Joe shares why they released their own FirstBlood tokens 13:16 – Ethereum has some limitations 13:34 – The FirstBlood tokens are given unique utilities that are crucial to making the network work 13:42 – First layer is the transactional level utility where both ether and FirstBlood tokens work 14:20 – Witness program utility can only be run by FirstBlood tokens 14:52 – DotA is the first mobile strategy game and now is a stand alone 15:53 – When a game is settled, a set of information is sent to a network of witness nodes 16:02 – Witness nodes will then run tests using computational power to fetch the data and cross reference the data to make sure that it is valid 16:14 – The data then gets published into the blockchain and smart contract 16:32 – The winner of the games will pay a small percentage fee to the network 17:40 – The token price isn’t that important for the team 18:14 – The ratio of the token is arbitrary 19:24 – A lot of Dapps don’t have a real money function yet 19:39 – FirstBlood is closed to launching the beta 19:59 – Currently, there are 1592 people who have FirstBlood tokens 20:51 – Joe doesn’t think that it’s risky for them to have a lot of people handling the network 21:06 – The selection process has a cap rate on how one