How this company hopes NFTs will transform fantasy sports
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This is Most Innovative Companies from Fast Company, where we speak to visionary founders to understand how they think, how they innovate, and what lessons they may have for you and the businesses that you run in every shape and size. I'm James Vincent, a founding partner at Foundr.

This is a story about introducing the new with the familiar. In the time that I shared with Steve Jobs at Apple, there are many examples of wonderful keynotes that you should go look at, whether it was the iPod, whether it was the iPhone, are you getting it yet? But today I'm going to talk about the iPad. Because around that time, if you remember back, you had a computer and you had a phone, and the phone was doing quite a lot of things, but it was quite small. And you had a computer and you had a phone, and you had a computer and you had a phone,

And there was this question about whether or not we needed a third device at all. In fact, so much so that Steve came on the stage and said, I don't know whether we need a third device. Do we need a third device? If we needed a third device, it would have to be better at the six things that we do every single day. So let's take a look. You can almost imagine him doing it.

He went through email, the internet, photos, gaming, video, and in each use case, he did a side-by-side. Let me go do this now. Let me look at my photos. And of course, you pinch it on a large screen. You go, well, I think it's a bit better on this. And oh, email. Well, actually, it's better because it's bigger and I can move it around. Or the internet. Oh, well, that article suddenly, bang, right? And so, and you're using your hands, right?

And so this brand new device that everyone was kind of like, is that just a kind of bigger touch? Suddenly took on a life of its own. Instead of him saying, oh, there's this new fangled device that you're going to use in some new fangled way. He took the six things that you use the most and gave examples of why this product was better through the familiar.

So today I'm going to have a great conversation with Nicola Giulia at SoRare, who I think is also introducing the new NFTs through the familiar gaming cards. So I'm excited for that conversation. I'm really excited today to have my guest, Nicola Giulia, who's the co-founder and CEO of SoRare.

So rare. It's like Panini gaming cards gone digital, baseball cards gone digital, backed by NFTs, really caught fire in the world's biggest game. For the sake of those people that don't understand, we'll call soccer because it's mostly an American audience, but we understand it to be football, the largest sport in the world. And now, of course, you've moved on to baseball and basketball, and I really want to hear about that. But anyway, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. Amazing to see you again, James. I'm very excited for the conversation. I think it was roughly two years ago that you gave me a call and you said, okay, we've got this NFT thing and I'm a passionate football support. There I go. I'm just going to call it football. I'm passionate football enthusiast.

And I feel like there's an opportunity to really get people to understand what NFTs are and what the blockchain is through such a simple use case with the world's most popular sport. So why don't you take me through that a little bit, just your inception idea? How did you get to SoRare and InSight?

And yeah, why don't we start there? Yeah, no, definitely. So if we take it like very simply, Sorrel is a mix between, as you said, like collectible cards and fantasy sports. So basically you can collect cards that represent the player you love, and then you can use them in a variety of games. The one we are developing is

fantasy inspired, so basically the performance of the player on the pitch is impacting your performance as a user, as a manager. That's like the combination of those two things that makes around what it is today. But if we take a step back,

I think it's very exciting for sports fans because they can play all the roles that exist in a sports team. Basically, they are an owner. They can make investment decisions on the players. Here, the players are on the accounts, but they can decide whenever they want to buy and sell player accounts. They are a sports director because one of their missions is to detect the talents of tomorrow. They are a coach.

because with these cards they can compose teams they need to strategize and need to define who to put on the field on a given game week and they are like a player as well so they have these four roles on

owner, sports director, coach and player and that's what also makes the product amazing and we are using NFTs as you mentioned and I have been in the blockchain space or web free as we call it like for seven years now. In 18 we saw this technology with my co-founder and we were like wow like

It's going to change the way we own stuff online. Like Web2 was about reading stuff and creating stuff, but it was not possible to own something that is digital, right? Like the Web2 was not built with uniqueness back then. NFTs are a way to authenticate and secure something digital. And once you have this possibility, it creates an infinity of use cases.

And so we are using it to collect in the sports universe, but there's many, many more use cases, I think.

On a previous episode, we had Jose from Farfetch and he was talking about Web 1 is read, Web 2 is read-write, and Web 3 is read-write-own. And of course, the line that you use is own your game. Exactly. Which was some work that we did together that is seeming to stand the test of time. So as we pull out and think about NFTs and their use cases, one of the things that is so appealing about SoRare is that it's a...

physical behavior that people understand. I remember going to the local store and picking up the little pack of Panini cards when I was eight years old. And indeed, in America, it may be baseball or basketball, but that behavior is very much entrenched in culture. Maybe a modern digital version is Fantasy League, where you collect players and

you're using NFTs not in purely a virtual digital, like I don't really understand my physical human connection with it. You're basing it on something very grounded in culture. And that was always a very strong appeal to me. Is that the inception of the idea in your own mind? No, definitely. I think part of the vision that we have is really to connect the physical and the digital worlds and

And so, as you said, like collecting is something that is really physical. And the first form of money were shelves. So like it's like thousands of years ago. And this is something that we do as human beings to express who we are and to connect with other people and so on. So there's many, many reasons why we collect. And obviously, as our lives are becoming digital, you know, like I thought that

there's going to be an interest to do that on the web as well. So yes, that's one thing that helps us to connect with the physical world. The other thing, obviously, is like the sport, right? Like the games are happening in the physical world and we all bridge to better connect with these games.

So that's from the physical to the digital. But you can also have an impact on the real world because when you own these NFT cards, it unlocks things in the physical world. You can attend the game, you can meet a player, you can access training grounds. So we are starting to develop all those possibilities that are unlocked by online.

owning the con and that's very exciting as well. So yes, that's definitely part of our vision. Oftentimes I get asked like, what do you think about the metaverse? First, I don't know what it is. I know I don't know how to define it, but what's for sure is that I don't want a world where like we are,

spending even more time connected, right? And I think one of the beauty of the product that we are developing is that the gameplay itself, right? Like you don't need to stay in front of the screen. You collect your cards, you compose a team and then you can go outside, have fun with your friends or do spawns, whatever, but you don't need to play

play in front of the screen and that's something that's very important to me I really don't want to contribute to this hyper connection that we are living I want to help like at least stabilize if not decrease it that's

That's fantastic. The single storytelling universe, I think, was a topic we were discussing, which is, you know, you're in the digital world, you want to go physical, you're in the physical world, you want to go digital. And that interaction between those two different worlds, like one of the things I remember about the way you've approached it is authenticity, right? I bumped into Jared Piquet in Stockholm, and he could do nothing but talk about how awesome SoRare was. It really feel like you've gone on a path

to build authenticity through players, through clubs, through fans, and you're coming at it through the game rather than sort of transposing yourself over the top. Can you talk about that a little bit? We were very, very excited to build a product that is inclusive of the players

the sports community in general, meaning, as you said, the players, the teams, the leagues at all levels, right? Like, so for me, authenticity is also building something that is not only for the elite players or the elite teams or the elite leagues. Like, we have 280 teams from Brazil to Ecuador to Japan to South Korea, like, to African countries, right? And that's the beauty of it. Like, you are discovering new people, new opportunities

new leagues, new teams and that's really inclusive and you don't need to play with Messi, Mbappé or the top teams to be good. We want the scouting elements, the passion for the sport. I think that's very exciting. If we get back to the athletes,

building something that is inclusive and the players, they are doing the game. They are actually doing it. So it was very important to me to get their support and to build something that they care about, that they love. And so we have thousands of football players, but also the sponsors who invested in the company and who are supporting it, from star players like Mbappé or Zidane and more that we're going to announce to less known players.

That's, again, very important to us. And we make sure that all the players that support us genuinely love the vision and the product. And so a vast majority of them actually invest in the company. I think that's important because you want them to be authentic in the way they talk about it. So you mentioned Gerard, a good example of someone who has been very active in helping us build the company, basically.

Because it's interesting just if we take football, and I'm sure that other sports are the same, in the last few years, it really feels like they've elevated in money. If we talk about football, the English Premier League particularly, and just a whole ton of money coming in. There's six clubs with hundreds of millions of dollars. And even the Super League conversation a year ago really felt like there was a separation. Fans came up out in the street and were like, what the heck? You don't care about us.

The fans seem to be being left behind by the money, and this feels like some push democratization of their involvement in the game. They're vested in the game. They're owning part of the game. Is that a little bit of the motivation?

Yeah, that's definitely part of the motivation to have them part of the game and to have also part of the revenue flowing back to them. And like, oh, we would like to democratize a sport and to make it less elitist. Onboarding all these teams, all these leagues,

It's building a global product, basically. And sports is about breaking down racial barriers, social barriers, and having a unique language that everyone can understand. And I think that to enter this community, you don't need to know anything more than your passion for the sport.

that's unique. We don't adapt the product, the marketing, nothing like to any country. So that's, I think, one of the strengths of the product. So if I was to compare the two when I was a small child, I'd go to the local news store and get a little pack, right, of Panini card. So tell me about the experience of SoRare. Go on SoRare

What do I do? First, we have like a free version. So you can start, you know, collecting free cards that are not NFTs and use them to play tournaments. So compose a team with them and maybe like win some rewards and progress in the game.

Then if you want to enter other competitions, you can buy NFTs that represent whatever player or team that you love. Part of our community is only collecting, so that's everything they do on the platform. But we have another heart that is collecting and engaging with the experiences, like the fantasy tournaments. So with the NFT accounts that they own, they use them to compose a team.

with like a goalkeeper, defender and so on. And then based on all the players are doing on the pitch, you get run, right? Like, so if you have like, so there's a team of five, like not 11. And so like if your players are doing good on the pitch, you are doing good as a manager and you can win like other NFTs or physical experiences and so on and progress in the game. So that's roughly how the platform works.

So we're here in the States. I'm actually in the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan. The big news for many of the U.S. listeners from Fast Company is not only have you got baseball, but I think only last week you announced the NBA. So congratulations. Tell me about the NBA story. How difficult was it to switch sports and how much will you embrace? Did people understand the concept in the same way?

First of all, we want to build the biggest company in the world of sports entertainment. So obviously going after US sports was a big goal of us when we raised our Series B, which was like 680 million late last year.

It was a big focus for us. We believe it's going to be huge because, again, we are the intersection of two concepts that are very popular in the US, collecting and playing fantasy sports. And so we are mixing these two with this notion of unique, like own your game, basically, like you truly own these cards and you can play them across the season and you can resell them freely and so on. And you can do stuff in the physical world, as I said.

We believe it's going to be a very, very important market for us. It's already a big one, like top three market for us. We haven't done any paid marketing in any part of the world, by the way, like in the US, but also in Europe. And it's already like a top market for us. So we're going to accelerate. We just launched our MLB products. We're going to launch our NBA product in October or November. It's moving fast.

If we zoom out about Web3 and just think about that landscape and look at use cases, NFTs, blockchain, crypto, feels a little bit like it's a very nascent conversation. And it's a little bit of triage going on here. Well, this one's going to go well because so-and-so told so-and-so to buy or sell it. There's not security and stability in this whole area. What I think is interesting here is that

One of the themes I always think about as you introduce new things is to introduce them through the familiar. The nice thing about your is it's familiar. I understand fantasy league. I've always collected cards. I love my NBA players and I want Kevin Durant or I want whoever. And so you go to it and you say, oh, there's a digital version of a thing I'm super familiar with.

And I think one of the challenges with NFTs is that it's new on top of new. How do you think about the role that you're playing in democratizing NFTs? I think, first of all, when any radical innovation emerges, there's a lot of good actors and a lot of bad actors as well. And a lot of people during the hype that come for the bad reasons, that's hard for everyone. And the conversation the last couple of months has been about NFT.

see that as a space as a category as a market but it's not any of that right it's just a technology right because of the lack of compelling use cases like a lot of them were like only highly speculative the big question was what's that right like what they do with that and so on uh and as as you said i think we are coming with something different like we are coming with uh like a

true human needs. Like, I want to connect with my friends. I want to collect. You know, I want to have fun. And we are serving them. And the technology is just a mean to this end, right? And we don't put the word NFT. We don't market NFTs, right? It's just like the underlying technology that makes sense for the product that we are building, right? Like, if you want to preserve scarcity in the digital world, you need NFTs. If you want to enable NFTs

portability for your cards and make them usable in different games or experiences this is the right fit if you want true ownership you know and use them across the seasons and even if the game or the company is still on it this is the right technology right so we want the fans to feel the benefits of it uh without having to explain the same way that you are

listening to a playlist on Spotify. You don't know it's like artificial intelligence that brought it to you, right? You're just enjoying some good music and you're happy with it. And that's the same for us. There's a great quote by Charles and Ray Eames, which are toys and games are the prelude to serious things.

Gaming is the future of play, as is clearly exhibited by most people's behavior. Hopefully the gaming encourages more physical play and the physical play encourages gaming and the two are connected. I'm aware of my son, plays a lot of football,

But he goes on FIFA at the end of the day when his muscles are tired. And then the next day he wants to play again. And so maybe it's not a surprise that you guys are first out. But if that is true, what might the next use cases for NFT be outside of the thing that you do? Where do you think NFTs go next?

I think that anything of value on the web at some point will be an NFT if we think long term. If we think in terms of specific use cases or industries, gaming has been at the forefront of innovation. It would have been history and I think it's still going to be the case. I think that...

game items needs to be they need to be owned by the players I think that makes sense right like there's billions of dollars that are being spent every day in games and I think that's crazy to think that's

Again, like today, the vast majority of them are not owned by the gamers. And, you know, they need to buy them again in the next four seasons. They cannot resell them. They cannot move them. And we want to help participate, change that. So I think gaming is going to be important. I think any industry where you have creators and art is a good one, it's going to be affected. So we saw...

some growth, some traction in art, and I think that makes sense. If we think about connecting with the physical world and some collecting as well, like ticketing is very interesting.

And we did some experimentation around that, like some of our tournaments, the winners got NFTs representing players, so player accounts, but there were also tickets enabling you to go to the game, to the stadium in the physical world, right? So that's an exciting use case and could add a collectability layer to the ticketing industry. So I think that's an interesting one. Many, many more audits, but again, I think gaming makes sense. Anything that is

like so like creative industries like are going to be affected as well and one of the big benefits for them that we didn't

discussed today is like because there's nfts you can track the change of ownership between owners uh you can track royalties on the secondary market so if your creation is being resolved like 10 years from here because you are now like hugely popular you can still benefit from that you can still collect royalties

on the back of it. And I think that's very interesting and a big, big win for creators in general. We'd had the founders of Patreon who get artists paid. They saw the use case of ownership, whether through NFTs or just some other mechanism as the future, which is to ensure that aggregators don't get in the middle and make the money.

but that you maintain your sovereignty of ownership. And you just mentioned royalties, which is I would buy that, but six owners later, I might still be getting a little bit of royalty from the fact that I bought it first.

which is a really interesting concept. And maybe that's going to take a minute for people to get their heads around that. In fact, in art, you mentioned art. It's such a great example. The artist sells it. And then from then on, maybe they sell it for a million bucks, but it's worth $80 million 10 years from now, but they don't get a cent. Yeah, that's one big use case. There's a lot of artists that get popular later on in

in their life and they don't see like the benefits of the early creations and I think that's amazing like if you believe in digital as something exciting which I believe is going to be the case because we are getting used to owning things that are digital even if

sounds well when you hear it first like okay it's not tangible it's actually something that people are getting more and more used not only with nfts by the way yeah well i noticed obviously nike when they bought artifact and then have been creating both digital and physical assets it's been tremendously successful and i think people have related to it quite quickly and

For me, again, as you mentioned, when you get into a new category, you're looking for those brands you can trust. Obviously, Nike's a brand I can trust. If they're going to do it, they're going to do it right. It feels like your approach has been to go through very legitimate and authentic people in the sport so I can trust you. So how important is that as you build relationships?

NFTs that there are brands you can trust so that people get involved? It's a very interesting question because I do agree that trust is really central. And so trust can be brought by very old institutions like the NBA, the MLB or football leagues.

The players, as you mentioned, in any case, like we are building decade-long relationships with them. And so we have a very long time, exclusive contracts. So that's very important to us. But trust is also important to be built for us as a brand, for Sorrel, right?

So you need time. So as you said, the company is relatively new, like four years old. And so you cannot pay time, right? You need to develop acts and proofs that can bring trust, being transparent, moving fast, and engaging with your community, recognizing your mistakes. You know, all of this is very important. We are building games and experiences with an open real market, as you know, any market. Like you need trust and your community is asking for trust.

Part of the trust comes from people in the game, the fans. I noticed the NBA president came out and talked about how much we're behind this. The Players League came out and talked about how much they're behind this.

players themselves, clubs themselves. That's where the trust comes from, right? Is that it's authentic. Yeah, no, totally. And so, yeah, you mentioned the NBPA and the NBA. So it's a good example. So Serena Williams is a board advisor to us, like a variety of social impact initiatives, but she's also active on the business front. And so we had calls with the president of the NBPA, Mika, Serena, and I, to help explain what we are building,

That has been important as well, like for her to have players, some of them being active from different sports, but we're not only from basketball, backing us, supporting us, helping us, very operational. Let me ask you a curveball question. How come Nicolas from Paris is first in NFTs and coming into these massive sports in the US and around the world? I think it's a combination of things.

I think the ambition of French fondance is really growing fast. We have an amazing pool of technical talents in Paris, like amazing education and so on. Obviously, if we think about the biggest sport in the world, which is football, it's in Europe and the French national team has been very successful the last couple of years. There's some proximity with the leagues, with their needs. So we wanted to stand down and have

spend a lot of time on the ground in the UK, in Spain, Germany and so on explaining what we are building and how it's going to benefit to the sport in general that leads the team in the leagues. So I think, yeah, it's a combination of all of this that makes it possible.

Should I expect you to likewise going to have to spend a bunch of time in the U.S. now? Yeah, I am. I'm trying to. Yeah, it's not a perfect split, but spending like more and more time in the U.S. It's the big goal of the year for us. Obviously, like we just launched our MLB product. We are launching soon our NBA product. It's a lot of launches.

Obviously, like different audiences, we need to adjust the way we build the product, the way we're going to talk about the product, you know, to cut down to a market that is different. We believe the fundamental needs are the same, but obviously we need to adapt. So this podcast is all, Nicolas, is all about innovation. If you were to go forward five to 10 years from now,

what would you love for people to look back and say, "Those guys did..." What would that be? It's a good question. I think there's different things. I think, first of all, I would love to reinvent the gaming industry, if it's an industry, for good by giving ownership back to the users of the game items.

They spend money, they spend time for things they don't own. And so I think that's something that I want to change for good. I want to make an impact in the physical world as well. That's by the revenue that we are giving back to the teams, to the players, that is used to educate them, to train them and so on. I want to have an impact on people practicing sports

in the physical world and more. And I think that's really important in this world where we spend more and more time connected. And so we are about to give back also parts of our benefits to initiatives that are favoriting, like sport, that is helping the practice of sports, that's giving material to young people to practice sport and so on. So that's also something where I want to have impact.

It's interesting, if you sort of zoom out, NFTs are very much collectibles. And I wonder how much they move towards community. Because I keep hearing you talking about community. And right now they're mostly collectibles, right? Maybe a million people have an NFT around the world. Can they build community? And if so, how? I believe that if I need to pick just one, I would pick community. Because even collecting...

it's a social behavior, right? Like you are doing it partly because you want to show it to your friend. You want to show it to the world. And basically collecting something digital, like an NFT card is much more powerful because you can show it to the world. Like with physical, it's a bit limited to where you are and the people you can show it to. I would pick community. I think that owning an NFT, a surround NFT card is being part of a community of a club. You can collect, but you can also connect. You can have,

Have fun. I would say that's the right umbrella. Wonderful. Nicolas, thank you so much for the conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Next time you're in New York, look me up because we're over here. I look forward to seeing you. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. Yeah, great to see you. Thank you so much, James. So after my conversation with Nicolas Julia at SolRare, I'm left with a whole bunch of really interesting questions

reflections on how innovation gets introduced to the world. Here's a guy that introduced NFTs, blockchain, things that people really find hard to get their hands around.

through the lens of something incredibly familiar. These are trading cards. They're panini cards. They're baseball cards. They're things that you, your kids have collected throughout your lives. They're just digital. So I found it a really good use case for innovation when you're trying to find a place

to build new behaviors, maybe find behaviors that already exist and extend them, build attributes to them from the digital to the physical. Obviously, Nikola is a huge football fan, soccer fan, and built very authentically with the players, with the clubs. He really did the rounds to make sure that they were authentic. And then he used the word trust

Trust is super important. Nike being an example of a brand that's gone into NFTs and begun to prove to people that actually there is value and good brands are there and I can trust Nike and I am going to be trusting SoRare because what they did for soccer, they're now doing for golf.

baseball and for basketball i think in the coming months increasingly the us audience is going to feel the impact of so rare and feel the impact of a thing called an nft

and see the value of it. And then maybe as the next use case comes along, they go, oh, I understand what an NFT is. So why would I be scared of it? There's nothing to be scared of. Really, really good lessons. I love the idea of games being the prelude to more serious things. We learn new behaviors because they seem not trivial, but just easy to do. They're fun things to do. So gaming, in the general sense of the word, has, in

enhanced massive amounts of technological development. Every app that you have on your phone has been advanced because of gaming technology. There is just no question, not just gamifying, but the ability to get the technology to you was enhanced because gamers demanded it. I think it's a prelude to a lot of what we're going to see in the future, which is NFTs throughout our lives.

They're really smart contracts. And NFTs are literally going to verify the fact that I own it. So Web3 is about ownership and NFTs, maybe we shouldn't be so scared about them after all.

All right, that's all for this episode. If you're a new listener, be sure to subscribe to Most Innovative Companies wherever you listen. And if you like this episode, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts. And we also want to hear from you. So let us know what you'd like to hear more of. Send us an email at podcast at fastcompany.com or tweet us.

at hashtag most innovative companies. You can also follow me on Twitter at FNDR underscore James.

Most Innovative Companies is a production of Fast Company in partnership with founder FNDR. We couldn't afford the vowels. Our executive producer is Joshua Christensen. Our sound design is Nicholas Torres. Writing is Matias Sanchez. Alex Webster and Nikki Checkley helped with the production. This podcast was done in collaboration with my wonderful partners at Founder, Stephen Butler, Becca Jeffries, and Nick Barham.