Luca Netz Discusses the Future of Pudgy Penguins | Digital Social Hour #116

I was super frugal.

I think I had a million.

I had probably a half a million bucks before I spent anything.

Wow.

And the only reason why I spent that is because I was with Patty and we go to Ben Simmons' house and the Kardashians are there and they completely just ignore me and I'm like, why are they ignoring me?

And I spent like the whole day thinking about it the next day and it's because my swag was just like, dude, I was wearing dickies with like holes in my thrasher hoodies.

And I'm like, that was the only thing I came to as to why no one paid attention to me and why I was a wallflower that whole night.

Doesn't it look dope at least?

Look at my high school dropout, dude.

I believe I can go to toe-to-toe with any Wharton business kid.

Any Wharton Harvard kid.

You would wreck that.

Yeah, any Harvard business kid.

I could go toe-to-toe with any of them.

Welcome back to the Digital Social Hour.

On this episode, I have someone taller than me.

I have Luca Netz with us today.

How you doing?

I'm doing great.

How you doing?

Dude, I'm good.

I can't believe you're 6'8 now.

I can't believe it either after sitting next to you.

Man.

You've been taller than me for years.

For years, man.

Yeah, I keep growing.

25 is not supposed to.

Man, I used to be able to post you up.

I don't know if I can now.

You definitely won't be able to.

You weren't able to pose me up before.

Come on now.

You know what happened last time we played.

You just had a good pick and roll.

Your partner was kidding.

Man, what you been up to?

Working, man.

Pudgy Penguins.

Talk to us about it.

What a business.

What a business.

What an endeavor.

I think

for a long time,

I was like yearning to wanting to build great things.

I just didn't know where to go with that.

Ultimately, we came around to Gel Blaster and then ultimately to Pudgy Penguins.

This is, I think, what I always wanted to experience.

Just an unbelievable challenge.

An unbelievable challenge with so many variables that ultimately, I think, is testing me to be,

you know, Drake has a line because you know it's real when you are who you think you are.

In my mind, I think I'm a great entrepreneur, right?

In my mind, I want to be one of the best.

And I want, that's where I want to write my history, like how MJ is the best basketball player in LeBron, and you have the Mount Rushmore of basketball.

I want to be on the Mount Rushmore of entrepreneurship.

I feel that.

And this was,

at the beginning, I didn't know what I signed up for.

And I'm really thankful that I did

because I just excelled so much as an entrepreneur and as a leader.

And I have so much more to excel and so much more to grow.

I mean, even how much I've grown over the last 12 months versus how much more I will grow over the next 5, 10, 15 years.

I'm just looking forward to it.

But to say that it is easy

is to lie.

Like, it's definitely not easy.

And I'm I'm just excited for the challenge.

I'm excited for the journey.

And, you know, more importantly, I'm excited just to make products and content and experiences that people love.

You know, for so long, I think when you're younger, and I know you and I grew up in like similar backgrounds, you're like intention is like to make money.

And then once you make the money, you realize how unfulfilling it is.

And then the next chapter comes to like, okay, well, what's fulfilling?

There's a lot of things that are fulfilling.

And depending on your preference, it can sway in either which direction.

But like a huge purpose of mine is making products and experiences that people love.

And when people, you know, watch a piece of our content and say, wow, this helped me so much.

It's made me smile.

It's made my day better.

Or when I see, you know, somebody with a punchy penguin plush and they got it for a niece or a nephew and they're jumping for joy.

Or when we throw an event or create a digital experience that gets people really excited, like these are the things that are fulfilling to me.

And it's such an interesting

moment of maturity that I yearned for in my mind, but I couldn't find a way to kind of get there.

And I think that's the universe gave me Pudgy Penguins and gave me that opportunity.

I mean, even buying it was like a brainless decision.

It was almost like my fingers did the buying and I wasn't even thinking about the purchase really until it was really coming close to closing.

But just super grateful and thankful to be in this situation and just to really push myself to a limit that I've been really wanting to push myself to for a long time.

Would you say buying it was the biggest risk you ever took?

Because you spent two and a half million on it.

So, yeah, it's actually funny you brought that up because

you and I are kings of consuming content from people that are doing better than us.

And a common denominator among successful people is taking risks.

And I had looked at my, you know, my 18 to 23-year-old Sprint,

and I was super successful, but I actually didn't really take that many big risks.

You know, Gel Blaster at the time was a $600,000 investment,

$600,000 in 2.5 or two different things.

And I knew Gelblaster like instantly.

I was like, oh yeah, this is a nerf.

But

this was one that when I was making the decision, I was thinking to myself, is this a decision that, you know, like, why am I doing this?

And I thought, well, the risk reward is here.

And the best entrepreneurs and the most successful guys are not making it not taking risks.

And I'm 23, 24 at the time.

And I thought to myself, well, if you're ever going to do it, you're going to do it now because I can take a two and a half million dollar hit now.

When I'm 45, 50, maybe things are different and I have less time to kind of learn and take those risks.

And I just did the math in my head and I was like, if I'm going to do this, now's the time to do it.

So I did it, but easily my biggest risk.

And it's paid off

in just the knowledge and the people that I've met.

If it went to zero today, it would have been worth it.

But I'm really confident on paper we can build a billion dollar business out of Pudgy Penguins.

I believe it, man.

You guys are crushing it.

You just raised money.

I mean, business is already worth 10 times more than what you paid.

So

I want to touch up on Gel Blaster.

That was one of the most viral products I've ever seen.

You were behind that.

Walk me through what happened when you first discovered the product or did you create it?

No, no, I didn't create it.

I was on

a road trip with Jesse from NELC.

We were going around Sedona and I think we were in Big Bear and his assistant at the time, Courtney, pulled out these little toy blasters.

And

you know me, we're in the business of winning products, right?

Or we were in the business of winning products.

And so understanding that, the second I used it, I thought to myself, well, Nerf was always such a big disappointment.

This is a banger of a product.

Like, this was everything you wish Nerf was.

Nerf was a letdown as a kid.

Complete letdown.

The commercials were so banging.

What I realized was it was the Nerf commercials that got you.

The Nerf commercials were so banging.

The product packaging was so banging.

And then when you actually went around to shoot it, it was just like a massive letdown.

No matter how many new SKUs you thought, every new like Gatlin gun and like M16 that it would make would just be better.

And it just was actually just the same thing, just repackaged in a different shell.

And so immediately after playing with those gel blasters for an hour, I make an Instagram story.

I'm like, who owns this?

And within a day, the power of Instagram and having a network, I get in touch with the founder and the CEO.

And I say,

I want to own this amount of the business.

What is it going to cost?

And we kind of come to the deal that we invested about $600,000.

I became the CMO and just brought in my whole team of...

brand builders and we just redid basically everything except for the actual you know toy gun itself i mean we redid the colors and the skins and stuff but took it over and they were kind of just getting started and we were the jet fuel to kind of bring that thing

to every social network tick tock feed Instagram feed Facebook feed across the country and you guys got in like Walmart too right yeah every we're in every Walmart Costco Best Buy insane

Target nationwide that's insane man yeah that ad I used to get every day for months man good job on that one

So let's talk before that.

I mean, you were doing e-commerce for a while.

Used to run Supreme Patty store.

Walk me through what you were like during those days.

Yeah, I think

I was,

you know, dropped out of high school, got my first job at Ring,

left Ring, sold solar, and had did a couple underground rap shows in between.

And then I...

got hit with a course.

I bought the course and it kind of taught me about dropshipping.

And, you know, having no money and being relatively broke, dropshipping is a great mechanism to kind of find success.

Once we found success pretty early in terms of product market fit on the first store, started building brands, inventorizing, you know, my whole business that you and I got to know each other around was my whole thing was monetizing social influence.

Influencers had millions of followers, but they didn't have millions of dollars.

So I thought to myself, well, you know, they have the eyeballs and they can bring the clicks and the traffic and they were the people that I was paying any I was paying anyway.

How about you remove the ad costs, just split on that and kind of scale that way.

And that was kind of the business that made me

hundreds of millions of dollars in gross over the course of four years and a lot of interesting trials and tribulations since.

But,

you know, that business, again, not that challenging.

You know, I was actually really disappointed in myself looking back at it for that little sprint around that company specifically.

I'm seeing what Mr.

Beast is doing now and the night media guys, you know, Danny Duncan, his business development team, Super Savvy, Jeffree Star.

And I was before all of that.

Right.

But I was just thinking so transactionally

that I wasn't thinking about like the huge, enormous potential.

I was just thinking, I was like complacent with, okay, $100,000 a day, $250,000 a day.

even some days half a million dollars a million dollars a day and then just like in my mind figuring out the net and like what my take-home was and treating it like a cash cow business and not like a brand equity enterprise business.

And what I found over the course of just meeting people over the last couple of years, you know, you can make $10 million a year, but take you, what, 20, 30 years and make a couple hundred million dollars.

When if you like commit to making something that has brand equity and that has enterprise value, you know, you can build that for four or five years and make the same amount of money, if not more,

in a shorter timeframe.

And so, me being young, you know,

almost in a stupor for being like how successful I was from basically as poor as poor can get to, you know, multi-millionaire in my teenage years.

I was looking at business very transactionally and very naively, like, how much money can I make to get a new car or to get a new house or to get a new watch or you know, to buy new clothes or to save, not necessarily how can I build products and companies that can stand on their own, grow on their own, create products that people love and die for, and nurturing community and ultimately enterprise value that can be acquired.

And that's actually the game that though in the short term doesn't give you the same gratification, in the long term, will give you a more joyous life.

And that's the epiphany that I came to about two years ago.

And I think Gel Blaster really gave me that epiphany because we

were really Von Dutch when I had that Von Dutch sprint and I brought them back in 2020.

I saw basically my talent and my network in full effect.

And I had never really leveraged that before.

I had always been super transactional in deals that I was making with people and kind of just leveraging them as the marketing engine.

And then when I saw what I did at Von Dutch and I saw how much money they made,

I was like, oh, dude, if I owned Von dutch i'd be set for life right you know i i just i literally was thinking that because when i walked into von dutch

ed was like yeah we're doing twenty thousand dollars a month

twenty thousand dollars a month by the time i left it was printing millions yeah it was everywhere it was everywhere and and i was just like if this was mine if i owned this this was my business i mean this would be it right i'd be done I'd be this, this would, I would go sell this to some fashion house and it'd be done.

Now, granted, Von Dutch had a lot of the ingredients that I didn't didn't create, right?

I just put the jet fuel on things.

But ultimately, you know, Von Dutch also gave me the confidence to buy Pudgy Penguins

because this might be my thing.

We'll see where my career goes.

And again,

for the foreseeable future, the only thing in front of me is Pudgy Penguins.

And it's actually the first thing I've ever done that I've accepted that I would do this for the next 20 years, which I've never said before about anything else.

Wow.

But I actually think my thing is going to be going into companies and like reviving them if for some reason a new chapter turns in Pudgy Penguins, which I doubt would happen.

But if it was, I thought about it.

I was like, Tumblr would probably be my next buy or something like that.

You'd be good at that, man.

You already proved it with Von Dutch.

Yeah, and Pudgy Penguins.

Yeah, that's true.

Pudgy was dead when you bought it.

It was on the way.

It was below one ETH, right?

Yeah, 0.5.8.

Yeah.

Talk to me about the mental journey because you grew up financially poor most of your child life.

You became a millionaire soon after that.

What was that like mentally?

Because a lot for a lot of people, I feel like that would kind of destroy them.

Yeah, I think the part that I'm blessed about was

before I didn't just go from like high school to like starting my first business to crushing it.

I went from 10th grade, high school dropout, two years of just absolute workhorsing it.

I was the first, I was the first or second person in the office at ring every day.

So I would take, I would get up at 6 a.m., I would get up at 5:30, take the 6 a.m.

bus from Wilshire and Fairfax to Santa Monica, which is an hour bus ride on the 720.

I would get to Santa Monica at 7 and then from 7 to 4

I'd be at Ring.

Wow.

And I did that for like a year and a half, two years.

And

long story short, I knew what a dollar was.

Like when I was budgeting my meals working at Ring, it was $5 and it was three sausage McGriddles at McDonald's and that's what I ate for a year, two years straight.

And so the value of a dollar has never been foreign to me, it's always been very clear.

And so, I'm very thankful for that.

Now, it doesn't mean I didn't make the mistakes that a lot of us make when you come into money, but I was able to be a little more grounded because I had struggled so much

and I had actually been in the workforce.

Like, it didn't come easy, right?

The whole time I was at Ring, the reason why a lot of the guys at Ring got to know me, because I was, you know, packing boxes, you know, RMAing and QAing products,

was because I was listening, I was getting my college education at Ring via YouTube, dude.

And all the top guys, because

I was like one of their very early employees, all the top guys would see me on my YouTube watching me watch Stanford and Harvard and Berkeley alums speak.

And they're like, what are you doing?

I'm like, dude, I'm a college drop.

I'm a high school dropout.

I got to get my college education somehow.

And so

I was fortunate enough to just get like nurtured and to be put into a high-end work environment.

But I guess when when I first started making money, it wasn't until

I was super frugal.

I think I had a million, I had probably half a million bucks before I spent anything.

Wow.

And the only reason why I spent that is because I was with Patty and we go to Ben Simmons' house and the Kardashians are there and they completely just ignore me and I'm like, why are they ignoring me?

And I spent like the whole day thinking about it.

the next day and it's because my swag was just like dude i was wearing dickies with like holes in my thrasher hoodies and i'm like, dude, I got too much money to be still

not dressing appropriately.

And like, that was the only thing I came to as to why no one paid attention to me and why I was a wallflower that whole night was because I just wasn't dope.

I just didn't look dope at least.

And so once I kind of bought the swag and then saw everybody change how they interacted with me based on the swag, which is like so shallow, but you know the business, you know the game.

Yeah, you're the watch.

You're in LA.

You know what I mean?

You know, I'm in the business of monetizing social influence.

Yeah.

You know, who's going to want to work with me if I got holes in my thrasher hoodie from when I was 16?

And so that changed everything.

And then I started becoming a little more spendy.

But I think all in all, I didn't go down the same path that most did, just because I think the way that I grew up and my experience, you know, after high school and really working my tail off for $1,800 a month kind of showed me that, hey, like, be grateful for what you have and don't be a fool.

Now, I still made foolish decisions, but I was always managing money appropriately and made sure that I diversified and bought the right things.

Like I bought my first house when I was 19, you know, pretty much paid it off.

That's early, man.

Yeah.

And so in that respect, I was, I was pretty wise.

Now, you mentioned when you made millions, you felt unfulfilled.

Yeah.

Why do you think you felt that way?

Because you were putting in the work and, you know, You don't feel like you earned it or was it something else?

Dude, you just grow up.

You know, for those of you who grow up in tough situations, a lot of us, at least for me and myself and some of my peers that I've spoken to, you just think that money's that North Star.

And my mom's having a nervous breakdown every month.

I can't do any of the things I want to do because I don't have money.

And I'm just like, if I have money, everything will be fulfilled.

And the second you have it, you realize you're like, okay, well.

The misconception I think is I don't think money will bring you happiness, but not having money, depending on your personality type, but I think a majority of personality types,

living your life surviving is not living.

And so I think I find it hard to believe that a person who spends eight hours a day working a job they don't like or doing something they don't like and is doing it for money and is surviving,

I have a hard time believing that they can be happy.

Now,

when you are living, it doesn't mean you can be happy.

Now, I think you cross that catechism and then you can start exploring like what really brings you joy and purpose and fulfillment.

But I, for myself, when I was growing up, I thought, well, money was this North Star.

Money would change everything for me.

And

though it's better, you know, not being able to worry about paying the bills or your mom.

There's some natural foundation of joy there.

But it is not the parabolic curve of happiness that everybody expects.

But it does create a foundation.

Like, I'm not going to say that being a millionaire and being dirt poor is the same.

Right.

Being a millionaire is a lot better than being dirt poor.

I'll tell you that much.

But it is not that exponential growth of happiness that I think everybody expects it to be.

But it does create a little bit of a moat so that when you do have those really bad days, like today, today was, I woke up grumpy today.

I turned 25 yesterday.

I was just in a bad mood.

I was like, be grateful, Luca.

Every time I'm in a bad mood, I'm just like, be grateful.

Cause you know how bad life could have been?

I mean, life could have shook out so many ways for me.

Yeah.

I mean, really, you know, and I'm just thinking to myself, I'm like, be happy, man.

Because if you told yourself seven years ago that you'd be where you were, you'd say, no, way, Jose.

Right.

And even if you did believe it, which I probably would because I'm a confident person, I probably wouldn't have like truly been able to digest it and feel it.

And so.

I'm grateful for the fact that I'm able to wake up in a home every morning that I wish I had when I was growing up, that I'm able to drive a car that was always a car that I've always wanted to have and able to take care of my family.

And my mom travels the world now.

She's been doing it for the last year, year and a half, and I live through her.

And so these things make me happy.

And so that I'm grateful for, but it's not the end goal to happiness.

You still have to figure that out, but I don't believe you can figure that out while you're still.

struggling every single day and spending your time surviving.

100%.

It's definitely tough because if that's your main priority, then you can't really focus on being happy if making money is like what you think about all day.

I want to go back to school because you dropped out of 10th grade.

I'd like to ask my guests about what are their thoughts on the public education system because I wasn't a fan of it, but what was your experience with it?

Yeah, totally not a fan.

And it's so heartbreaking.

I mean, the more I get older, I used to like

listen to all these conspiracy theorists, and I think there's a lot of

nonsense out there.

But wow, is the system so broken?

And school specifically is one of those systems.

What a broken system.

And if for some reason there was another chapter in my life outside of Pudgy, I think that would be one of the problems I would want to go solve.

Because I'm a high school dropout, dude.

I believe I can go to toe-to-toe with any Wharton business kid, any Wharton Harvard kid.

You would wreck them.

Yeah, any, any Harvard business kid.

I could go toe-to-toe with any of them.

I promise you I could.

I really believe in that.

You put me in a room with an objective, 30 days to build a company, who makes the most money.

I will take any of them to school.

I'm a high school dropout, right?

Like, how can I go and sit there and galvanize and lead and do all of the things that I know how to do?

Well, I just learned off of YouTube and I learned from experience and trials and tribulations and mistakes.

But a lot of the things that I learned, at least in the early stages, I remember making

my first huge year of success, I think

19, I made like $2.1 million was on my tax record.

And I was freaking out.

I was like, dude, taxes legal.

What do I do?

I had no clue.

And nobody really around me had a clue.

Everyone was saying, go to, you know, LLC on LegalZoom.

And all of this is like, dude, LLC on that, I overpaid $1,500 for that LLC worthless thing.

You know, no strategy, no understanding, right?

And even the ability to like just speak well.

Now, the interesting thing about school is there's a couple things that I do agree with.

Like, school teaches you how to do things you don't want to do.

I like the eight-class system, right?

A lot of kids complain and think to themselves, well, I don't want to be a historian, or I don't want to be a biologist.

Why am I taking science?

Or why am I taking history?

There's a lot of things I wake up and do every morning that I don't want to do.

And I think school helps program you in that direction.

I think there's some benefits to school.

I think the concept of school is good and healthy, but how it's executed is a disaster.

I mean, this country is falling apart for the first time.

I've never even gotten into politics, but

from the education system to the integrity of how we're decision-making, it's really tough right now.

But the school system needs to be fixed.

Huge advocate for fixing that system.

Somebody needs to come in and do it.

Maybe if nobody does it before me and I turn a new chapter, maybe it will be me.

But it is easily the biggest crux to this country today.

And I'm so thankful that I left.

I am so thankful.

I'm glad I dropped out of college.

We didn't even talk about college, but they charge so much.

It's like insane.

The reason why I ended up leaving is because I wanted to be a businessman.

Yeah.

And I was going to get a business degree.

And I said, well, nobody can afford it in my family.

So what type of businessman would I be if I went into debt to get a business degree doesn't like sound like something a good businessman would do and that's ultimately why I came to the decision to leave because I said well I might as well just start making money

you know a lot of people look at me and my age and my success and they're like wow this kid's so young and so successful if you actually do the math I've been doing this for about 10 years now

dropped out when I was 16 so nine

A lot of people are successful after doing nine years of something.

That's true.

Look at it that way.

Yeah,

that's why I think some kids, you know, if you're a young kid listening to this, obviously trust your own path and trust your gut and trust your instinct.

But if you want to go make money, why are you still in school?

School's not going to help you teach you how to make money and be successful.

It's not.

I got a person in the Pudgy Penguins team, one of the most important people in the Pudgy Penguins team,

took a leap year on college.

And he's deciding if he wants to go back or not.

He doesn't want to go back, but his parents want him to.

And he'll tell you unbiasedly, unequivocally, he's learned more in, let's just call it the first month of him taking his gap year

than he had in his whole semester of college.

Wow.

I promise you, unequivocally, and he would sit here on this podcast and tell you the same thing.

And if we weren't in a podcast and nobody was watching this, he'd tell you behind closed doors unequivocally.

Because it's just, you don't learn there.

No.

You just learn.

I mean, obviously there's...

things that you learn, but nothing you can't learn off of a YouTube video.

And somebody actually told me, they were like, the best thing that I learned from college is really two things.

The networking and the socializing, which you can never argue.

Totally agree with that, but you're a testament to the other side of it.

You're the king of networking and building relationships and no college background.

And then the stories of the alum coming and giving like their stories, right?

Whether that may be.

But that stuff is recorded and posted on YouTube.

Half of the value of college, and the person who told me this is a billionaire, I won't say his name, but he was one of the few people I had access to that was like a high-net worth individual when I was growing up, just a family friend through a godfather or whatever.

And

it's like, dude, well, that's what college is going to get me.

I can go, I can go network.

I'm in the best city in the world.

I was in Los Angeles, and I can go watch these YouTube videos and learn the best parts of college.

Absolutely.

YouTube University, baby.

Yep.

I want to talk about how you choose your business partners.

Do you go into business with friends?

Is that an option for you, or do you like to keep it separate?

Oh man, I just got my heart broke on

one of these recently, too.

I don't learn my mid-I grew up in such a small family that friends to me are a family, and I have a few of them, and the ones I'm really close with, I have a great relationship with.

I enjoy working with friends because it makes the business

more

fun to get up and do every single day.

It almost feels like a sports, like a sport game.

Like playing some basketball with your friends.

Yeah, like a teammate.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The problem and the lesson that I learned a while ago, but I truly haven't learned because I've made the same mistake, is you try, you got to really try not to do that.

Now, there's two friends of mine that have been able to delineate professional and personal, and they've been my best business partners.

One of them, Peter, who I've known since I was 13.

I mean, we can get in a screaming match in business and then that night go and eat sushi.

99% of people I can't do that with.

Right.

And so there's a very unique relationship because he's a childhood best friend and we work almost in tandem, like a duo really well, like yin and yang.

But in general,

I've made the mistake

of having and working with friends when you can hire them and become their friend and that's okay.

But

being their friend prior to working professionally and then working together professionally is really tough because most people don't have the maturity to take accountability.

And

most people do not have the maturity to separate business and personal, including myself, so I'm not pointing, I have a hard time delineating between the two.

And

the tough conversations are really hard to have.

And building a business that's meaningful, that is going to make a lot of money, is going to require many, many, many tough conversations.

And so

I learned this the hard way.

You can't have the tough conversations with people who

are not ready to have them and that have this existing underlying friendship because they take it personally.

When in reality, my company is a team and our objective is to win.

My company is not a family.

Pudgy Penguins team is not a family.

We're a sports team and we're here to fing.

And if you can't perform, then you're going to be put on the bench.

And if you can't perform on the bench, you're going to be drafted somewhere else.

And that is the only way that I see companies winning.

This is not a place where we sing kumbaya.

This is not a place where we want to,

you know, just kick back and relax.

We have an objective and an obligation not only to ourselves, but this business in specific, Puchy Penguins in specific

has the responsibility of over 10,000 holders who have put their hard-earned money into my business to buy my collectibles.

And it is a business that you want your collectible to be the highest price possible because that's what you want for the people who collect your product, at least for myself.

And the digital collectibles kind of enhance that metric and that functionality.

And I am not going to let them down because you decided you don't want to perform and that you want to go and do something, or be lazy, or act lackadaisical,

or not treat this with the same urgency that everybody else.

So, we very much at Pudgy Penguins have to win.

Maybe with other businesses, you can be a little more chill and lax.

I'm sure there's some D2C and some e-commerce companies that are very

super, you know, emotionally driven and friendship oriented.

I could think of some products that that might bode well with.

But not when I have people putting their hard-earned money into my digital collectibles with the expectation that they'll be worth more one day.

I don't take that expectation lightly.

And we have to perform and provide value to our business, to our fans, to our consumers.

and most importantly to our collectors and our first believers.

And it's brand building on steroids.

It can either really boost you up in a meaningful way or it can tear you down.

And

this one specifically, you have to adopt this mindset and has been really tough because the stress and the conversations and the tough decisions and the macro fighting against you.

I mean, there's so many things that make this business hard that this one specifically has required a really deep understanding of people, you know, not

of having being in that mindset.

And unfortunately, there's been some people who have left us along the way because they just simply haven't been cut from that cloth.

Right.

Not everyone you start with is the people you finish with in business.

It's very rare where the original team is the full exit team, you know?

Yeah.

Luca, it's been a pleasure, man.

What's next for you?

Where can people learn more about what you're up to?

Just give us a follow.

LucaNet's on Twitter and Instagram.

Pudgy Penguins on Twitter and Instagram and TikTok.

What's next for us is, you know, I'll tell you this, Sean, I tell it to a lot of people, but I'm going to be the number one.

I'm going to be the number one.

I'm going to lead Web3

into uncharted territory.

I'm going to lead Web3

where it needs to be, and they're all going to follow, and we're going to create the case study and the roadmap for this to succeed.

And so that's where I'm going.

I want to build Web3's first great IP company.

We're going to build the world's next great IP business.

And we are going to democratize IP in a way that nobody building IP even knows where we're going or how we're going to do it, but we're going to do it.

We know where we're going.

So, love that, man.

I'll be rooting for you.

I know you're going to do it, but I'll be watching.

Appreciate it.

All right, guys.

Thanks for tuning in to the Digital Social Hour.

I'll see you guys next time.