Non-Fungible Tokens: Federico García Of Qurable On The 5 Things You Need To Know To Create a Highly Successful Career In The NFT Industry

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

I would love to know them, for now I can tell you that our recipe includes: teams, strong knowledge of technology, daily analysis of the requirements of different industries, a lot of trial and error and above all questioning and challenging the model on a daily basis. The collections that made history, like BAYC, opened a super interesting path- now it’s up to the rest to continue building in order to (in 2 or 3 years) be able to list the 5 things required to be successful. Today the successes are few and in many cases ephemeral.

Many have observed that we are at the cusp of an NFT boom. The thing is, it’s so cutting edge, that many people don’t know what it is. What exactly is an NFT and how can one create a lucrative career out of selling them? To address this, as a part of our interview series called “5 Things You Need To Know To Create a Highly Successful Career In The NFT Industry”, we had the pleasure of interviewing Federico García.

Federico García, is Founder & CEO at Qurable. He has more than 20 years of experience in the business and technology market. His vocation is to create projects from scratch and make them scale.

Passionate about technology, music and sports, he has an academic background in Software Engineering from Argentina´s National Technological University, was a juror for MIT, member of several organizations such as the Argentine Union of Young Entrepreneurs and he actively participates as a mentor to entrepreneurs.

During his professional life, he spent time at several large companies and led his own company: Lagash, which was acquired by MercadoLibre in 2020. During his time at MercadoLibre he was Product Director within the Marketplace in Fashion, International Purchase, Supermarket, Ads, Motors , Real Estate and the entire search and purchase flow.

Qurable empowers interactions between brands, creators and their audiences creating memorable relationships thanks to the power of Web 3.0. We supercharge membership and loyalty concepts, targeting specific audiences through tokens and adding unlimited value for the collectibles communities.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about your backstory and how you grew up?

There has been a common thread throughout my life: the obsession with innovation and design. I´ve been a sneaker collector ever since I was a young kid, always on the lookout for something different, new, or even disrupting. Majoring in computer sciences enabled me to be a part of innovation- of course at first, I did not innovate much as a programmer, but my objective was to prepare myself and do so.

Is there a particular book, film, or podcast that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

Let my people go surfing, by Patagonia´s founder Yvon Chouinard, is a book that reflects many of the things that I have always questioned about traditional business models. Retelling the Patagonia experiment, Chouinard shares his view on management, leadership, teamwork, constant innovation, and always daring to defy the status quo. As an entrepreneur, I emphasize the importance of constantly revising business models, the importance of clear objectives, committed teams, and the importance of a definition for success that goes beyond the economy. In 2022, and situated in this current worldwide state, I idealize Yvon for his conviction and consistency, sustained throughout his life- it is the reflection of everything that is good and aiming to help the world.

Is there a particular story that inspired you to pursue a career in this new industry? We’d love to hear it.

The wonderful thing about working with exponentially growing technologies is that it´s not just one inspiring story, but thousands of them that inspire us daily to create new user experiences. We were fascinated by the irruption of CryptoPunks on the NFT market and the announcement of Facebook´s name becoming Meta- yet we were constantly interpellated by the existing conflicts as regards the acquisition of these NFTs (that was maybe the most inspiring point). Generating value in the NFT market by creating tokens that generate a unique relation between physical and digital assets, while reducing the existing obstacles for users to a minimum- that’s how Qurable was born. Focusing on connecting the physical and digital worlds through NFTs and fixing upon user experience, one of our first features was allowing clients the purchase of NFTs without requiring a crypto wallet.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began this fascinating career?

After selling off our first company to Mercado Libre (March 2020), due to issues regarding contracts, I became a part of Mercado Libre´s direction for two years, during which the whole world went through the pandemic and Mercado Libre grew in solely one of those years 71% of it single, active users. I was lucky enough to lead the M&A process (which was an accelerated MBA)- I would never have imagined I would be negotiating a buy-sell contract with Latin America’s first unicorn and one of the world´s most important marketplaces. I really am fortunate.

My own company (employing over 500 people) and the years at Mercado Libre, impacting through a product hundreds of thousands of users along the region. The best is yet to come!

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

The funniest mistake was allowing a client to choose an event, a moment, somewhere for us to go and get acquainted (like an after-office). The client chose a baseball game, to which I went alone, joining the client and four others. It was fun, mainly because back in my country we are only concerned about soccer, Messi and Maradona, so I honestly had no clue about baseball´s rules or dynamics whatsoever. Therefore, we spent the afternoon trying to get me to understand the game and it´s social dynamics instead of business.

Besides the funny anecdote, the most important lesson (which I thankfully encountered pretty fast, as mistakes frequently rise in start-ups) is the importance of counting on a team that is not only committed but also diverse. I consider different approaches to the same issue extremely valuable, as they usually offer faster, more approachable solutions for which — of course — commitment allows successful implementation.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I believe every person we encounter has an impact in our path. Many people have shaped me. My current associates (who were also my partners in previous companies) are an example of this, but there are three people outside of my organization that I would like to mention.

People like Alejandro Scannapieco (Managing Partner Business Hacking Studio at Globant ex CFO Globant), helped me understand the importance of scaling the business and various other relevant insights about the VC world which is now capitalizing so much. Daniel Ravinovich, COO at Mercado Libre, who during my time there made a better professional out of me by fixating on every detail of the products (obsessed with pixel perfect), still considering that MVP must be generated, where the minimum (the M on MVP) is needed to reach the success we aim for with the product´s next iteration. Matias Wolosky (CTO & Co-founder at Auth0), who without realizing it inspires us with every talk at NewTopia Community, shedding light on Product-Market fit and the ups & downs of enterprising.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We are currently working with UNHCR, from Argentina, creating the first model for a tokenized NGO, which will allow the organization an efficient and transparent management model, where all the donations they receive can be registered in the blockchain, guaranteeing traceability. This is an example of an NFT project with high social impacts, which will allow UNHCR , among other things, to decentralize and expand the scope of the organization, thus having a greater impact on the communities that contribute to its cause, since they will be able to give benefits (token rewards) to these people, highlight them as members and make them part of the election process of certain activities. We are taking the technological model of NFT to the extreme, making it dynamic, meaning the NFT evolves as the person becomes more committed to the cause that UNHCR pursues.

Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. I’m sure you get this question all the time. But for the benefit of our readers, can you explain in your own words what an NFT is, and why people are spending so much money on them?

We are facing a new kind of internet. NFTs are part of web 3 but not the whole of it. As it happens in times of transformation, some components stand out more than others in the initial phase, promoting change and leading the first wave of adoption.

We could spend hours talking about the applicability of NFTs, but the important thing about this is to understand that these technologies are in continuous development and that we must analyze in which business models they can be applied and in which they cannot or what use we can give them in our daily lives. A Token-Gated that enhances interactions between brands, creators and their audiences is not the same as collectibles or tokens that can serve as proof of attendance for concerts or events, also different to those that we can use in virtual worlds or Metaverses, where a Nike shoe can dress my avatar in that metaverse, and even me, if Nike would send me the physical model at the time I buy the NFT version for my avatar.

In the next few years we are going to witness radical changes in the use of these technologies. The way in which we relate to physical goods today will no longer be the same, as physical goods will be able to have their digital twin. Our identity will be both in the real world and in the metaverse.

Today, we combine fungible and non-fungible tokens to enhance people’s digital identity and generate engagement between brands and creators with their audiences. Nowadays, all of us who interact with web 3.0 and NFTs are early adopters- we have to start talking about value and cases of use; the speculation is over.

The NFT industry seems so exciting right now. What are the 3 things in particular that most excite you about the industry? If you can, please share a story or example for each.

Web 3 is the next important leap in the way we consume and share information online. It will have a wide variety of uses, that are even hard to imagine today, but I highlight:

• Decentralization. The storage of data that cannot be censored by any entity, such as governments or corporations. On our platform, one of the user cases that we see growing the most is that of NFTicket, where decentralization and ownership transfer allows for a rediscovery of this business model.
• Token-Gated scenarios. Democratizing, empowering and growing exponentially the economic model of small creators, artists, influencers, streamers or large content generators who live off the value of what they showcase to their audiences- but today they monetize only 10%/ 20% of the total value they generate due to the existing platforms that take advantage of centralization. This type of Token that we have in Qurable allows these fantastic creators to unlock exclusive content to their most loyal audiences.
• Usability. Today web 3.0´s NFTs are only for a few. This technology has many setbacks, and companies like mine seek to massify these experiences — and there is no other way to achieve that without thinking about the user. The experience we had with Adidas is a clear example: the marathon´s finishers were able to get an NFT with or without a crypto wallet. We minted more than 8,000 tokens in a couple of hours, enabling those finishers to get their NFT Medal in a single click, reducing web 3.0´s setbacks completely.

Just as web 2.0 was exponentially adopted- thanks to service-based platforms, web 3.0 will be exponentially involved in the way we relate to assets, what we use them for, what they enable us to do and to whom they belong.

New business models will be enabled; where small creators will become companies, where companies will launch only in the metaverse and where today’s large companies will be forced to understand their audiences 1000 times more for now, regardless of the age or name of the consumer, what really matters is their behavior. This is where a digital address fulfills an important function in the understanding of a person’s digital identity.

What are the 3 things that concern you about the industry? Can you explain? What can be done to address those concerns?

Although there are many questions, among others, about decentralization issues, user experience and scalability of these technologies- I understand that these are to be expected, given the changes we are witnessing. We have a great opportunity to make a better internet, based on years of experience and I think that we have ahead of us as web3 users more advantages than disadvantages as we focus this new process on the real needs of users.

My focus and that of my team is to generate value, not to force cases where the use of this technology is counterproductive for the user. Above all things, we consider how these new tools that are being enabled can solve today’s problems. My witness user is not me, but my daughter. GenZ has a different logic and we have to start studying its behavior to get ahead.

What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about NFTs? Can you explain what you mean?

Wow, there are many myths that are created day by day, about the value of collections, economic profitability, usability, that NFTs are only for a few and I could go on, however I like to think of myths as stories belonging to the past, and web 3 is the future- a future that is being built will surely have areas for improvement ahead, still, I trust that we will be able to solve and overcome each of them.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen people make when they enter the NFT industry? What can be done to avoid that?

The biggest challenge we face in this transition stage is to really experience the paradigm shift- to stop thinking about what we know and believe today that can be done on the internet, in order to really project the new experiences that can be achieved on the web. 3. To focus on users and communities is something that is heard daily but not always applied. The challenge that we who are in this space have is to raise that value so that the common people do not see an NFT as a JPG of several thousand dollars, but rather see the utility or even better see how these uses get into their day, as it happened with social networks in web 2.0. This is our mission; to democratize and accelerate the adoption of these aspects through real cases.

How do you think NFTs have the potential to help society in the future?

Of course, we already talked about what we are doing with UNHCR, but there is also a big change for the way small and medium-sized enterprises approach their business in developing economies. Blockchain-based payment solutions can bridge a gap and open up new markets, as blockchain -by its nature- connects groups of entities and allows data to be synchronized between multiple independent stakeholders, bridging the financial gap that exists today for this type of company, since they do not need to resort to centralized databases to which they do not have access to due to lack of scoring for their online management.

What are your “5 Things You Need To Know To Create a Highly Successful Career In The NFT Industry?”

I would love to know them, for now I can tell you that our recipe includes: teams, strong knowledge of technology, daily analysis of the requirements of different industries, a lot of trial and error and above all questioning and challenging the model on a daily basis. The collections that made history, like BAYC, opened a super interesting path- now it’s up to the rest to continue building in order to (in 2 or 3 years) be able to list the 5 things required to be successful. Today the successes are few and in many cases ephemeral.

If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I believe that everything related to education generates the greatest impacts. Decentralized organizations require a great responsibility on the part of individuals, but at the same time, they allow more people to be part of communities in which they still cannot participate by themselves today. We can build healthy and sustainable systems that provide access to education to many people . The technology is ready and available for all of us to use and be part of this transformation.

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

If it weren’t with Yvon, who I already mentioned, then without hesitation I would say Michelle Obama. I admire her deeply for various reasons, but if I had to mention only 3 words: Leadership, impact and Empathy.

Thank you so much for these excellent stories and insights. We wish you continued success on your great work!