AMA Recap: Invisible College
Date: Aug 12th, 2022
Host: DeFiNaut
Guest: Nick deWilde (Co-Founder) and Rockwell Shah (Co-Founder)
Hello, Raccoon family and crypto enthusiasts!
We recently hosted an AMA with Invisible College. Here’s the AMA transcript for those who missed the live session. We sincerely hope you have as much fun reading it as we did while running the AMA!
[Nick]: Hey all, I’m Nick, one of the founders of Invisible College. I’ve spent most of my career in professional development. Prior to starting IC, I was a product marketing leader at Guild Education, a Series E company in the corporate upskilling space. I also ran a startup successful bootcamp that helped high-potential people transition into design and marketing roles at high growth startups. I’ve got my BA and MBA from Stanford.
[Rockwell]: Hey ya’ll! I’m Rockwell Shah, one of the co-founders of Invisible College. After graduating Cornell University in Economics, I led and scaled successful companies in the healthcare space, including 4PatientCare and Pzizz.
After transitioning into web3, I created one of the largest blockchain gaming guilds in the world, launched a DeFi protocol that raised $2MM in three days, and co-founded Invisible College, a web3 university where the tuition is an NFT 🙂
[Nick]: BTW you can find me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/nick_dewilde) or my monthly newsletter (https://junglegym.substack.com/)
[Rockwell]: You can find me on twitter here: https://twitter.com/RockwellShah
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: Thank you for the short but sweet introduction gents. I see where the idea for Invisible College came from or atleast where its roots lay. I must admit while checking out the website initially and then everything going on, I immediately fell in love with how everything seems to fit together. All parts make sense. So props for that!
[Nick]: Thanks. It’s been a fun ride 🙂
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: I see there’s someone on the team with a lot of eye for detail too, am I right?
[Nick]: Yeah that would be Jake (our artist) and Zac (our designer)
[Rockwell]: We’re all pretty detail oriented 🙂 Sometimes I even see when Nick’s hair is out of place
[Nick]: True
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: I have the same treat 😄 so that’s why it was very pleasing to discover Invisible University. ok let’s move to the pitch!
[Rockwell]: Invisible College 😜 I feel like that was a test lol
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: haha jokes on me! OK it’s time for the infamous elevator pitch. Imagine you find yourself in an elevator with 100 raccoons, and they all want to find out what Invisible College is all about. Let’s go!
[Rockwell]: Invisible College is a web3 school that students access via an NFT. By owning at least one of our Decentralien NFTs, you’ll get access to over $2000 of courses from some of the world’s top creators and instructors, a private discord server with an amazing community of learners, and weekly events that help you stay on top of what’s happening across the crypto ecosystem.
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: ok that works. I like how it’s immediately clear for the NFT investor that he’s getting value, and the value is defined.
[Nick]: https://twitter.com/decentraliens/status/1557019699241635840?s=20&t=MqLNxMo8zeKV6mrYRN8vHg — This is our latest announcement and I think the video makes a really strong pitch
[Rockwell]: Video is pretty cool. Voice actor is amazing.
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: check it out raccoons!
[Rockwell]: (I may or may not have been the voice 😂)
[Nick]: Listen to those sweet dulcet tones
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: so the courses are from Nasacademy then?
[Rockwell]: The courses are from all sorts of instructors, and they are hosted on NAS academy. For example, I have a course as well, the Bitcoin Masterclass course.
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: Just watched the video, love it!
[Nick]: https://nas.io/rockwell
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: And I do have to say the voice acting is really good 😄
[Nick]: That’s what @rockwellshah’s human face looks like
[Rockwell]: 😁
[Nick]: Unfortunately he’s married ladies[Rockwell]: Wait till you see my robot face.
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: I was wondering however, what can you tell us about the idea for Invisible College itself? Tell us about its origins and what inspired you to build? Like it’s great seeing everything you’ve established, but we want to learn about the journey
[Nick]: After personally experiencing the benefits and challenges of getting into web3, it became clear to us that crypto is:
– Potentially lucrative
– Challenging to master
– Risky to explore without guidance
Rockwell and I were lucky to have patient friends who could help us understand tricky concepts, navigate confusing applications and avoid sketchy websites that could drain our funds. That enabled us to experience magic moments in crypto that got us excited enough to build a project of their own. At Invisible College we want to pay it forward to others.
As we started building and designing the school, we realized that exploring web3 was very different from web2. In web2, most people start out as builders and only start investing if they are fortunate enough to hit the accreditation threshold. In web3 that script is flipped. Just by using a web3 product, you become an investor. Those who experience the magic of ownership, often get so excited that they can’t help but start building something. We wanted Invisible College to be a school that facilitated this journey by helping people learn, invest and build in Web3.
Our next unlock was recognizing the potential of combining a school with an NFT project. We started to imagine the amazing opportunity of owning a piece of a great learning institution like Harvard or Stanford. Each new course would not only provide new learning opportunities but could also increase the value of the token learners use to access the school.. If at any point the school stopped serving the student’s needs (or started asking for donations) students could sell their stake and reap the value. That made the team excited about giving students ownership of the school via an NFT collection.
That also had the added benefit of reinforcing the floor price of the NFT. Unlike other NFT projects where price depends solely on hype, our Decentraliens could be bolstered by the value of all the courses, events, content, and community that the NFT unlocks.
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: I’m in the crypto space since 2013 and back then atleast some stuff was “basic” or you had some time to figure stuff out before joining or using it. Right now, it all just goes so fast, that there’s indeed a need for educational material that is entry level.
[Nick]: Totally
[Rockwell]: I think it’s important to note we teach both entry level and more advanced material. Invisible College is a home for all skill levels.
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: ok thanks! I agree that’s what I meant by the fact that I like you immediately defined the value in the pitch, meaning it’s tangible. It’s not based on promises or a roadmap with a “to be built” metaverse — which can be great — but it’s better for the floor if that value is already there
[Nick]: The critical thing we care about is the raito of floor price to tangible value you can unlock day 1. Right now we’re at around a $240 floor price and the course catalog is valued at about $2400 (so about 10x)
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: yep and it’s not like the value is gone after using it like is the case for a lot of nfts. They do an airdrop of some sorts and the next one in line to acquire the nft doesn’t have access to that utility anyore. The content is forever “rewatchable”. Awesome! Lets take a moment to talk about the team that makes the project possible, how many members do you have in your team? and tell us about their background.
[Rockwell]: Besides me and Nick, there’s:
- Zac, our designer who is currently the Head of Design for a venture-backed startup in the infrastructure space. He’s led product and design teams at a bunch of different early stage technology companies and is responsible for our website.
- Jake, our artist, who has 13+ years of design experience and is leading the design team at Labelbox.
- Drew, our engineer who’s currently a senior infrastructure engineer and has worked at a bunch of well known Silicon Valley companies architecting and automating everything from pipelines to kubernetes deployments. He wrote all the code for the NFT mint.
- Then there’s Lyle, who leads our community and has worked as an account manager and growth marketer at a bunch of VC-backed startups. He’s been with us since day one and was one of our first community members
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: Love it, a bunch of smart and experienced people together, only good stuff to come from that 😉 Are there any notable partnerships or investors that you can disclose? What type of value will they be adding to the project?
[Rockwell]: And bad jokes 😜
[Nick]: Yes! The biggest one is our exclusive partnership with Nas Academy which is giving all Decentralien holders free access to over $2,000 of high quality courses. You can check out more about the partnership benefit here: https://twitter.com/decentraliens/status/1557019699241635840. As for investors, we’ve got folks here and there who picked up a bunch of Decentraliens, but we didn’t want to do the VC thing. Taints the vibe of the community.
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: Are you looking into potentially adding courses from other providers or is it an exclusive deal?
[Nick]: Everyone who’s invested is invested via the collection
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: that makes sense. Would you say Invisible College is a DAO?
[Nick]: We will likely drive independent courses to the Nas Platform, but there’s nothing stopping us from adding other platforms. That said, we likely wouldn’t do anything too competitive with Nas
[Rockwell]: There are very few real DAOs in existence today. We are experimenting with the best governence structure for the community because ultimately we want it to exist regardless of any one person
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: yes “DAO” is a bit like “decentralization”, it’s more a spectrum than a concrete thing. So right now, are the NFT holders’ opinions asked for some directions of the project?
[Rockwell]: Yes, our most recent experiment is using advisory groups for different topics, like Merchandise and Corporate Education. So Decentralien holders can signup to a group that most interests them and help move the school forward on that domain. Ultimately every person voting on every issue doesn’t work. So we are experimenting with different structures to allow holders to have more thoughtful governence ability, and influence the direction of the school.
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: ok that makes sense, thank you for explaining. So we already know once you hold a Decentralien NFT, you get access to the courses, is there other utility? I also know there’s different levels of scarcity and rarity, can you explain if there’s any value there? Also do I get some extra if I hold multiple Decentraliens?
[Nick]: Holding a Decentralien NFT gives you access to over $2,000 of high quality courses, all of our weekly learning events, and our private learning community that we host in Discord. Oh, and you can access the back catalog of over 100+ event recordings.
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: ok so there’s a private learning community and then also event recording, are those like pannel talks?
[Rockwell]: ^cool graphic of benefits
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: nice!
[Rockwell]: It ranges across a bunch of topics, including lessons, panel discussions, fireside chats, townhalls, and more. You can see a list of descriptions here: https://invisiblecollege.notion.site/d8c791fce296406aae9f7cae33f6fa1e?v=0171998808b54489afb27fa624cad072
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: ok cool, let’s have a looksy raccoons!
[Rockwell]: Recently we had both the founders of Rampp and Curious Addys come in and demo their products live and show our students in depth how to use them. That was really cool.
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: I’m personally not aware what Rampp and Curious Addys are but I’ll quickly google them 😄
ok that looks cool indeed! ok so now a question about the investor mindset vs the using mindset with each of them having different amounts of capital. Have you thought about integrating with an NFT lending/renting protocol so users that cannot afford the floor price, could still get access to the library of courses?
[Rockwell]: Yes! It’s something we are looking into but it’s a bit tricky, especially with a Solana collection. Hopefully we can figure out a solution for that because it would be a cool feature.
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: Yes you could also argue ofcourse that it might have a negative effect on the floor price, because maybe people would rather rent it instead of buying it. But that’s a whole other discussion
[Rockwell]: It really depends on demand. We wouldn’t launch rental unless demand was really high.
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: that’s true!
[Rockwell]: But there’s only 10,000 decentraliens. And there are a lot more than 10k people in this world that want to learn crypto.
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: definitely and they look cool too 😄
[Rockwell]: Which one is your favorite? 😝 putting you on the spot!
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: I see some have a bit of that solana spirit, that’s actually the one(s) I like. That background with one color going into the other
[Rockwell]: 😏
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: you see, I immediately spot the rare ones
[Rockwell]: You have the eye!
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: How many courses are there available at the moment, and what type of courses are you mainly focussing on?
[Nick]: There are currently almost 20 courses you can access with the NFT and that number will be growing over time as Nas adds more courses to the platform. Currently they cover topics like:
– How to launch an NFT Project
– Community Building
– Video Editing
– Crypto Investing
– Audience Growth
– Storytelling
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: I had a cool idea btw, maybe it’s already materialized, but what you could do is mint another “diploma” NFT that people get airdropped once they’ve successfully completed all the courses or maybe it’s a bad idea 😄 just thinking out loud here haha
[Rockwell]: We’re experimenting with stuff like this in different ways. For example, we just announced today POAP integration so if you come to an event, you get a POAP. And then we give prizes randomly each month, quarter, and year to people based on random draws and being at the top of the leaderboard
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: nice! that’s a good way of engaging the people more indeed. BTW talking about the solana trait, I noticed the collection is indeed on Solana. Could you please explain why you’ve chosen that blockchain?
[Rockwell]: We chose Solana for a few reasons: 1. Low Gas fees make for a better 1st expirence for newbies, 2. We liked the UX of the Phantom wallet and Magic Eden much more than Metamask and OpenSea, 3. We didn’t want new people to stress about their environmental impact, which made Solana much more compelling. The platform has had some downsides (mainly outages on the day we were supposed to mint!) but it’s been a pretty good experience all in all.
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: Yeah I mean we’re all still experimenting right. Ethereum, Solana, Tron, you name it. It’s like trying to improve the car whilst it’s riding
[Nick]: Rockwell wanted to mint on Tron
[Rockwell]: lol be careful people might actually believe you
[Nick]: 🙂
[Rockwell]: It’s a fun, bumpy ride 🙂
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: ok so before we move to the community part (telegram and twitter) we would like to look at what is happening in the near term. Could you please share with us the first milestones on the roadmap? “
[Nick]: The main item on our roadmap is to add more courses and valuble stuff into our education bundle to increase the value that the NFT can unlock. Currently our Value to Floor Price ratio is around 10x. We’d like to keep increasing that. As the floor price rises, that will be more and more demanding.
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: Awesome, because you need to be able to keep the holders happy that have watched all the educational content and also new investors. And there’s more than just courses too ofcourse 🙂
btw 1 last question, could you explain about the launchpad thingy?
[Rockwell]: We help projects that come out of our community launch and get traction/raise money. We did it with Starship Guild pretty successfully
[Nick]: $2M in a single weekend
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: ok that’s amazing!
[Rockwell]: We’re also hosting a crypto-wellness app called Bliss in our community right now
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: ok so thank you so much @rockwellshah and @dewildebeast for joining us today and teaching us about Invisible College, we really had a blast
[Rockwell]: Thank you for having us!
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: I hope to be hearing more of you in the future and I’ll sure keep track of the latest since I follow you now on twitter 😉
[Nick]: Thanks Raccoons! It was fun!
[Rockwell]: GO GET EM RACCOONS!
[DeFiNaut | founder @DeFiRaccoons]: Thank you guys!
Live Community Qs
Q1: I was evaluating the prices of the decentraliens and I noticed that there is quite a wide range of prices. Is this price difference merely subjective or are there some Decentraliens that incorporate more benefits than others? Can you please explain this to us?
R1: It’s just subjective based on how it looks and rarity. All the decentraliens have access to the same functions (although there is a private paladin chat in the Discord).
Q2: Invisible College is quite a unique name, what was the inspiration behind coming up with this name? Any backstory?
R2: Yes! It’s actually inspired by this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_College
Twitter Qs
Q1:With the various features that you offer in the Invisible College Ecosystem, who is the Invisible College platform actually for? who is your real target market? is this designed for Token Investors, Web3 Builders, or The Crypto-Curious?
R1:
- People who are just starting their crypto journey and want to learn with a community of awesome people
- People who are interested in investing in crypto and learning important frameworks to become better investors
- People that want to stay up to date and be the first to know about new DeFi protocols, NFT collections, and opportunities in crypto
- Builders who want a supportive community around them and access to other people building in crypto
- People who are interseted in transitioning their career into web3 and want the resources and connections to help make it happen
- Advanced crypto people who want a community of other experienced crypto people to chat, take courses and have fun with
Q2: Has there been or will there be integration with metaverses? Which metaverse projects do you aim to collaborate with? Can you tell us about your partnerships in this field? Also, what plans do you have to grow your Community?
R2: Depends on your definition of the metaverse. For me, metaverse means my digital life. So Invisible College is hosted on Discord, which I consider a metaverse. If you mean like a game or some kind of avatar based metaverse (gathertown, etc), no, we don’t have any plans to integrate with an existing metaverse although we get approached all the time to do it and if the community really wanted it we would explore it. But no one in the community has really asked for a metaverse integration.
We grow the community through a number of ways, including doing AMAs (hello!), PR, public events, partnerships, guest lectures, seminars, and free workshops.
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