YGG Advisory Board — Round Two
Yield Guild Games (YGG) is proud to welcome an additional round of advisors to the YGG DAO. These are five industry-leading experts who share an interest in driving the economic development of the open Metaverse, with the expertise needed to help the Yield Guild unlock its maximum yield-generation potential.
YGG’s advisors are driven by their vision for the future impact of play-to-earn gaming. Their individual roles will serve different areas of the business, as per their unique strengths. Some will help the guild in accelerating its growth, some will lend assistance in maximizing gameplay yield, and others will serve to assure that the DAO’s most crucial roles are filled with the best talent that the world has to offer.
The following is a brief introduction to YGG’s latest round of advisors: Li Jin, Anirudh Pai, Julien Bouteloup, Gabriel Leydon, and Christy Choi.
They join existing advisors to YGG: Anil Lulla, Aleksander Larsen, Joe Mahon and Eric Arsenault.
Li Jin, Founder of Atelier Ventures
Li Jin is the founder and general partner of Atelier Ventures, a fund dedicated to expansion of the “passion economy” and platforms that increase employment opportunities for creators. Previously, she was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she worked with major consumer software companies, including Substack, Imgur, and Hipcamp.
As an angel investor to several passion-driven startups, Li aspires to help people do what they love for a living, while opening up opportunities for economic growth. As an advisor to the YGG DAO, she hopes to help the guild reach a wider, more mainstream audience while bringing more interest to the play-to-earn movement in the process.
Jin describes herself as “very passionate about economic empowerment” and sees the emergence of the creator economy as a powerful opportunity to make this happen.
“I want to bring more attention to the fact that extreme poverty exists and that the tools are within our reach to be able to break that cycle,” she says, adding that she intends to show the world how YGG fits into that mission.
Li was also the instigator of the Leaping Corgi Scholarship, which auctioned an NFT for the purpose of raising funds to provide YGG scholarships for new players from developing countries to be able to play-to-earn with Axie Infinity.
Anirudh Pai, Partner at On Deck
Anirudh Pai grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and became a tech entrepreneur early on in his career, when he helped form a company to design simulation software for McLaren, the British automotive manufacturer. Pai is an avid world traveler and has experience building companies in different countries, across many continents. At On Deck, his mission is to make sure the best people get into the most innovative companies, a process he sees immensely enabled by cryptocurrencies.
“I always thought crypto would center around what YGG is doing,” Pai says. “When I saw YGG, I thought: this is what I always wanted to do in crypto, which is helping people and making sure deserving areas actually get access to income in a stable way. This is what it always should have been.”
One of the areas in which Pai will assist Yield Guild is figuring out how to best accelerate growth in emerging markets. This is an area where his professional experience will be especially valuable, using his talents to find the best people abroad to fill key positions within the YGG DAO, helping to define their roles, and then advancing their impact through the technology that they use.
Pai appreciates the transparency of the DAO model, as well as the fact that it provides a clear plan of action while remaining flexible. He describes a DAO as “an index of all the coolest stuff that’s happening inside the walls at the same time” and expects to see a lot more attention paid to these types of organizational structures in the very near future.
“YGG is tailoring the world to the 21st or 22nd century by attacking this problem of organizing people in every country — eventually — on virtual worlds,” he says. “So YGG DAO is a mini economy, and the invisible hand is making people better each day.”
Julien Bouteloup, Founder, StakeDAO, Curve crew member, Blackpool
In addition to being an angel investor to several fintech startups, Julien Bouteloup is the founder of StakeDAO, and part of the core team at Curve Finance. A Bitcoin miner since 2010, Bouteloup has been involved in a range of Ethereum projects through smart contracts, audits, arbitrage, flash loans, and other DeFi activities. He also has experience working with Blackpool Finance, a DAO dedicated to NFT gaming and trading, that is driven by quantitative analysis.
As an advisor to the YGG DAO, Bouteloup brings a unique set of skills to the table. He will perform audits of smart contracts to be used by the DAO and help design the architecture around which those smart contracts will interact. He appreciates the transparency and community accessibility that is inherent to the DAO model, as well as the fact that it can readily scale to meet demand.
“It’s a new way; it’s a new paradigm,” Bouteloup says about the concept of the DAO. He acknowledges that problems will arise in any paradigm shift, and that persisting to work through those challenges is the only way to change society for the better.
“Each time (a DAO is launched), we are the evolution of a society,” he says. “These structures always have their pros as well as their cons, and we have to play with the trade offs.”
Gabriel Leydon, Game Designer, former CEO of Machine Zone
Gabriel Leydon is the co-founder and former CEO of Machine Zone. He has been responsible for overseeing the development of some of the biggest mobile gaming titles ever published, including Game of War, Goldstrike, and Final Fantasy. As an advisor, he will be helping the YGG DAO in the areas of strategy and design.
Leydon first met YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon during a tour of Asia in 2018, and having had the chance to get to know Gabby over some years, Leydon knew he wanted to contribute to Yield Guild as soon as he learned about it. He finds YGG DAO’s level of user engagement to be one of its most interesting aspects and recognizes the transformative economic benefits of the play-to-earn movement.
“YGG is structuring the next generation of business,” he says. “I think that players will have a tremendous say in everything they do now, from the games that they play, to how they work, and how YGG works.”
Leydon sees huge growth potential for the guild. “I think YGG’s going to represent hundreds of millions of people,” he said. “It’s going to have challenges just like everything else, but Gabby’s a really smart guy and I’m excited to support him and his team.”
In addition to video game development, Leydon is an expert in community building — another area that will be critical to YGG’s success. He understands what communities require in order to thrive and what keeps them going for the long haul. With a bit of direction, he sees Yield Guild with a membership above one million by the end of its first year.
Christy Choi, Founding Member and Former Director, Binance Labs
As an angel investor and Founding Member of Binance Labs, Christy Choi has been on the search for projects like YGG for years, looking for novel ways to demonstrate how the utilization of cryptocurrency can help to empower unbanked people. As director of the Binance Labs Incubation Program, Choi helped several major projects to grow during their infant stages, including Terra, Polygon, and Perpetual Protocol.
Before Binance, Choi was a senior consultant at Oliver Wyman where she assisted executives of major, Asia-based financial services companies. As a consultant, she helped tackle issues related to strategy design and commercial due diligence, as well as financial and risk modeling.
Choi believes blockchain gaming will drive the mainstream adoption of crypto and feels the YGG DAO has been a significant source of fuel for the play-to-earn movement. “People are finally understanding what these projects really mean,” said Choi, adding that she finds it gratifying to observe the progress and success of founders who stick to their guiding principles and vision.
As an advisor to YGG DAO, Choi will help expand the guild’s subDAOs — not just in terms of function but also geography. She sees the potential to improve the interconnectedness of Yield Guild members across different regions in Asia through the use of subDAOs, which can also serve to better connect play-to-earn projects with DeFi solutions.
Choi is a builder by nature, with extensive experience guiding early stage projects from seed to scaling, and YGG is fortunate to have her onboard during this critical period of the guild’s development.
Join the YGG Discord and follow us on Twitter for future updates.
