Looney Tunes on Hedera! Jon Stock of ACME LABS / King Solomon (Part 1)

King Solomon interviews Acme Labs as part of the Hedera Corner in the LightHouse by Genfinity! Brought to you by LightHouse Report sponsor Hedera Hashgraph and in collaboration with our partner and Hedera wallet provider HashPack.

Transcription

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, we'll get Acme Labs up here. I think we do have Stader coming in as well, so definitely excited to nail out some interviews today. As we get up Acme here, I think I reached out to Marc from HashPack to make sure that Stader’s coming in also. Yeah, but we have Acme Labs up here today on the panel. How are you guys doing today?

ACME Labs – Jon Stock – Founder & CEO
‍Ah, there we go. Doing quite well, thanks. How you doing?

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Living the web 3 dream. Twitter is always one of the most fun and engaging things to deal with and in life, so yeah. I don't wanna, I know you guys are super busy. I know Stader's busy as well. We'll get Stader up here, but while we're getting Stader up here, I always like to start these with allowing, kind of, whoever we're interviewing to provide like an introduction into themselves, and their history in web3. Like, kind of what got you interested, in digital assets? What got you interested in distributed ledger technology, crypto, blockchain? And I'll let you guys take it. Acme.

ACME Labs – Jon Stock – Founder & CEO
‍Awesome. So, I'm Jon Stock. I will be representing Acme today. And let's see, so we can start with my intro into kind of the web 3 Distributed Ledger Tech. So I actually first got exposed to crypto and web3, one of my golf buddies, was working at NASA, and back in like 2014, maybe 2015, I first heard about, some of the stuff related to blockchain Tech, that he was interested in. And didn't quite grock everything that was happening, but it was interesting and he was someone that I had a lot of respect for. And then when I was doing my Master's Degree, so I ended up getting a master's focused on Innovation and strategy with emerging Tech. One of the core kind of Technology Stacks that we started diving into and this was back in 2017 was distributed ledgers, actually. My favorite class I took in grad school was called breakthrough Innovation with Blockchain Technologies, and interestingly enough that was actually, it was during that 2017-2018 time period that I was studying this stuff, Leemon actually came out to Harvard and gave his one of his early intro talks to Hashgraph, and that was actually my first exposure to Leemon and Hedera and Hashgraph Technologies as kind of a alternative distributed Ledger Tech to a typical blockchain. And it happened to talk to some of the folks who were kind of diving more deeply into this stuff, who were mathematicians significantly smarter than I kind of at Leemon's level of, you know, math capacities, and they had done some deep dives into Hashgraph as well and validated, yes, this is this is a bit of the magic. So that was back so that was my first exposure into it kind of where we saw this evolution. Of what our digital experiences will be, what the internet and you know kind of everything evolves into, we think distributed Ledger Tech is kind of a core component of it. We also recognize that there's going to be a you know, we are moving from 2D to 3D. We are moving from kind of passive to interactive content and experiences, and so that's part of the other part that we play into, is seeing where the Convergence between distributed Ledger Tech and mixed reality, augmented reality,  you know, real-time interactive gamification, these sorts of things play. So, that's kind of a long-winded answer around how I personally got kind of exposed to distributed Ledger Technologies, and why we think it's, it's so critical, and then also why we've, we like Hedera, and we've been, you know, kind of in the mix of what's going on there, and ultimately when we, when we chose to, you know, kind of put together the core Tech stack of what we're doing for our platform at Acme Labs, Hedera is in our estimation the most kind of Enterprise class in Enterprise grade DLT to build on top of, and so we really think it's critical to have core infrastructure that is performant and scalable and cost Effective and likely not to go down on you, as well as, you know, be something that long term you can, you know, you have a stable Foundation to build on top of. So that's, that's kind of how we ended up leveraging, you know, Hedera, and then it also turns out it's, it's pretty easy to build with. You know, the, the sdks that they provide and their, their different services are fantastic, so could not say enough good things about, both the, the kind of fundamental technology of Hedera, but the ease with which you can build on top of it, and you know, kind of the, the scalability that it provides, also fantastic.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍That's awesome. I know you guys have Tiki up here as well. I'm pretty sure I remember Tiki from the, from the hash and times event that we did for two days straight. I would love for Tiki to maybe do a little bit of an introduction and then we'll definitely want to get an introduction from Stader as well here.

ACME Labs – Josh – CCO
‍Hi, I can jump in right now, and give a little bit of introduction to who I am. I'm my name is Josh. I, uh, do a lot of the creative stuff around here as far as, you know, brand building and working with the creative potential of this brand. My background, I was, I worked in brand marketing for ABC, NBC before that, Shy day on some big Campaigns for about 18 years working in the entertainment industry. My heart, my passion is really about, artists and bringing art to the masses. And I think that one of the things we talk a lot about with Acme Labs is what is the future of the technology, what is the future of, really delivering art to people and there's a little bit of this, kind of Warholian art for the masses to the space that I think is really interesting, the ability to, democratize and share art to a broad audience, which is cool because before this technology and really like Instagram and those things. If you had art people walk into your house or your gallery and you're limited by the amount of wall space that you have. Right when you introduce VR spaces, people can walk in and wander around and see like an infinite amount of Art. And part of that comes to me because a Couple years ago, I left entertainment marketing and I started my own company that does artisan Tiki mugs. Right, we work with artists all over the world to create these limited edition Tiki mugs. And, we did so because I realized that I had a lot of artist friends who weren't really good at the like branding and selling and business side of those things. And so one of the things we're really passionate about is like letting artists create art. And giving them the tools they need to kind of distribute that art, whether it be in the gaming segment, in the NFT space in the canvas space, traditional space. And so, yes, so I joined this team. Sorry, I'm giving a little bit of a rushed intro. I was supposed to have demo in my house today, and they decided not to show up because they sent people other places. So, I was like scheduled to go out of town with my family and been altering today, so I'm a little Russian trying to gather my thoughts. So, apologize if I'm bouncing all over the place. Okay, I feel like that my pitch today is a little off, but part of it is, I joined this team. So, backstory on me and John, John and I grew up together, I've known him since the sixth grade, fifth, he was fifth, I was sixth when his family moved to town and came to my school and we've been friends ever since. But John's always been on the forefront of, you know, emerging technology. He was that friend who was always talking about things before they happened and so about a year ago, a little over, he took me out to dinner and was like, "Josh, now that you run your own business and you're not working in corporate America like you were forever, I have this project I think you'd be really interested in." And I was like, "I, I'm not building a food truck with you John or an ice cream truck," which if you know John, at one point he owned an ice cream, like a high-end ice cream truck right before all the food truck stuff took off, so he's like on the cusp of trends generally. So, I was joking with him. He said, "No, we're working on this project." And we have, the Chuck Jones estate is our partner, right? So you're talking about one of the preeminent animators of the 20th century. It's like Miyazaki, Disney, Chuck Jones, right? Hannah Barbera, you can throw in some others but this guy was responsible for Marvin the Martian and Wiley Coyote, and all of these different characters that you grew up with. Co-created Bugs Bunny with Tex Avery, and you're like, "Man, that's crazy!" That's like it starts to make your wheels spin about the potential of taking a legend and bringing his content, his art into a new medium, into a new generation of where technology is going. And so I left, I told them I think about it. I was pretty much up all night that night because the wheels in my head are spinning and I'm going, "Man, there's so much potential in this space!" And even more so when you get to start with something like, "Hey, we get to open Chuck Jones' catalog of characters that were never used and play." And so as a brand builder, I worked on things like Lost, Once Upon a Time, Agents of Shield, Modern Family. I launched a bunch of different things. One second, sorry, my toddler's asking for food at the same time. Modern Family, and you know, I worked on Parks and Rec. I worked on a bunch of different shows that people would know. So branding's always been really at the heart of what I do. And when you think about the potential for building new brands in this space, it's infinite and amazing. And so we're really passionate about building something that's lasting. I know that a lot of people have asked us, like, "You know, you're launching a digital collectible collection on Hedera. How come you're not doing the hard show? How come you're not doing the white list? How come you're not doing all of these things?" And the reality of all of that for us is that we want to build something that we can bring a broad audience into because there's so much potential. And to this point, the space has really been limited by the early adopters. So we're looking at ways to make that technology invisible and to bring more and more people into this space. And there are a lot of ways we're doing that, and I'll let John talk a little bit more about the tech. But what I'm really passionate about is the story. So John can talk to you all day about tech and why we're building on it. I'm going to tell you why we think this platform has the potential to bring storytellers' visions to a broader audience. When you are in entertainment as long as I once you realize that there are like 10 entities that control everything that ever gets produced, and they tend to produce a lot of the same things. Like, how many Law and Order type shows have you seen? How many medical dramas? How many Friends knock-offs? So the thing that has changed with technology is like TikTok and Instagram and YouTube let people share their content with a broader audience than ever before. And I think that VR/AR, distributed ledger technologies will allow people to do that on a bigger scale. And that's what makes it interesting for me. And that's why when the entertainment industry started to collapse in on itself, I got out of it because they're all struggling with streaming and how to make money on streaming, which is a 12-year-old technology. I don't think it's the answer. I think the answer is looking at where technology is going and figuring out how to tell the best stories we possibly can across those mediums because we're in the nascent stages of trying to figure out what that looks like. So, sorry, that's probably a lot. That's a little bit of mine.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍That's totally fine, and don't worry about the toddler in the background. Obviously, you know, I have three kids of my own here, so it gets a little bit wild when you're trying to do meetings or whatever it may be, and I know that you've had a hectic day as well.

ACME Labs – Josh – CCO
‍It's one of those days where you plan to not be at the house and they, like, didn't even call. So they're supposed to do demo in our bathroom and redo a bunch of things, and literally nine o'clock, my kids are in the car, we're waiting for people to be here. They're supposed to be here at eight. They called me at 9:15, and they're like, "Well, we're not coming today."

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍So yeah, we got yelled at. I had my wife had me drag like a 200-pound dresser down out after the trash guys came. The trash guys came back around, saw the dresser, saw them on the phone, and they came up and knocked on the door, and they're like, "We're not, you know, we're not taking this." I'm like, "No  I wouldn't have put it out here if I thought you guys were gonna be taking it. I want somebody else to take it." It's been an interesting day, so I definitely want to get to Staderr, and would love to hear Stader's, kind of, you know, maybe what you know, your introduction into this space, what got you interested in crypto, web 3. I should mention, obviously, Stader does operate staking aspects with HBAR X on Hedera, but also, you know, Stader as a whole has multiple different ecosystems that they deal in, but I would love to hear from just a personal standpoint, maybe a little bit of an introduction from yourself, who you are, how you got into web three.