9: Jacob Horne - Markets for What Matters
Jacob Horne (Website, Zora, X, Farcaster), is co-founder and CEO of Zora, a platform that allows the tokenization of media.Jacob started his career at Coinbase where he was a product lead and helped create USDC. Five years ago, he left to wade deeper into the waters of internet and crypto-native coordination and creativity and co-founded Zora.His central interest is how people coordinate together using the internet—the includes currencies, markets, ownership, art, speculation, and memes. We discuss how memes and symbols enable coordination, "The Meme and the Memo," words, money, and laws, Zora's premise built on Stewart Brand's "information wants to be free but it also wants to be expensive," a case for markets around attention, the new version of Zora and "a coin for every piece of content," speculation vs. gambling, token-powered brands, Ethereum and Solana, Coinbase and USDC, and a wide-ranging personal section that showcases why Jacob is so generative.The parting prompt I hope this conversation leaves all of us with is this: while information is ~free today (and also abundant, infinite), it is also quite expensive to consume in terms of time. We ought to think carefully about what content we spend our precious time consuming and rewarding.
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Speaker A: Welcome to Dialectic, Episode 9. Jacob Horne is co-founder and CEO of Zora, a platform that allows you to tokenize media. I don't know many people who are more energizing to spend time with than Jacob. He is so generative and full of ideas and is eloquent in explaining even the most esoteric of them. Jacob started his career at Coinbase when he was effectively plucked off of Twitter and flew across the world from Australia to join them. And he spent several years there, including on a small team that started USDC, the stablecoin.
But he's really spent most of his career in the last 5 years working on Zora. Jacob is somebody who is ultimately excited about and focused on how people coordinate. For him, that means an obsession with the internet, with memes, and with currency and tokens. For all of the people in the world who give crypto a bad rap for being short-term, uninspired, and purely transactional, Jacob is the complete other end of the spectrum. This is a conversation that I think gets into some profoundly important ideas as we have over the last 15, 20 years, and certainly into the future, move from a world where information was scarce to a world where it is not only abundant but effectively infinite.
and in that world we have to radically rethink how we think about information. There's a core idea in this conversation that ties back to a Stewart Brand quote where he says, information wants to be free but also expensive. And you'll see how Jacob interrogates this idea around the internet and cryptocurrencies and tokens and content in markets and describes a world future where we actually might want markets around attention and around content. If you're skeptical, I'd encourage you to come in with an open mind. If you're curious, I think Jacob will inspire and challenge you.
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