Noah Gaynor is the Co-Founder of Parcel. Parcel is a “Zillow for the metaverse”, a metaverse-native platform building key infrastructure for the needs of virtual real estate users, builders, property managers, investors, developers, and service providers.
We talk about his journey from tradfi to crypto, Parcel, fundraising, the future of virtual real estate, Meta and more!
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NA: So great to have you on Noah. Been a while since we've been trying to set this up, so it's cool to finally be able to talk I'm keen to start with. Yeah. I'm keen to start with you and journey from Tradfi to crypto. I think it’s super interesting how you got to crypto. So I would love to hear that.
NG: Yeah, sure. And again, thanks for having me on yeah, this did take a while to get set up finally, but I'm glad to make the connection and appreciate yeah, you featuring me and Parcel on the show. So, my journey. I became very interested in financial markets, really in college and started learning about stocks and derivatives.
And I think I always had a very entrepreneurial spirit and sort of liked the idea of, you know, maybe being self-sufficient or being able to invest you know, for a living. Not be relying on maybe like a large institution, which I guess is kind of in the spirit of blockchain. So right after college, I became a proprietary trader, which is basically trading, you know, for our firm, you know, the ferns firms, own pool of capital.
It's not like trading on behalf of a client at a large institution that job proved to be extremely difficult and stressful, and it was very entrepreneurial. Like, you definitely only, ate what you killed, but it wasn't sustainable for me at that time. So, I then transitioned into more of a corporate role.
I was an internal consultant in the brokerage industry. But still, on the side, you know, I was like very interested in investing and trading, saw the markets closely and, you know, thought about all kinds of side hustles and other ideas which could ultimately make me kind of like independent and have some career freedom.
So, my first exposure to Bitcoin was like 2013 when it started making the news, like TechCrunch and I dove in a little bit, I kind of understood that there's something interesting there it wasn't entirely clear what it was if it was a currency if it was a technology like I didn't fully wrap my head around what blockchain was at that time. And then I started to look into custody solutions. There weren't many at the time, there is one called Mt. Gox which seemed to be the popular one. And very luckily before I put any money there that hack happened. I mean, lucky for me, unfortunately for other Mt.Gox users.
So, you know, I think that the natural thing at that point was just to step away and I kind of forgot about it until early 2017. I think it was rallying during Consensus week here in New York. And a co-worker came up to me, asked me if I had heard of something called XRP. And that completely sent me down the rabbit hole. Obviously, I learned what Ripple is all about, but that just sent me down the rabbit hole of blockchain altogether, learnt about Ethereum and everything else out there.
So that was kind of like a really big turning point. Because obviously it was interesting as an investment, but I kind of saw the technology as being so much more pervasive, it had so many bigger applications and really disruptive to the whole financial system as we know it. So, at that point, you know, the switch flipped and I went all-in on crypto, like financially. And just in terms of where I wanted to go with my career, that was like my first foray into crypto.
And then beyond that, yeah, I left the corporate world. I travelled a little bit. I ended up in Tel Aviv, Israel worked there in the crypto industry for about eight months. In more of an advisory capacity, like consulting, blockchain start-ups doing fundraising, ICOs, token design and things like that.
I was sort of the bust part of, of the market after the boom. So, it wasn't the most exciting time to be there, but I was still very long-term bullish on the fundamentals. And then I came back to New York to get my MBA at Cornell Tech, where I actually ultimately met my current co-founder Ian in our MBA program.
NA: Oh, very cool. It’s interesting how many people I've met that have fallen down the crypto rabbit hole starting with XRP. But that's great to hear. Following that journey which was super interesting how did you go down the path of deciding, you wanted to start at a company in the crypto/web 3 space?
NG: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean obviously, you know, investing really interests me and even advisory is really interesting cause you get to sort of like work with founders and investors and have like a good purview. I think at the end of the day, I felt that web three enables everyone to do everything.
So, you can be an investor and a trader and an advisor, and also a builder. And I just felt like, yeah, I can manage my personal portfolio, maybe not as actively as if I was doing it full-time but I could still do that. Plus, I can build and I can build great consumer products with great user interfaces.
And it was just sort of like a burning desire. Just kind of like a screaming need that there's so much poor user interface in web three. I don't even want to say it's poor, it just like has even been addressed, to begin with, which I think happens, you know, at the beginning of most technologies. So, it just seemed like there was just enough need for more great products to be built.
That's really what I wanted to do. And it also allows you to bring in some more of like the creative or artistic and like psychological side of things beyond you know, purely trading.
NA: Yeah, right. No, I hear you. And so, let's talk about Parcel a little bit. How did you and Ian come up with the idea and what exactly is Parcel?
NG: Yeah, so Ian and I actually both started different companies coming out of grad school at Cornell tech. There was like a startup incubator there. So he went in the direction of a web 2 gaming platform. It wasn't a crypto native and I went more of the DeFi payment space. I was working on a project that I'm just basically non-custodial on and off-ramps.
So, a way to connect your metamask wallet to your bank account without having to go through a large, centralized exchange. And after we had both been working on these companies for about a year, and neither of them were really blowing up at that point. And Ian on his own started going down the rabbit hole of NFTs he's, you know, he's very creative.
He's done a lot of graphic design and other kinds of arts. So, he started making his own NFTs and really fell down the hole. And then we just started having more and more frequent brainstorms and chats and mostly just as friends, but then we started brainstorming like other project ideas with another one of our classmates as well.
And one day we had only been doing it for a few weeks and then one day, yeah. Ian was like, oh, I've been trying to buy land, in this game Ember sword, it's really difficult. There's not a lot of information out there. Everything's fragmented. Open Sea is not giving me everything that I need.
You know, what if there was a need for like a land aggregator and, and to his credit, it was really his idea. He mocked it up, basically what it could look like in a very crude and MVP and threw it on Reddit on r/decentraland, and it was the top post of the day. And we're like, wow, we actually might have something here.
So, we actually just started sprinting on it and we're like, okay, let's give this. We were both pretty exhausted from our last start-ups. So, like, all right, we're going to give this you know, two weeks, see if it really has legs. And then if it has legs we'll give it another two weeks, etc.
And we ended up having enough momentum that we were able to shift to it full-time and yeah, we've been full-time on it ever since. The grand vision of Parcel, you know, so we're an aggregator of virtual real estate and we just released our marketplace for virtual real estate users.
And we have price estimates and, you know, like a portfolio view. So right now, we are addressing sort of those low hanging fruit UX things like, yeah, we have, you know, the interactive maps, so you can sort of see the listings next to the map. Right. You can see how much that Parcel may be. A much better experience for buyers and sellers versus the generalist marketplace.
The grand vision is really much greater, and the marketplace is just the first step. So, the grand vision is to be, you know, a one-stop-shop for virtual real estate users of all kinds. You know, so that's, of course, the buyers and sellers and brokers and agents and the metaverse, but also, you know, architects and property managers and, you know, plumbers and electricians, like whatever the version of that is in the metaverse, you know, they're going to need resources as well. And then of course like communities, all the NFT and other communities too, that are going to want a presence in the metaverse. So, whatever they, those users may need, whether it's like financial services, if you want to get a mortgage on your virtual home, or if you want to Airbnb out your virtual condo or if you're a landowner who wants to build his or her dream home, and you need an architect that will help make that match as well.
NA: Got it. And would love to hear your thoughts on, the future of virtual real estate and where you see that going and how you think it will play out?
NG: Yeah. So, at Parcel, we view virtual real estate right now much like physical, real estate in our approach and our philosophy around it. So, you know, we think it is fundamental to the existence of VR, virtual worlds possibly some AR virtual worlds as well. It's kind of, you know, it's the foundation on which everything else everything will need to be built on top of and the way to price it right now we think it's pretty similar to the physical world.
It's like location. Are you near anything interesting? Are you near water? Are you near roads? You know, is there anything interesting about your parcel? And then also like what's on top of it, is there a unique piece of architecture or art on top of it? Do you have a billboard that could generate revenue for you? So like right now, I think it's very much parallel to the physical world and in the future, there will be many new things, many new inventions and applications that might change that. But, most of those have not been invented yet. So, I think this is kind of the best we can do at the moment. But you know yeah, we do it as absolutely fundamental NFTs for the metaverse, which is the evolution of the internet.
It will be, I think we won't say internet anymore. We probably won't even say metaverse anymore. It'll kind of just be assumed that you're always plugged in. We view this whole class as utility NFTs. Like these are NFTs that can earn some kind of passive income or yield for you, or, you know, they can go to work for you.
And that particularly gets us really excited compared to like a static piece of art or, you know, static image NFT that might not be as useful.
NA: Yeah, for sure. Have you guys come up with then I guess an easy explanation for people not in crypto or web three to understand virtual real estate and the metaverse in an easy way?
NG: That's a great question. Basically, I think the thing that clicks with people, I usually start by saying like, okay, picture like a video game, you know, you've seen a million before, or you have an avatar running around in some kind of virtual world. Most people understand that. Like, cause they've played games or they've seen their kids playing games like that.
I think the point is that I think the blockchain element clicks for people. And you say, well instead of a company owning that world, you can own that world. So, you can own a piece of that world, or the community owns it and governs it and makes decisions as to the future of the game.
So, all the value that's generated like in that economy, if you think of like, it is helpful when they have some kind of analogy. If, you know, if someone's kids play Roblox, for example, or Minecraft or something like that, you can say like, there's this bustling economy they've seen, they've probably even paid for assets in those games now.
You know that economy can be owned partially by you as an individual. And that seems to be the best way to describe it right now. Without too Sci-Fi or too abstract on people.
NA: Yeah, no, for sure. That's definitely pretty easy to understand explanation. Do you have any thoughts on Facebook and Meta entering this metaverse space?
NG: Yeah, definitely. You know, we've talked about it a lot, obviously internally and with other metaverse projects. My opinion is, this is fine. Like they're actually going to do a lot of the heavy lifting. They're educating potentially billions of people on the idea of the virtual world and the term, the metaverse. They're going to get people acclimated and accustomed to it.
And my hope is that the blockchain-based metaverse and virtual worlds will have such greater incentives than Facebook's virtual world that they won't even be able to compete. So hopefully they'll sort of onboard everyone to the idea of a metaverse, but the blockchain ones will prevail because it'll just be such a greater opportunity for them to earn and to profit and do probably all kinds of other things and socialize and play and work and you name it.
NA: Yeah, no for sure. That does make a lot of sense. You guys raised your first round of funding for Parcel. I'd love to hear your journey on how that was and how your experience raising the funding was?
NG: Yeah, sure. So, we raised, yeah, we raised over the summer. We knew we had kind of a good thing going, but obviously, we need to scale the team. Ian was building away on the product. And I put together a deck over a couple of weeks and I got some good advice from a friend.
Who’s just like don't drag it out. Just say you're doing this in two weeks. Tell everyone you're wrapping it up in two weeks and just do it which is great advice. Cause it could drag on for a long time and we just started blasting out to every which way by, you know, warm referrals, cold emails, friends of friends, like you name it.
We just started pushing it out there and what we found was actually, I think every investor who ended up participating in the round was referred by a different investor and many of those ended up passing. So, you know, it's not always bad. If like, if you get passed on by an investor, it just means you're not the right fit for them or the thesis of their fund or what stage you're at.
But they all know, you know, investors are closely knit, and they often refer projects onto their friends. So that was kind of an interesting learning.
Yeah. I mean, you know, we managed to find some really great people who have supported us in kind of in different ways through whether it's through like publicity or recruitment or making other connections within the industry. So yeah, they've been a great asset to us and I think most importantly, we were able to scale the team and the business. And now we're up to six full time, a handful of part-time and still growing pretty quickly.
NA: Really cool. I like the learnings you got out of that. I think those are quite interesting for people to know.
NG: Yeah, as a first-time successful fundraiser, I tried unsuccessfully in the past.
It was all new and every day was scary or nerve-wracking or exciting. But so yeah, you know, whatever wisdom I can pass on to other founders going through the fund-raising process very happy to.
NA: Yeah, that's great. Finally, what's a secret obsession of yours that not many people know about?
NG: Good question. Well, I think my close friends and family probably know, cause I was screaming about it that like during COVID I got into like the whole alien and like UFO thing and I don't want to say full-on conspiracy theorist, but there are certain things that I find very compelling, like such as the existence of aliens or UFOs.
So yeah, that's something I don't necessarily tell everyone upon first meeting, but I have kind of become a believer.
NA: That's a good one. Yeah. That's super interesting.
NG: I mean, if you think about just the probability, right? It's where it's almost a 0% chance that, that we are alone in the universe and also probably 0% chance that we're the most intelligent in the universe.
And the US government has acknowledged, there are things they can't identify in the sky. So, put two and two together.
NA: Yeah, no. Fair enough. And finally, can you tell us where, where we can find you online and in the metaverse?
NG: Yeah, definitely. So, on Twitter, we are @meetparcel, that’s also our website meetparcel.com. From there you should be able to link out to everything. So, we have discord, which is a pretty active weekly virtual real estate, weekly newsletter. Which we've been having a lot of fun which is only about three weeks old and we're starting some giveaways as well that you can find through those social channels.
So definitely check those out. Personally. I'm @noahgaynor on Twitter and my co-founder is @roomakdoteth on Twitter. He's the more creative and an interesting one for sure.
NA: Okay, cool. Well, have all those links as well in the transcript. But thanks for jumping on it was great talking to you about Parcel and your thoughts on virtual real estate. Super enlightening.
NG: Thanks Nawaz, this was great. I hope to see you at a conference soon.
Follow me and Noah on Twitter here!
Disclaimer: The Inquisitive VC is provided for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended to provide commercial, financial or legal advice. Nothing in this article constitutes an offer of securities or regulated financial products or financial services to any persons or a solicitation to buy or sell any tokens or securities or to make any financial decisions. Do not trade or invest in any project, tokens, or securities based upon this podcast episode. The host may personally own tokens or be an investor in projects that are mentioned on the podcast.
Noah Gaynor - Parcel