My guest today is Gary Coover (https://twitter.com/c00v ), COO of Superlayer (https://twitter.com/superlayerio ). Gary started his career as a consultant before going to get his MBA and cofounding a D2C startup. Eventually he ended up in Korea at Samsung, tasked with building out Samsung’s innovation arm called Samsung X. After helping scale that for 8 years, he was bitten by the Web3 bug when he noticed the momentum it was gaining. He joined Kevin Chu and Mahesh Vellanki as COO at Superlayer, a venture studio dedicated to Web3 startups. We discuss many of Gary’s learnings from Fortune 100 to startup venture studio, including the difference between cats and kittens and the importance of having a strong shit umbrella.
We discuss:
How do you build out a venture/innovation arm at a tech behemoth?
Spoiler Alert: mostly takes thick skin and good relationships
Venture Studio vs Incubator/Accelerator vs Venture Capital
Web3 as 2 different businesses
1. Product
2. Tokenomics
What does a healthy community look like?
- Aligning incentives in a way that benefits the collective over the individual
- Creating lasting partnerships
The future of Web3 as an industry. Is it more of a building block?
Chapters:
0:00 Gary’s Founding Story
7:52 Creating Samsung X, An Innovation Arm
13:09 Venture Studio vs Accelerator vs Venture Capital
16:49 Why Superlayer? Business + Tokenomics
34:41 Future of Community and NFTs
46:36 Is Web3 a building block or an industry?
56:34 Closing Questions
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