#62: Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding)

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:00:00]:
If we don't have the opportunity to share our stories, no one's going to. We're not going to see ourselves in the media that we consume unless we put the tools to create that media in everybody's hands. There's great tools if you wanna do super short form content, if you wanna do the next dance contest, you know, or dance challenge rather or Tide Pod eating contest. You know, like, you're set up. But but there's a lot of work involved in creating quality long form content, which is what's necessary for some of these narratives, And that's what drew me to to start Never Ending.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:39]:
Let's discover the Cleveland entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are telling the stories of its entrepreneurs and those supporting them. Welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern. And today, I had the true pleasure of speaking with Jamie Van Doren, who is an entrepreneur and a gamer with an unusual background, a mixed race Latino who grew himself from teen homelessness to the C suite. He's been successful in a variety of industries, including consumer products, professional services, and even clinical research and nonprofit management. Most recently, Jamie has founded Never Ending a Cleveland based gaming and entertainment startup that aims to change how stories are told and by whom. I very much loved hearing Jamie's story, his path to entrepreneurship and perspective on the market at large from the metaverse to NFTs to pseudonymity, and really the ambitious vision he set out building Never Ending.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:47]:
Ending. Please enjoy my conversation with Jamie Van Doren. I was thinking about where the best place would be to start this conversation. And in preparation for this, you had actually pointed me to an article you had written called let me make sure I get this right. Fear versus Hope and Compassion. What poverty taught me about the meaning and measure of success. It was vulnerable and powerful. And honestly, I recommend anyone tuning in to peruse their way through it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:19]:
I'll link it in the show notes for for everyone to to reference, but I'd really love to start with that article and and kinda work through an overview of of your journey as we make our way towards entrepreneurship, gaming, and ultimately the the work you're doing with Never Ending.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:02:38]:
So diving right into my life story, but that that's fantastic. I'm happy to do that. It's, I don't wanna take up the whole podcast with that, because I could very easily. There's a lot of twists and turns in there. But, basically, I grew up in in really extreme poverty. My mom is intellectually disabled. My biological father, was a Mexican immigrant. You know, through circumstances, didn't realize my mom's disability.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:03:04]:
They met at a party that she snuck out to go to because she was a teenager. That's what teenagers do, regardless. And so she eventually met and snuck away with my stepfather, who they got married after a week and a half and moved to California. You can guess by those initial bad decisions that the rest of the trajectory was not super fantastic. My stepfather was an alcoholic, ended up really struggling to keep a job, and, you know, my mom wasn't really able to work, and to make extra money, he started my stepfather started selling cocaine. And like many people who get into drugs, he became addicted, and that led to us eventually becoming homeless. I couchsurfed for close to a year because I was not equipped to live in a car. That was that was the bridge too far for 13 year old me.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:04:02]:
I had dealt with a lot of stuff, you know, a lot of bullying and everything, and that was the bridge too far. The point of some of this is that in the midst of all of this, I saw a lot of what I didn't want my life to be like, and I was truly blessed because there were people in my life who thought that I was worth investing in. For example, there was an elementary school, teacher's aide named Judy Hines, and I remember her because she was, you know, just a powerful force for good in my life. Now, I got really interested in Greek mythology. She bought me this giant hardcover book about Greek myths. She made sure that when there was this opportunity to go to see the space shuttle land, I was able to do that. I got to be inside a b 52 bomber, you know, all because of her. It was it was fantastic life experiences that showed me that there was so much more out there than what I was seeing, and not even from the perspective of, oh, those people have that and I'll never have that, just from the perspective of this world of opportunities, and this idea that if I wanted it, I had to find a way to make it happen for myself.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:05:18]:
And that was even the situation of being a homeless teen and couch surfing. There was a lot of being at the whim of the universe, but there was also this sense of, like, you have to make sure that you are polite, that you are charming, that you're pleasant to be around, that you don't disrupt people's lives if you want to sleep on their couch or in their spare room, you know, or or wherever, or on their floor. So there was this sense of, you know, you you do there are certain levers that you can pull. There are always certain levers that you can pull, and it's identifying those levers. And I took that with me as we moved back to Michigan. You know, I finally got in touch with my grandfather and was like, look, I you know, this is your grandson, call and collect, you know, we need to come back. You know, my life kind of went went from there, and I I launched my professional career very slowly, but everything was about identifying that next step, you know, seeing what lever there was to pull and trying to pull it so that I could leverage my experiences, leverage connections, and continue an upward professional journey so that I could have a safety net, so that I could ensure that I didn't end up homeless again, and so that I could have this sense of fulfillment and happiness that I did not see my parents having as I was growing up.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:44]:
And what, as you kind of look to those levers to pull, drew you to the world of gaming and to entrepreneurship?

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:06:53]:
So many. So many, Jeffrey. So first, just gaming in in and of itself was this great opportunity for exploration and connection. You know, I remember my first time playing a role playing game with with people who became friends. And in that moment of having created a character and being on this this journey of, you know, our imagination of sharing of creating the shared story, you know, the fact that I was this half Mexican kid that was super poor, you know, that had a messed up background, did not matter. All that mattered was my contribution to that story, my ability to bridge connections and to build off of other people's ideas and and to play well in an interesting way to have fun. That was powerful. I did not have to yeah.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:07:47]:
You I didn't have to carry any of the baggage of me. I mean, who doesn't want that? Who doesn't want that? That's why, you know, these tabletop role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons are experiencing such an amazing renaissance. You know, Hasbro announced back in February of 2021 that Dungeons and Dragons, one property, has reached 50,000,000 fans and players worldwide.

Jeffrey Stern [00:08:09]:
It's incredible. I I've always been really kinda fascinated how societally we seem to underestimate the power of video games and just kinda dismiss them as trivial or time wasted. But from my own experience, playing these video games growing up, it's incredible how much you've learned about the real world, finance, incentives, community building.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:08:32]:
It also helps us it helps communicate what's normal, which is actually the other thing that led me into Never Ending. So, you know, we have seen that as we introduce LGBTQ characters to video games, for example, there becomes more acceptance. You know, you look at at 6 feet under. You know, this happens in TV as well. 6 feet under, you know, after, you know, that prominent gay characters after that show aired and was super popular, there's more acceptance amongst viewers towards the LGBTQ community. But the inverse was why, what attracted me to or what got me to Start Never Ending. So when I was growing up, I did not see people like me on TV. I did not see people with my kinds of stories.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:09:19]:
Anybody who was like me on TV who was really poor, who was Latino, often, the message that I got was, hey. The best you can hope for is a steady job. You go out there and you get that steady job, and you live maybe a middle class lifestyle. That's not very motivating. Like, the best you can hope for is the middle of the pack. Mhmm. The other piece is that I didn't realize until it became, until the dreamers became a bigger political issue and the dreamers being those children who were brought to the US as very young kids. I didn't realize how common it was for Latinos to not speak Spanish, which was always a complicated part of my heritage.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:10:08]:
You know, being Mexican and not speaking Spanish just felt odd. People would make assumptions about that. And, you know, based on what I saw on TV, you know, if I was if I'm Mexican, I should speak Spanish. But it's it's common. Lot tons of people from Puerto Rico, you know, Mexico, tons of second generation people from Latin America don't speak Spanish. And what I realized was that if we don't have the opportunity to share our stories, no one's going to. We're not going to see ourselves in the media that we consume unless we put the tools to create that media in everybody's hands. There's great tools if you wanna do super short form content, if you wanna do the next dance contest, you know, or dance challenge rather or Tide Pod eating contest, you know, like, you're set up.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:11:00]:
But but there's a lot of work involved in creating quality long form content, which is what's necessary for some of these narratives, And that's what drew me to to start Neverending.

Jeffrey Stern [00:11:11]:
So maybe just give us a little bit of an overview of of Neverending. How you think about the company today and a little bit of the the founding story building from there.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:11:21]:
Absolutely. So my team and I at Never Ending are creating a web app, a massive platform for amateur animation and storytelling. Essentially, you'll be able to create a cartoon version of you or really any kind of character or a whole cast of characters. You'll be able to put those characters into a custom scene that you build from a library of backgrounds, props, and creatures, and with a few clicks, turn that scene into a webcomic or add animations to create an original animated video. So it's putting animation and long form content creation into the hands of every single person regardless of artistic ability or any skills with animation, which is pretty cool. We're super early stage. What we have done what we did to validate the idea is a couple of things. We launched a kick starter, an early kick starter, just to see, is this something people would even want? And it turns out it is.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:12:17]:
In fact, we raised nearly $20,000 from less than 200 future customers, some of whom paid a whopping $700 to have lifetime access to an app that hasn't even been built yet. That's how much hunger there is for this type of of for this type of tool.

Jeffrey Stern [00:12:35]:
And where where does that hunger come from? Like, what what is the unmet need here?

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:12:40]:
I think it's a couple of things. People wanna be able to share their stories. They wanna be able to express themselves, and they wanna be able to do that in a way that they can't right now. I think COVID has really shined a spotlight on how tenuous our social connections are and our ability to share our authentic selves and our authentic stories. And I think social media just exacerbates that lack because social media, as it stands, invites social comparison. You You don't wanna share your authentic self for a couple of reasons. 1, what if your authentic self just isn't that likable, you know, and you receive that rejection? That sucks. Right? The other piece of it is this, is that what feeds the ego when you're on social media are the likes, the engagement.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:13:39]:
And so when we look at what other people are sharing, you know, their pictures in Cabo, that great food that they had at that restaurant, the dinner that they made that none of us are going to spend 2 hours plating the way that that person spent 2 hours plating and so on. You know, they share the happiest moments of their lives often often, and so we get the sense that we have to have these perfect lives in order to be accepted. The other piece of it is the amount of bullying that comes, you know, when you're online. These platforms are, unfortunately, kind of toxic for a variety of reasons. They give us the wrong message about what our lives should look like. So I think that people are hungry for something different, a new way to be able to express themselves authentically, but not have to put their real selves out there. So the other way that we validated this idea, and this that what I just said leads to that, is we launched a beta of just an avatar creator, just a 2 d avatar creator, something that you might see in any kind of video game.

Jeffrey Stern [00:14:41]:
Yeah.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:14:41]:
We launched that in December. We had grown to over 8,000 users by the next December. So in 1 year, we had grown over 8,000 users. We then have grown to now over 14,000 users. And what this does is it tells us that people want control. People want control over their online personas. They wanna be able to present themselves in different ways and experiment with different identities. And this is something that we all do anyways.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:15:12]:
We do this in real life. When you go to work, you put on an identity. If you happen to play volleyball with the guys, in a home, then you're putting on a different identity. When you're hanging out with other friends to go to the movies or to go to the bar, there's a whole different identity, and that's different from the identity that you have with your family at home. So we do this already, but people want the opportunity to expand this. And now that our lives are becoming more and more digital, we also want to be unfettered. We don't want to be chained to having to look a certain way and having people react to us because we look a certain way or present a certain way. So this is a tip of an iceberg, and I'm excited that we're exploring it just as it's becoming really relevant.

Jeffrey Stern [00:15:58]:
Yeah. Just the ideas you've introduced here, I think, are circling around and converging on some, some big buzzwords of the day, like the metaverse and NFTs. And, and we'll, I think we'll definitely hit on those, but the one that I, I wanna take a quick detour to explore a little bit more is this idea of, of pseudonymity, the idea of being pseudo anonymous. Because really as I'm understanding it, one of the ideas you're putting forward is that rather than making these naive appeals to people to look past gender or race or to not discriminate online, instead really trying to make that much more difficult to even do in the first place by, by allowing people to be pseudo anonymous. And so I just wanna spend a little bit of time talking about how you've thought about this idea, what it kinda means to you and what it unlocks and and how you're you're incorporating it in in the work that you're doing.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:16:51]:
100%. So this crosses issues of gender, race, ethnicity, you know, as you kind of touched on. I'll share that we've gotten a lot of feedback from a lot of creators about this. So never ending, we have started from this understanding of inclusivity and representation are really key and core to what it is that we're doing. That's important personally to me as a Latino and as somebody who's gay. That that's important because I wanna be able to see people I identify with on TV. I wanna feel like I am seen in the world like I exist in the world. And we do take a cue from the media that we consume as to who is in the world and who belongs in the world.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:17:34]:
So if you never see a black person on TV, then on some level, you assume that black people don't exist in the world or don't belong in your world. Same with Latinos and others. We've spoken with, like, a lot of underrepresented influencers and content creators. There's a lot of black creators that are like, I would love to be able to create awesome black stories, things that focus on my cultural heritage. There's a a gentleman in Chicago that we spoke with who's, an immigrant from Ghana, but has been in the US for years years years years. But his grandmother used to always tell him stories and fables, and he used to blow her off and be like, grandma, grandma. And now he's like, I would love to turn those into animations. That would be amazing.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:18:22]:
It would it would just mean the world to me. Then you have other creators that don't want to be a great black animator or a great black storyteller. They just want to be a storyteller. But the issue is that we, as a society and culture, will tend to see them as black first and creator second. And this opportunity to have pseudo anonymity moves past that. It allows them to create in a space, and all you get to interact with is their creation. If they put out a story, you just see that story. If they put out an avatar, you just see that, you know, and and they're using that avatar to represent themselves, and that's who you see.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:19:06]:
But you know on a level that that isn't the real person, and so it doesn't carry the same types of prejudices. So really, again, it unleashes people that unfetters them from the limits of these socially constructed identities that we have. You know, this issue of race is defined by skin color or where you're born, you know, this, the issues of gender identity and gender conformity, and so on. It allows people to be able to share things about themselves without fear of the negativity being about them as an individual. Does that make sense?

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:46]:
It makes a lot of sense. Honestly, it's it's this really powerful idea that you are ultimately in a pseudo anonymous way, judged on the merits of your idea rather than who you are as a person, because no one knows who you are necessarily.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:20:03]:
Yeah. And we see this already happening. We're already moving in this direction. If you look at esports, for example, think about the top streamers, Ninja. I guarantee you nobody named him Ninja. You know? You look at at what is it? Is it double a 9 skills? I always wanna say a a 9 skills, but double a 9 skills. You know? That is not his name, but that is a persona. That it it is already a brand identity, and so you you have this sense of there's more than just pseudo anonymity.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:20:34]:
There's this opportunity to create a brand identity, which is what VTubers are doing already. There are lots of VTubers out there, and I'm sure that they are super happy that they don't have to spend hours in front of the mirror, you know, fixing their hair and their makeup to make sure that they look perfect, to fix up, you know, the background of of their room to make sure they have a clean, neat streaming space. You know? Instead, they've got this 2 d avatar with some low level animations that, you know, does some tracking to their movements, and that's who they are. That's that's their streaming persona. Or in some cases where they have some more money, they've got a full 3 d full 3 d avatar.

Jeffrey Stern [00:21:20]:
And so how do you think about the positioning of Never Ending in relation to honestly, like the internet as it exists today? Like where where are you now, and where do you see the opportunity for for never ending going forward?

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:21:34]:
We really see ourselves at the intersection of entertainment, gaming, and traditional social media. It's a new space in some ways, but that space has been converging already. I had the idea for never ending in January of 2020. Wow. It's been years. It's crazy.

Jeffrey Stern [00:21:55]:
It's wild.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:21:56]:
And and this just in late 2021, there's all this buzz about Roblox in moving into social media and moving into digital entertainment. You know? So I I saw this coming. I saw this convergence happening, and I think it's going to accelerate. So, we're kind of at this very interesting and unique inflection point and what I see us doing that is different is this idea of entertainment and creating and giving creators the tools to create really fantastic long form content. You know, we've already seen the streaming wars with Netflix and Prime TV and HBO Max and Disney Plus, and I could go on. But what is going to flip the script on all of that is when you have individual creators that don't have to pitch to Prime TV, that don't have to pitch to Netflix or Disney, but who can just create their own content. And then you have situations where you have big gaming properties who don't have to go to Netflix, don't have to go to Disney, don't have to go to Prime, but could go to Jeffrey Stern, who for the past 2 years has been putting out awesome animations and has a huge, you know, 1000000 millions of people following, and maybe they work with Jeffrey Stern on creating their their Fortnite movie or their League of their next League of Legends movie. So it's not and Netflix has to come to you and them to license that content.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:23:31]:
You know, it's just democratizing entertainment, and it is removing some of the gatekeepers so that more types of stories can be told. And we're not told by 8 major studios what's going to be popular and what is worth what story is worth telling.

Jeffrey Stern [00:23:53]:
Can you kind of paint a picture in practice how this works from a a character building perspective, a scene building perspective, an animation perspective? Like, take us through the the process of, you know, how how does this look today?

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:24:06]:
I can tell well, we don't have the full product release today because this is like building a video game. All the guts are game guts. And for those who don't know, video game creation is not what it used to be, where you had, you know, 10 people, you know, sitting together for a few months. Most video games now take 3 to 5 years to create. Some of them, some of the open world games take 10 years to create. It is not uncommon, and they're not created by it used to be that a team of 50 was really big. Now that's a small team. So you have triple a games being created by a team of 500 people and still taking 3 to 5 years to create.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:24:51]:
So when I say that we don't have it done yet, that that's providing some context as to why now we're doing a lot of shortcuts and we're not we're not having to do all the narrative gameplay, and and there's a lot of things that we don't have to do that a game has to has to do. So we are accelerated from that perspective. I can tell you some of what we're working on and how it will work. There are some things that I can't tell you yet because we're working on some provisional user experience patents. Because one of the things that we're doing that's really unique is by taking a video game style approach, we are reducing the time to create an animation from 45 minute, 45 hours to create 1 minute of animation down to 1 to 2. So if you use Adobe After Effects, if you use Real Illusion, any of these, you know, big products out there, it's gonna take you on average 45 hours to create 1 minute of animation. We're using a video game approach where you've got a lot of preprogrammed things that you can use like you were in a video game, that's all I'm going to say, and that's going to cut the time down to 1 to 2 hours. Now will you have the same level of customization as you have when you're crafting all of these animations by hand? No.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:26:01]:
But for 90% of us, we don't need that, you know? We need, like, 3 to 5 different running styles. We don't need 20 or whatnot. But, basically, you know, how the app is evolving is, you know, you're able to create an avatar from a huge array of parts. So you pick a body style, you pick a style of head, you pick a style of hair, you color all of these things, you pick eye styles, noses, mouths, everything. Everything is unique, and then you start dressing your character like you would from a huge array of options. We have over 900 unique character options in the app right now, and that expands on a weekly basis, which makes our 3 d team nuts because our 2 d team is obviously way ahead of them. They're like, we're never gonna catch up, and I'm like, that is entirely the point. That is entirely the point.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:26:58]:
Then people are able to kinda save these characters, and they're able to pose them however they want, they can select from a variety of prebuilt poses or just move and pose them using a really simple interface. All of our tools are really drag and drop point click tools. We're really moving away from complex menus. And I I don't know if you've ever seen Adobe After Effects, but if you open it, the first thing that you'll probably be is, like, where do I click? What do I do? It makes no sense. There's, like

Jeffrey Stern [00:27:32]:
Yeah. A level of technical proficiency required.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:27:36]:
Yeah. Like, a 100 hours of practicing just to get competent on it. Just to get competent. So we're cutting that down. We want it easy enough that you could just come in and start using it. You build out your scenes, like I said, from a library background, so you go and you select them. You can even build a background from a variety of components. So you might put in a blue sky or maybe you put in a an evening sky.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:27:59]:
You select your cloud levels if it's outside and, you know, select what you want in the far horizon and so on, what you want the ground to look like, everything. You can build all that out. You then go through and just set it up with, you know, props, put your characters in place. We make it really easy to duplicate a scene that you build so that you can go back in and edit it. So if you wanted to build storyboards for this, it's it's it has that kind of storyboarding feel as you create these different scenes. Animation can happen either by using that storyboarding tool and just adding animations, like dragging and dropping them onto a character or an object. But the engine that we're creating is a very unique approach for if you don't wanna take that style and you want to actually enjoy animation, like, enjoy the process of creation, we're essentially gamifying it so that when you create an animation, it actually feels more like you're playing a video game than it does like you're building a storyboard or anything else. But I again, I that's as much as I can tell you right now without because the minute that you that you give too much away publicly, the clock starts ticking on on your patent, like, in your ability to do a patent.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:29:09]:
So we're doing a provisional first.

Jeffrey Stern [00:29:12]:
Yeah. No. I I I appreciate that. With that, I'm curious, like, how you think about, I guess, competition. Like, is it the Adobe After Effects? Is it Unity? Is it Roblox? Like, there are all these different tools. And, again, the the way you've kind of painted the picture of the convergence of all these ideas is, like, social media is the comp like, who who how do you think about that?

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:29:33]:
All of the above, unfortunately. I mean, that's an oversimplification. I I do have to always keep in the back of my mind that that there are tons of alternatives out there. If I look at pure competition, I do look at some of the professional tools without a doubt. I do look at, you know, things like Unity. I do look at things like Roblox. And then I look at some of the emerging things that are out there in the avatar space. So Genie, for example, or Genies, for example.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:30:03]:
You know, I I'm looking at the metaverse, so, you know, The Sandbox. We're looking at Decentraland, other places to understand where are things trending, what are people doing, how are people engaging with content. Obviously, looking at TikTok up, looking at YouTube, looking at Snapchat, just everything that people are doing to create content, looking at Twitch. The great thing is in this ecosystem, a lot of those places that are competition will also be strategic partners. So it is a perfect example of this. Twitch is a live stream platform where people are live streaming, and and so they are creating media on that platform. People will be creating media on Neverending, but they may actually stream themselves creating that media on Twitch, or they may not use Neverending specifically for the creation of new media, but might use their avatar on Twitch. So these become strategic opportunities.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:31:08]:
So when I look at all of these competitors, I'm not just looking at threats. I'm looking at where these opportunities for convergence. How do we how do we build a relationship with this place so that there's a strategic partnership here where we can actually accelerate our growth? We're such a small fish right now. You know, we can we can nibble at the edges and we actually enhance the experience for their users while growing our own user base. So I'm a big fan of kind of expanding the pie before you you start slicing it up, and I bring that approach to my view of competition. You know, how do we where are the opportunities with a competitor to actually increase the size of the pie?

Jeffrey Stern [00:31:52]:
As you try and stay abreast all these trends, how do you kind of parse the signal from the noise when you think about things like the metaverse and NFTs and, and kind of the, the things that are at the forefront of a lot of the convergence that you're talking about here, but also just seem like really out there right now. And, you know, people are trying to very much figure out what the future of this stuff is gonna look like.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:32:17]:
Yeah. So one of the things that I do is I get quality data, quality information. So I listen to the buzz. Once I know that it's a buzz and and I realize this is something I gotta look at, I actually try to look under the hood, and that helps a lot because things are not always what they appear when everything is buzzing, and I'll give you an example of that in a moment, And part of this comes from my background. You know, part of this comes from having to always learn information on my own in order to get to that next step. You know, I did not actually graduate from college until 2013. I was full grown adult before I got my degree from CASE, and I I had to took me 10 years to get my degree because I was going part time. It was a long, long time to go to school, and I did finally the last year and a half, I finally, quit my job and went to school full time just so I could get it done because my option was another 6 years.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:33:17]:
So and I did not wanna do that. So I have tended to, if I don't fully understand something, to, you know, lift up the hood and kinda dig in. So NFTs is a great example of this. You know, everybody's like, oh, NFTs. And it seems like if you put NFT or metaverse on any kind of project, the VCs just throw money at you. And that's fantastic, and part of me wants to do that, but it's also dishonest, and so I'm not gonna do that. We do have some connections with that. There are some things that we're exploring in both the metaverse and the NFT space, but the issue is that NFTs are not what people think they are.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:33:55]:
Everyone's like, oh my gosh. It's amazing. I've got this this non fungible token that's on the blockchain. Well, actually, it is not. What what you have is some data on the blockchain that points to a URL. So your your NFT of your image does not exist on the block chain. There's nothing on the block chain that says this is what your NFT looks like or this is what it should be. Points to a URL, which is problematic because if I buy that domain, you know, if I buy that URL or if I get into your server, can change what your NF what it points to, what your NFT looks like.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:34:33]:
So we talk about it then as more sophisticated people talk about it in terms of, well, your NFT, it's like a receipt. It's a it's a digital receipt for this asset. Again, it's problematic because when you go and buy something, your receipt usually says what you bought. You know? If if if I go to Target and I buy something

Jeffrey Stern [00:34:52]:
Typically, yes.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:34:53]:
Yeah. It doesn't just say you spent a $132 82¢ here. It lists out what you got. Well, again, that doesn't exist on the blockchain, which means that there is real note. There's no real digital record except that you bought something. Where this becomes problematic is that we've got this whole idea of web 3, you know, blockchain making the Internet distributed, decentralized. Except there's a and you see that because there's a ton of different blockchains, Ethereum, Bitcoin, you know, Shibu Inu, so on and so forth. But we're already seeing, especially in the NFT space, some centralization.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:35:34]:
So right now, if you have an NFT, that's gonna exist primarily in your digital wallet. You're gonna open up your digital wallet, you're gonna see your NFT. While your digital wallet doesn't actually contain any of the information about your NFT, it doesn't point to the blockchain or anything. What it does, most likely, it is it has an API over to OpenSea, and it says to OpenSea, hey. What do you see, OpenSea, when I point to this NFT? And OpenSea sends back that image. So if you have a situation where OpenSea takes down an NFT because they feel like it doesn't conform to their standards or anything, what do you think will you will see when you open your digital wallet to see your NFT? See a 304 error, image not found. And so your NFT isn't actually, again, existing on the blockchain. Now, does this mean that NFTs are stupid or that we shouldn't be looking at Web 3 or that we shouldn't be looking at blockchain? No, not at all.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:36:34]:
What it means is that instead of getting super excited about it and just staying super excited, we need to start digging into what some of these issues are and what they mean. Because what what we're doing is it we're creating a ton of technical debt, essentially. We're creating a situation where, you know, we're going down this path based upon what people are assuming this technology is and what it does. And it doesn't do those things. But you start making assumptions based on that, and then you can get into some pretty bad places. It's the same with the metaverse. I love the idea of a metaverse. I I I read Snow Crash.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:37:16]:
I read Ready Player 1. I liked Ready Player 1 a lot more than Snow Crash, but they're both both cool. It's interesting that they're both dystopian worlds, but that's another story. The issue is is that we don't have a clear definition of what the metaverse is or that clear definition has been subsumed or taken over so that the metaverse means anything that's on the web, which is not true. So the primary characteristics of a metaverse are that it does exist in a digital space, that it is immersive, so you're able to kind of exist and interact there in an immersive way, and that your data moves with you. So if I have an object every time I come into the metaverse or go to a different place in that metaverse, that moves with me. Now, the challenge is if metaFacebook is building a metaverse and Roblox is building a metaverse and The Sandbox is building a metaverse and Decentraland is building a metaverse, Well, if I have my avatar and my identity on Meta, how motivated is Roblox to allow me to move my identity over and and all of my data, my wallet, my items that I got in in there, and so on. And you have this issue too because if if my items are backed by the blockchain, but some of them are on the Ethereum blockchain and others are on another blockchain.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:38:55]:
Well, wait. Are they able to still be attached to my avatar the same way? Probably. I mean, it's it's, you know, it is again, it would be like a digital wall wallet. But you but if Meta is only using Ethereum, then how do these other things show? You know, where how does this happen? What's what's going on on the client side, you know, for this?

Jeffrey Stern [00:39:17]:
Right. How do you have that interoperability?

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:39:20]:
Correct. And and that is kind of a a challenge. The other thing is that a lot of these are not immersive. So I am not bashing Decentraland. Let me say this right now. I'm not bashing Decentraland. Decentraland says that they're metaverse. It's the Sims.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:39:37]:
You have where other people are coming in and building locations. It's it's a it's web based technology. It's 3 d rendered web based technology. They do not have any VR experiences yet, so it is not immersive by definition. We also have to get past these technology hurdles of, you know, making the immersive portions of the technology easier to use, faster, less expensive so there's not this barrier? And then, additionally, how do you interact with somebody who is outside of that immersive space? And there's some really cool tech that's going on with this. There's some really awesome stuff. Everything from, you know, sound haptic vests to haptic gloves to digital light projection and so on. But we still have a long way to go, and there are a lot and until and unless we have some honest discussions about what metaverse means and if people are really building a metaverse versus a unique online world, we can't really tackle these.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:40:37]:
I know that was a long way of me answering how I parse how I parse information.

Jeffrey Stern [00:40:43]:
No. It's a fascinating deep dive there. To to kinda surface us out of there, with all that context, what does the next year and change look like for never ending from, like, a business perspective? What are the things that that you're most excited about as you look as you look forward from here?

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:41:00]:
So a couple of things. When we first launched, we were really kind of exploring not as much who we were, but who our customers were. So we were looking at gamers, we're looking at podcasters, streamers, minority and other underrepresented influencers, esports. Those were some of the big buckets that we got into. Just, you know, different people who could be content creators through a lot of discussions with potential customers, actual customers, and others, I'm excited to say that we have really identified streamers as our first best customers. Because underneath that umbrella, you have esports. You have underrepresented and minority creators. You have tabletop role playing gamers and others.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:41:43]:
But the streamers becomes the common element, and it allows us to really focus on where efforts are. So to that point, I'm excited because we're gonna actually have some cool mini apps coming out, over the next few months that are going to really accelerate our adoption with streamers and allow them to use even the 2 d versions of the avatars in really cool and interesting ways. We also had some great b to b discussions with folks that that want with businesses that wanna look at how do they engage people around their mascots and things. And our avatar creator is is a great engine for that. So imagine being able to dress up the Geico Gecko, you know, in all sorts of outfits and things and how come

Jeffrey Stern [00:42:29]:
that would be.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:42:30]:
You know, like, even if you're not a Geico customer, like, you'd be like, oh, I got to go to the Geico site because I got to check out, like, this gecko and the new Hawaiian shirt that just came out for him. You know? So there's some really cool opportunities for us to work with brands around avatars as well. So I'm excited to continue to iterate on what we're doing and continue to build. You know, I have said from the beginning that as we get features, we're going to drop features. We're not going to, like, kind of keep the baby and wait until it grows up before we show it off to the world. We're going to continue to push stuff out there. So I'm excited with, the scene creator that's coming out in a few weeks, and I'm excited to really hear from more customers and see why they're liking what it is that we're doing to continue to grow. And, yeah, it's really to continue to grow.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:43:22]:
I'm really super excited to continue to grow and launch more features. So I I think we've got some amazing stuff on the horizon.

Jeffrey Stern [00:43:29]:
It sounds like it. One thing I I realized might just be helpful context, actually, because we we haven't talked about it yet. But is when you talk about customers, like, what what is the business model? How is it that you are making money as a organization?

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:43:41]:
Yeah. I'd love to know that actually. No. I'm kidding. I'm totally kidding. To all our investors out there, you guys know that I'm kidding. Right? Because we talked about this model. So we have a a freemium app with subscriptions for access to more premium options and microtransactions for access to additional customization, and this is a model that has served mobile games extremely well.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:44:07]:
When I started, I did not wanna focus on ad revenue. I did not feel like that was going to be sustainable and that there were a lot of issues around that, especially as I heard more and more people clamoring about data privacy and so on. And it turns out I was right as Apple has now made opting in something that has made Facebook advertising, don't get mad at me, Meta, potentially, like, unusable or at least much less effective than it used to be. You know, since you've got a whole ecosystem of folks that you can't track their data anymore. So we will be able to as we grow, we'll be able to move from just freemium and subscriptions and microtransactions to other revenue opportunities. So by building both the tools and the place to consume content, so the tools and the destination, will be unlocking some opportunities around premium content, around commercial licensing, around revenue share with content creators. You know, we know that early on, we're going to want to launch a marketplace for artists to be able to sell their art for use in our platform. So they'd be able to sell backgrounds.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:45:23]:
They'd be able to sell props, things like that. And that creates a whole another revenue stream for us and enhances the usability of the app and the customer experience without adding any additional cost for us. So there's a lot of revenue opportunities for us, but we are initially focused, like I said, on subscriptions plus microtransactions.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:45]:
Got it. That thank you for for going into that.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:45:48]:
I know. I always give, like, probably way too much info.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:52]:
No. No. It it it it's very interesting. I I wanna circle back to the article, that we mentioned at the beginning of the conversation and kind of bookend what we've been talking about here with regards to to leadership and and how your experiences have shaped how you think about decision making and and company building. And and one thing that you mentioned, in the article that has stuck with you and stuck with me reading the article is making the best decisions that you can with information that you have at the time. And I think some of the things you've you've talked about today have kind of hinted at this, and kind of the iterative process and not necessarily letting the baby grow up. But but how do you how do you do this? How do you make the best decision you can with the information you have at the time?

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:46:39]:
A lot of it is about understanding that perfect is the enemy of good and that fast usually wins. So you have to make a decision quickly because if you don't if you don't move, that's a decision, And you have to accept that you're probably going to be wrong, and you're probably going to have to pivot and do something different. We've made lots of little mini pivots. There have been lots of things that I've been like, oh, I wish we had done this instead. But then I recognize why we made the decisions that we did, and I and I see the opportunities that we have from them, and we just build from there. And my whole life has been about that. I can look back at a ton of decisions that I made, growing up that I wish I hadn't made, a ton of things that I wish I had said differently, done differently, but I operated with the best information that I had at the time, and there is no going backwards. There is only going forwards.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:47:33]:
And I can either spend my energy on recrimination, on regret, on rumination, or I can reflect on that. I can learn from it, and I can move on. It doesn't mean that I forget the things that happened in my past. I can still revisit them, but I need to revisit them with the right lens, with the lens of learning from that, with the lens of saying, okay, well, now how would I deal with it so that I'm prepped for situations in the future? And I think when you have that kind of understanding, you recognize and hopefully offer that same grace to other people. You you recognize that, wow, sometimes people don't make the best decisions. Sometimes they're not able to bring their best selves to the table. You know? And a person is not a single action. They're an aggregate of all the experiences that you have had with them, and they're an aggregate of all their past experiences.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:48:33]:
And so I we do a lot of coaching in my with my team, and we do a lot of building people up. And as a result, you know, I have had a lot of people. I we now we've raised some money, so now we pay people. But I had a big team that wasn't making any money. I don't know any other founder who had, like, 12 people working for them that were all unpaid. You know? I mean, that's it's a lot of people to get to and these were not friends. There were people that I literally hired off of LinkedIn and Indeed who came into it knowing that they weren't going to make that they were making no money. And lots of those people are still with us now that we're, like, 26 people.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:49:17]:
They're still on the team, and many of them are still making well below market rate because they love the vision, they love the fact that they are contributors, they understand that I have to make decisions at the end of the day, and they don't always agree with those decisions, but they believe in me and they support me because I believe in them and I support them. So they reflect back to me exactly what I give them, you know, and I respect them, so they respect me. I think that's really critical. I think that it's really critical to understand that although you cannot control what happens to you in the world, and you can't always even control your reactions in the moment, you can control what you try to put out in the world and how you try to leave the spaces and the people that are around you, and if you are consistently trying to leave those spaces better than you found them, people will see that, and the world and the people around you will respond in in in kind.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:23]:
That that's really powerful. I think it speaks to the vision that you have for for the company and the work that you're doing. Thank you for sharing that.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:50:34]:
Well, thank you for giving me the platform. I appreciate it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:40]:
Jamie, I'm really appreciative of of your time. And I know we're we're kinda coming up on it here. But one of the the questions that we ask everyone who comes on the podcast is bringing it back to to Cleveland, actually. Is is not necessarily for your favorite thing in Cleveland, but for a hidden gem for something that other people may not necessarily know about. So with that, I will ask you for, your favorite hidden gems in Cleveland.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:51:07]:
My favorite hidden gem. I probably should not make it, like, the game room that I built in my basement because I don't need everybody trying to come over to my home and be in my game room. So they're just on different sides of the city. Adrenaline Monkey and Play CLE. Those are 2 of my favorite places. Both are kind of ninja gyms, obstacle course gyms, where they have climbing walls, They have obstacle courses. They have zip lines. You know? It's fan freakingtastic.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:51:37]:
It is the best time ever. Like, I could do rock wall like, climbing walls all day. And the best part is is, like, I am low key afraid of heights a little bit.

Jeffrey Stern [00:51:50]:
A little bit?

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:51:51]:
Yeah. You put that harness on me, and I'm like, I'm not gonna fall now. And if I fall, I fall slowly. So I'm okay. I still get, like, the nerves and stuff, but I will, like, race up that wall. Oh, it's the best. I I love both Adrenaline Monkey and Play CLE. Play CLE is on the far west side out in Westlake, I think, and adrenaline monkey is on the further east side.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:52:14]:
So something for everybody.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:16]:
Yeah. That sounds like a blast.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:52:18]:
Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I I'm a big, like, physical person. I actually I teach kung fu at Case Western Reserve University in my very, very limited spare time, and I up until the pandemic, I actually competed all over the place. I've been to China, like, 5 times. I've, been to Italy and Paris and

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:39]:
competed to

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:52:40]:
the US and in Canada and stuff, And I love it. So I'm I'm a pretty physical active person, so that's why I love those places. The pandemic has definitely been a challenge since I have not been able to really exercise that piece of my identity, that piece of who I am. But it's okay because it has allowed me to be laser focused on never ending, which has been its own joy, and it really has been. I have spent so much money and made so little money, which is totally fine, but I love it. I I I could do this all day every day, and I often do. So so it works out well. But I I'm passionate about what it is that we're doing, and so even though I'm not out getting to run around play CLE or adrenaline monkey, I'm still having a really fantastic time.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:35]:
I'm glad to hear that and and, appreciative of of you sharing your passion with with me and and everyone tuning in. So, thank you very

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:53:44]:
much. Thank you.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:45]:
If folks have anything they would like to follow-up with you about, where is the best place for them to do so?

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:53:52]:
Oh, we have lots of places. So if they wanna send an email, I would send that to hello@benevereending.com. That's hello, h e l l o, at benevereending, b e n e v e r ending.com. They can also find us using Be Never Ending on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Twitch. So we have started a Twitch stream because we understand that content creators are, you know, going to be an important audience for us. And in order to have credibility and to have the reach that we need, we need to also create content. And as we build the platform, then we'll be able to use never ending tools more and more to actually, you know, share content, which will be really cool. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:54:37]:
Yeah. Yeah. Empathy for the user. Absolutely.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:54:40]:
Absolutely. Best thing to do to to understand the user is to be a user.

Jeffrey Stern [00:54:45]:
Yeah. Well, Jamie, thank you again. This was awesome.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:54:48]:
Oh, my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. Feel free to have him back on another time.

Jeffrey Stern [00:54:53]:
Absolutely. Look forward to it.

Jamie Van Doren (NeverEnding) [00:54:54]:
Alright. Have a great one. Thank you.

Jeffrey Stern [00:54:57]:
That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show. So if you have any feedback, please send over an email to jeffrey@layoftheland.fm, or find us on Twitter at podlayoftheland or @sternjefe, j e f e. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land.