Re:Envisioning Web3 | 1-1 Fireside Chat with Jed and Maaaaahhhaaaaa 🐸

Jed noted Maha sounded different today. The reason: he woke up to his cat throwing up on him, which is how he caught Jed's early phone call. He then set the tone for the hour at 17:37: "I'm gonna be as as vulnerable and as open as I can today... I usually don't let as many people in. So I'll do this for the space though for the culture."

Club soccer from age four, football kicking by junior year, then snowboarding at 11 pulled him out of team sports entirely. Around 2017 a mystery lump on his back — "it looked like I was carrying a softball on my back" — sent him to 23 specialists, most of whom poked it and said "hmm" 21:16. A doctor diagnosed a herniated back muscle, operated, and he woke up to the news that it wasn't that at all. He got a mesh anyway. Jed's reaction at 25:38: they said it wasn't a hernia, but still gave you the mesh?

The deepest stretch of the chat. Maha described the drift from active-person identity to patient identity, refusing it, and rebuilding purpose instead — accepting he might only snowboard a few more times and will pay for each one the next day. He looked out at a snow-covered mountain that morning and had to let it go 22:48.

A boutique at 17, two weeks at Sports Chalet (taken for the free snowboarding, abandoned for the corporate atmosphere), Leroy's, Zumiez, then Armani — "there's just no way. Like, I don't think I'm cut out for luxury." By 21 he'd quit to start a laser engraving business with friends off his stepfather's retirement hobby laser, dowelled together a skateboard to win a contract, and drove to Las Vegas that night to buy a commercial machine 29:01.

They delivered a huge order to a distributor, asked for a check, and got a term they'd never heard. Rent was two weeks out. Slick Ric chimed in that the holder is collecting interest on your money; Maha's counter: "or they're waiting on their net 90 too" 32:00. He's fairly sure he and his friend became a long-running inside joke on that distributor's team.

First buy at $99 in 2017, on Robinhood ("like an idiot"), while his mother — newly in traditional financial advising — warned her "degenerate son" he'd be scammed. It doubled, she said tell me when it triples. It tripled. She said "this is bullshit" and started stacking 38:51. He later sold alts to help buy his house, from bed, while recovering from the surgery.

Threelanders hired him off a McFly tip and flew him abroad for the first time. The accommodation did not pass inspection, so when he caught wind of an activation at NFT Paris with no one representing, he volunteered — 13 hours to Thailand, then 11 more to Paris two days later, getting dragged around and introduced to the Ledger and Consensys teams. "I'm just like baffled by the entire situation."

Six-plus months of banging their heads on a kids' brand ended with one question: who here actually has a kid? Nobody. "Here we are as a bunch of like middle-aged dudes trying to build for kids. It's kind of creepy without kids." They realigned toward a Simpsons/Futurama energy, and he says the brand, the team's enthusiasm and the collector base all improved from there. Along the way he gave a sharp aside on why luxury houses now run full kids' lines, and why Pokémon still works on all of us 50:12.

Not the art, not the game — the catch-22. Holders deserve to feel built-for, but holders can't be your only customers, so you have to ship web2 products that give them nothing immediate except a bigger company. With a team of four wearing every hat, "100% of the challenge is resource and perception of product and time" 1:00:51. Jed pressed on how holders eventually share the upside, floating equity and revenue share for the Regens team, and both landed on the same conclusion about tokens: dumping the whole bag on day one was never going to work 1:06:13.

Frankie's Adventures has done roughly 8–10k lifetime downloads on pure grassroots; Frankie Go pulled 7,000 players in 18 weeks but was web3-incentivized. The 2026 bet is a near-total rebuild of Adventures, test-marketed in the Philippines and Brazil where acquisition is cheapest, with a realistic six-to-eight-month lifecycle per title — because being Clash of Clans is a unicorn 1:11:20.

Margie asked for the name of the hotel for anyone's Thailand bucket list, which unlocked one more story: locked out of his room on night one, Maha went to the front desk, and the attendant walked him up and opened the door with zero questions asked. "I could have asked for any door. I did not want to sleep that entire night, guys." Jed's recommendation: barricade it.