Nicolas Thorne: From the Ashes of NFTs Emerged an Entrepreneurial Guide

Season One, Episode Eight: Before NFTs and blockchain technology, Nicolas Thorne tried to build a business around digital scarcity. The concept didn't quite land its mark.

 

Web 3, crypto… NFTs. You’ve heard of them. Some of these things have spun off new technology and concepts like blockchain, and others have completely dropped in value. Regardless, before the term NFT truly existed, there was a pioneer who followed a similar vision:

I started a business for, I'm not going to say the wrong or like bad reasons, but probably not the best reasons. I started it largely because I wanted to start a company. And I started around a concept that I thought was really intellectually stimulating.

I still think it's intellectually stimulating, which is. Kind of digital scarcity, which I suppose is what's at the heart of blockchains and NFTs and these things. And, and this kind of contrast of the digital world being abundant and pixels being infinitely reproducible. And yet that there was this feeling that if our lives were moving online, that scarcity was still this like amazing human construct and maybe there was a way to create it.

That was the words of Nicolas Thorne, who is no longer trying to sell what would one day be known as NFTs, and is now the General Partner at New York-based incubator Prehype.

This week on Mastering the Art of Failing, Nicolas shares his story about several instances of failure throughout his entrepreneurial journey, but has overcome it, and has since taken those learnings to help shape new founders and startups.