How Magic Eden CEO Jack Lu grew Magic Eden to $182.3M revenue and 900K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is jack lew after monitoring the crypto space and recognizing its potential particularly on solana jack took the leap of starting out at ftx one of the industry's leading exchanges where he worked within partnerships and corporate development following this he decided to fill the gap in the market for a community focused interactive nft ecosystem and marketplace and launched magic eden which is witnessed one of the fastest paces of growth in crypto jack you're ready to take us to the top absolutely all right fastest pace is a big statement i have to ask you to back that up with data what do you mean fastest by what by what metric yeah absolutely uh well first of all thanks thanks to time for having me nathan um well we started magic eden seven months ago uh in that time we've become the second largest nft marketplace in the world so this month where we're about to trade around four or five four to five hundred million dollars of nfts um on our marketplace and we're the fastest marketplace to reach uh cumulatively a billion dollars in gmb uh traded so we did that in around four or five months that's amazing cool there's guys there's the data no beating around the bush it's right there so so so real quick uh jack put this on a timeline for me when do you write the first line of code for magikeeden uh that was around late september yeah september or so so just last year i mean we were talking like like eight months ago yeah that's right that's right wow we launched a site in 14 days actually so the first one was really sticky taped together to dare i say but uh you know we we we launched fast and let the market tell us what we were doing right and what we're doing wrong and and how you said you you hit one billion in cumulative nft sold on your platform in january in february uh i don't remember the exact month but it was around that that's right yeah okay uh that's amazing and so what what enabled you to grow so quickly right obviously you ran bd at a massive exchange maybe there's some connections there that help you grow but what was the credit to that original mousetrap and the growth yeah absolutely so i think there were a couple of things um well number one you know i have to definitely give credit to the timing right of the market so uh you know q1 q2 last year was when ethereum nfts really took off and really caught the cultural zeitgeist right with peoples bayc and so on but q3 there was a huge boon of interest in solana the blockchain that we're built on as well as the nft activity there so we caught that timing really well and broke that tailwind um but separate to that i think within the company itself the main point that really helped us grow i think was the the skill set of the founding team so we've got four founders myself uh our cto his name is sid my my our chief operating officer his name is joshua and our chief engineer his name is joji or rex uh and i really felt like the four of us came with a good synergies of skill sets that allowed us to build something really fast and have really good intuition about what was the right things to build so the key there were two of us came from crypto exchanges so i came from ftx and our chief operating officer officer georgian came from coinbase and dydx which is a you know one of the largest d5 exchanges and then my two technical co-founders came from ubereats so they came from really big consumer marketplaces and if you step back and think about it the nft marketplace the business model is really like a crypto exchange right um but the features the software that you build looks really like a consumer marketplace i just felt like we had some really natural intuition about what were the right things to build this makes tons of sense now were you very diplomatic about equity at the beginning everyone gets 25 or how'd you guys think about that obviously maybe maybe there's even an equity question is this all built in like a dow or central treasury or something like that no it's a it's a it's an equity thing pretty vanilla but yeah like uh equal split you know i think oh wow you did equal absolutely you know equal partners in this we could have done it without um uh we could have done it without each other oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're gonna get a different valuation a vc is gonna pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're gonna do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview i love this okay so you get going you write code you get volume up quickly i mean how did you do just like just people are going to hear these numbers and be a little bit in disbelief so i want to try and break it down to like lego blocks right where you've now built this masterpiece the first lego the first nft store on your platform what was it how much did it sell for and how did you help that buyer or seller do you remember oh two hours i can't remember i'm embarrassed to say but we've got like almost 10 000 collections uh now listed on magic so i can't remember although i do remember one of the earliest um one of the earliest collections this must be in you know the first 10 or something was called cyber trolls and um our team we were trying to bd the artist to list their collection with magic eden but then uh the the creator of that collection turned you know turned to turn the conversation around and started showing himself to us and saying yo you know i actually want to work for you guys because you guys have something really special going on we hired him his name is igor he was our first bd guy and he was just the killer like absolutely um integral to the you know the founding story and the early success of maji eden so so is that what you're doing you're almost like you're almost like sotheby's you're actually spending all your time recruiting artists effectively uh yeah so we've got two main business lines we've got uh a business line called launch pad where we help artists launch their nfts for the first time and that is absolutely what you know as you described it's very much like artist outreach right and then we have a another business which is called secondary uh secondary trading so this is where the art is already in the hands of holders and they're trading back and forth it's more like a craigslist kind of thing um that that piece of it is much more about being in touch with the collector community and you know uh marketing to them and incentivizing them to come to magic mm-hmm and if you obviously you have 100 of revenue right what percent is launch pad versus secondary trading it's around um launchpad is a little more spiky i would say it's around 2080 so or 30 70 so 20 launch pad 80 secondaries or sometimes it goes up to 37 yeah yep so and just to i guess just to go back to volume you quoted 400 million that was 400 million in gmv last month in april yeah and what do you think you'll do this month this month has started off pretty strong actually so i think we're already at um [Music] well where are we...