Mike Duboe:

Gabe, we've been excited about this one. Normally I would start by doing an intro, but I actually don't want to do that today and I'm just going to start by asking you: What is MSCHF?

Gabe Whaley:

Good question. MSCHF is honestly whatever's convenient for you to describe it as at the time, and that sounds like a cop-out answer, but it's actually not. What I've learned over the past six years of really digging deep into this is people's descriptions of MSCHF ends up being more of a reflection of themselves in their own context than what it actually is. If you go ask people in the fine art galleries and museums of Paris, they're going to say MSCHF is an artist with precedent going back to Andy Warhol or Duchamp, or maybe they'll even say Banksy, for better or for worse. They perceive MSCHF as an artist. If you go to the other part of Paris, which is all the luxury brands, people might actually say MSCHF represents the new luxury, which is sort of an intellectual or conceptual layer of luxury, not exclusive to heritage or craftsmanship, but a new layer on top of that. They're not wrong, I guess.

You could also ask the kids standing outside of Supreme in Brooklyn and they'll be like, Oh, MSCHF is this hype thing that they make stuff that you can resell on StockIT, and they're right and they're wrong. And also when we first raised venture money, it was largely from Silicon Valley, and so people in Silicon Valley were saying, This is a new tech media play. All of the above are true. All of the above are wrong. What is it? At the end of the day, it's me and 30 of my friends here in Brooklyn, and we've basically created a wedge in the universe that allows us to make whatever we want, whenever we want, that somehow conveys our point of view in ways that are actually interactive in the systems that we're commenting on. And that can be anything. That can be footwear, that can be art, that can be luxury goods, it can be collectibles, it can be film, TV, books, everything, all of the above. So that's MSCHF. It's my excuse to just keep getting away with the next thing.

Mike Duboe:

You've just given us an hour of content to dive into, but maybe before getting into your personal story to create this, are there any descriptions of MSCHF you've heard that you just totally don't resonate with? What are some of the worst ones that you've heard?

Gabe Whaley:

Oh, good question. Definitely, rich art school kid doing projects on daddy's money, which comes up a lot and could not be further from the truth if you look at my background. Honestly, I'm not too precious about it. I think MSCHF is a very fluid thing and all descriptions are right and wrong simultaneously, and I think that's a good thing. In fact, it's the best when so many people have a different opinion of what MSCHF is because that means it's working. That means we haven't put ourselves in a box yet.

Rishabh Jain:

I can't remember ... Oh gosh, there's a famous art commentator or art critic who said something like art ... The job is not to figure out what the art is trying to communicate. The job of art is for you to decide what it is communicating to you. I wish I remember who this was who said this, but it sounds like you have a very similar view for what MSCHF is. You actually like the idea that the person is involved in what the company is showing up as.

Gabe Whaley:

Yeah. All the work that we put out has different layers of comprehension and even consciousness, for example. And I think when we put anything out, people will often appreciate it for very different reasons. One great example — and this is our first ever physical product — we went down the street and bought these white Nike Air Max 97s with the classic iconic air bubbles and took a needle from a hospital — don't ask how we got that — and injected water into the air bubbles. And one, it looked really cool, and two, when we put it on, someone said, Oh, you're walking on water like Jesus. And so we thought, okay, let's make 12 of these, one for each disciple. Let's price them at $1,425 because Matthew 14:25 in the Bible is where Jesus walked on water. Let's create these really interesting religious iconography that we can adorn onto the box and onto the shoe itself, and let's release it to the world and see what happens.

Long story short, we sold a lot more than 12 of them, but the funny thing coming out from that was watching the different layers of appreciation. So you would get obviously the Nike sneakerhead-type people and they're thinking, Oh my God, it's so amazing, it's so cool, it's going to be so hot on the resale market. Then you get a little bit less niche, but just general fashion slash streetwear people and they're just appreciative because it's a little bit edgy and it's like interesting design. And then you get a very next interesting layer, which were Christian sneakerheads and they were buying it. There were youth pastors writing and saying, You sold out so quickly, how do I get a pair? And then there was another layer which were the legal academic professionals — lawyers, law school professors — who appreciated it from a completely different academic lens of freedom of speech, First Amendment, artistic expression, copyright, trademark. Now, all of these people appreciate it for different reasons, and honestly, some of them we were making fun of and I think a lot of them were trying to figure out, Am I in on the joke or am I the butt of the joke? And also why did I still buy it anyways? And to me, I'm not saying that's what art should be, but that is honestly one of the ideal outcomes for anything that we put out is, it kind of leaves you thinking.

Rishabh Jain:

Yeah. Okay, so you just said is one of the ideal outcomes. How do you think about success going into, in the middle as you're seeing the reaction, and then at the end of. When you view it, how are you defining it and then how do you talk about it internally?

Gabe Whaley:

Yeah, so this is going to be a contrarian response that you probably don't expect, but we look at success as the act of creation and not the response, not the traction. Because if you start assessing yourself based on the herd, they're going to lead you astray. So our tradition was always celebrate the night before something goes out. Don't celebrate afterwards. You have to be at peace with yourself if no one sees it. You have to be at peace if people hate it, you got to stand by it, you got to be proud of it. Only that sort of insane attitude about your own output could give you the nerves and the courage to put something out truly risky, otherwise you're going to dilute, you're going to play it safe, and you're going to end up making things based on customer research and interviews and data. There's a place for that, but it's not in our space. Now, over the years, we've figured out how to apply all that stuff to build more predictability for the business, of course, but the core practice continues to be true. It is the act of creation.

Mike Duboe:

So maybe let's get into this system that you have here, and I think all marketing teams want to create systems of creativity to be able to do basically what you do replicably. What is your process and how has that evolved over time? Just start with that.

Gabe Whaley:

For sure. So I'll talk a bit about our brainstorm process, but then, and if I forget, remind me to talk about how we think about distribution as a practice, which actually is quite core to everything that we do. So brainstorming, a lot of people look at MSCHF and they think, Wow, that must be such a fun job. You probably just sit around and have ideas and you're creative all the time. And do you guys do drugs? You probably get high all the time and just dream up ideas. No, not true. It's zero fun. It's hard work, it's disciplined. So the ideation process at MSCHF starts as following. So we have one person whose full-time job is essentially, it's very similar to being a university professor or a high school teacher. We refer to them as the librarian. Their job is to curate topics, build a curriculum, do research, and present new inputs for the MSCHF machine.

And that comes in the form of white papers, mood boards, presentations, guest lectures, talks, anything that you can imagine, just like you would see in school. Those are circulated on a weekly basis to the team. And then every single day — Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday — there's a one-hour-long brainstorm of various formats. It can be group work, it can be heads-down solo, it can be drawing. You have to instill a lot of variety into that. Every idea is documented, every idea is tagged, every idea is categorized, and there's a long-tail vetting process that takes about two months, if not a quarter, to move ideas from the mass pool into a pool where we would greenlight it if we had to choose something to start making today. We force the idea to sit in that pool, then, for another couple of months. Now it has to survive the test of time. You forget about it and you come back to it, and if it still feels exciting, then you slot it for production, which now on our timetables could be 12 months out. So that's the brainstorming process. Why is that good? Being creative is actually a muscle. It's not something that you're born with. And some people, sure, are naturally good at it. Some people are better than others at it.  It's totally a muscle. And so if you go for long periods of time without stretching your brain in that way, you do get worse at it. And the more you practice, you do get better at it. So that's the brainstorming process. It leads to volume, it leads to routine, and ultimately it's kind of a numbers game where you can extract good ideas and separate them from the bad ideas that you feel good about. Now, the process about making a good idea actually work. There's the ideological one, and then there's the practical one. Ideologically, what we always say is, a good idea has to hit in one sentence and hit even harder in three sentences. What that means is there are layers of comprehension, and typically those layers means it applies to multiple audiences. And so that is always a super important thing to pack in there because also it gives people something to talk about, which inherently makes it pressworthy, it makes it shareworthy.

Everyone is a content creator. Give them something to make content about. You have to build that into the DNA of the idea. And that gets me to the more practical part of this process, which is we built a department at MSCHF called the distribution. We call it distro. It's the distro department. And distro is obsessed with how do you plant opportunities for natural circulation and maybe even virality, although the term virality certainly has a different definition every day now. But the distro team was tasked with taking any idea that we would have and actually building in loops like virals, shareworthy loops, into the production process itself and then marketing it. An example of that would be, actually, I talked about the Jesus shoe. So the follow-up to that was the Satan shoe, because from an academic point of view, you can't have Jesus without Satan and vice versa.

And being the nerds that we are, we knew we had to do both. So what did the distro team suggest for the Satan shoe? How do you build distro into the product? You get Lil Nas X to be the photoshoot model, and also you get Lil Nas X to wear them in his "Montero" music video, and then that creates a whole world of assets that you know are just going to start making the rounds. So that's an example of building distro into the product because you know that gives you more loops. And then when it goes live, there's the whole rollout strategy. How do you get those images circulating to build tension a few days before the release? How do you use the release to create that moment of buzz? How do you have a follow-up release? A big part of our strategy used to be having a death strategy for every product that we would do, because that would give you another moment. So there's the get excited before it's real, now it's real, then it dies: three moments. And if you do it right, that actually spreads your attention span over maybe a glorious two weeks, which is infinity in today's terms.

Mike Duboe:

Yeah, I mean, so on this timeline, one of the things you said that surprised me was that you let ideas sit for a couple months, and that, to me, it seems like the cost to that is you're not moving as fast as culture or you miss the opportunity on some kind of zeitgeisty ideas. Can you say more there? How do you guys think about that?

Gabe Whaley:

MSCHF doesn't do any zeitgeisty ideas, but they feel zeitgeisty. Everyone thinks we do, but we're not like "Saturday Night Live." We're not in a writer's room tonight planning out tomorrow's show. We chose an approach that speaks to much longer-term behaviors and trends that feel very of the moment. So I would say a lot of our work has been focused on the meta versus what happened yesterday. I don't know. Taylor Swift is getting married now. There was a glorious three days to react to that if you wanted to, but not really for us. But maybe you can extract from that and just be like, okay, celebrity unions, okay, that's a topic that you can play with, and how does that manifest over time as a MSCHF idea? So that's more how we think about it. And I think a big part of that comes from how to compete in a crowded attention marketplace because everyone's going to be chasing yesterday's news.

So by default, your competition is high. And when everyone's chasing that, it really is a resources game. It really is a timing game, and you're just going to get drowned out. Even if you have a great idea, it's very likely that you're going to be drowned out because everyone's going after it. For the same reason, I don't like doing things for holiday, even though I think every marketer is kind of programmed to build a calendar based on holidays and spend more money around holidays. And while I get it, I understand the business value of doing that, from a marketing point of view, look at all the white space when people aren't trying to talk. That's where you can have permission to be really creative because it's wide open. So that's kind of how I think about it. How do you create a game where you are the only player, then you win. And that's actually what MSCHF is in a nutshell.

Rishabh Jain:

Okay. I mean, yeah, like Mike was saying, there's so many things to dig into here. One part of what you said, I mean, the level of rigor in your process is astonishing. So you have a role called a librarian whose job it is to send out a week ... I mean, I'm imagining something extreme inside of the hood. It's like this pipeline is extremely clear and everybody knows the roles that they're playing at what point in time. And on the other hand, of course, the observation of MSCHF is it feels like things just pop up. I guess what leads to that internal discipline and maybe spend a little bit of time walking us through the elements, either of your own personal history or of the kind of people you have assembled inside of the company, that allows for that rigor in the process to lead to these beautiful moments.

Gabe Whaley:

Yeah, for sure. Honestly, I think the process is not that profound. There are much more operationally complex companies out there. All we had to do was essentially build a very versatile, essentially an assembly line, a factory for ideas, and that starts with the inputs, which makes sense. Then you have the ideas, then you kick ideas into production, and that's a combination of project management, design, engineering, manufacturing, and then you kick it to marketing, and then it goes in the calendar and it goes live. And then we have our audience platform. So the audiences grow every time we put something out. And then you have this underbelly of shared services such as finance, legal, HR, customer support, and you just keep that going. And we became insanely efficient over the years, basically giving ourselves the ability to put out such different types of output on a really rigorous calendar.

So to answer your second question, hardworking people, that's not so unique. I think there are a lot of hardworking people, so that's not necessarily the secret sauce. I think a lot of our advantage comes from our outsiderness, and that definitely, I mean, most likely started with me because I started the company and they always say founders attract teams that relate to themselves or are a reflection of themselves, which makes sense. So the high level on my background is ... You would think that I'm this cultural savant kid of the '90s, socialite, whatever, really tapped in. I could not be more opposite. Grew up in rural North Carolina, immigrant Korean mother, dad who was in the army, neither of them went to college, lived under a rock in North Carolina. All my classmates would go hunting on weekends, they would wear Carhartt because it's functional, they were part of Future Farmers of America.

That's the world that I lived in, which was great, except I wasn't even allowed to participate in that because we lived far away from people so you couldn't really hang out with anyone. My parents were also very strict because it was that immigrant mentality of you need to get out of here and go be stable and become a doctor or lawyer or something, which I failed at. So I went from this very sheltered, strict upbringing where I was not allowed to watch TV, movies, play video games, listen to popular music. Instead, I was, I guess slightly above-average student in school and a decent classical pianist if you didn't look too hard at my finger placement. And I literally knew nothing about culture, did not wear cool clothes, did not hang out with the cool kids, was sort of this misplaced nerd in a very rural area.

And then for college, I did not get into the schools that mom and dad wanted, except West Point. That was the only school that I got into. So I went from a very sheltered upbringing to a more sheltered college experience at the United States Military Academy. I was there for two years where, again, no TV, movies, video games, music, no clothes, you're wearing a uniform, you're head's shaved, and you just create a very particular worldview. And then I quit. I dropped out at age 20 after two years. And, I mean, it's basically like, imagine leaving a cult that you were in your entire life and then popping up in New York City for the first time ever. Just imagine how overwhelming that is. In fact, I think there are TV shows made about this. Well, I experienced that and I spent age 20 to 23 just trying to figure out, Where is my place in all this?

Who are my people? What do I wear? What do I listen to? What do you spend money on? What do you do for work? I had no idea. So one thing at a time, I started trying to find my place, and somehow that manifested in creating these projects that critiqued everything that I was observing because I wasn't able to participate in it. That kind of led to MSCHF, with obviously a lot left unsaid in between. And so when I look at the team now, it's a very similar makeup of people who were not the center of attention in school growing up. They were not the cool kids. They're not particularly fashionable or tapped in. They're just, honestly? Quiet nerds who love making things. And I personally love that.

Rishabh Jain:

Okay, this is going to sound, yeah, I guess if you ask a company, a general large-scale company or the CMO, a very common refrain among CMOs is, We have to tap into Gen Z.

And the common way that they tap into Gen Z is by hiring people who are in Gen Z, who are in that. And you just said the inverse of that, I guess, and you are the creator of a lot of these moments. Now, if you're talking to the CMO of one of these companies and they're hearing what you just described as what you do for your system, how do you help them reconcile the current way that they think about it and what they're attempting to do and the way that you think about it? Yeah, what's the bridge — or is there a bridge — between those two views?

Gabe Whaley:

Yeah, I don't think they're necessarily mutually exclusive. And look, I'm 35 now, been at this for a long time, and I'm pretty jaded about how things have changed. It comes with the territory, and I will have to do my own existential shake-ups to figure out, okay, what does MSCHF look like in a new generation? Because I'm starting to get to that point. What do I care about? How do I want this to work? So I think the balance is, it really is choose your fighter. You can be insidery and you can speak from within, or you can have that eagle-eye point of view and take a more macro approach. I wouldn't even say one is better than the other, but you should invest in recognizing what you're working with and make sure that's in line with the approach that you're trying to take.

Mike Duboe:

On this topic of the evolution of MSCHF and evolution of yourself as well, you've talked a lot about the creative process here. MSCHF now is larger and several more years in than when you initiated this process. The question I have is, does creativity scale and how has your process evolved over time?

Gabe Whaley:

Yeah, yeah. So I think creativity does scale because creativity is this X factor that you can layer onto an object or experience or interface that gives you that 10x multiple, it gives you that viral factor, which I think is very valuable. The catch is, creativity ... Well, creativity and virality are definitely not the same thing. Virality is fleeting, and the shelf life of virality has been decreasing a ton over the last decade, and more and more every day. Where creativity scales, I believe, is through long-term consistency and applying it to the right places. So the way that I approached this in the first few years of MSCHF was, how do we consistently put out something new on a ridiculous schedule so that you're always getting the attention and then capturing that attention into your own platforms and then growing that. And that was how we were scaling creativity. In a way, not too dissimilar from a vertically integrated movie studio with our own distribution platform, basically like Disney or HBO or whatever.

You put out the content, you have your hits, you have some L's as well, but at the end of the day, they're all either building brand or they're growing revenue or they're growing audience. And that does compound over time, which is super valuable. Now that we're more than half a decade in, we're going in this direction where we've put out so much work over the past few years and so many different categories, and that's afforded us the ability to go deep in various categories and observe patterns, trends, but also build efficiencies internally. And so now, as we continue to go wide with our artistic practice, we're actually spending a lot of time going deeper in the categories that we've established and applying that creative muscle to ideas with longevity kind of baked in as a business. So you asked me at the beginning of the chat, how do you describe MSCHF?

How do I describe it today from a practical point of view? MSCHF is a holding company for creative enterprises. So we really are this house of entities. I wouldn't say brands because they're not all just consumer products that people can buy. We have, sure, we have footwear, we have luxury leather goods, we have fine art, we also have theme parks. I'm not joking. So it is a house of things that seem to not make sense with one another, but when you step back and look at the emotional through line, it's an emotion that only we own and we have a monopoly on that emotion. And so how do we build our house on top of that?

Mike Duboe:

All right. One of the things I'm trying to understand is what compounds in this system, and maybe one way to get at that is what's gotten easier with scale versus what's gotten harder?

Gabe Whaley:

Yeah, good question. Well, the hard thing with scale is, when you're building a cultural entity, the more popular ... It's the catch-22: the more well-known you become, by law, the less cool you become. It is just the way things work, which is very painful because I think we became very well known and then we were looking that problem in the face very quickly. So that becomes harder. What becomes easier? I mean, operationally things just become a lot tighter, right? You're no longer in zero to one. And obviously there are new challenges when you're beyond those early stages. But we have this rich internal history and track record and culture that allows us to quickly dig into and grow the different entities that we're essentially overseeing, managing, and investing in now. The other part of the structure of being the holding company of these different entities is we're starting to be at a position where we can give our different categories their own context and their own sets of rules to exist in culture.

Our handbag line, for example, is called GSCT, which stands for Global Supply Chain Telephone because it was birthed from a one-off concept of creating a handbag where we played that childhood game of telephone with the handbag design in five factories around the world. It became super popular, it continued to be popular, and now it is its own brand in the MSCHF universe, it is GSCT by MSCHF. So now it plays by its own rules, with its own audience, with its own leadership, its own team, its own budget, its own P and L. And so this approach actually allows us to stack these verticals horizontally so that we don't have to grow the top line of each of these so much in a way that dilutes it from a cultural perspective, but instead we can build the house.

Mike Duboe:

So I want to try to draw the bridge between what you're doing and lessons that modern CMOs or founders that are trying to do marketing for their startups, what they could glean from this. And one of the things you've done, maybe a good transition here, is you've launched Applied MSCHF, which is a client-facing agency. How does that look today? And maybe how are you bringing some of these insights over to companies?

Gabe Whaley:

For sure. So the origin of Applied MSCHF actually came from the structure that we have as the holding company because Applied MSCHF is essentially a creative back office slash studio that was servicing all of our internal initiatives. So it just kind of made sense, open it up for business, it gives that creative team more material to play with, it makes our world bigger, it becomes a revenue stream, so all of that makes sense. We are getting hit up by a lot of people, and it's actually interesting to see what they want. The most obvious one is people are coming for the silver bullet. What's the MSCHF secret sauce or whatever. And I think they're really going to hate it when I say it's just hard work and discipline. But Applied MSCHF will be offering our services in a way that can help brands use their place and culture to create new things that lend themselves to moments that keep them in the conversation.

And I think the opportunity here is, for the longest time, marketers have spent their brain power and energy and resources creating fiction to sell products. So it's like these narratives, and why does anyone care about National Cupcake Day? Doesn't matter. It's not real. But now if you look at any marketer's calendar, it's like it's National Couples Day, National Breakup Day, National Cupcake Day, National Basketball Day. Who cares? No one cares. Doesn't matter. Everybody's been weaving these fictional narratives long enough. The consumer is too smart for that, and they don't have time. So the way that we see it is, MSCHF spent the last six years using culture as material to make new things that people wanted to talk about, engage with, buy, sell, whatever. If we're working with brands and culture, that gives us the same opportunity, but maybe a little bit quicker and a little bit more legal. Now, we can work with Coca-Cola and instead of just shooting an ad to sell more Coca-Cola, maybe we can make something with what Coca-Cola has. What does Coca-Cola have? They have iconic colors. They have iconic bottle shapes. They have a ton of different flavors. They have fizziness. What's one of the most recognizable sounds in the world? It's when you crack the can of Coke open. What do you do with that? There's so much material that these brands are sitting on that they don't use because we have so much muscle memory to just generate fiction to sell a product that's not going to change. But actually, the opportunity is to make new things.

Rishabh Jain:

I want to connect this to something you said very early on about your measurement of success. You said the way you measure it is actually the point of release of a product. And if I'm the CMO at a large organization, I'm thinking about how do I manage my stakeholders and manage risk of a project relative to my investment into it?

And you're running such a different system and now you're going to expose that system to, let's just say Coke, okay? So Coke comes to you and you're now talking to the CMO of Coke. How do they think about success relative to, yeah, how do you map for them how they should be thinking about success in these types of projects? And then how do they think about risk of these types of projects relative to how they have already in their own world, they have their own views of mapping risk and investment and things like this? How do we a combine these?

Gabe Whaley:

That's a good question. At the end of the day, the things that Applied MSCHF will do for these brands plays into any CMO's KPIs regardless, which is how do you build that funnel? How do you build the top-of-funnel, like eyeballs, awareness, conversation, and how do you drive that down to leads to conversion? And you should measure everything that you do based on these KPIs that are unique to each company. And at the end of the day, I do do that for MSCHF, but our culture is not based around that. And that's a pretty important distinction. We would ruthlessly track open rates, sellout times, resell multiples, page views, video views on content that other people make. That was a very, very important part. Couldn't celebrate that, though. That was my only internal distinction. So for these brands, the KPIs don't really change. I think it's just in order to do anything that's truly going to be remembered, you need to carve out time and space and just brain power to take a bit of risk.

And the reason for that is not just me pushing my own agenda, it's if you're not doing that, everything else you're doing, someone who's competing for your customer is doing the same thing, guaranteed. That's why the word "table stakes" exists. Everyone's doing the same thing. They're building content strategy, they're seeding to influencers, they're doing events, they're doing CRM channel marketing. Everyone's going to do the same thing. And with AI, it's going to make it all look the same. It's literally all going to be the same. It just is. It's going to be so easy, and there's going to be so much more volume now because the numbers game just blew up by times a thousand. So it's going to be more important than ever to carve out some budget, some team, whatever, however you want to do it, to let yourself take some risk and hold yourself accountable to it. But give yourself an opportunity to take multiple shots on goal, learn, develop, and play in a game where other people aren't so dilutive.

Rishabh Jain:

So I want to just take the opportunity to shift into AI, and I'll start very broad because you started with this idea that everything that the marketer is doing already is going to become even more competitive because AI is going to increase the volume. When you think about your creative production systems and what your output is, in what ways is it augmented by or helped by AI? And in what ways do you feel like, Hey, actually we want to intentionally be separate from this because there's not going to be any white space left?

Gabe Whaley:

Yeah, I don't know if our team uses AI that much yet. I think there's definitely ... People have definitely found value in using it to expedite research and production processes, pretty standard, just kind of menial computer work. Creatively, ChatGPT is not cranking out good MSCHF ideas, but you can ask it to come up with a MSCHF idea and it'll give you something that is like 40% to 60% there, which is pretty funny. And theoretically, that could get better, right? Yeah. The thing about MSCHF, and I keep saying this, is we managed to carve out a space where we were the only player. And so if that space starts to fill up, we're going to hop to another space. That's how we've gotten here, and I think that's one of the things that will stay consistent as we continue to exist. I am worried for all marketers out there because while we're all excited about these tools, and now there are companies where you don't even have to pay an influencer, you can just generate an influencer to do a product review. That's so bleak! That's crazy! And I'm not even saying that to defend the influencers — whatever, the market is the market — I'm saying that's just going to lead to, I think that there is, it's like the dark forest theory of the internet where just like nothing is real and you can't trust anything, and so your default is going to be skepticism. And I think a lot of us hear the word "slop" and stuff like that.

That to me is depressing. But also, wow, what an opportunity, what an opportunity when everyone is doing the same thing. We should be thinking about that.

Mike Duboe:

Yeah, I was going to say, this is a meta that MSCHF should play to, right?

Gabe Whaley:

Well, you know what the meta is, ironically? The meta is how do you build permanence? How do you build things in the real world? How do you elevate craftsmanship, and how do you have the discipline to create and maintain secrets over a long period of time? But maybe we're not ready for that conversation yet.

Mike Duboe:

One of my reflections here as we're kind of approaching end of the conversation is there's such a scarcity of original thinking out here in the world right now, and you're one of the few names that continually comes up as, you've been an original thinker over and over again. You've kind of persisted that. One of the questions that that's leading to is, if you're a CMO or running marketing for a company, is individual thinking actually always optimal? Do you think actually a CMO or a marketing function should think originally? What are some of the costs to that as well?

Gabe Whaley:

I think it's just a balance, right? There's a lot to be said about doing things that work, doing things that have been done before. The table stakes are important. I would never say throw away the table stakes, but I like to think about this in terms of how do you give yourself unfair advantage? My job as CEO of MSCHF is to give this group unfair advantage, otherwise we could not exist. So if I'm a CMO of a company, make sure you're checking all the right boxes, but what are you doing to give your team and give your brand an unfair advantage? That's going to require some courage. That will require some risk.

Mike Duboe:

And if I'm a CMO who wants to bring in some DNA that rhymes with MSCHF or that you've been able to attract and recruit, and I may or may not see it in my team today, what kind of advice would you give to someone like that?

Gabe Whaley:

I think I would speak to what I look at when we hire, or what I look at when ... or what I see when I get excited about someone that I meet and I just think to myself, I have to work with this person someday. Usually that person has an intense excitement and curiosity about these liminal spaces that people are ... They see the world in terms of moments of exploit creatively, which I think is really smart. Instead of going with the trends, how are you seeing one step beyond the trends? There are people like that out there. I would be looking for outsidery-type people, and I would be looking for people who have a track record of making things on their own. Especially now all the tools exist. It's amazing. You can make everything now. Now you don't even have to learn how to write code. Back in my day, you had to write your own code for your website and do all of that stuff. So I would be finding the kids who are making stuff and seeing around the corners.

Rishabh Jain:

And if you were to give a piece of advice to people in terms of ... I think one of the main themes that I'm taking away is you need to find your own white space. So it's like MSCHF has found its own white space. There's the table stakes, and then there's this question for any given brand, what is its opportunity to win? You made the statement around like, Hey, what is the unfair advantage that I can give to the organization? What are some of the things that someone can start to do to start to explore that — outside of hire you guys, you know what I mean? (laugh)

Gabe Whaley:

Yeah. One of the best things that MSCHF ever gave me that I did not anticipate was it allowed me to have a foot in so many different industries and categories that don't usually talk to one another. I may be one of the few people on the planet who have such a firm rooting in the world of fine art, in the world of streetwear, in the world of luxury fashion, in the world of collectibles, in the world of technology and venture capital, and also now increasingly into the world of hospitality and real estate. And so being able to triangulate the insights from so many different industries gives us such a crazy advantage, especially because then you can start applying business practices and methodologies from one industry to another one, and that is a true cheat code to one plus one equals five. It's actually incredible, if you think about it.

There's a lot more to unpack there, but we'll leave that for part two. So it really is how do you break out of your own bubble, right? If you're a direct-to-consumer CPG marketer, I'm sure you're going to all of the CPG conferences and you're probably going to Cannes Lions and South by Southwest. Sure. Continue to go to those, but go to something else, right? Just go do something else. Anything. Different space. Make it uncomfortable, you'll learn a lot. By the way, the cheap version of this is if you're in New York City, just ride public transportation. It actually ... That, I think, goes a long way. Just seeing everything.

Mike Duboe:

One reflection here, and something you said that I very much agree with is, most of the interesting people and ideas sit at the intersection of circles that typically don't overlap, and it seems like you have found a way to continually introduce new circles into the constellation that is MSCHF. The question I would wrap on here is let's zoom out 10 years. What is MSCHF?

Gabe Whaley:

Good question. If we're still around in 10 years, maybe we start to show up in some of the history books, possibly, maybe not like the current administration's history books, but maybe art school, maybe design school. And I think that's cool, and I'm thinking a lot about that, actually, because I don't think — just the measure of an artist — I don't think the work was significant until you have survived that test of time. So I am super hell-bent on just making it that long no matter what. Right now, I think our current setup is very good. I can imagine being a much larger, horizontally stacked holding company of these enterprises from all of these different categories, which ironically is more or less what I pitched in 2019 when we first raised money, which was we are going to build this universe that allows that MSCHF point of view to exist in as many categories as we can possibly touch. So it's day one. We're going for it.

Mike Duboe:

Gabe, thanks so much. This has been great.

Gabe Whaley:

Awesome. Glad to do it.

Rishabh Jain:

Amazing.

Gabe Whaley:

Ride subway, public transportation.

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