Yam Karkai’s illustrations made her an NFT sensation. What now?

All summer, crypto advocates had been spinning the bear market as an opportunity to “build.” Karkai and Malavieille assured me that World of Women had enough money in the bank to weather the current downturn, assuming it followed the same one-to-two year run as previous crypto winters. “The partners that are reaching out to us now, they’re not looking at our floor price or what the market looks like,” Karkai told me.

In the basement, the team discussed an upcoming World of Women Monopoly set, where each color on the game board corresponds to a different planet. “Are there only women on these planets?” Olivier asked. The presence or absence of men in any WoW-inspired universe would require an explanatory story. Now the group’s task was to brainstorm possibilities. “Something must have happened,” Karkai said. – We need a conflict. Perhaps, she suggested, “it was a terrible revolution where all the women were chased, and basically men wanted to take over.” But if the goal was inclusion, she noted at one point, “this has to be a positive transition.” Perhaps, she suggested, the women had escaped to form their own civilization, and the men would eventually be inspired to “reach out” and band together. It began to feel as if George Lucas had sold the rights to “Star Wars” action figures before he understood what had happened long ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Online, Karkai speaks the lingua franca of gracious managerial enthusiasm. “I want to thank everyone who has been a part of our journey in any way,” she tweeted in a thread celebrating World of Women’s first anniversary. (Her followers often respond to her tweets with “gm”—”good morning,” the web3 world’s preferred term for content-free positivity.) In person, Karkai’s reliance on the language of “empowerment” and “creativity” comes off as either cautiously inoffensive or faithless. “She doesn’t quite know how to joke with people,” Malavieille told me.

Snow, who left his job as director of entertainment at Meta in May, helped set the leadership tone. Snow started at Google under Sheryl Sandberg, and followed a path she’d seen taken by many other Lean In acolytes: from corporate technology director to cool startup COO Even dressed down in a tropical-print dress and sneakers, she stood out among their new colleagues in WoW T-shirts. She had completed the company’s first organizational chart, and the team had begun interviewing marketing firms. The goal, she said, was to take World of Women from NFT project to “global web3 brand”.

The pivot is now a claimed plot point in startup stories: a company begins by selling one service, only to become a payment app or a rideshare platform instead. Another tech company in World of Women’s situation might have drawn on a deep bench of programmers or on an unexpectedly useful piece of code, but World of Women lacked those assets. What it did have was a growing brand and a small but devoted group of fans—perhaps none more devoted than new COO Snow bought his first WoW in January for 10.8 Ethereum (about thirty-two thousand dollars), just as the NFT sale was dizzy. new heights. “I still feel like it was fantastic money spent,” Snow told me. “Whatever the price paid, it was absolutely worth it to be in this community.”

Amid the broader downturn in the crypto market in recent months, the idea of ​​community has gained new weight among true believers. Participation creates a sense of intimacy, and long-term success depends on drawing people in. Lana Swartz, associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, has followed the communities around cryptocurrencies and web3, observing the way they rely on a “blurring between sociality and selling” that has long been present in multilevel marketing schemes and, more recently, in the industry of influence. “That’s the environment where women’s NFTs touch,” Swartz told me. “It’s not barren ground.”

According to ownership records, there are about fifty-six hundred unique WoW holders and about eleven thousand seven hundred WoWG holders, with considerable overlap. The World of Women Discord, meanwhile, has around sixty thousand members. The company’s internal figures suggest that most members of the community are based in the US, UK or Canada, and are in their thirties; slightly more than half of them are women. Malavieille told me the company hoped to take cues from the community when it came to the next step. Would World of Women fans play games in the metaverse? So far, it seemed like they were eager to meet each other, but not particularly interested in video games.

“Fandoms are what make projects happen,” said Alex Hooven, director of product strategy at FOX Entertainment’s web3 operation. For Hollywood, the built-in audience of an NFT gathering, with its core of vocal supporters ready to offer free promotion, is appealing even in the absence of much narrative content.

When the World of Women team met in Lisbon, the ideal model—the one with the most ardent fan base and enough plot lines to expand ad infinitum—seemed to be the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Kempf made a brief objection. “We’re not a story company or a movie company like Marvel,” he said.

But for the moment, Karkai was adamant. “I think going forward, and being realistic, we really need to build a strong universe,” she said. Otherwise, she continued, “at some point it’s not going to be relevant anymore.”

When Karkai was a girl, she thought she could talk to her dog, Iris. As she tells it, the family couldn’t afford recreational activities or video games, and she was an only child living in a world of fantasy. If she saw something shiny outside the window at night, she felt sure it was a fairy. The magic seemed real. “I really believed it,” Karkai told me. “But I didn’t want to tell anyone, because every time I’d try to say something like, ‘Oh, magic exists,’ someone would be there to kill it for me.”

Karkai recalls that after her parents divorced when she was ten, she escaped further into the imaginary. She watched epic franchises like “The Lord of the Rings”; old favorites including “Singin’ in the Rain” and “The Wizard of Oz”; and classic Disney films such as “Cinderella” and “Pinocchio”. She thought she might like to make films one day too. “I always knew I wanted to do something creative,” she said.

At seventeen, she took the money she had saved from working for six months on a farm and moved to New York. (Karkai, who grew up speaking three languages ​​and now speaks five, was fluent in English.) She found an apartment near Washington Square Park, took long walks and ate lots of oatmeal. She once attended an open house at New York University. It would be “a dream to study cinema there,” she said. “But obviously it was an impossible dream, because it’s so expensive.” Unable to find work in New York, she traveled as an au pair and then moved to Paris, where she shared a studio apartment and took film classes while waitressing, babysitting and bartending. She met Malavieille at a Halloween party – she was dressed as Uma Thurman in “Pulp Fiction” and he showed up without a costume.

Karkai says that she grew up in southern Europe and the Middle East, but she now prefers not to share more than that publicly. An emphasis on pseudo-anonymity is not unusual in the crypto world – almost nothing is known about the alleged inventor of Bitcoin, who goes by Satoshi Nakamoto. Just as Karkai sought to make the WoWs inclusive by obliterating points of difference, she seeks to create a public identity that is indeterminate.

At interviews for entry-level jobs in Paris, she remembers that the same thing kept happening. “People would ask me, ‘So, where are you from?’ ” she told me. “And then, when you go into detail about these things, people start judging you.” She found that Parisians were willing to be quite direct. “I think that culturally there are too many differences, ” she remembers someone telling her. “You know, ‘We don’t have many foreigners in the company, so you wouldn’t fit in.’ ” Karkai’s side projects spread. She started a cooking blog, and one of her photos—of a rhubarb pie tiled in red and green stems—got attention on Reddit. She became interested in photography and created preset filters for the photo-editing software Lightroom. Malavieille “believed in every only little thing I started,” Karkai said. “He would tell all his friends, ‘So, Yam Yam has this new blog, or this new Instagram, follow her and like all her posts and comment and stuff.’ But Malavieille also had the knowledge and professional success that Karkai lacked: a college degree, steady work as a presenter. She felt the strain of relying on his financial support, and she believed that his colleagues looked down on her.