Time, how to record pieces of web3 w/ Keith Grossman (President @ Time)

This episode of the Ledger podcast, recorded live at VeeCon in Minneapolis, highlights the historically complex and often difficult relationship between web3 and the press. However, Time Magazine, with its notable timepieces NFT collection, is presented as a key leader in Web3 adoption, demonstrating the potential for old media to evolve. 

Ledger’s Chief Experience Officer, Ian Rogers, is set to have a one-to-one conversation with Time President, Keith Grossman, who is steering this evolution.

Watch the full video below or read into the key topics discussed in the Podcast ahead:

Key Highlights:

VeeCon: The Embodiment of Community and Excitement

Ian Rogers and Keith Grossman discuss their VeeCon experience. Keith was struck by the large, diverse crowd (six or seven thousand people) with representative pfps—and compared the excitement to the fervor for new iPhones. 

He noted the event felt more like a carnival or like a county fair, a sentiment Ian echoed, calling it a “country fair meets carnival meets like family reunion” where communities connected. 

Keith particularly emphasized the strong community of VFriends, acknowledging Gary Vaynerchuk’s significant influence as a unifying “glue” in the web3 space.

Keith Grossman’s Journey: A History of Digital Transformation

Keith recounted his journey, starting as an intern at Wired in 2014, where he was introduced to the crypto space. His career has been marked by moments of digital transformation:

• Wired: He helped digitize the brand’s revenue, making it the first Condé Nast brand to derive over 50% of its revenue from digital. He also launched the tablet edition with Adobe that Steve Jobs endorsed.
• Ars Technica: He focused on community power and built the “ars accelerator,” including a “predictive algorithm” that could forecast if an article would exceed 100,000 page views within 1.5 hours, growing revenues 85% in one year.
• Bloomberg: He worked to unify disparate platforms and launched “quick take social mobile video” with the goal of providing “verifiable trustworthy social mobile video content in the news space”.
• Time: The challenge was evolving the “storied brand that’s been 100 years old and evolve it for the next hundred years”.

Why Leapfrog to Web3: Identity, Ownership, and Isolation in 2020

Time’s decision to enter Web3 was not part of the initial strategy after the Benioff purchase; the focus was on fixing the website and building newsletters. 

However, 2020 served as the catalyst, prompting the realization that digital tokens, or NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), are the foundational digital primitive of the emerging Web3 era, much like the webpage was for the early web. This meant Time could redefine digital content ownership and connect with new audiences through a decentralized network.

“Why always play catch up in web 2 when we can leap frog into web3”. 

Keith identified key trends during the isolation of 2020:

• Digital Identity: People started to understand that their digital identity was just as valuable as their physical identity.
• NFTs and Value: If digital identity was valuable, why wouldn’t what they value online be worth just as much as what they value in the real world.
• Community Formation: People were gathering around each other and forming new communities based not on demographics or geographics, but on shared psychographics.
  

The final moment of conviction came in February (2021) when owner Mark Benioff sent an email referencing the Nyan Cat sale, which made it all click: how they could take TIME into web3.

Timepieces: A New Economic Paradigm and Community Uplift

Time entered Web3 in March 2021. Key steps included: releasing one-of-one NFTs, accepting 32 cryptocurrencies (now 33, including ApeCoin) for digital subscriptions, and committing to using the token and blockchain to change the relationship they have with their consumers.

Keith spent six months listening in Clubhouse rooms and Twitter Spaces. He observed that this technology allowed creators to be paid for their overall contribution to society not for just their point of creation. He realized that a brand’s job is not to make it about itself but to uplift that creator further and then be validated by a community.

Timepieces statistics (at the time of recording):

• Community Size: 40,000 people across Twitter and Discord.
• NFTs Dropped: 20,000 NFTs.
• Wallets Connected: 6,000 of the 12,000 wallets that own Timepieces have connected their digital wallet to time.com to remove the paywall without giving personal information.

The Personal and Professional Transformation

Ian Rogers commented on Keith’s “all in” professional commitment, drawing a parallel to his own non-linear move from Apple to LVMH to Ledger, noting that Ledger makes far more sense than LVMH.

Keith shared his personal motivation:

“I cannot sit back and just allow myself to be an observer in this.. I want to be a participant and I want to shape it”. 

He recognized that he was witnessing a bigger revolution take place from online renters to online owners from privacy being in the hands of the platforms to privacy being in the hands of the consumer. 

He is committed to ensuring the internet his eight-year-old daughter, Ellie, uses is a positive one that he has helped to shape. 

He views this as a 20-year trend not a small fad.

Time as the Right Vehicle: Trust, Trustworthiness, and Capturing History

Keith asserted that the Time brand is the right platform because its “red border represents trust” and objectivity. In a space with great potential but also significant bad actors, a brand like Time provides a platform to validate a revolution. 

He linked this to Ledger, stating that a brand like Ledger is important in this space because the bad actors are extraordinarily smart.

Time’s President, Keith Grossman, emphasized Time’s role in capturing living history, citing Vitalik Buterin’s cover story. This editorial decision, independent of the Web3 team, inspired Timepieces to create a decentralized issue and NFT, dropped as a surprise airdrop for the community. 

Mo suggested that if the internet was an information revolution, Web3 is a revolution of value. He found it appropriate that Time is capturing all of these moments in the time of web3, creating an incredibly interesting documentation of the evolution of web3 itself.

The Power of Community Feedback and Kindness

Keith Grossman admitted Timepieces made a lot of mistakes during the genesis mint, including underestimating demand and issues with bots and gas wars. The key lesson was the importance of real-time community feedback, realizing the smartest person in the room is often connected through web3.

He highlighted community power with a story: After the difficult launch, the Cool Cats community hosted Timepieces in their Discord. Furthermore, an anonymous Timepieces holder built their entire, secure Discord server for free. Moved by this kindness, Keith bought the holder’s NFT, “the world’s smallest nft,” to remember the gesture.

“Love is the only commodity you can’t hoard the more you give it away the more you get in return.”

Timepieces: The Read-Write Social Ownership Web

Keith defined the relationship between Web2 and Web3 through the lens of privacy:

• Web1: Privacy is “nobody owns anything privacy”.
• Web2: Privacy is “they own you privacy” (platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter).
• Web3: Privacy is “you own your privacy”.

Timepieces acts as a web 2.5 bridge. 

Time is leveraging Web3 and NFTs for ownership verification, allowing users to connect their digital wallets to time.com for access, aligning with the Web3 principle of consumer data ownership. This shift allows Time to offer genuine value, like exclusive raffles, in exchange for voluntarily shared information. 

Additionally, the Timepieces initiative integrates existing Web2 relationships and content into the Web3 community, maximizing their value.

Advice for Other Media Publications

Keith advised other executives not to rush into the space if they are not ready to be “fully committed to the space”. He recommended three phases for entry:

1. Phase Zero (Acknowledge): “Acknowledge the space,” “show people that you are present,” and “just listen to the community”.
2. Phase One (Launch): Focus on the launch and the drop mechanism that makes the token “accessible so that way i can bring you into my ecosystem”.
3. Phase Two (Sustain): “Where the hard work really is,” focusing on “how do i sustain a community, how do i deliver to a community, how do i show up to a community”.

He stressed that brands must move out of the center and to the periphery. In Web3, the equation shifts from “brand finds a creator who attracts an audience” to one where “a community uplifts a creator and a brand uplifts the creator further and in return gets validated for the community for that.

Keith believes that although there will be “booms and busts 100”, this shift is a “long-term technological and generational shift 100”.

Security and Ledger’s Endorsement

Keith closed by strongly endorsing Ledger, acknowledging the brilliance of the people in the space, including the “pure brain power that’s in the space” that is being used for both good and bad. He stated that Ledger provides the necessary safety and protection at a time when people realize their digital assets are going to be worth just as much as their physical assets. Ian Rogers agreed that the wallet will sit at the center of one’s digital life, making security and self-custody incredibly important.

Reading List

Learn more about these topics mentioned in the episode, or explore our library of articles on Crypto, Security, and Regulation on Ledger Academy

• NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens)
• Metaverse
• Digital Identity
• Self-Custody