https://news.madlads.com/p/the-vibhu-norby-drip-haus-interview
Vibhu Norby is a prolific builder with numerous brands under his wing both on and off chain.
His love for technology originates with video games and a passion for building that was encouraged by a supportive family during the computing boom of the 1990’s.
My parents put me in a video game design camp. They taught us how to write very basic ActionScript and make simple games.
I fell completely in love with programming and have never looked back.
He built a reputation as a savvy angel investor in the digital retail and commerce space before turning his sights on crypto.
Vibhu cut his teeth with Roblox (and other tech giants) before launching b8ta, a retail-as-a-service platform which created custom sales environments.
This experience put Vibhu on Solana’s radar and they launched the first dedicated IRL crypto store, Solana Spaces.
The early iterations of DRiP HAUS were formed soon after and has since established itself as a benchmark blockchain brand that gives a voice to creators.
Vibhu sat down with me to talk origin stories, motivations for building and strategy for DRiP’s future.
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Was Solana Spaces your first foray into the blockchain world?
Vibhu: I had explored Ethereum and NFTs during 2021, but not heavily.
I had tried Solana, thought it was interesting, but I hadn’t committed to joining in full time as a participant until we received a call from the Solana Foundation about potentially building stores.
I started getting more serious about looking into it, that was late 2021.
What is the DRiP origin story?
Vibhu: The very first drop we did with a photographer named LIGHTS and Dr. Thoughtcrime, two Solana creatives.
When we were launching our Solana store in Miami we had acquired a piece of photography to give to people as a commemorative NFT.
We went looking for tools to distribute [an edition of 1800 pieces] to a whole bunch of people and there weren’t any good ways to do that at the time.
Vibhu: I hit up an engineer named banana because he had a set of tools and scripts that lets you do things with Solana.
He had a minting script and I sent it over to our engineering team and said “can you build something with this?”
We sent those out and we realized this was kind of interesting, sending [an edition] out to a whole bunch of people.
Vibhu: Now it seems very meaningless because this thing happens all the time.
But in Solana we didn’t have any open edition at the time, we didn’t have large editions of anything.
I looked at the cost of it and thought “we can do this pretty often if we want to."
Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever shared this philosophy. I had the [Solana Spaces] account on a schedule where we were doing the same touch points on the same days every week.
What I noticed was that these kind of things worked very well.
Vibhu: People knew when to expect certain things from us, they’d be paying attention at that time and we get more amplification out of it.
We had the same thought to do more edition drops, we should do this on a regular basis and they get something. Our minds are working because we realize that we could recreate an email mailing list, but with NFTs.
That was a very novel idea.
We formalize it and throw out this thing on Twitter where we said “drop your Bonfida .SOL domain and then we’ll start sending you NFTs”
Vibhu: The first artist, VINCENZO, DM’d me a few minutes later.
A lot of things that we keep doing them over and over again. Eventually this product formed, we thought other people might want to list their own.
Today we have many, many creators on the platform.
The infrastructure, the concept is pretty similar but the way it comes to life has become much richer than we ever imagined.
Is DRiP the first time you’ve worked hand in hand with creatives?
Vibhu: It’s definitely a first for me.
I’ve worked with a lot of people. Business people, entrepreneurs. I don’t consider myself an art connoisseur. That’s not really who I am.
But I have a knack for solving problems and I’m pretty creative myself so I think I understand the mindsets.
Vibhu: I’ve grown my appreciation for art through DRiP and working with many artists.
I see how hard they work.
The internet is broken for creators.
Google taught a generation of entrepreneurs that it was cool to monetize other people's content without giving back.
-‘The UX of the internet is broken’
Vibhu: You walk into a hotel lobby and you’ll see a big painting on the hallway to the elevator and you just kind of walk past and think nothing of it.
These days, because I’ve gotten to know so many painter,
I appreciate that someone made this thing. How it was made.
It wasn’t preexisting before DRiP HAUS
What is the next hurdle for DRiP?
Vibhu: There are a couple of buckets that I think about here.
The first is the DRiP needs to be it’s own mobile app and needs to provide an embedded wallet for people who are signing up for self custody.
Vibhu: [Self custody] is an important thing for everyone to learn about, but for 90% of the world it is an impossible concept to grasp and they will only hurt themselves if they attempt to do that without the proper kind of training wheels and knowledge.
Our plan is to provide a path for people to progressively learn about self custody.
Start with embedded and move to that over time so you can access advanced experiences like marketplaces and other things that are visible.
Vibhu: And two, the big leaps that we’re all waiting and building towards is a bridge.
There’s a leap of faith that that everyone found themselves in NFTs had to take at some point. Maybe it was gradual for you, maybe it was sudden.
But the first thing that someone talks about when you mention how the NFTs work or how DRiP works is “well why can’t I just right click and save this thing and now it’s mine?”
Vibhu: For you and me, we’ve been in digital assets for some time.
At some point we made the leap of faith which was “okay, I understand that. I can see this thing. I can even download it and have it on my computer but it’s not mine.”
That this is not a technology thing, it’s cultural. You either embrace it or you don’t and the people that find themselves in crypto embrace it.
In modern finance, it's standard practice for service providers like banks to retain custody of your assets. This means, for example, that when you want to make a withdrawal from your bank account, while you may have a legal claim to the money, the reality is that you're asking for permission from your bank.
Banks can and regularly do deny such permission, and their reasons for doing so do not always align with the best interests of individual customers.
Vibhu: We need to build a bridge to understanding [the blockchain] universe for everyone.
That is very tough, but I think it can be done.
The best way for that to happen is for a friend who introduced another friend. DRiP is reaching enough critical mass that this happens every single day with 1000’s of people.
I think that in five years, ten years, it will be as bizarre to make that statement about content or JPEGs or videos as it is to download a song from a file sharing service.
Vibhu: That is not a tech thing, you can definitely do that. You can definitely go download an illegal movie.
You can torrent, you can surf Reddit. It’s a combination of the user experience of not doing that being much better.
The stigma around that is a cultural thing.
Those two things are going to organically appear with enough time scale. I’m betting on that happening. Everything will change when that happens.
All the things we’ve been building, everything people are building in crypto will finally start to make sense.
Vibhu: You have to understand digital ownership and appreciate what that means, how someone gets introduced to this is the most important thing.
Far too many people are introduced to crypto by getting robbed or getting scammed.
That stuff will hold everything back.
I’m not suggesting that should be how it works long term but we need to create a viable path for someone to come into the product completely unaware of all that and grow their understanding over time.
Vibhu: We really, really have a big focus on accessibility.
That is what we came to Solana to do with Solana stores and we continue that mission with DRiP.
How many years away are we from seeing the average person using crypto?
Vibhu: At DRiP, we are working every day to make that a possibility.
In reality, I think it’s the most accessible to all of crypto. If we do our job then we’re not more than three to five years away.
If DRiP doesn’t succeed then it might be ten.
Twitch recently laid off more than 400 employees and you reached out with an olive branch from web3, what kind of conversations emerged form that?
Vibhu: It happened on a whim because we’ve been thinking about growing our creator acquisitions outside of crypto now.
I saw the news and know a few people there so I knew it would get some reach.
I definitely learned a lesson which is “never post a job offering on LinkedIn” because you get absolutely flooded with inquiries, literally hundreds of messages.
Vibhu: 95% of them did not fit in anywhere near what I was looking for, they weren’t from Twitch. I did receive a couple of messages from people that had been laid off and were in our arena, have done a few calls.
It was very nerve wracking for me because honestly I don’t normally talk about crypto stuff with people from the outside.
There’s always a 50% chance or greater that they think you’re a scammer.
I was nervous to reveal that in fact DRIP isn’t what you think. It’s built on crypto and we do a good job of masking it in the experience. It’s not so upfront in your face.
Vibhu: I was shocked by how receptive people were to it.
It didn’t ultimately result in us hiring anyone but every person I talked to had some story to share about crypto.
Not always positive but there are a lot more people who have experimented with or felt the crypto industry in some fashion, like “I have a friend that’s into it.”
That made me feel a bit more confident about doing this in the future.
Do you plan to opensource the platform?
Vibhu: We don’t, we’re not open source.
There are lots of open source components that we use in term of composable programs like Bubblegum which is a cNFT minting protocol.
Our core technology like our front end engine, our airdrop engine. These are things we consider proprietary. Four our purposes it makes sense for DRiP to own these things and to continue to improve it’s product.
I’ve actually debated this in public with Jordan from Solana Labs and some other folks that are open source maxis.
Vibhu: I think there are certain types of things where if you’re storing user assets, and those are self custody assets vs. custodial, that code should probably be open source.
But the thing is that the vulnerability that happened two years ago to Slope Wallet.
It’s pretty likely that even an open source model may not have caught the way that situation went down. For Backpack and other projects where you want your community to help you accelerate growth it could make sense.
Vibhu: That is just my opinion. I know other people disagree with me but I’ve been building software my entire life at this point.
Open sources can be slower.
You start to care about documentation, READMEs, clean code. and all these practices, that are important and required.
You have a growing list of people that depend on what you build.
The bar for breaking those things is different. You mostly see waterfall development within open source projects versus a true agile, real time type of thing.
The Waterfall approach was established in 1970 by Winston w. Royce. It contains five phases of management, where each requires a deliverable from the previous phase to proceed.
Waterfall is ideal for projects like software development, where the end result is clearly established before starting, and is best suited for projects that require a lot of predictability.
Vibhu: We build really fast, really great products.
Open sources would not only hurt our business, but would actually slow us down and it wouldn’t make any sense.
At the end of the day I only believe about solving problems for customers.
If open source accelerated that then we would do it. If it doesn’t, it’s not that important.