And so I wonder what your thoughts are on how creators, no matter what happens in social media landscape, how should we be thinking about being able to access the people who said, "I wanna follow what that guy is doing, what that lady's doing"?

Well, if, if done the way that I intend and I'm already doing, you will have access to that audience at all times, the ability to communicate with those people, um, have their email addresses.

All of those things will be part of, um, the future.

I think the big differentiator between us and all the other legacy platforms is these platforms have, you know, dug their, their, their stake in the ground on advertising, and that requires them to kind of put a shield around your ability to access the audience because then you can convert that audience into your own advertising revenue stream.

And so I'm not, I'm not concerned with that because Fanbase is a free platform to use.

We don't run ads, and then the revenue that you do make comes from either people tipping you or you adding extra content that people subscribe to you, so that added extra layer.

So that's not really our focus, so it doesn't change, it doesn't, it doesn't alter the way that we operate our business as opposed to the way the other platforms operate their business.

Or maybe.

Wow

... and pay them to put those ads on their page and never spend money on Instagram or Facebook.

So for that reason, they suppress your content.

I don't care how many followers Steve Harvey, Beyoncé, The Rock, whoever, Cardi B, Drake, anybody has on social media, they'll never reach their full following because the advertisers have to make money off that reach.

So at, at Fanbase, I wanted to say, "Look, I don't care how many followers you have on social media.

I don't care how big you get.

If you have 100 million people that follow you on Fanbase, we're sending your content to 100 million people." That's the first and foremost.

How did that process come to you to say, "I can do this"?

Wow

... and pay them to put those ads on their page and never spend money on Instagram or Facebook.

So for that reason, they suppress your content.

I don't care how many followers Steve Harvey, Beyoncé, The Rock, whoever, Cardi B, Drake, anybody has on social media, they'll never reach their full following because the advertisers have to make money off that reach.

So at, at Fanbase, I wanted to say, "Look, I don't care how many followers you have on social media.

I don't care how big you get.

If you have a hundred million people that follow you on Fanbase, we're sending your content to a hundred million people." That's the first and foremost.

How did that process come to you to say, "I can do this"?

Mm-hmm.

Um, and that's 'cause they blow the money.

It's really a, it's really tough for Black founders.

People don't understand, like, Black founders get less than half of 1% of all capital raised.

They don't want DEI, they're not trying to give us money.

And especially someone like myself that is disrupting the tech space in, uh, building something that we can own, and then, you know, Black people are on the side of ownership.

Like, you know, we, we don't own nothing.

Mm-hmm

Mm

...

when that liquidity event is going to happen.

They don't know if those businesses are going to be successful, and they still put that money in because the upside is that's the risk.

Now, if you wanna put your money into the stock market and let it sit and maybe double and triple over the next 25 years, yes, but if we wanna escape the generational wealth gap that exists for people of color and Black people in this country, we have to aggressively invest in tech startups that can scale to hundreds of billions of dollars.

We're not getting out if we don't do that.

I'm just, I'm being 100%.

And what do those micro dramas look like? That's gonna start on Q1 in Fanbase.

Mm-hmm.

Right? So Elon has X, there's Truth Social.

Um, Zuckerberg tends to flip-flop between whatever it is, and whatever's gonna happen with TikTok, I'm pretty sure the Trump administration is gonna have their hand in that.

And so the design for Fanbase was to build something that was Black-owned but for every single person on the planet to use, because we have to look out for ourselves.

We have to make sure that we're not getting shadow banned, our accounts aren't getting de- deprioritized, we're not getting pushed off these platforms, and then more importantly, um, owning these platforms.

'Cause again, um, the idea behind creating a social media platform that people could actually have equity in is because we know that Black culture plus social media equals billion-dollar platforms.

But we never have equity and ownership of these platforms, and then we beg to be respected, we beg to be let in, we beg to be acknowledged, we beg to be equal, and no one has ever gone and just taken the step of let's build the infrastructure.

Yeah.