On Tuesday, March 1 I was able to sit down for an interview with Jacob Eisenberg, whose official title at NBA Top Shot is Community Lead. I appreciated Jacob’s honestly and the introspection in his responses, and while I went into the interview a bit skeptical of Top Shot’s future given the issues described in last week’s column, his answers made me feel more confident in the product moving forward. My questions are in bold, and I have underlined what I believe to be key quotes in his responses. So, without further ado, here is my interview with Jacob Eisenberg of NBA Top Shot.
How Are Edition Sizes Determined?
We believe strongly in the polarity of Moments, so on the high-end between Legendaries and Rares, it’s super important for us to keep scarcity top of mind. That is, to use an analogy, the exclusive NFT country club. In Series 3 there will only ever be 10K Legendary Moments or fewer. Then on the Common side, we have LE Commons like the Game Recognize Game with Kevin Durant’s curated picks, those are numbered to low five figures, and then on the Base Set side, we look at those as the closest analog to what trading cards are.
Growing up, I was a big Knicks fan, and while I could pull a Patrick Ewing from a pack – that didn’t necessitate that just because it was a Patrick Ewing that it would be a $50 card. At Top Shot we believe strongly that we can provide utility for every single Moment on the platform, be it a high-end Moment or be it a Base Set 60K Common, through use of Flash Challenges or through use of trade tickets. It’s our best opportunity to bring new users into the platform by having these Moments at very readily accessible price ranges, so if you’re going into the marketplace and you’re a new user, you can get your favorite player for $3 or $5, or you can get a Moment that has a bit more scarcity at a higher price point.
Do you have projections for Top Shot’s growth and do you intend to eventually introduce Moments with an even higher Edition Size than 60K?
I think we’re absolutely open to looking at growth trends and projections and factoring in as we grow, increasing that number. Now I think for us, it would be dishonest to say we weren’t anticipating growth factoring into the 60K number, because again, we’re trying to create a world where you can rip multiple packs in your first experience. There wasn’t always this strong conviction that if packs were unavailable that that was good for the environment, and I don’t know if we necessarily have that strong belief today.
I think there’s a strong argument to be made that it’s better for a new user to come in and be able to rip packs, there’s also a strong argument to be made that it builds up FOMO (fear of missing out) if they can’t rip packs. So, I think for us having that constant availability is absolutely something we’re very keen on. Now that being said, I think the month of February in which there were iterations of blended packs and how those were rolled out initially, I think we know that there are things we need to fundamentally address to make that experience better for our community and that’s what we’re taking and analyzing the data to improve the experience over the coming months.
Did the Trade Ticket system influence the decision to introduce 60K Moments?
I think the Trade Ticket system is very much in the top of the first inning, we’re very excited about all the different things we can do. As you know, so far all we’ve really done are Locker Packs and the Series 1 reserve packs, those were on an 18-month timeline, so we’re still fairly early in that timetable. I think absolutely when we’re looking at our platform, we’re looking at this Trade Ticket system as a way to have a sync in the game design, so the community can always trade-in their Moments and because they’re trading in four Moments to get a Locker Pack with three Moments, we’re actively removing Moments from circulation at all times. So, the number of Moments in the Locker Room will never decrease – right now I believe we’re at seven figures in terms of Moments that have been traded in and that’s only going to go upwards.
What was the genesis of the Collector Score system?
We built the Collector Score because we had a clear problem where people were coming to Top Shot looking at packs as free money, and we wanted to create a system that incentivized people who actually cared about our product to have a leg up on the competition.
I agree with that, but I feel that Collector Score has been underutilized during Series 3.
One reason why we, in your words, have kind of “underutilized” Collector Score is because when you’re explaining what Top Shot is to a new collector or a perspective collector, the very best version of that explanation doesn’t factor in Collector Score at all. If you’re explaining Top Shot to someone, there are so many different layers to this where a drop-off might happen. Explaining what an NFT is, why you are going to go on Top Shot and collect rather than watching the highlight on YouTube for free? Whether you want to explain sets or tiers or rarity or Moments in circulation, that’s just on the baseline, right? That’s before getting into anything about Dapper balance, or Flow, or Trade Tickets – our game is complicated – we know that and we need to simplify.
That’s a good point, Top Shot is so many things at once that I often have trouble describing to folks outside the community exactly what it is. So, in your words, what is Top Shot? How do you explain your product to someone?
I liken it to a hybrid of four things that you might know. Number One, trading cards, just like trading cards, ripping packs, you get that feeling of being a kid again, just like with trading cards you might get something that’s really special, or you might get something that you don’t love as much. Unlike trading cards, we’re not selling still images on a piece of cardboard, we’re selling the greatest moments from NBA history as officially licensed NFTs.
Number two, it’s like a real-time marketplace, be it eBay, be it StockX, people buying/selling/trading frictionlessly, all over the world, 24/7, every single day on Top Shot you’re going to see millions of NFTs traded back-and-forth, millions of dollars worth of NFTs traded back-and-forth. Generally, if I’m showing someone Top Shot for the first time, I’ll pull up Cryptoslam and I’ll say, ‘since I just started this breakdown of what Top Shot is,’ and I’ll refresh and say, ‘these are all the transactions that have occurred. You can see that DeMar DeRozan going for $140, and you can see Ayo Dosunmu going for $21.’
Number three, it’s like fantasy sports. With Flash Challenges in particular we’re bringing real-time performance to the forefront of Top Shot, there’s real-world performance tied to it. You can front run and make projections on who might be the winner of a given Flash Challenge, or you can wait until the results bear themselves out and react to the market on that.
And then last but not least, an airline loyalty program for the NBA. If you, for example, pulled a Tim Hardaway card back in the day, there was no way for the Warriors to know you got a Tim Hardaway, there was no way for Tim Hardaway to know you got a Tim Hardaway, and there was certainly no way for the NBA to know you got a Tim Hardaway. With the NBA and Top Shot on the blockchain, we have the ability to reward collectors for what they love and what they own. So, flashback to last June, take a snapshot of everyone’s accounts and [if you had a Collector Score of at least 250] from Phoenix Suns Moments you were entered into a raffle and we flew everyone and their plus-1s out to Phoenix for [Game 5] of the NBA Finals. At the Finals they got to tour the arena, they got to walk on the court and they got to sit in a luxury suite with Rex Chapman and Tom Chambers as they watched Game 5. Flash forward one more week, if you had [at least one 3-Star Rookie] in your Top Shot collection, you were entered into a raffle and we flew out eight winners and their plus-1s to New York City for the NBA draft. We took them out to a steakhouse and they didn’t know it was anything more than a steak dinner, well, as it turns out, four first-round picks come in one by one and start chopping it up. Ziare Williams was talking about what it was like playing with Bronny James at Sierra Canyon, Keon Johnson talked about what it was like to set records at the combine; these are unbuyable experiences. The next day, we took them to Chelsea Piers and they got to play one-on-one knockout with Obi Toppin, a future dunk contest winner. Our fans got to toss Obi alley-oops. These are the things that fans could only dream of that were never possible before this type of technology and that’s what we’re so excited about. We want to provide more utility for our fans, we want to bring all of these four layers into one to make Top Shot the true future of being an NBA fan.
Interesting. I’d like to move on to some issues I’ve seen with improving your Collector Score through Team Sets. Is it Top Shot’s goal to have Full Team Sets be restricted to 50 collectors per team?
No, there’s no Moment on Top Shot that is designed to be a bottleneck. I think we have a game design issue – not necessarily a content issue – and I think we’re reconciling both of those in real-time. So, to answer your question more specifically, between Jeff Hornacek on the Jazz, Anthony Davis on the Pelicans/Hornets, Kevin Garnett on the Celtics, Derrick Rose on the Bulls, there is no Moment we are ever minting on Top Shot with the intention to be a bottleneck on people being able to have the entire Full Team Set. Now, with that being said, again, because there is this imbalance, because we’re doing Christmas Day Deck the Hoops historical drops, not every team has played on Christmas Day. So, there’s always going to be these nuances that we’re identifying and trying to solve for as we get smarter with each of these new exclusive releases down the road, but to answer your question very directly, I don’t think there’s a world where we think it’s good for our community or good for our game design for us to never have another Jeff Hornacek Jazz Moment or another Kevin Garnett Celtics Moment. Again, we’re trying to build for accessibility, we’re trying to build for the community, there’s no world where there aren’t thousands, if not millions of Celtics fans who have a deep connection to Kevin Garnett and restricting that access to only 50 – there’s no world where we only want 50 collectors to be able to enjoy Kevin Garnett as a Celtic.
I will say that when we built out Full Team Sets as a concept, we never had the intention of it being something that everyone was pursuing, so again, this was something where our intentions led to some unexpected outcomes.
Do you think that the current format of Standard and Elite packs is the best way to onboard new users? I know that you’re currently looking at the data from February’s drops, what specific metrics are you looking for?
We’re absolutely mindful for growth’s sake that there’s nothing more tantalizing for a new collector coming in… and having the chance of pulling something that is truly scarce, valuable and potentially life-changing. So that was a lot of the intent behind bringing in this new system for distributing Moments, to make it a more accommodating first-time user experience for a multitude of people coming into Top Shot and we’re so early in this game that long-term, that is truly a great format.
Now that being said, I think when we rolled out [the Standard/Elite packs], we took some assumptions that maybe we have to refactor. But when we’re looking at the data, more specifically, what things are we looking at? We’re looking at new user cohorts, what is their retention from queue to queue? How many people are showing up to the queue? Is there more demand? We can say emphatically that through the first three drops of this new system, more people were turning out for the queue than before. Additionally, from there we’re looking at the general activity around Challenges after these queues. All these things are factoring in, and of course in the last week it’s become a much bigger thing – be it through Russia and Ukraine impacting economies or be it through the cryptomarket, in general, impacting the economy – but it’s clear that there are reverberations as we open up new products on the NFL and UFC side where there are impacts on our marketplace and we have to address that. It’s not something that we’re naïve to at all, I think that all these converging factors, the Dapper products launching, the geopolitical issues that have changed marketplaces around the world, and that’s led to a more exacerbated expectation than we had, but it’s not something that we’re afraid of being able to correct in March. When we rolled it out in February, we designed it as a test to gain learnings and we’ve been very encouraged by some of those learnings and discouraged by others, but the things we’ve been discouraged by aren’t things we don’t think we can solve with an iteration or two.
So, it sounds like the goal is to keep moving forward with the Standard and Elite queues, am I misunderstanding that?
I don’t think our minds are made up definitely, I think our goal is to progressively get to whatever version two of this is as another kind of testing ground to make sure we can course-correct on the things we know we need to tweak. If we prove that it’s just untenable and we’re constantly having to tweak, then you might very well see us retreat back to the old system. I think based on the data and based on what the top complaints are, I don’t think that those are things we can’t correct, and so what I was saying initially, I think that this system is more beneficial for a new collector coming into the Top Shot experience being able to get in on a Moment of delight so to speak in a much faster capacity.
That might come with the tradeoff that we need to iterate on hit rate in these packs, or whatever it might be, there are different levers we can pull, maybe we sell less packs and that allows the hit rate to go up. Whatever it might be I think we’re all aligned that there are tweaks that need to be made, but it’s not necessarily in our best interest to throw the baby out with the bathwater if we do think that this model in general can help growth.
Top Shot was setting records before these packs came out, it was a smooth-running system, so I’m a little bit confused here as to why you made the change. I understand it was a popular feature on NFL All Day, but Top Shot was running smoothly, and this past February was one of the worst months since August of 2020. I’m not going to blame that entirely on the new pack format, but you can’t say it’s not a factor. 75% of those packs were losers, and it’s not just that they were losers, they were -50% losers in terms of ROI – they were big-time losers. You don’t want new users coming into the platform, dropping $100 and getting $50 back. That’s not to say that every pack is a winner, of course, every pack is not a winner, but it was the degree of losses that we were seeing that played a role in the market tanking. So, I’ll ask one more time, is this the format that you think is best and will you continue with the Standard/Elite drops moving forward?
I think you might be conflating two things because the format from February, where you’re talking about the amount of losers and the ROI percent losers, that’s stuff where I’m totally aligned with you. No, that is not the format we see going forward. But that does not necessarily mean that blended packs can’t be optimized based on the data and the realities that you’re outlining. We can make the experience better, while still not having a guarantee of pulling X, Y or Z. Does that make sense?
Yes. My final question is, I don’t believe that you are allowed to trade on Top Shot, right? Because you are an employee?
Correct.
Does Roham have an account?
So, we were able to trade before Top Shot went mainstream, we were very much dogfooding our product and come January of 2021 when we actually started to have an audience that was sizeable, we had an internal freeze on our accounts. So, I have an account, Roham has an account, this is not something we shy away from, Roham’s username is his name, we have not touched our accounts since that freeze was implemented over a year ago.
