🎙 "We're Not Really at an Inflection Point Yet:" OpenSea's Nate Chastain

In this week’s episode we interview Nate Chastain, head of product at OpenSea. Opensea got its start back in 2017 when CryptoKitties launched on Ethereum. After those digital cats, the NFT space was pretty dead for the next couple of years. Now OpenSea is reaping the rewards of hanging through that NFT winter, as NFT summer explodes with punks, apes, penguins and more cats.

Nate was openSea’s first product hire and now he’s making sure that what started out as a platform for essentially CryptoKitties and a couple of other projects, can deal with millions of digital assets. He talks about the scaling challenges OpenSea is facing and what’s next on the roadmap after raising $100M dollars in a round led by a16z. The daily records in volume and users, are proving the founders right in thinking maybe it’s not finance that will take crypto to mainstream, but something that looks like a cute game.

The podcast was led by Camila Russo, and edited by Alp Gasimov. Transcript was edited by Camila.

🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:

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Camila Russo: I have been wanting to do an interview with someone from OpenSea for a while. I mean, as you all know, listening to this podcast, NFTs are exploding right now and a large part of that activity is happening on OpenSea. It's the largest NFT marketplace at the moment. And Nate is one of the few people kind of leading the operation of making sure that everything runs smoothly as the market goes absolutely crazy. And things have it heated up even more than they already were just in the past few days. August has been insane so far. So definitely want to get into that but first curious about your background, like what led you to crypto what were you doing before joining OpenSea?

Nate Chastain: Sure. So I'll start all the way at the beginning. Coming out of college, I was moving into a career as a comedy writer, so I was working at Mad magazine and then The Onion as a staff writer there. And I was enjoying doing that work, but one of my reservations after, after eight or nine months working at The Onion was that it put you in this, in this head space, that was a little bit problem-oriented without being solution-oriented. You were constantly thinking about what was frustrating people or what was, what was painful about someone's daily life and then mapping that to jokes and headlines for the paper.

So ultimately, it just felt like a healthier headspace to, to be in, to pivot into thinking through ways to translate those insights into solutions through software or other tools. So I had this lingering interest in product in fact for a long time. And ultimately just taught myself how to code. So I've been in the blockchain space for the past four and a half years. I was working on a product initiative at MetaMask before joining OpenSea, led a couple of initiatives that ConsenSys and was a front end developer for a few years before that.

CR: Well, so interesting. I think that's a transition, not a lot of comedy writers do, to blockchain.

NC: Certainly that is unorthodox yet. I think it was helpful to get started on that wavelength of frustration because I think a great strength for a product manager is being able to empathize with the user sort of making use of your product and understanding what's causing them pain. So I had already strengthened that muscle early on and, and felt comfortable making that assessment. Users also are quite vocal about what they are frustrated by with open speed, but that there are many who are power users for our app who are spending several hours a day on OpenSea and some minor frustration encountered several times a day can ultimately boil over into a tweet or a support ticket or something else. So we benefit from the passion, I would say that users have for using OpenSea.

Leap of Faith

CR: When did you join OpenSea and what was it about it that you found interesting?

[ … ]

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