Charly Palmer · Dr. Karida Brown · In The Paint

Keith Grossman, then President of TIME and the creator of TIMEPieces, introduced me to the painter Charly Palmer and to Dr. Karida Brown. By the autumn of 2021 Charly and I were in regular contact, and by December we were planning time together in Los Angeles for the following spring.

Nobody pitched anybody. Charly was taking his work into a new medium and wanted someone who understood both the art and the mechanics around it. Karida drove the projects with him. The conversation that started there ran for years.

The relationship grew along two lines. One was strategic: the projects Charly and Karida were involved in, and later one of their own. The other was personal: guidance on digital art and Web3 for two people who were starting to collect.

The stakes were different on each line. On the first, the question was what a cultural programme and a sports organisation should do with digital art. On the second, it was their own money and their own taste. I treated both with the same discipline, because a recommendation that would not survive the second test should not be offered for the first.

In March 2022 I was in Los Angeles for In The Paint, the Lakers’ art event, which Charly curated that year at the team’s training facility. I went with Karida. The evening before, I was courtside at a Lakers game and met the team.

That was where my work with Charly and Karida met the Lakers. I was introduced to Lakers leadership, and the conversation about digital art continued by email and in person at the UCLA Health Training Center. My advice covered the digital and Web3 possibilities open to them, digital art and NFT strategy, who the collectors and the community would be, which people in that world they should meet, and how to position and tell it. That relationship has its own record.

Alongside the projects, I introduced Charly and Karida to digital art as collectors. I already owned one of Charly’s digital works. I explained how crypto and NFT collections work, recommended projects, and advised on when to buy, when to sell and when to wait. I brought them into private communities and introduced them to the people inside them. Over time that became their collection, built with my input.

Some of the recommendations gained value. Some of the most useful advice concerned purchases I talked them out of. This part of the work was personal, and its measure was simple: whether my judgment held when it was their money on the line.

Dope Ass Frens came out of that trust: Charly’s portraits of friends from sport, music and culture, carried into a digital collection. I was to be one of the frens Charly painted.

Karida wrote to tell me they were committed to moving it forward. The domains and the social handle had been secured, she introduced me to Kim Moran, and she asked me to guide the project. In the spring of 2022 the work moved into production. Kim Moran prepared the artwork, and Karida had the separated files sent to Juliana Cossa and me for the integration into the smart contract. At the end of April she shared the launch deck.

My contribution was the architecture of the project: its structure, the pricing, the token and NFT mechanics, the community strategy, the story and positioning, and the roadmap.

Dope Ass Frens was only partially developed and launched. Some ideas changed shape and others were abandoned. Charly and Karida kept consulting me after that. A project can stop short and the relationship can still be the thing that lasts.

The relationship kept opening doors. The Lakers invited me back to In The Paint in March 2023, during NFT LA, and again the following year. Karida introduced me to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, which became a separate advisory with his agent, Deborah Morales, from November 2022 to March 2023, and ended with my advice not to launch a collection.

None of these people needed a Web3 vendor. They needed someone who could tell a painter, a first-time collector, a basketball organisation and a legend's agent what this technology could do for them, and what it could not.