Nception

In June 2021 the NFT market was moving faster than the brands watching it. I co-founded Nception that month, first spelled Inception, to work on the part many projects skipped: the brand strategy underneath a collection, and the community that decides whether it lives.

The same year I founded Unlimitart to collect digital art and began advising Stan Wawrinka on Web3. The fund taught me the market as a collector, with capital at stake. Nception was where I worked on it as a strategist.

An NFT is a brand object before it is a technical one. People buy into what it means, who else holds it and what it lets them do. A collection treated as a minting problem produces a product without a reason to hold it.

Nception connected the three things that have to move together: the strategy of the brand, the mechanics of the NFT and the community forming around it. Any one of them alone was easy to sell in 2021. The work was in making them answer to each other.

Nception is how much of the market met me in those years. NFT.London listed me among its 2022 speakers as Nception co-founder. In July 2022 TechRound interviewed me, as co-founder, on why business on Web3 would be driven by NFTs, crypto and blockchain. The judging panel of Arts Thread's Global Design Graduate Show, run in collaboration with Gucci and featured by Google Arts & Culture, listed me under Nception NFT.

The judging seat put the venture's thesis in front of a different audience. I judged in the Digital, Visual Communication and Film category, where young designers were meeting the question of who owns digital work as a practical problem rather than a theory.

Speaking was part of the work, not a side effect of it. A venture built on community has to be visible where the community gathers, and has to say something there that holds up a year later.

I co-founded Nception and worked on it from June 2021 to October 2023. My other engagements of those years have their own records.