Quantum Conversations: Jonas Lamis

A Chat with Co-Founder and COO Jonas Lamis

This piece is the second of three in a series where Tom sat down with the founding members of Quantum to learn more about where they have been, where they are, and where they want to go as they empower creators and collectors the world over.

You can find Tom’s conversation with Quantum’s Chief Curator Kris Graves here.

This interview has been slightly edited for length and clarity. It was prepared by Tom White.

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Who is Jonas?

Jonas Lamis is a serial entrepreneur and the Co-Founder and COO of Quantum Art. In his words:

Since the dawn of the industrial age, humans have been organizing themselves into tribes. The size of the tribe scaled with the cost of information, and information used to be very expensive to get and understand. That changed with the rise of the internet, and now small, distributed, highly motivated teams can eclipse the giants of the 20th century. AI, analytics, automation, blockchain. These are the building blocks of a new humanity organized around small, resilient groups of like-minded individuals.

First, and foremost, how would you describe yourself as a child?

I was pretty much brought up as an only child. I had one brother who was eleven years older than me, so he was out of the house by the time I was interesting. I had older parents. I would say I was a very good, studious, and well-behaved child who basically did whatever his mother told him to do.

I'm not particularly proud of that at this point in time. Now that I have four children of my own, I think I appreciate having some rebellious streaks in my kids; I like how they try to think for themselves and not just do what I tell them they have to do.

I feel like that's especially pertinent working with artist, creatives, and individuals that have a strong vision on what they want to do, how they want to do it, and why they want it. How old are your kids? 

My oldest daughter Rebecca is 23, and she is in the NFT space now. She actually works at Quantum, but she's also launching a DAO called Unicorn DAO with Nadia from Pussy Riot. They have recently gone live with that project, so she's now a co-founder herself. Then, I have a 21 year old daughter who's a junior in college at Chapman University studying film production. Finally, I have 15 year old boy-girl twins.

Is there a piece of advice from a family member or friend growing up that remained with you? 

I'm really bad at taking advice. I have a very strong belief in my own opinion of things and those opinions being right. At this stage, I don't seek advice from people. I've never had mentors. There's no adult from when I was a kid that, in my mind today, I looked up to. I can't say there was really someone who sent me on my way so there's no words of wisdom from any older people in my life that I can recall at this stage. I think it's kind of weird, but it is the truth.

It's interesting, because my dad was an artist. He was a very well-known sculptor, and when I was a little kid, he was really famous. He had showings at all the New York galleries and shows at the big New York Museums, things like that. As such, he was very much part of the art world. He was also a college professor of art, so we kind of ended up in this weird small town in the Midwest called Terre Haute. I was influenced quite a bit by traveling every summer to New York or LA, going to art shows, and being a part of the art culture. But I wasn’t really all that interested in it because it's what my parents were doing. 

That's what made me stay away from art as a kid. Instead, I was much more interested in architecture and engineering. That's why I went into engineering for college—because it took me all the way to this project [Quantum] that actually was getting back to my artistic roots.

It came full circle. Do you think that was happenstance? Were you intentionally trying to get back to those “roots” or was it a bunch of happy accidents?

I would consider myself a journeyman entrepreneur, if you will. I've started a lot of companies, and I've been a part of even more startups. None of them have been quite the phenomenal breakouts that you see on your stock ticker or anything like that. Some got acquired, others shut down, but they produced enough money so that I could keep playing the game.

Surviving is the most important feature, right?

Yes. I'm happy to survive as an entrepreneur. It's been fun. But if I look back on them, none of them were deep in one technical area. I'm more of a trend watcher trying to hop on the next trend, be it enterprise software, SaaS software, consumer SaaS, or even artificial intelligence. I've had startups in all those areas. I'm smart enough to detect what trends are going to become hot, but I'm not smart enough to go deep on any of them. 

I sold an AI company in 2016. When I looked around to see what I missed, I kind of missed crypto pretty much, right? I bought a little bit of Bitcoin back in the day, but I didn't pay any attention to Ethereum.

At that point, I knew that crypto would be the next big thing; I had to get into crypto. So, I ended up getting involved with the Tezos project really early on. I invested a great deal in Tezos and built some companies within the Tezos ecosystem. That to DeFi and I was building a DeFi company that was kind of in the proof of stake and chain system, not on Ethereum. After that, I just happened to fall into the NFT space. 

I was on a panel with Priyanka Desai from Flamingo DAO and she told me they were creating this DAO for NFT art collectors. That sounded pretty cool to me and I knew that I needed to get involved. That led me deep down that NFT art rabbit hole. Now I feel that I have finally arrived at a point where my passion for learning about the next great technological thing merged with my latent knowledge of art. 

I'm having a lot more fun on this startup than any of the others. Candidly, that’s probably because it's more aligned with my genetics. It’s in my blood!

Do you remember a time in your career that took a turn or a time when you felt it was really gaining momentum? Maybe that's right now, given what Quantum is doing.

I think you're right. As I said, I’m having more fun here than previous startups. We've accomplished more in the first six months of Quantum’s existence than compared to any of my other startups in their first six months. It's growing a lot faster, and it seems to have found product-market fit a lot more quickly.

To be honest, that’s likely because it's not solely my idea. It's Justin's idea; or rather Justin plus a small group of people who figured out that this was the right thing to do. Luckily, we have four very competent co-founders who each are skilled in their own area of expertise.

Looking back on where you are now and where you were, how has failure set you up? For the success with Quantum, how has it prepared you? How has it girded you? Do you have a favorite failure, if you will?

I don't have any favorite failures. But I will say, they say it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become an expert at something and I know that I have ten thousand hours of startup management under my belt. I know that I can summon the things that need to be put into place for a startup like this to grow very quickly.

I can now do so in a much more efficient way than I would have five or ten years ago, because I have done it very many times. In my mind, we are able to move at a very fast pace because of my having gone through this process in the past.

What do you wish you knew then?  When you were starting out, what do you wish you knew about scaling, startup management, et cetera?

It's very important to have people with deep subject matter expertise helping make the decisions. In every one of my previous startups, I knew that the startup needed to exist to solve a problem, but I wasn’t a deep domain expert in any of those problems or spaces.

In most of those cases, I was not only the founder or co-founder, but also the product guy too. Now it's clear to me that it’s vital to have product people who actually understand what the product needs. 

In the past, I assumed that I was smart enough to figure it out. Now, with Quantum, where there’s someone like Justin who's an amazing community builder, or somebody like Kris who's an amazing curator, it's easy to see that those are the two skills that you really need to be able to create our desired marketplace.

What advice would you give to a student coming out of college, to help him or her succeed in a very kind of dynamic world? 

I think that the more curious you can be about what's happening in technological spaces, the better your prospects probably are to find a place where you can insert whatever skills you happen to have into where technology is progressing rapidly.

For better or worse, software is eating everything. [Marc] Andreessen said it a decade ago, but now it's more true than ever before. In my mind, it’s now decentralization’s time to eat everything. 

Big companies, corporate jobs, corporate ladders, mentorship, and working your way up are going to be less and less of a thing compared to what they were in the twentieth century. The twentieth century was an anomaly for society, for humanity. We spent 20,000 years living in villages in a decentralized manner.

And then, all of a sudden, we had centralization. Everything became consolidated yet everything grew bigger. 

The famous economist Ronald Coase said that the size of the firm is correlated with the cost of information. To me, the reason why everything became so big in the twentieth century was because it was incredibly expensive to obtain information from all the far corners of the world, bring it all together, bubble it up the chain to make decisions, and then push it all back down again. That's why you have IBM, the US government, giant cities and states, the military, et cetera

Then the internet happened. It served as a giant, decentralized knowledge emancipation machine. It allowed for a team of three people to compete against IBM because the information is decentralized. When that happened, the size of the firm eventually trends towards zero.

The missing piece was crypto. The ability for decentralized, permissionless trust to facilitate transactions was the one piece that the internet couldn't provide. Blockchain now does exactly this.

In my mind, it seems obvious that we are going to go back to the tribe, back to the village. We lived in the village as a tribe for the vast majority of our existence as homo sapiens, we centralized for a brief couple of hundred-year periods and now we're going to go back to the village because people desire to be tribalism. You see it with the Trumpers versus non-Trumpers and such happening everywhere around the world. People want to be tribal but they had to come together because of peak centralization. And now, I think that they're going to be tribal again.

Lastly, what's a question that you wish people asked you more often or a topic that you haven’t had a chance to address or to speak about?

I've come to the conclusion that I'm very happy to not talk about stuff. I have become very aware of mansplaining and my privilege as a white guy who grew up with successful, married parents at the time and was admitted to the best schools and such.

I don't think what I have to say is all that relevant. I feel as though a lot of other people have really relevant stuff to say too and they get to say it a lot less than I do. So I'm much more interested in that.

For instance, as I mentioned, my daughter Rebecca is starting Unicorn DAO, which is focused on women, LGBTQ+, non-binary communities, and creators. To be honest, I am excited for us white guys to have a lot less to say. To that end, I really don't think it's all that important to get my story out there.

What's next for Quantum? Where do you see it coming or going in the next six months, one year, five years, what have you? 

None of my startups have ever been in as big a space or had as much opportunity in front of them as this one. The NFT space in general is going to be as large as the internet was. 

It’s not solely digital art. Rather, everything that can be contracted will be contracted with NFTs. At the same time, with the mainstream adoption of augmented reality, everything that we used to collect physically, we will instead collect digitally. It's going to show up in the physical world as a digital asset not only through our little Apple spectacles or whatever we're wearing, but also within the metaverse. The transition from people wanting to acquire physical goods more than digital goods is well underway.

But it's just in the early stages. Anyone who can become an arbiter of what constitute good, valuable digital goods has an unfathomable opportunity in front of them. It's such a big opportunity. 

I recognize that not everybody sees it that way. There's a number of people who don't understand NFTs, who want to understand NFTs. It goes back to what Mike Maples said, “The key is to be right when the consensus says you're wrong.” In my mind, that's where we are right now.

What are the threats? What are those headwinds? 

The threat is that it may take longer to onboard people than it needs to because of technical challenges and lack of understanding of what the “normies” need.

I don't think there are any risks that are insurmountable over the medium term. It resembles evolution—you're not going to stop it; it will happen because it's more efficient and humanity trends towards more efficient outcomes over time. For better or worse, we're all going to become digital beings someday. This is just part of the path to get there.

Any final thoughts or words of wisdom?

Stay curious, my friends.

Things are just going to continue to change faster and faster. Of course, the good news is that younger people are not used to the old speed of things. That faster change really affects you the more rooted you are in the past culture.

There’s lots to be excited about ahead!