Written by: Luca Netz, founder of Pudgy Penguins

Compiled by: TechFlow

On October 7, Twitter user Horlomite Research posted a tweet accusing Luca Netz, the founder of the NFT project Pudgy Penguins, that all the funds used to acquire Pudgy Penguins came from 4 different Rug projects.

Luca Netz soon shared his 8-year entrepreneurial journey on social media after graduating from high school, seemingly in response to this Horlomite Research question.

DeepChao TechFlow has compiled and organized the above content.

Dropped out of high school and made a living on his own

Luca was originally extremely disappointed with his studies and his family environment was also very difficult. When he was in high school, he decided to drop out and start making a living, which became the starting point of his entrepreneurial journey. He organized underground rap shows in Los Angeles and achieved some initial success. But he also realized that there were too many risks in running a show, and it was best to find a stable job.

First job: Packer for Ring

Luca sent out resumes everywhere and finally got his first job packing boxes at Ring, a smart doorbell company. This simple manual labor opened the door for him to start his own business.

After working at Ring for a few months, Luca was promoted to the QA (Quality Assurance) and RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) departments (dedicated to ensuring product quality and providing customers with satisfactory after-sales service). At that time, Ring was expanding rapidly, but Luca also realized that his personal promotion space was limited. This prompted him to start thinking about transformation.

Getting involved in e-commerce

Luca started buying various online courses and eventually chose cross-border e-commerce. He quickly found product-market fit in the jewelry field and achieved explosive growth.

Luca adjusted his business model, stocked products in the United States, and achieved 90% domestic shipments, of which 10% of orders were still dropshipping. He then successfully sold this e-commerce business to its largest competitor at the time. This first successful exit kicked off his investment career.

Become an Internet celebrity IP

Using what he learned there, Luca began to monetize social influence and became the driving force behind many influencer-owned brands.

Working with influencers to build direct-to-consumer brands around their likenesses. He is responsible for product management, order processing, customer service, and website development, while influencers decide on the products they want to sell and the associated positioning and marketing strategies.

The business was so successful that it inspired him to form Netz Capital to invest in venture capital, as he believed it would have the greatest impact.

Invested in many start-ups, but was hit hard by the new crown

In 2019, he invested $3 million in 15 different companies, covering a variety of fields including sneaker retailers (CNK), SaaS products (SSB), and other direct-to-consumer brands (unhappy).

However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many of these companies faced major challenges, one of which was CNK, which has physical stores. To provide support, he provided a loan to CNK to help them through the difficult times.

The loan was repaid when the CNK team decided to launch an NFT project.

Inspired by NFT, decided to focus on brand building

This became an opportunity for Luca to get in touch with NFT. He also realized that the Internet celebrity economy had no sustainable commercial value and decided to focus on brand building.

His first attempt was to revive the Von Dutch brand in early 2020. However, after a second deal with Von Dutch fell through, and during the COVID-19 crisis, Luca decided to create an online course on what he had learned so far.

He realized the life-changing power of online courses and decided to provide others with the same opportunity that he had received from others. Today, he can confidently say that hundreds of lives have been changed as a result of his work.

Luca Netz then became the largest investor and CMO of Gel Blaster, beginning the journey of one of the fastest growing toy companies in North America. During his time at Gel Blaster, he became quite interested in collecting and learning about NFTs, and began collecting his first batch of 1/1 NFTs and PFPs.

Spooky Boys and Disputes

During the NFT craze, a friend of Luca contacted him and asked him to help run the NFT project Spooky Boys because he had been trying for a month but couldn't find a solution.

Luca agreed to help and told him that if it was successful, he would need to pay Luca's costs plus a percentage. The project was a success and Luca fell in love with the industry. After weeks of back and forth, he saw the promise of the project and wanted to become a partner in it. Although they had many arguments and could not come to an agreement, it eventually led to his proposal to buy the project, which led to more arguments and eventually alienated their friendship, and the project was owned by his friend. The community eventually took over the project and Luca Netz rejoined the project in an advisory role (which he still is to this day).

Luca said the best part of the experience was meeting Lomel, the developer of the project, and he will be forever grateful for the experience.

Seize the NFT media advertising boom and make successful arbitrage

Through what he learned here, Luca saw an opportunity to arbitrage on Instagram posts. At the time, the price of Instagram posts was rising every day, with course sellers, information product experts, and emerging NFT projects all bidding up advertising prices.

Luca saw this as an opportunity to buy up as many ad spots on Instagram pages as he could and resell them when the price went up. He became the gatekeeper to these platforms and once they were sold, he let the buyer negotiate with the page owner for the creative and posts. This business was run by two people in Luca's alpha group, who basically automated the entire business and they made millions of dollars in a few months. You can learn more about this in his post. (Related link)

Acquired Pudgy Penguins, aiming to build the first Web3 mass brand

A few months later, Luca Netz saw an opportunity to buy Pudgy, saying that Pudgy was his first real high-return trade as an NFT trader, and he had always known and seen its vision. It was clear that Pudgy had all the elements to become an NFT spokesperson.

Three months later, he began his journey to create the first mass-market brand in the Web3 market, and after a year of hard work, he successfully raised funds.

He firmly believes in building a company the right way and has personally experienced the impact of neglect and exploitation on the community, so they came here with the vision of building Web3 IP and set the North Star as a benchmark for building Web3 IP to ensure that the company's development will not cause harm to the community, but will have a positive impact on the community.