This week, OpenSea had the chance to chat with Carly Reilly about everything from her high school persona, to her favorite metas in the NFT space, to how she created her NFT collection, Overpriced Jin. 

Reilly is the founder and CEO of Overpriced Media, a web3 brand centered on NFT content and conversations. Previously, she spent two years as the National Finance Director for Andrew Yang's 2020 Presidential campaign, helping him raise $40M. She is also a Washington Post contributor, former co-host of the Yang Speaks podcast, and has been featured by Bloomberg News.

OpenSea: Starting off with an icebreaker. Can you tell us about high school Carly?

Carly: I was a good student, but I would say I was always a little intellectually rebellious. If you really knew me in high school, you probably aren't surprised that I'm now doing web3 stuff. I always was a little bit contrarian, you know? 

I actually switched schools. I was in public school for my freshman and sophomore year, and then I went to a boarding school for my junior and senior years. It's not common to start your junior year, so that was character-building to start at a boarding school at 16 when everybody else already knew each other and was entrenched in school. I came out of it and I feel like I actually grew a lot from that experience, and I ultimately loved it.

OpenSea: So, how did you go from there to crypto? Tell us about your journey into web3.

Carly: Out of college, I went to work at a hedge fund and there was one degen at the office who was super into crypto. I somehow ended up being the one listening to all of his ramblings. I owned some Monero [an altcoin] at the time. Again, the contrarian in me. But [then] I made money with it. I think I probably put $20 in and made like $3,000, and at 22, you're like, “That's amazing.” I mean, that's still a good return. So that got me in. I knew of Ethereum at that time but didn’t own any. It was 2016, 2017. It was still really early Ethereum days. 

Then I worked on Yang's presidential campaign as Finance Director. I worked with a number of our big donors and some of them were into Bitcoin. I stayed interested in Bitcoin that way, though it was more from afar. After the presidential campaign ended, I was at a venture studio in early 2021. I started to reacquaint myself with what was happening in DeFi and was like, oh ****, all this stuff that was theoretical back in 2016, they're actually doing some of this now. That's really interesting. That's when I started to dive back in. That was early 2021 and I found NFTs in April of that year. I left the venture studio job and worked in blockchain that summer.

OpenSea: Can you tell us about that journey a little bit more specifically? How did that come to be? 

Carly: I was at this venture studio and it was a lovely job and the people were lovely and we were doing cool things and we were building cool companies. But I was so unhappy, just illogically, you know? I was like, this is not what I'm supposed to be doing. I wanted to do a podcast. I wanted to do something in media, and I wanted to do an NFT podcast. In March of 2021 I quit my job at the venture studio without anything else lined up. I was just like, I know whatever I'm doing here isn't right, so I need to figure out what I wanna do. I took that leap of faith. 

I started looking on Angel List at blockchain companies, [asking] what's around, who's building in the space. That's how I ended up getting my job at a blockchain startup. In the back of my mind, I wondered [if I could do] something with content, but it's so intimidating to get started. But listen to your gut, and things happen. Ryan Sean Adams (the founder of Bankless) DMed me one day on Twitter [and said], “Hey, we are looking for somebody to plant a flag on NFT and metaverse content for us. We are more focused on DeFi, but we want somebody covering this. We love you on Yang's feed; you're talented, and see you're into this stuff. Would you have an interest in this?” And I was like, “Oh yes, very much interested.” It just worked out so beautifully. They were willing to let me have the IP for the show, which was really important to me to feel like I really owned the thing. And from there, it's been able to spin out all these other things like the newsletter and the live tour. It was really fortuitous.

OpenSea: Do you remember some of your earliest guests on the show?

Carly: I've interviewed Betty (of Deadfellaz) a number of times on panels. She was my very first guest and now I'm interviewing her again in July. Zenica (of ZenAcademy) was my second or third guest. Mack Flavelle (who co-founded CryptoKitties, Dapper Labs, and Big Head Club) was an early guest of mine. And he's been on a number of times since then.

OpenSea: You have an enviable bird's eye view of everything that's happening across the ecosystem. How do you stay on top of everything? What do you read, personally?

Carly: For what it's worth, I constantly feel like I am like falling behind and like there's just so much that's happening in this space. I'm always worried that I'm missing something. I follow so many people on Twitter. Twitter's obviously a big source for what everyone in the space is talking about. I do check Decrypt, CoinDesk, [and other big] news publications. I try to take an approach of taking [in] a lot of information and then figuring out what I find interesting and then going deeper on the things that I find interesting. I love Matt Levine. I think he's super valuable for getting a good perspective on what's happening in crypto markets. I [also] think NFT Scoop is really good. 

OpenSea: What are you seeing right now in the NFT space?

Carly: I feel like I'm gonna say obvious things here, but I think we're in a waiting moment. There are macro forces that are bigger than any of us, and it's hard to know when the right kismet of pieces comes together to make something click. 

The use cases that I think are really interesting that y'all are working on are loyalty [programs] or redeemables or [NFT] tickets or even collectibles in the proper true sense of collectibles where people actually do give a **** about the thing in and of itself and not just its price. I think about this in the context of fashion NFTs. [Think about a] Gucci skirt that just sits in your wallet somewhere that nobody's checking. [It’s] so unbelievably not interesting and kind of useless. This is why in the context of gaming, I think skins are really interesting because you have context around them. You have a gaming ecosystem around them. I think there are really interesting things that could happen with digital fashion because you're creating context suddenly. [You] can wear it.

We [may] get to a point where you link your wallet to your dating app in the way that you link your Instagram to your dating app. That, to me, is such a no-brainer. I've always thought dating or matchmaking services are really interesting in the context of NFTs. You [may realize you] went to the same concert and maybe didn't realize it, and you also go to the same coffee shop and [discover] all these things that are similar to each other. I think when we create context like that around it, where people are actually checking NFTs in a different way, to me [that’s] the thing that will make it pop off. 

I went on a trip to Paris and I was like, I wish POAPs were a thing right now and I could grab my POAP at all the restaurants I went to and the museums I went to. I want that even more than I want to snap a selfie at these places because I just want that little record of all the places I've been.

OpenSea: What's been your favorite meta so far?

Carly: That's a good question. My OPJ NFT was an open edition, and that was in November of last year, so kind of the beginning, right before the latest round of the open edition meta kicked off. We had those super early days of open editions and then it came back. I [also] enjoy the burn meta stuff, like what Damien Hirst and Jack Butcher did. It’s almost like gamifying the art process. Creating these choices is fun.

OpenSea: You married loyalty and redeemability with your Overpriced Jin project. Can you explain the project at a high level and what you learned along the way?

Carly: During the height of the bull market, people would ask me, “When are you launching an OPJ NFT?” because it seemed like such a no-brainer if you're doing an NFT podcast. But my fear was being put in a position where I had some sort of alpha group because being in a position where people buy a bunch of NFTs to come hang out with a Discord was just very unappealing, and I've joked before about how I'm kind of introverted, including like… digitally introverted. 

Then I was advising this company called Liquid Collections, which was founded by Kit Codik who was the founder of liquor.com. He ran liquor.com for 20 years. I asked him if we could do some sort of bespoke spirit as a thank-you gift to past guests of the show. We settled on gin. We realized it was a really interesting model to expand out, and I wanted to do live events, so it felt like a really cool way to pull all these things together and do cocktails and conversation [with an NFT tied to it]. It felt authentic to things I wanted to do.