Meet Frank DeGods: Co-Founder of DeGods and y00ts. 

Hop on a twitter space at any given moment and you’ll likely find Frank DeGods. Growing up in Los Angeles, he always wanted to make movies and worked on sets since he was 15. Frank received a Regents Scholarship from UCLA for Film but after about a year started to grow tired of the industry having already spent so much time there. While attending UCLA, he and a group of friends found a way to hack electric scooters that had been dropped on campus. Once they had access to all this transportation, they wanted to do something with it and started a last-mile delivery service start-up called Duffl, which is now in 8 major college cities. The company started growing really quickly, and Frank served as CEO for a year. At the time he didn’t know much about start-ups but he learned about a program called Y-combinator which is like an accelerator program for really high potential start-ups. “I didn’t think in a million years we would get in because it’s kind of like a big deal. People say it’s like … the Harvard of startup accelerators,” Frank said. But they did get in, and Frank left UCLA to keep building the business.

They eventually raised about $1.3 million USD to continue to run the start-up. With 5 Co-Founders, this side hustle grew rapidly. Frank eventually left to go to coding bootcamp because he had a desire to start working in Tech.  

From the coding bootcamp, Frank received a position to run growth at MainStreet, a series-A tech startup. He served as a one-man marketing team saying “I think I just crushed it at that role.” When he started with them they were at a $5 million valuation and ended up raising at a $500 million valuation. 

His initial crypto exposure came in his MainStreet days working a few contracted gigs, but he started diving deeper. Frank was looking for other opportunities outside of MainStreet at which point he created the viral website bitcoinorshit.com. The whole idea was to display “how much you would have if you bought bitcoin instead of this other dumb shit historically,” Frank said. When he started looking into NFTs, things started to click. He watched a few mints on Solana and started to research deep into the Solana NFT ecosystem. After working on a few side hustles with friends he realized he had the perfect team for an NFT project.

They launched DeGods in September 2021, which used Dust Labs technology to become one of the top Solana collections. Dust Labs, also Co-Founded by Frank, builds software that helps NFT communities bring more value to holders, and it was also used in his second NFT collection, y00ts, a curated community of builders and creators connected via 15,000 NFTs.

So, when asked what is on the agenda for Frank for the near future? His answer was “Growing y00ts and DeGods.” With his solid track record for growth, these will certainly be projects to keep on the watchlist. For now, the party continues and DeGods is hosting DeNYC this week, a multi-day experience for community members. The event offers the DeCountry Club Classic, a city-wide treasure hunt, Basement party, and more.