The Signal
Two months after returning as Yuga Labs CEO, co-founder Garga gives a candid account of how Bored Ape Yacht Club grew from a dozen crypto obsessives into a 100-plus-person company — and how money, management layers, and too many simultaneous projects weakened the culture that made it work. His reset is blunt: shrink the scope, put the strongest builders directly on 3D Otherside, open the world to community creation, and restore the speed and empathy of the original team.
Key Takeaways
- 01
Scale broke the feedback loop
Yuga jumped from roughly 12 to 40 people in a month and eventually past 100. Each layer put more distance between founders, builders, crypto culture, and a community whose unhappiness was not always felt inside the company.
- 02
Capital changed the incentives
The $450 million raise let Yuga survive a brutal bear market and fund ambitious bets, but also attracted corporate expectations, encouraged spending, and ended the underdog story people had wanted to support.
- 03
Fewer things, finished brilliantly
Heavy Metal and Legends of the Mara carried strong IP but did not meet the quality bar. Rather than keep every brand internal, Yuga moved them to Faraway and concentrated its own game effort on 3D Otherside.
- 04
The community must build too
Otherside changes when outside creators can ship while Yuga sleeps. Opening the ODK is meant to recreate the leverage of the original ape JPEGs, which holders turned into hundreds of businesses without central permission.
- 05
ApeChain needs a real home
Garga sees the Arbitrum-based chain as a chance to give ApeCoin a front end, cheap transactions, and a place where developers and Yuga IP can produce useful experiences. Grants should grow the network, not merely distribute treasury tokens.
On the Record
“The default state of any big organization is like stupidity and lethargy.”
“We're successful when we're a scrappy startup and our butt's on fire.”
“We should be doing fewer things and doing them brilliantly.”
“If there's not that empathetic bone at the center of the company, then are you really operating? Have you found your way or lost it?”
The Breakdown
From wristbands to a hundred employees
The first ApeFest had fewer than ten people behind it; Garga personally handed out wristbands while a line wrapped four blocks around the gallery. Three years later, Yuga had crossed 100 employees. The company gained specialists and operating capacity, but every twenty new hires seemed to break the process that had worked before.
The gap was cultural as much as organizational. Early founders lived in Discord, Slack, and Twitter and knew every movement in the market. Later hires could be exceptional designers or developers with little crypto context, while approvals and management layers slowed decisions that the original group once made in a single conversation.
The price of becoming the favorite
Yuga's $450 million raise gave it room to survive the bear market and take swings that missed. It also made restraint harder: available money invites plans, prestigious valuation attracts people seeking a mature corporation, and nobody sees the company as an underdog after a raise that large.
Garga remembers the project before that weight. He was a book editor working 12- to 14-hour days and watching StarCraft to switch his brain off; 30 days into a New Year's resolution to improve his life, he texted Wylie that they should make an NFT. Within a year, Steph Curry owned an ape and Chris Rock appeared at their event.
What happened to 'fuck it, Saturday'
The Mutant Ape drop captured the old decision-making style: after debating timing, the team simply chose Saturday and shipped. Holders later used 'what happened to fuck-it vibes?' as shorthand for the distance between that energy and a company running through committees.
Garga says Yuga tried to become somebody it was not. The repair begins by putting founders close to the work, cutting bureaucracy, and repeating one operating mantra: make delightful things fast. Some people find that urgency energizing; others did not join a large company to work that way.
Looking honestly at the misses
Returning to the CEO seat required Garga to look at his 'baby' without pretending it was perfect. The most painful sign was a period when external sentiment and holder morale were brutal while people inside the company could remain comfortable. A crypto-native company should feel its community's pain, even when it cannot control every narrative.
Heavy Metal and Legends of the Mara were not good enough, he says, despite IP he still loves. Yuga can take only so many swings at games, so its internal game effort must concentrate on 3D Otherside. Faraway can run those spun-out brands and their communities with more focus than Yuga could.
Otherside becomes a platform
The critical transition is from a world built only by Yuga and contractors to one where holders and independent developers build beside them. Garga is opening the Otherside Development Kit to selected creators, with broader access to follow. The model is Bored Ape itself: Yuga sold a JPEG, and holders independently created restaurants, merchandise, stories, and hundreds of businesses.
Early BAYC repeatedly tried to do something so surprising and complete that copycats had to find another lane — a free companion collection whose royalties supported animal charities, or a token-gated festival too large to imitate casually. Otherside needs that same mixture of permissionless expansion and ambitious central spectacle.
ApeCoin gets a house
Yuga and the ApeCoin DAO are separate, and Garga says Yuga did not steer the vote to build ApeChain as an Arbitrum-based L3. Now that the decision exists, however, he wants Yuga's engineers and IP to help make the chain worth visiting. Cheap transactions create room for games, community businesses, and Otherside interactions that a governance portal alone never supplied.
His rule for treasury emissions is that tokens should bring valuable new participants into the network; otherwise they merely dilute existing holders. The chain needs its own front door, voice, and active builder ecosystem rather than becoming one more bridge-dependent network where nothing happens.
The underdog again
BAYC's rise was hated by older crypto participants who saw NFT buyers as unserious, but price kept making the criticism look foolish. When prices reversed, years of deferred contempt arrived at once. Garga sees one useful consequence: after every bear case has been aired, Yuga can again behave like the hometown underdog.
That does not erase the industry's basic hazards. If every neighbor received an ape, he jokes, most would lose it to phishing within a week. Bringing the next audience in requires both a product worth caring about and infrastructure safe enough for people who do not live on Crypto Twitter.
Distilled from the episode transcript · Counterparty Recap Desk
