Interview with Mike Wen (Gallery)

Building the Social Layer for NFTs

Lisa Xu
2 min readJun 15, 2022

I recently had the chance to interview Mike Wen, Co-founder and CEO of Gallery. Gallery is the premier gallery experience for NFTs, enabling users to curate and share their NFTs through an on-chain social platform.

Gallery launched just last year, but has already attracted top NFT collectors and artists to its platform. The company recently minted 10,000 Season 1 membership cards and has partnered with an impressive list of NFT communities and projects, including

Gallery has raised $2.7M from Collab+Currency, Distributed Global, Lattice Capital, Palm Tree Crew (Kygo), Galaxy Interactive, FlamingoDAO, Scalar Capital, and The LAO. Coinbase Ventures and Dapper Labs.

Mike and I had a lot of fun talking about:

  • NFTs as a form of self-expression
  • Building an on-chain social network
  • Gallery’s community-driven approach to product and growth
  • Mike’s predictions on the future of NFTs

Watch our fireside chat (part of our Crypto Driven interview series) below.

Crypto Driven is a global community and interview series run by FirstMark Capital that dives into the latest trends, emerging platforms, and top companies across the crypto & web3 ecosystem. Crypto Driven is hosted by me (@lisamxu) and my FirstMark colleagues Matt Turck (@mattturck) and Jack Cohen (@itsjackcohen) .

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Lisa Xu

VC @FirstMark investing in early stage startups | former homes: Handy, Peloton, Bain & Company, Wharton