IN CONVERSATION WITH is a series from Archetype where we interview artists in/at the edges of crypto across music, visual art, design, curation, and more.Trevor McFedries is an entrepreneur, musician, and technologist best known for co-founding Brud in 2016, the media company behind the virtual pop star Lil Miquela, and co-founding Friends With Benefits (FWB) in 2020, one of the earliest and most influential social DAOs. Before his work in tech, McFedries was a musician and DJ performing under the name Yung Skeeter. He currently also is a part of the music duo SoFTT.Through his various projects, Trevor has worked with brands including Nike, Prada, and Calvin Klein, as well as artists including Katy Perry, Ke$ha, Sky Ferreira, and J Balvin. His career spans music, digital art, and crypto, positioning him as a pioneering figure at the intersection of art, culture, and technology.The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.Katie Chiou: For those who may not be familiar with your work, can you share more about your background/journey as an artist?Trevor McFedries: I always joke about Martine Syms’ concept of a “conceptual entrepreneur,” and I think of myself as that, probably most acutely. But in more practical terms, I'm a musician, artist, and entrepreneur. I do enough engineering to dabble, but I would say entrepreneur is the major hat. My journey is that I was a software engineer who stumbled into music. I was DJing and making beats for fun, and two buddies of mine and I were in this rap group called Shwayze that got signed to Interscope and put out a Top 10 album when I was 22. It was 2007, right as the internet was eating the music business. I was thrust into this position where I'd be pulled into Jimmy Iovine's office to talk about MySpace, while also going on TRL. Seeing this legacy media environment and creative culture industry pushed away by technologies, I was on the other side as well. I've lived at the intersection of art a