Alexander Taub and the serious business of being ridiculous

A founder who has spent years making introductions eventually helps invent a town full of goblins. The goblins acquire a burger truck. The truck acquires a driving game. Players can scream into their microphones to slow down time. Somewhere along this route, Alexander Taub’s career begins to look less like a résumé and more like a particularly lively group chat.

There is a thread through it. Taub, the Miami-based co-founder and CEO of Truth Arts, has worked on ways to understand audiences, assemble communities, and give those communities something to do together. The products have changed considerably. His interest in the people inside them keeps resurfacing.

In September 2026, he announced SocialCrank, a new audience-search product that returns to territory he first explored with SocialRank more than a decade earlier. Between those two names lie a sale, a professional network, tools for collective ownership, a merger, and a fictional universe. The goblins have been busy. So has their co-creator.

The partnership before the goblins

Before there were characters to market, there were partnerships to arrange. At Aviary, a New York startup supplying photo-editing technology, Taub worked on business development. His team lined up more than 30 partnerships for a launch. Each partner provided another route to users, and another reason for the product to keep circulating after the launch-day attention had passed.

He later worked at payments company Dwolla alongside Michael Schonfeld. That relationship would survive several changes of product and company. The two started SocialRank in 2014, then built Upstream, and eventually became co-founders of Truth Arts. In a career with a shifting cast of company names, Schonfeld is a recurring character.

Taub was also writing. In a 2014 interview, he described publishing four posts a week on Alex’s Tech Thoughts and contributing to Forbes every two weeks. That year, McGraw-Hill published Pitching & Closing, the business development book he co-authored with Ellen DaSilva. Partnerships were becoming something he could teach as well as practice.

His public biography includes the BD Meetup and business development classes. This was a practical education in getting people into the same conversation, with a useful professional habit attached: explain what the other person stands to gain. A promising introduction still needs somewhere to go.

A profitable company, a closed gate

SocialRank gave brands a way to examine their social audiences. A follower total could tell a company how large its crowd was; the product helped identify who was actually in it. Customers included the NBA, Nike, and Netflix. The business raised $2.1 million and became profitable in 2017.

Profitability did not settle its future. SocialRank depended on access to data controlled by social platforms, and those platforms were tightening access. The people building the analytics could improve their product without gaining much control over the conditions that made it possible.

In November 2019, Trufan acquired SocialRank’s assets and intellectual property for an undisclosed sum. Taub and Schonfeld moved on to Upstream. The sale makes an unusually instructive chapter because the company had paying customers and a sustainable business. The question concerned how much room it had to grow, and who could close that room.

Years later, Taub would describe the experience as building on somebody else’s property. The lesson has followed him into subsequent projects: a good relationship with your users does not remove dependence on the platform between you.

A room on your phone

Upstream began with professional relationships. It offered communities where people could ask for help, make introductions, and meet. Its virtual events used short, randomly matched video conversations, giving participants a manageable way to encounter someone outside their usual circle.

By May 2021, the company described more than 200 communities on the platform. Taub had moved from New York to Miami, where he recognized some of the camaraderie he remembered from the earlier New York startup scene. His account of the move also had an ordinary family appeal: finishing work and taking his children out could happen with less friction.

Then the product moved toward DAOs, organizations using blockchain tools to coordinate decisions and shared assets. Upstream launched its Collective product in November 2021 and raised a $12.5 million Series A in 2022. The professional gathering place was becoming infrastructure for groups that wanted to own and manage things together.

Taub could make the machinery sound less forbidding. Explaining Vault DAO, which let one person use multiple wallets to approve decisions, he reached for Rick and Morty and its Council of Ricks. Different versions of the same person could sit around the digital table. It was an elaborate route to a simple precaution, with a cartoon doing some of the explanatory work.

The town becomes a company

Alongside Upstream, Taub co-founded Truth Labs with artist Process Grey and Cesar Kuriyama, the founder of 1 Second Everyday. Truth Labs launched IlluminatiNFT and then Goblintown in 2022. Its goblins were conspicuously unsuitable for a glossy corporate presentation, which was part of their appeal.

The idea arrived during the market downturn in May 2022. Taub wondered whether people whose profile pictures were apes or punks should become goblins when the market went bad. Grey could make the characters; Kuriyama suggested making the mint free. The team dispensed with the customary roadmap and Discord server, too. The joke had a recognizable subject: an industry accustomed to selling an elaborate account of the future. Here was something people could encounter immediately, with considerably worse teeth.

The two sides of Taub’s work eventually converged. Upstream brought product and engineering talent. Truth Labs brought artists, design, and a world of characters. Their merger closed in January 2024 and was announced the following month under the name Truth Arts. Taub became CEO; Schonfeld became CTO; Grey became chief creative officer; Kuriyama became creative advisor.

The announcement contained a frank admission: Upstream’s DAO business had not found product-market fit. Combining the teams offered another use for the technical work and another way to develop the creative world. Such an admission gives the merger more substance than the usual arithmetic in which two companies are automatically declared greater together.

Truth Arts also introduced Operation Resurrection, allowing eligible collectors to burn NFTs for future equity rights through a Republic offering. The proposal attempted to connect collectors’ interests with the company’s future. It was a specific program with eligibility rules, rather than a blanket claim that owning a collectible meant owning the business.

“Put yourself in a position to get lucky.”

Alexander Taub, on a lesson that stayed with him

A truck with questionable prospects

For a character business, the useful question is what the characters can do next. Goblintown’s answer included a physics-based driving game in which a wobbly truck attempts a dangerous delivery. The title, Goblintown: Really Hard Driving Game, takes a commendably direct approach to customer expectations.

The Steam release date is April 30, 2025, in Early Access. The premise includes obstacles, shortcuts, unlockable vehicles, and a microphone feature that slows time when the player screams. Frustration has been given a place in the control scheme. Anyone who has shouted at a game may appreciate finally receiving a mechanical benefit.

Taub described it plainly: “The game is a straight Web2 game using our IP and world.” Its origins in digital collectibles did not require the game itself to include crypto or NFTs. The character world could reach players through a familiar store and a familiar purchase.

That decision puts the entertainment ambition under a useful test. People can encounter Goblintown because they want to play. The truck has to be worth driving, the obstacles worth another attempt, the world worth spending time in. A collectible’s trading history cannot take the wheel for them.

The joke needs a filing system

Another Truth Arts project addresses a quieter problem: where to put all the memes. Meme Depot gives people a way to collect and organize images, GIFs, and videos online. For anyone who has hunted through a phone’s photo library for one joke, the appeal is embarrassingly recognizable.

In June 2024, writer Jason Levin described sitting with Taub in New York and talking about memes over coffee. His account lingered on a product that could group material into collections and search for words inside images. Behind the noisy subject was a practical tool for finding something again.

Taub’s interest makes sense beside the rest of his work. Memes move between people, acquire meaning inside groups, and offer a compact way to signal shared taste. A product that helps organize them sits quite naturally beside his earlier interest in organizing audiences.

There is a pleasing professional reversal here. The co-author of a book about business development now has reason to think carefully about the storage of ridiculous pictures. The job still involves understanding what people want to pass along.

Back among the followers

On September 29, 2026, Taub announced SocialCrank as a successor to SocialRank. The first planned product focused on Twitter audiences, with early access available. His account emphasized a changed way of asking questions: describe the people you want to find in ordinary language, rather than master a complicated dashboard.

The announcement was forward-looking. A search demonstration and a list of planned platforms are a beginning, with the work of delivering the broader product still ahead. Returning to a familiar problem brings experience; it also brings a fresh set of expectations.

Taub’s ambitions have often come with a sense of humor. Asked in 2020 whom he would like to have lunch with, he picked Knicks owner James Dolan, hoping to persuade him to sell him the team. The answer requires both a New Yorker’s basketball loyalties and a founder’s resistance to modest proposals.

His more portable advice was to put himself where luck could find him: stay accessible, remain open to opportunities, avoid burning relationships. Across his companies, that approach has produced collaborators who keep reappearing. Schonfeld is still in the story. So are the artists and the communities. And now the audience-search question is back, with a few more goblins among the followers.