YEBO

A loyalty card you can take with you

Picture the last loyalty program you joined. The points sat in someone else's database. The rules changed without asking you. And the day the company folded, or got bought, or simply lost interest, your "rewards" evaporated. You never owned anything. You were renting goodwill.

YEBO is built around the opposite idea. The company makes no-code tools that let brands and creators spin up 3D virtual stores and issue rewards as NFTs - digital assets that belong to the holder, not the issuer, and that are meant to travel from one Web3 environment to another. The tagline is plain to the point of stubbornness: advancing the business of Web3. No moonshot poetry. Just a claim that this stuff should be useful.

It is a quiet company - roughly seven people, a single office in Los Angeles, no funding announcements to wave around. But the bet underneath it is not quiet at all.

Web3 promised ownership. Mostly it delivered homework.

For a few years, the pitch for NFTs was that you could own digital things. The reality, for most people who tried, was wallets, seed phrases, gas fees, and a JPEG that did nothing once you bought it. Brands wanted in, then discovered building anything meaningful required a blockchain engineering team they did not have.

So two problems sat side by side. Customers got "ownership" that felt like a chore. Brands got a technology they could not operate. YEBO's read on the situation is that both problems share one cause: the assets were not built to be useful, and they were not built to move.

That word - interoperability - is doing a lot of work. It means an asset you earn in one place should still mean something in another. A reward should not be a hostage of the platform that issued it. It is an unglamorous principle, the kind nobody puts on a billboard, and it happens to be the entire point.

An odd trio: Wall Street AI, video games, and a guy who built insurance quotes

YEBO is led by David Mandel, who is not a Web3 tourist. He and his brother founded Bitvore, an AI company whose data products are used across most major Wall Street firms. Before that he was a seed investor in Broadcom, in Access360 (acquired by IBM), and in Fulcrum Microsystems (acquired by Intel). He holds a math degree from the University of Pennsylvania. People with that record do not usually spend their time on 3D storefronts unless they think the underlying shift is real.

The bench around him is unusually game-shaped. Co-founder Zack was VP of Business Development and Digital at Capcom - the roughly $3.5 billion game maker behind franchises you have heard of - and held senior roles at DoubleFine and Namco Bandai. Stephen, the co-founder emeritus, led the design of YEBO's original 3D tools and was once lead architect of GEICO's online quote system, which is to say he knows how to make complicated things load fast for ordinary people.

It is a strange combination - financial-grade AI, AAA gaming, and enterprise web architecture - and that may be the most interesting thing about it. The bet is that consumer-grade Web3 needs all three at once: the rigor, the polish, and the patience to make it boring enough to actually use.

Four tools, one promise: no developer required

YEBO's offering is a set of building blocks for the Web3 economy. The thread running through all of them is that you should be able to make and run these things yourself.

The catalogue, as YEBO describes it: tools to build and deliver content for the Web3 economy, and to re-purpose NFTs.

A slow build, on purpose

Timeline assembled from public records and archived versions of the company site. Dates around the Web3 pivot are approximate - startups rarely send a press release the day they change their mind.

Why "portable" is the number that matters

YEBO has not published customer counts, revenue, or funding - so honesty requires saying the proof here is structural, not financial. The argument for the company is really an argument about where loyalty is leaking, and what happens when rewards stop being trapped.

The skeptic's question is fair: does anyone need this yet? YEBO's wager is that they will, and that the brands who move early will want a tool that does not require hiring blockchain engineers. Whether the market agrees is the open part of the story.

Who is in the room

A founder who reads balance sheets, a founder who shipped video games, an architect who made insurance quotes load fast. The Venn diagram does not obviously overlap - which is the joke, and possibly the strategy.

Bring people in by getting out of the way

Most Web3 mission statements promise to "revolutionize" something. YEBO's is smaller and harder: build an ecosystem that brings people into Web3 by letting them make their own no-code digital assets - buildings, stores, products - with full interoperability baked in.

Notice what is missing. There is no token to pump, no metaverse you must believe in, no demand that you change how you shop. The mission is about lowering a wall, not building a cathedral. If Web3 has a future as infrastructure rather than spectacle, it probably looks more like this - dull, useful, owned by the user - than like the hype that preceded it.

Back to that loyalty card

Return to where this started: the loyalty program whose points lived in someone else's database, governed by rules you never saw, gone the day the company lost interest. That is the default. It is so normal we stopped noticing it was a choice.

YEBO's whole reason for existing is to make a different default possible - one where the reward is yours, where it moves with you, and where the brand that issued it did not need an engineering department to set it up. The company is small and the market is unproven. But the idea is simple enough to outlast the noise around it: ownership should mean ownership, and the tools to build it should be available to people who cannot code.

If that sounds modest, it is. The most durable shifts usually do.