The founders of the Bored Ape Yacht Club have, until very recently, gone only by the pseudonyms Gargamel and Gordon Goner. To go along with our first digital cover story, Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow stepped out from behind their Ape personas to give Input the scoop on how they met and conceived of what would become the world’s most popular NFT project.
“We were both home from college, both studying creative writing at the time, and we immediately got into a fight about David Foster Wallace,” Aronow says of their meeting. “Garga was like, ‘That guy sucks.’ And that was kind of the beginning of our friendship.”
Solano and Aronow aren’t letting their massive success bog down their ideas for BAYC’s future, though. Watch our exclusive video interview below to hear more about how they plan to go “bigger and bigger” with the Bored Apes as they build out a metaverse of their own:
On the topic of where BAYC goes next, Aronow says: “While we build the broader brand — the sandbox, so to speak — the community is building the sandcastles.”
