Nicole Muniz is the CEO of Yuga Labs, the company behind and responsible for the creation of the non-fungible token (NFT) platform Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC); and the managing director of Something New, a company that specializes in creative design, marketing, branding and managing companies. ^[1][2]

Career

In 2006, Nicole Muniz began working at K.Walter Thompson Worldwide, an advertising company that later merged with Wunderman Thompson, as a producer. In 2008, after leaving K.Walter Thompson Worldwide, she became an executive producer at B-Reel, an independent film production company that specializes in creating advertisements for brands such as Nike, Ikea, and Sephora. She left this job in 2016 to become the founder and managing director of Something New, a company that specializes in creative design, marketing, branding, and managing other companies. Since 2021, she has been working as the CEO of Yuga Labs, while still maintaining her role at Something New. ^[6][7][8][9]

Yuga Labs

In early 2021, the founders of Yuga Labs, Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow reached out to Nicole as Wylie and her were friends. The founders sought advise on one of their first ideas, a NFT project that allows buyers to place pixels on a collaborative board - the end product being a collaborative art piece. However, Nicole thought that the major problem with the project would be people creating inappropriate drawings. This comment gave them the idea of creating the current BAYC "BATHROOM" as they thought inappropriate, graffiti like drawings reminded them of bathrooms in bars. ^[5]
Since then, Muniz has been on board as CEO and in charge of representing Yuga Labs - taking interviews and public announcements at crypto venues such as TechCrunch session on November 17th 2022. Since the doxxing of the founders of Yuga Labs, Muniz had to deal with major public confrontations including taking an interview with D3 Network, which was the first video recorded interview where she explained some of the concerns of the uncovering. ^[3][4][11]

“Releasing their identities and frankly only giving us 30 minutes was very, very dangerous for them and their families”

“It was a story about ‘what if,’ and that sort of leaves me with this feeling of just like, it just felt so dangerous. And the only thing that people got out of it was just knowing their real names”

On December 19th 2022, Yuga Labs announced the appointment of Daniel Alegre as their CEO, affective in the first half of 2023 and Nicole would be reassigned as strategic advisor. ^[1