Community as the new moat for business in Web3

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web 3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode [Music] gmgm what's up friends welcome to web3 academy it is the weekly doer spotlight and this week we have with us v or vyara v did i say that right you did say that right thank you yes yes uh let me give a brief intro and then i'll let you jump in here v uh v is the cmo of late checkout uh which is a community design firm

and community is at the heart of everything that they do at late check out which is really why we wanted to bring v onto the show today uh initially when we joined late checkout i know she led the go-to market strategy and we're gonna talk a bit today about go to market versus go to community what the difference is and how we think businesses should be thinking about them today before late checkout we spent close to three years leading marketing for element ai which was acquired by servicenow i believe during the pandemic and during her time there she was part of building out an incredible team and part of a team which is recognized

by the ai 100 awarded the turing prize and i know your ceo was also featured as one of fast companies most creative people and then before that just to keep going down v's incredible resume uh she spent a decade in cpg uh where she contributed to working on brand uh omni channel relaunching digital and international markets and building and scaling brand communities uh and i i need to mention v is also launching a podcast i don't know if it's is it out yet v or is it coming out soon it is coming out soon and thank you for asking me about that okay awesome what's the name we don't need to chat about yet but

yeah she is launching well tell us the name go ahead sure sure so the name is is po crypto and the the idea is one based around representation so if you think about marginalized communities so think of racially mode racially marginalized or otherwise marginalized communities the idea is that there's a lack of representation and that this lack of representation creates a vicious cycle around um more diverse contributors so the face premise is how can we shine a light on some fantastic people of color within crypto who are really moving web 3 forward with the subjective of creating a virtuous loop around

participation so think about a 17 year 18 19 year old who's a person of color who sees another person of color who's just crushing it in web 3 and who because of that believes that they can to achieve what is being achieved in front of them so the idea is really to seed great minds with these fantastic stories of success because representation begets participation so it's really a podcast about the people of color within crypto or web3 driving uh web3 forward uh with fantastic projects protocols um products whatever the case may be with this objective of creating connections with you know aspiring participants and established participants and creating

some sort of community around that so that's that's the dream that's the goal that's that's wonderful i think we might have to get v to film a little ad for our podcast you are so beautiful with your words it's amazing i love that this is so great i also forgot to introduce uh i'm here jay as always uh and as well my co-host kyle read head what's up kai what's up guys i'm excited to be here excited to pick your brain v uh community is is top of mind for jay and i for web 3 academy right now uh and so we we're just so excited to be able to uh to be able to pick your brain so go for it jay

yeah before i ask you the first question be just give our listeners an overview so today is all about community as we've mentioned a few times and particularly community and web three and we're going to talk about sort of four different areas of community community-based products community-based branding community-based growth and community-owned growth and we won't dive into each of those yet but we will get into those uh throughout the show today but to start uh we always love to ask all of our guests it's uh probably one of our favorite question is really how did you start your journey down the web 3 rabbit hole when did it start was there somebody particularly who got you into it yeah what was that what's what's that story

so all praise and props goes to to greg eisenberg um so when when i joined a late checkout um i was put on this project where um i don't know if i'm gonna get in trouble for this but i was put on this project and i i started to research it pretty frantically simply because um you want to come prepared for any kind of conversation with with something to contribute and it started off fairly um simply where you know you have a you have a client conversation or you have a pitch presentation and you need to get familiar with the with the body of work within the space and i was just doing my due diligence and i started to to come

up to come up with a certain amount of resistance you know what i mean like intellectually to some of the things i was reading and i'm like i don't want i don't think i understand what's being what's being discussed here and um so i started to pick it apart and i still didn't understand and then i i i kept on going i think i'm still going so this was over a year ago but the the idea is really it really is literally falling down a rabbit hole so one conversation sparked just curiosity and i've been following my curiosity ever since but um the person who made that possible for me was definitely greg eisenberg and what about web 3 sparked

something inside you you know i was reading on late checkout about your manifesto you know what why dedicate your time in your life to web three you know what's what's your what's your guiding light towards it yeah for sure i think i think like a lot of people it's on different levels so there's definitely the intellectual level the part where the ideas are just so interesting um and i think it's so concept-rich and i talked about this yesterday a little bit where it's concept rich so this idea that is quite abstract in terms of some of the things that are coming

together and the way that it is shared and explained is quite dense so you need to be committed to understanding so intellectually it's very stimulating um i also believe that it's dynamic so it's ever changing so it really keeps you on your toes in terms of um needing to stay abreast of everything that's happening and then it's also multi-disciplinary so if you think about the technical aspect the communication aspect the legal aspect um the ethics the philosophy um there are just so many different parts of

the human experience that are intermeshed i mean economics sociopolitical anthropological it's just extremely rich in terms in terms of things to keep you excited and and stimulating i think there's also the personal part so i'm from east africa originally i'm obviously a woman of color and i think the the promise of what what three can offer is extremely exciting so if you think about a whole new trash or a whole new opportunity of wealth creation with potentially um a broadened spectrum of people invited to

participate that's something i can really get excited about for me for my children and for people who who look like me or who feel otherwise like the previous incarnations of what we've seen haven't necessarily invited them to the table so that to me is very powerful and something that could keep you up at night in terms of you know contributing to something bigger than yourself yeah i think for us very much the the same draw to web three this this potential for equal opportunity uh for this unlock of access um whether it be and access i think across so many as you mentioned so many different areas and factors of life you

know access to banking for the 1.5 billion people who currently don't even have access to banking uh definitely and then and then the potential to be part of something that is growing so fast is just so stimulating uh i know that yeah we we we get excited every day about the the potential uh and where this could go um okay so wondering whenever i'm going to come out of the rabbit hole i feel like i'm still down we're all just digging right right yeah and then you fall upon these nuggets or like these diamonds as you dig and you just spend some time there and then you move around but it's extremely um i don't know if you guys feel this way but

i haven't felt like this in years from a professional standpoint where you feel like you're playing um the only thing i can compare it to is when you're a kid and you're playing um that sense of like just figuring things out and ooh that didn't work and that was kind of a waste of time or all of those things where you suspend judgment and it's really about just the discovery i haven't felt like that in years from a professional standpoint i don't i can't remember the last time i felt that way i feel like a kid in a sandbox i completely agree with that yeah and and time just disappears you you end up i i've never i've never been so excited to spend so

much time learning something like it's all i want to do it's it's actually it's actually sometimes problematic i bought a house recently and i'm trying to renovate it and i'm like like literally like trying to find spare time to sand my deck so i can paint it but at the same time i'm like listening to a podcast and trying to figure out what's right 100 and i think um the other part that we talk about and i think we're all passionate about is doing it with friends so this idea of being able to share your learnings and even challenge your learnings with a community of like-minded people is extremely stimulating for a couple of reasons i think one is definitely the shared the shared learning but also the challenge of the challenge that

comes with with people potentially not having the exact specific same ideas as you and coming out of that conversation enlightened about you know new different uh different ways of doing things um and i think that's how we all learn right like you you hear it and then you try it and then you discuss it again and then you come back to it um so yeah i think the the pure aspect of of web 3 the community aspect of what three is extremely enriching and you know that's i think one of the most interesting things about community web 3 is like when you get into communities and you meet people and jay and i are lucky we get to talk to people every week on this podcast when you ask their web 3 story or why they're in this like

so many people have such a different reason of why they're in here and it's like how many problems is web3 aiming to solve right now it's just it's incredible what it's trying to do and there's so many people that are all in this space for so many different reasons but like we're all kind of like banding together and i think that's what makes this community so interesting and so cool um which i think is a great transition into getting into discussing community but to me that's just like one of my favorite things about web3 so i just wanted to add that in there so before we we pulled necessarily on the thread of community and web 3 i just wanted to talk and stop and talk about community as sort of a concept first and it concept particularly within business

so v why why is community so important for businesses why should businesses be spending time thinking about community why does it matter what does it allow them to do that marketing might not allow them to do or other other focuses might not i think one of the i'll start with the challenges one of the challenges of community is return on investment so like a lot of activities um i don't believe we figured out what the right measure for community is and i think we're looking in the wrong spot that's a whole other conversation so i would say that first and foremost at the moment what community needs is belief and conviction

at the highest level so whoever is in charge of the endeavor needs to be deeply committed to community um because the conviction will feed the kind of virtuous circle or cycle that you need around growing community when you don't have the return on investment traditional metrics that people are looking at or looking for when evaluating a business activity i think that hinder that kind of short-term lens hinders the long-term effort that community building needs um there are definitely community builders that i look at and

and am inspired by i think about david spinks over at cmx or xcmx i think about uh rosie sherry i think about rapha the builder i think about all of these fantastic thinkers around community and what it means and i believe we've not figured out the right way to evaluate community and therefore that to me is one of the biggest hurdles for a business to invest in it if you're not able to put it on a slide and talk it through at the board level your that slide's not going to make it in and you're not going to be important and you're not going to be invested and it creates this vicious cycle so i would say first and foremost

if the highest instance of whatever business you're a part of does not believe very deeply that community is what it's all about i think you're set up to fail so that would be my first thing and thereafter i would say if you have that kind of environment to be able to play around what community means i think the opportunity is limitless because the opportunity is if we think in traditional business terms of a highly engaged super consumer it's going to drive down again very traditional business terms

which is going to drive down your retention costs and who's going to drive down your acquisition costs because of the virtuous cycle they're creating with word of mouth and who's going to lower your service costs because they're going to do part of the customer service job of speaking to other people who are interested in what you're doing and they're going to do it in a completely objective almost third-party way they have no vested interest they're not of the company to be speaking about your product in the way that they are product service whatever the case may be around what it is that you're selling um and then there's all of the things that

can't be captured but think about content creation as a whole the amount of content creation that can come from a community that is invested uh it's unbelievable and if we're thinking about web 3 opportunities the ability to financialize or to monetize community is really unlocked so if you think about um doing the right work with your community meaning aligning what it is that you want to do with what it is that they want to achieve and you are really able to come together and again you know have a shared vision and mission that you're able to enable this community to to achieve

if you're if you give them the tools to achieve their goal they will literally buy the product so the idea is driving down acquisition costs driving down service costs creating significant retention um i would say true it's true loyalty versus retention but also then you're able to monetize the community with products and services so what are the events what is the content they want to consume what are the products that they need how can you help them achieve their goals and then you can build on top of this very invested potential community if you do everything right

from the beginning if with their best interest at heart and with a means to to really just connect them through your product as ultimately what you're doing yeah i really like the concept of community is the new moat what this if your community provides and you mention so many ways that they provide it they provide this almost this this bubble around your business where they're feeding information and feedback back in and helping you learn and grow and giving it to you as you said in a completely

objective way but then they're also they're pushing your message out and and and being these these voices for you that is so authentic that is difficult to achieve in the traditional marketing sense or through a marketing strategy yeah i completely agree and i think um the methods or the flywheel or the um the analogies that we need to bring are also uh different so what is the what is the perspective we need to bring to truly understand the value of community is probably something we we need to think

about so traditionally we think um and this is something i wanted to talk to you guys about and this is the experimentation part if you think about the marketing funnel traditionally this kind of v-shaped funnel or if you think about the flywheel or that reforge talks about i don't know that that's the same shape in web3 because it's much more of an hourglass right like it's you start out with this awareness this interest and you consume and it's definitely that first funnel but then it fans back out because then it becomes this community and i think up until very recently we did

retention but did we really go into community experience like this continuous onboarding of an existing community and that's why i think it's the shape is much more of of an hourglass versus a funnel or a cycle so i don't know what you guys think about that but i i think that that's that's the shape that's a great analogy because after retention which is usually what you see now it's almost like they become owner right like if if you're using web3 if you're using some sort of token or an nft or whatever it's like they become owner they also become sort of incentivized potentially so it's like there's community and maybe

owners after that i don't know um and and yeah absolutely i can see that as like your customers once you have them through that funnel they become the next entry point for the funnel because they're as you said word of mouth bringing in all the next people and and i think it's even like it's almost on steroids in web 3 because you give them that ownership or that equity or that whatever like that um that ownership inside that community and so they're even more incentivized than they would be in the kind of the web 2 world so i love that hourglass video that's that's great it's genius yeah jay i don't know if you think that as well but i think that's the thing right so i mean if you think about the way that we did it traditionally we'd stop kind of at loyalty and then we

we're at retention rather and we flip back into acquisition and if you think about your traditional kind of budget conversations that's really where the money goes right and that's usually the least place the last place where you want to cut so if we're thinking about in terms of business terms that is where the focus is that is where the money goes was always at the beginning of the journey the acquisition the growth because of the dynamics that we know uh in terms of the of the businesses and the markets we evolved but if you think about that now and you say well this new layer is ownership well that changes the relationship you have with this consumer slash owner um

all of a sudden your lens needs to include a much broader life cycle than from aware to acquired you need to go all the way through immunity all the way through re-engagement so that is going to change the shape of the relationship but also the shape of the marketeer and we started chatting about that before and i saw you guys that had a had a good exchange and you got some kudos from from uh from the ceo of of uh lens protocol uh standing right danny yeah stanley from lens and in ave yeah um

and it was an interesting thing where throughout my career and i've heard this at many marketers i've heard this you know there you get challenged around the relevancy of marketing why are you you're what is it that you're contributing and i think most of us have uh in some way shape or form have had to explain why we deserve a seat at the table and everybody will be able to explain why they're why they have a seat at the table so i think when i saw his tweet and he was saying you know there's no need for marketing in web 3 or something like that i think if we if we pull out of the um the attack of the marketer versus marketing so he talked about marketing he didn't talk about marketers so it's an idea he's talking about this idea i think if we pull back and we ask

ourselves the question i think that it's a very valid question what does marketing look like and is it called marketing in web3 because if you look to the traditional definition of marketing it's really connecting audiences to products this through line the community part wasn't necessarily part of the definition so is it called marketing in web3 i don't know what do you guys think i'd love to so this was yeah it was um he tweeted this out he was a couple days ago and i read that i was like wait what there's no marking went through what's he talking about and my response was basically like there's marketing in everything everything you do right it's not just about marketing a product or a brand it's like i market myself every

single day right like i walk into the grocery store i go into an uber and i'm marketing who i am to every single person that i meet and i don't even know why i just it's it's kind of what we do i think as humans um and so like i don't know i do hear a lot of people talk about how marketing and i think what they really mean maybe is advertising is gone in web three i don't know um because is it gone or is it i don't think so i think advertising becomes even better in web3 to be honest um but that's for a whole another rabbit hole um but to me i just think um you market every time you do like even as a community let's say you want to get we hosted an event for our community um yesterday it was on

monday night and we want to get a bunch of people there to talk and have a conversation about web3 we were talking with about tokenomics and governance how do you get people to that community call well you market that call right i wasn't marketing a product but i was marking an event and it's like every time i ever do like this podcast we're going to release this after again it's not a product but i'm going to go and market people to come and listen to uv because you're sharing all this amazing information and so it's like everything i do is marketing and so to say it doesn't exist in web 3 to me was just kind of like i was kind of shocked that's i think especially because growth is difficult

it's it's two different skill sets that we usually see in business there is builders and um visionaries creators who can who can who can build something that can you know there's nothing here and then all of a sudden there's a product or there's an idea or there's an event or something like that but then getting people to buy that thing or show up to that thing or engage with that thing is is is a completely different skill set and yeah i think it's it's interesting i would i don't know how

i think also just because a lot of the conversations i've had recently uh particularly in the past month have been around hey i've got this great 3 project how do i get eyeballs on it right so i think i'm having so many marketing and obviously that's because that's the role i play and that's those are the types of people that are coming toward to me but it seems yeah it seems i don't i don't understand how you in some way you need to tell your story and then you need to attract attention towards your story yeah and especially in the beginning when you're first starting unless i don't know i guess unless

you're like completely this gets into and i don't even know if we want to go down this thread but this decentralized versus centralized and so many times in this podcast we've talked about i think we came into web3 with this vision of like everything should be decentralized and then we quickly realized and we realized this through many of the guests that we had on this podcast pure decentralization is not productive it is actually chaotic and most of the most successful decentralized web 3 protocols or tools out there actually started centralized and then move towards decentralization right so i don't know i guess like could you the only way i could see it working

where you wouldn't have marketing would be if it was completely decentralized and you just had you know enough people from the beginning in your community that all really wanted the same thing and all were capable of telling the exact same story and nobody needed to be told what the brand was or what the narrative was like that just yeah that's what happens when you don't have good marketing ethereum which is i mean the most successful smart contract platform most of web3 is built on top of it it has the best product market fit and it's been decentralized all the way through pretty much but when you talk to anyone i was just on a call with a client and like he was trying to explain something about ethereum he didn't really understand and i was like ethereum needs marketing because everyone's thoughts about ethereum is because it's so complex

right that everyone's thoughts are just something completely different no one really knows what's going on and so like at some point it's like you kind of need it especially when it gets as complex as something like a smart contract platform um yeah yeah isn't that the role that bankless plays peglis is basically ethereum's marketing engine we're gonna edit that out but but 100 i think i think this idea of sharing concepts with people in a way that is digestible and for them to understand is definitely one part of marketing um but i do believe the shape of the competencies that the traditional marketer has will be challenged because the way that we've been brought up

as you as you noted uh jay is this this very growth oriented focus which creates um an acquisition flywheel for sure and it creates the skills that we saw develop in web 2.5 whatever we want to call it definitely in the dtc space but this community based marketer will need to develop and will need to be supported by a whole new set of tools i believe um but even what are the right frameworks systems of thinking analogies when you start to think about community marketing um is it about onboarding is it about retention is it about loyalty is it about um you know

is it about the how much of of total value every single community member is going to be um um based upon like what is the unit value unit community member over an audience member so once we start to bring in kind of the economic lens whatever whatever the metrics are i think we need to we need to think deeply about what they are and to come up with the system to be able to evaluate them if we want to have a constructive conversation and i think it's wonderful that we're doing it at the same time as everybody else is figuring their out where what i mean so it's this idea of saying you know what the skill sets will be different and it's fantastic to be able

to to work with and to collaborate with fantastic community managers or even people in the cx space so customer success space i think have a have a unique opportunity to uh to leave a really deep imprint on what this community market is going to look like you said a great term that i haven't heard before i don't think he's community-based marketer what is that like tell me like what is it what does that person do and maybe we don't know yet it's kind of what you're saying is we're not i really should put that up yeah yeah i think so um so what has this really great reference where he talks about community-based products and and in the way of late checkout community-based products are one of two things community is the product or community enhances the

product and i love that definition because it starts with a certain amount of specificity saying you know it's not an infinite type of product there's really two if it doesn't fall within these two then it's not a community-based product and the community is the product means that the thing that you are building is ultimately a community so if i think about web3 academy at least in its present form what you are holding or what jeff is building a jump or what they're building over at radar or all these other great house is first and foremost is fantastic community experience and then there's a community enhances the product so if we think about most protocols community enhances the

product there is a technical product that exists but it's the community enhances the product experience um and so how do you build community for these products is going to be the job of the community-based marketer and the thing that we're going to be doing will likely be called community-based growth and the way that we do that right now is pretty fragmented it's a it's across mostly web web 2 tools and then there's a huge amount of opportunity obviously with tokens um unlocking that last that last step but if you think about it the idea is that you know

there's a couple of challenges in the way that we're doing things right now um i think mostly at two spots at the discovery spot so how do you discover the projects that you want to be a part of or that are likely to connect with you seems to be an enigma and it's mostly through podcasts like this one that people will discover things that they're interested in blog posts that are not indexed and not seo optimized long form content by thought leaders that are somewhat obscure and not indexed again so there's definitely a challenge at the discovery

the discovery stage um we use mostly twitter to to find out about and to stay abreast of what is happening we use curated lists so it's a really unscalable process of just a lot of very dedicated people making sure that they don't miss out on super important information at the awareness level and discovery part of the journey i think once you're part of a community the onboarding is another point so what is the streamline onboarding how do you ensure that there is utility past that initial point of friction

what are the kinds of i mean we're seeing the resurgence of events whether they're online or offline but what a wonderful way for events to come back um i think also for billboards to come back i think if we think back last year nftnyc and like times square being taken over i mean how long had it been that you know uh out of home hadn't had its moment like it had in the last little while so there's a lot of opportunity to create this bridge between irl and url um but again these are these are kind of a hodgepodge of tactics there's no playbook yet and then as you pull into the median to long-term experience what does that long-term roadmap look like in

terms of continuing to keep your community engaged and re-engaged throughout multiple cycles and seasons and what does off-boarding look like we see it there's community churn there's a wonderful article that was written last week around the need for communities to be able to turn because you change change and the community that you were part of will maybe not be the community you want to be part of forever and therefore how do you start to manage churn off-boarding etc and kind of onboarding new members so this whole new life cycle will bring about you know new ways of thinking new paradigms new analogies new frameworks and also new skills

so i think the community-based marketer is today probably much more of a tinkerer because they'll be called upon kind of playing around with a lot of things that are a little bit janky but i think they're going to be the first generation similarly to what happened let's say in 2012 with growth hackers that first generation of professionals who start to connect the dots uh between you know top of funnel and midfold awareness and deep long-term focused loyalty i think uh what's really interesting to me is this if i'm a business leader and i'm using the term community-based marketer and i'm thinking about okay who does that

within my organization naturally especially because it has the word marketer in it uh i think a lot of businesses are putting it under marketing and i'm curious is that how you would recommend that people do it would you put it under marketing we talked a lot about the struggles of the um measurements for success of community and i'm not necessarily pulling on that thread but i think the way at least the way i think about it is marketing is all about you know all about extracting value right i'm pushing you through this funnel in order to extract value to so you buy my product right or you advocate for my product or you stick around and

continue to buy but communities different than that right if if community was just based upon value extraction then that community we wouldn't have communities very much we'd be human humans wouldn't exist anymore we'd be obsolete so yeah where's so i i think community is more based on value creation so so if you're if you're talking to a business or there's somebody on the podcast listening you know how do you tell them to think differently about how should they be thinking about about community where does it fit within their business what is how do they ensure there's a strategy around that i think

i think that it really is going to depend um but i don't think that it needs to be a marketer i don't think so i think you can definitely be a community leader and i think marketing could sit under community communications could sit under community um i think it could also be people who are in the consumer success space so everyone who's like customer success or customer experience fantastic candidates anyone who is thinking about long-term building with a customer with a customer advocate or a customer uh of of the brand i think could be a really great candidate so we're expecting hr hr people could be perfect for this as well

it's what i'm thinking of really i think that there's definitely an hr slash culture part of the conversation right uh culture is definitely in there but i don't know that the that we're there yet in terms of org do you know what i mean like i i don't i don't know that we're there in terms of org especially if we're thinking about community community owned and decentralized organizations do they have an org is this a department or is this a set of expertise around a squad that delivers value to the community i think it probably the structure probably needs to evolve

to support the strategy and the vision and the mission um and so that could take multiple multiple shapes i believe i think the the traditional org is probably going to be very challenged to think about how to embrace community the i've got a question for you when when you think of marketing it's fairly easy to come up with a framework of like your i don't know go to marketing strategy it's like pretty easy to come up with a few different strategies when you talk to a business i don't think that that's very easy when it comes to community so when you think about i don't know maybe a client comes to you and says okay we want to build a community what's your do you have a framework do you have a strategy like when you're thinking about building a community what

are the things you're thinking of and like how does this i don't know walk me through whatever your thoughts are because i think this is very challenging i think for for especially marketers right um so i'm interested to hear what your thoughts are on that um so full disclosure this is going to be me riffing me riffing live with you so um i believe that there are a couple of phases so this is a belief so so bear with me if you have no community at all um [Music] it's one approach and i think if you have a budding community or a good audience it's a different one so if you have a

budding community let's say an audience let's say you're very active on social your challenge or your opportunity lies in converting your audience into a community and then that that is something that there's not a million ways to do it but i mean it's fairly straightforward it is you know how do you bring them on to an owned platform and i mean you guys have done this fantastically well where you create a funnel whereby this audience becomes part of some sort of communication channel that is owned where you're able to manage the relationship

if you're able to create utility i think that audience becomes a type of community member i wouldn't say the most engaged but definitely a community member more on the audience side than community side if then you are able to foster meaningful conversations within that community you start to create engagement and as soon as there are relationships inside of the community meaning if you kyle and i start to jam inside of whatever platform that we're a part of and create value together i think you create stickiness so we we all want to belong and when you find your people

it is extremely sticky so if you start to meet up every day and have meaningful conversations and i start to look forward to seeing you in telegram group or in discord and whatever platform and saying hey jay hey kyle how are you guys doing today and we have a fun exchange and we work on a project together that creates a significant amount of value for me and stickiness i think if if you have no audience at all and you're looking to build a community it takes on a different shape and i would still recommend you start with audience because ultimately you want to ensure that whatever it is that you are

proposing creates value and without an audience it's very difficult to test so so that would be my my recommendation would be you know audience building creating utility that utility drives community that community drives value that value can then be monetized through products services etc and then it pushes out another arm of content so this idea of creating that kind of flywheel i think is is extremely interesting and it also i love that by the way thank you and it also creates that moat which is what jay talked about um you know earlier in this episode which has stuck

with me this whole time because one of the things with web 3 is because everything's open right and decentralized the the thing that was the moat back well still is today in web 2 anyways like you think of instagram for example once you have some followers in there you have an account that's the moat right like you can't just go somewhere else right and so that's kind of how tech has been built for a long time is that your tech is that mo but we're about to open everything everything's going to be completely open and you can move in and out seamlessly and so that moat is gone and so i think that really made me see like oh and web 3 community actually is everything because it is the moat right and you just kind of gave that framework of how you get there and once they're there you

said it's sticky they want to come back because they can easily go elsewhere in this world once everything becomes open so community really is that moat that thing that keeps you there um literally is basically like belonging so you know on a fundamental human level we all want to find our people and if you're able to help me do that especially now where there's such a space for people to there is a space for communities in a way that didn't exist before and i'd say that because of you know family ties aren't as important as they used to be religion at least for a lot of people as important as it used to be social engagements civics aren't as important as they used to be institutions

neighborhoods so there's all of this space for other types of communities to provide you with that value of that sense of being part of something and i think online communities do that for a lot of people especially if the things that we are discussing are really important and near and dear to us and we're able to do it in a way that we never could before i'm sure this is something that resonates with you this idea or this this thought of being able to jam with somebody who is at the complete opposite end of the world is something that really excites me very profoundly that i can communicate exchange and have deep meaningful conversations with

somebody that i've never met is something that really excites me that i can create trust with someone whose name i don't know these are all things that i took for granted and all of a sudden are being flipped on their head and i'm like wow i never thought i could trust somebody who's completely pseudonymous i can because i feel that i know them even though i don't know their name i don't even know their real name i just jam with them i've been jamming with them for two months on a discord server so there's a lot of things that um that are really up for interpretation uh that i find extremely extremely interesting particularly in [Music] the current geopolitical media narrative

world that we live in where there is a lack of trust and we are constantly faced with fear there's just there's never been so much fear there's never been so much stress it feels like mental health is at an all-time high to i mean i say this all the time kyle and i says all the time we have in our agency we have a team of 10 people all around the world and two of them one is russian and one is ukrainian but both were living in russia when the war broke out and i can't tell you what it was like to experience and talk to them about that versus read it on the news

right there's nothing that the news could have taught me that i couldn't have learned directly from them and that is yeah there's just something so powerful about the humanity of that that i think is so important coming back to what we started at the beginning you know what problems is web 3 going to solve i mean is it going to solve them all uh it's it's a it's a it's a the lack of trust and fear is a big problem that i think if we build more of these communities it really can answer that so one thing i i want to chat about is what v and you can take this two different ways maybe what are the the sort of the features of

web3 that you really think enable communities to be built in a way that wasn't possible before uh and and maybe along the same line is there any examples you have of communities that you're a part of uh or or that you know of that you you've seen using web3 tools in great ways sure so i think if we use the definition that the web3 definition of read write and own so i will ask to take that as the baseline that ownership part is completely new so if we say that the ownership part is mostly tokens so the way that whether it's nfts or

or or other tokens that part of that part of the relationship is completely new so what that means is i think tokenization tokenomics everything around around that aspect of trying to figure out the relationship between the community and the token which is the financial aspect or the financial evaluation of the community is a very interesting thing to be looking at i don't think that existed in web 2. so this idea of of looking at a token as the analog for community

um starts to be an extremely interesting thing to look at i think if we pull out it could also be very scary so the scary part is are we financializing completely everything but like with everything we'll probably go too far one direction and then pull back um but but i think that this idea of own which to me translates into this idea of tokens creates a parallel between community and financial financial kind of financialized value of what this community is creates an interesting tension um and the the communities that i see this

that i see using this well i i'm really interested in what service dows become so we think about um if we think about service dows as [Music] communities of professionals who are able to create demand for services that they are let's say they create a token uh and this token has a total value locked of x they as a community have a sense of what of what they are worth collectively and they start to create value based on that now let's say they start to create a

certain amount of liquidity around around this value and this token now has an indexed value and they start to create services for this for this serviced out that sustains that economic cycle um i'm not part of any communities that are like that but i look at i look at developer doubt and i'm really interested in how they're how they are growing and how quickly they're growing because again economic empowerment is something i'm extremely excited to see web3 help help develop and by creating these platforms that are accessible

more people can start to get access to and be part of a economic empowerment tool that gives them access not just to um jobs but also ultimately skills so skills first jobs later so this idea of you know having a very specific service that you are participating in the ecosystem for developing that service creating demand for it creating a token around it and inviting people to participate in its economy i think is a really interesting thing to be a part of i've never seen anything like that before

and i'm excited to see i probably have a ton of this wrong but i'm excited to see where um yeah and so this idea of being not just a participant but also an owner so let's say you are you know how difficult it is if you are a young graduate to get that first job so imagine if you can reduce the friction of that first job because you're part of and because you're part of this dow and because you have a certain amount of credentialed capabilities we're able to put you in contact with companies who are looking for you know um beginner level or entry level entry level whatever job it is that you do and

because of that we're reducing that friction we're reducing that tension that you feel when you graduate and you don't really know what you're going into by giving you a community of people who are going to help you transition we're going to make sure that the capabilities and competencies that you have on chain are recognized and we are potentially connecting you to your first employer through a bounty or whatever the case may be so all of a sudden you are onboarded into your professional life in a way that is extremely uh productive but also gives you so much so we talked about you know give like what is the value created the value created there is is immense you're completely reduced from this fear of adulthood into and making

much more of a collaborative community oriented and focused experience so that i'm very excited about there's two things i want to say one i just want to mention quickly is it amazes me how much humility there is in web3 and there's so much humility in what you said a moment ago which was i'm probably getting a lot of this wrong and i'm constantly blown away by every person we have the podcast last week we had uh sam andrew who's a blockchain researcher on the podcast so you know completely different comes from a finance background he's not a he's not a marketer completely different background than you and he said i don't know flat out on the podcast we asked

him a question he was just like i don't know and it's it's amazing it's it comes up again and again there's so much humility in the space of web3 and i think it really that's what i think allows communities to grow is you need people to sit around and say yeah i totally lost i don't know because then you can help each other out and then you can you can figure it out together so thank you for that that's that was wonderful it's like we all we all know something big is happening here with all these things we just don't know exactly what that is that's what we're all trying to figure out together but for me the cr on on chain credentialing um i think is extremely powerful so yeah so this idea of so let's say we talked about the beginning

of your career but think about all the times in your life that you're going to need upskilling you're going to need constant upscaling if the rate of change continues in any way shape or form like it has now so this idea of of being a part of a community that allows you to consistently and constantly update and upskill um creates longevity for you like from a from a career standpoint um but it also creates again this this this community around you who's going to be there to cheer you on as you you know embark on the next credential and and so on and so on and so forth and also connects you to an ecosystem of potential employers um [Music] who can who can help you achieve your

goals so auntie and credentialing i think is super interesting tokens i think is very powerful um but i think at the end of the day is making the world a little bit less scary with this community like having people around you who make the world just a a less hostile place because because people around you that care about you in that in that root yeah because not everyone lives in canada like we do where everyone's your best friend and just says sorry every other word it's tough right i mean everybody lives setbacks and if you're able to you know connect with somebody who makes who makes that day that moment a little bit

less tough that's that's a blessing yeah all right uh before we wrap up here um just want to any predictions future of web 3 future communities anything uh where you think this is going in a year and five years and 10 years one thing i'm really excited to think about is older adults than web 3. um [Music] [Laughter] i said i haven't even thought about that yet the ux is just so far off but i'm really interested to hear what you're about to say so please go on if you think about um if you think about

the amount of people who will come into a significant amount of i mean disposable income and who will have a lot of free time um how can how can we enable this cohort of people to participate meaningfully in web 3. these are all going to be people let's say they are technologically advanced and proficient they are going to be technically savvy they are going to have had exciting careers in whatever shape uh form that takes who um how can we ensure that um that they become ambassadors for for you know things around healthcare and you're in in healthcare things around

uh education things around reskilling and upscaling and potentially part-time work so i think that there's definitely a conversation around audiences that i find interesting so when will web 3 speak to older adults and you know what's being done in the space there i think education is extremely interesting um i think what we're seeing around social graphs with lens specifically is very powerful um but then there's so many other things so um i was i was talking to somebody uh fig at mirage and he's you know he's developing uh ar and ft's um around decentralized labels so there's

all kinds of projects and programs that are mixing and mapping the technological aspect to uh a social or creative one that i find extremely interesting like this this idea of meshing um less siloed thinking i found extremely interesting so applying some of the economic models to cultural businesses i find really really interesting um and then i think around things around you know onboarding this new generation of contemporary art enthusiasts i don't think that there would be so much um digital art being produced if there wasn't a whole new generation of collectors um and so you know what is the education for collector is going to

be what is what are some of the collector dows that we're going to see pop up to help people understand appreciate evaluate and trade art similarly to what we see with the contemporary space so these are just a couple of things that i'm thinking about that might be exciting so much just just a few just a few we're clearly gonna have to get you back on for a part two at some point in the future okay quick little speed round a couple quick questions for you and then uh would love to give you the flooring opportunity to give your shill uh kai i'm sorry that we're running slightly past the hour here we'll get we'll get there as quick as we can um so okay speed round uh

first favorite person to follow on twitter oh just one [Laughter] i really love rafa the builder um i find extremely insightful um really thoughtful fantastic follow awesome okay uh one web3 project you're following are excited about could be nft dao protocol anything within web3 um well there's the one i just talked to

you guys about there's two so there's meta labels that i think is extremely interesting i think uh chaos is very interesting i can't do just one it's not possible i think it's very interesting um but also i will say and it's um somebody in the community sherius who who really take this box of my head is everything around ens the ethereum name service i think i think there's tons there and i need to like block a day to just go deep deep deep into it but what i think ens is is extremely interesting and we're probably not even understanding everything that we can we

can do with it [Music] i love it um something you've purchased recently for under 100 that has brought you joy it does not have to be a web 3 thing it could be it could be anything under 100 dollars ooh well was it under 100 i just i just um put myself on the what does that call when you buy a book before it becomes a book it's the matthew ball book the metabolism oh the metaverse one nice uh the pre the pre-sale list or whatever i want to do that too

yeah yeah yeah so we should we should if you guys buy the book we should definitely have a clip a club around that because yes i'm so in listeners if you uh we'll put the link to his uh when does it come out it's like june or july i think it might be july it's soon um i want to say june but but that was like that was an instant like no-brainer 100 why not yeah matthew balls the is like one of the biggest names in the metaverse and not in the metaverse but like talking about the metaverse and he started like an etf on the metaverse et cetera um yeah he's super super knowledgeableness and he's got a book coming out soon uh and v and myself are definitely going to have it and we are going to read it and we're going to start a book club i'm

excited if it's the kind of thing you need book club for i mean it'd be like what i didn't understand that references um before uh before wrapping up just do you want to give you a chance to we talked a little bit about your new podcast and uh give you a chance to tell our followers or listeners where they can find you where they can reach out to you anything you want to promote please give your shill 100 so you can find me on twitter at viera so that's at v-y-a-r-a um the podcast is going to be launching sometime in late summer early fall the uh name is p.o crypto the play on words is people of color of

crypto and we say that very broadly meaning people of marginalized racialized communities and the idea here is to give a place um to talk about success stories of people of color moving web3 forward with the project's protocols and things that they're doing in the space that are that are driving that are driving the space forward generally speaking with a focus on um creating just that representation that allows a young mind or somebody who would be thinking about joining a protocol joining a project seeing somebody that looks like them sounds like them or whose circumstances sound like theirs and be excited to participate in web 3. so that's going to be at poc crypto

at p 0 c y c r y p t o on twitter i think i said that right and right now i'm just kind of squatting the the handle fantastic this has been wonderful thank you so much for the time uh v i mean wow i can't wait for part two a hundred percent and i want to thank you both for for inviting me this has been so much fun i'm i've used to also learn and um i can't wait to see what else you guys do thanks so much thanks so much v have a wonderful day thanks talk to you thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web3 journey if it

does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we ask questions where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the description below and finally a quick disclaimer nothing in this podcast was financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the

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