The conference was set up by three tracks: business, developers, and community/growth sessions. Perhaps the most engaging and insightful conversations were held in a space called SUD Lisboa with a picturesque landscape that deeply reminded me of San Francisco. For developers and people interested in the tech, the topics ranged from the latest tools, wallets, and DApps that are being built on Solana, to concepts to help price your next NFT drops fairly. TBH, I learned the most insights from just being in the room with engineers. It’s safe to say that there’s a true FORK in attendees’ experiences in this conference.
Let’s address the elephant in the room, shall we?
This is a boys club and stupid amounts of money are just sloshing around without fully developed products and business plans. New money is everywhere. All these dudes just got so rich and they are showing it by renting out multiple suits at Pestana Palace. I wish I could say I don’t care about this but from the women’s room, there are some elements of FUD. From the Defi Retreat Cafe, I overheard several dudes talking about what investor just committed large sums of money (I mean $15M) to their cap tables and the party they needed to have to celebrate.
And then there's another said element of FUD---all these male investors don't even know what defines a great business. Early-stage investing is about who you know. I’m starting to believe that women investors are underutilized because they’re a minority. The quality of their deal flow could be amazing, but very little of it is getting put into the world. We all need to do better. But who cares whether the money is from the government or from daddy? The important objection to rich guys throwing around money has nothing to do with their wealth. It's about the impact such dollars have on getting things done and on hiring diverse talent. And it’s not about them without us – women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups – participating in that larger conversation.
WAGMI
I said see you at the top and they misunderstood me. - Fair Trade, Drake
The one key message for Day 3 was We All Gonna Make It (WAGMI). But who all is we? To put this into perspective, US Congress has passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill that will dish out $65B for broadband improvements aimed at remedying the US' digital divide. This measure will usher millions of Americans into the digital economy. Tens of millions of Americans are currently shut out from participating in the digital economy. BroadbandNow Research estimates that 42.8M Americans lack access to broadband internet, and are closed off from buying and selling goods and services online. Moreover, less than 3% of the world are crypto users, and only about a thousand people got to attend one of the most forward-thinking conferences about technology in the world. Yet the VIP tickets still got access to the investors who were willing to drop $$$ on ideas with no product. My ticket was a general admission ticket and I still had to be “brave” and strike up conversations about my projects, businesses plans I’ve had since 2016 on Github.
I met a motley group of people from Los Angeles who told me they were in stealth mode building the “Patreon of the blockchain.” I just didn’t want to eat my lunch alone. Then another VC actually asked me if I was a “poser” because I dressed too good to understand the tech, that “developers could see right through who’s real” and that he would only introduce to some “top players” if I had good intentions. This person was from New York. Of course, this comment bothered me because I’m pretty sure .0001% of the world still haven’t gotten a clue about Solana and even coin holders wouldn’t bother to travel halfway across the world to attend a conference. Someone else asked me if I was “traveling on my own dime.” 😅😅😅
The superstars of the tech world
Still, I don’t let people define who I am and definitely not with this once in a lifetime experience. An in-depth conversation with my favorite technologist Alexis Ohanian, also known as Serena Williams's husband and Reddit founder, chatted about how he was obsessed with designing the perfect arrow for Reddit and how blockchain can solve secure voting protocols. Perhaps the most exciting thing he announced during his chat with Raj, is a $100M creators fund to build the next unicorn decentralized social media app, that would be powered on the Solana blockchain. With thousands of users shadowbanned on Instagram and Twitter a day, it’s clear that we need more options. Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey cannot be the arbitrators of truth. What many have been speculating is a type of social media DAO where we’d be able to vote as a community on certain things that would be allowed on the platform.
DAOs
Since I first wrote about DAOs in March of 2021 from a job I did not get, they were nearly just buzzwords and internet communities were just starting to form them in efforts to brand crypto NFT projects. A DAO is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, but it is really more than just an organization. A DAO governs itself in a way that is mostly independent of human intervention, controlling assets through blockchain technology alone. For example, PizzaDAO formed in light of Bitcoin Pizza day, but what came of that small project was a small community of crypto degenerates who put money in a pot, started running a node and spun off other projects.
I have been thinking about how to work with the radical nature of the DAO, which stands apart from how businesses are traditionally structured. I’m currently in Des Femmes DAO and with my forthcoming blockchain gaming drop in 2022, it’s crucial I need to start implementing these technologies. Stay tuned for more on this…
Decentralized Social Media Platforms
The next wave of Solana will be the applications built on this new blockchain. There are a lot of protocols and basic infrastructure tools that have already laid the ground work and now they need creators to come and build cool shit to keep breathing life into this thing. I love how a lot of the engineers I chatted with were focused on building cool social media projects like Only1.io that aims to empower creators to earn money through NFTs.
The growth of the internet was inevitable. One day we woke up and it was there: a patchwork of computers and servers that we could access for free and use to communicate and share information. The internet became one of the world's most impactful technologies—but no one planned for its creation. This is the same for Web3 and crypto. There are a lot of naysayers out there but the people reading this newsletter, buying crypto, participating in the conversations are gonna make it.
Quotes I am still thinking about …🤭
“Reject authority trust yourself.”
“It’s too expensive to save the world.” - Monolith DJ set hosted by MakerDAO
Glossary
WAGMI: We All Gonna Make It. A term used by crypto degenerates and celebration for mass adoption. Because we got in first and built web3, there’s room for everyone’s success.
FORK: A hard fork refers to a radical change to the protocol of a blockchain network that effectively results in two branches, one that follows the previous protocol and one that follows the new version. Source Investopedia
DAO: DAOs are a way of structuring a trust relationship that is effective, global, and decentralized. They had been mostly theoretical before coming to the attention of the broader cryptocurrency community. In fact, the term DAO was coined by a hacker on a mailing list back in 2014.