Web3 Entrepreneurs Say: Our Past, Present, and Future

Author: Metasense

At 8 PM Beijing time on April 22, the Twitter Space event "Web3 Entrepreneurs Speak," hosted by Metasense, was successfully held. The guests included the Co-founder of STEPN, the founder of RSS3 Joshua, and the founder of Mask Network Suji. The three outstanding entrepreneurs shared their stories of entrepreneurship in the Web3 field, as well as the challenges and novelties they encountered. Let's follow their footsteps to see what happened!
Here are some highlights from the event.

Alice: First, I would like to ask the three of you to share the opportunities that led you to Web3 and the reasons for initiating your current projects.

Joshua: RRS is a protocol for information distribution or content distribution, embodying the Web3 era. In the process of social development, we find that when a new era arrives, a large number of new content forms or carriers emerge, as well as many new asset carriers. Therefore, we feel the need for a new protocol to address this and make it applicable to the whole.
We continuously define and study a new standard while practicing it, and through certain explorations, we gradually developed the current form of the RRS3 project and product.

Suji: I think the communication of information between people is a very interesting topic. When I first heard about Web3, it was just a concept, and I found it fascinating. It wasn't until after 2016 that I saw articles by Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood about Web3.0, and later I had the fortune to meet some of the early foundation members. So in 2017, we decided to create a new generation of social network infrastructure.

Alice: How do you view decentralized Twitter?

Suji: We actually started communicating with Twitter in 2018. In 2019, the founder of Twitter created an open organization similar to a DAO. Besides his own employees, there were eight or nine community members, and we were one of them.

The reason we chose to develop Mask is that we tried and researched many paths and found it unlikely to completely separate Web2 users. Our approach is to build a new layer of network on top of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, a term called over the top (OTT). It's like when you use WeChat, you are also using your phone number; these two relationships are similar. So Mask is a network on top of Twitter.

Of course, I believe there may be other approaches. In social networking, we must let more ordinary people in. Currently, Twitter itself is still in a relatively chaotic state, which also presents an opportunity for decentralized social networking. But I think everyone should not think about challenging it, but rather about bringing its users into Web3. This has always been our goal.

Yawn: My entry was quite accidental. I entered this circle around 2017 to do investment. At the end of last year, I was chatting with my neighbor about GameFi and Axie, and we thought there should be opportunities to do better. So I paused my investment company and started STEPN with co-founder Jerry.

Alice: The next question is how to make better decisions. I would love to know if you encountered any impressive successful challenges during your project processes, and how you could make better decisions in that process. Do you have any insights to share?

Joshua: I think one important point in terms of roles is how to maintain focus. I believe that in the scope of the business itself, trying to stay focused is crucial. Because Web3 is highly modular, the requirements for composability are very high. How to make yourself very useful in a specific domain and provide value is extremely important.

Alice: I understand. I have an additional question. For entrepreneurs who want to enter Web3, what advice would you give them regarding vertical direction choices?

Joshua: When choosing a vertical direction, there are two starting points. The first is that you are a developer, and during the development of a certain application, you may discover structural gaps or missing components. Then you can research more to see if there are opportunities here.

The other is to look at the development of technology or the development of components themselves. You may not be a developer, but you can judge whether there are systemic opportunities or gaps through certain methods and plan ahead.

Alice: I understand that the proportion of developers in Web3 is actually quite small, and there aren't many people around who truly understand this technology; more are likely to be of the second type. Regarding industry predictions, I think it tests industry cognition quite a bit. Could you share how you deeply understand this industry and what methods you use?

Joshua: Refer to new information frequently. For example, if a certain type of infrastructure is experiencing rapid growth or if a certain type of infrastructure has matured, paying more attention to these types is the best way to supplement your information sources.

Suji: I think it's about different project solutions and approaches. We are also considering how much of the network is commercialized and how much is public welfare. Here, I would like to recommend an interesting project called search.interface.social, which allows you to search for various sources of your identity by searching your name abc.eth.

Through participating in a few donations, we gained a deeper understanding of why public facilities are important because people may not create their own private messaging platforms or distribution platforms. Bringing these things together is what ultimately forms a real network. What we see today as a simple social network like Twitter may be the result of many protocol layers being combined.

Yawn: Theoretically, we believe that if you are a successful serial entrepreneur, your intuition is often very accurate. So when we face major decisions, we often use the initial reaction as a blueprint for decision-making.

Then, when rationality intervenes, we analyze more rationally to see if we were too extreme or if there were any oversights, and we come up with a relatively rational method. Generally speaking, when we make personal decisions, we follow these two principles.

When we make group decisions, it involves team management. There are two issues in team management. The first is delegation, and the second is reporting.

We will distinguish which decisions can be delegated and which decisions require a method to report back to us, for example, when a role should provide a report.

Ultimately, we believe that the decision-making process involves how to make decisions, how to double-check and analyze, and the subsequent review, along with a team allocation model and team structure. This is a small part of our thinking.

Alice: To summarize, the first is to have an executable decision; the second is to be observable, where each node or point can have timely feedback and a summary.

Alice: During your project processes, have the three of you encountered any unexpected pitfalls or surprising challenges?

Joshua: The biggest challenge or difficulty in the early stages was gaining the trust of developers. Also, when your business is still relatively small or your services are limited, how to find that value and get them to become your foundational seed users and trusters is crucial.

Alice: How did you gain the trust of developers?
Joshua: There are roughly two ways. The first is that you have a good connection with the other party, and the teams or founders are familiar with each other.

The other is to create some demos to show developers that this component lowers the overall development threshold, making them more willing to try it out. Generally, this involves your team writing open-source applications, putting them on GitHub, spreading them on Twitter, or in your community, or directly engaging with users to acquire them.

Alice: From your perspective, do you think there are any differences between Web2 and Web3 developers?

Joshua: I think the biggest difference is in the understanding and use of modularity. For Web2, it is basically about building a complete set of services, without separation. For Web3, first, there is the assetization of data, meaning that data belongs to users, and developers do not have that monopolistic advantage. Secondly, there are many components to choose from and use, rather than having to build everything from scratch. This huge difference suggests that the product ecosystem or development ecosystem of Web3 will be more prosperous because its development efficiency will be much higher.

Alice: After STEPN became popular, many entrepreneurs started doing X to Earn. Do you have any thoughts on this? What new developments do you think will emerge next?

Yawn: It's difficult. The reason we initially chose to earn money or tokens by walking was primarily because it is accessible to everyone. Secondly, it helps us prevent cheating.

The biggest problem with X to Earn is how to prevent others from exploiting the system. For example, we implemented measures that require users to invest their time and effort, making the token output costly, similar to Bitcoin mining. If there is a token that can be produced without any cost, it lacks underlying value support.

At this point, the value support of that token becomes very weak. We see that other X to Earn models should succeed as long as they have costs and can prevent exploitation. Of course, there also needs to be incentives, practicality, and usefulness within their economic systems.

Therefore, having use cases, investment, and anti-cheating measures are crucial for X to Earn; additionally, X to Earn is also a customer acquisition model. In the market, your users will continuously churn, so you need to constantly replenish your user base. Since users are fluid, capturing and retaining them requires ongoing effort. Ultimately, what tests a project's capability is how strong they are in execution, continuously thinking of new methods to capture new users from various ecosystems and bring them in while reducing user churn.

Alice: For the last question, could you give some words of encouragement to those who are currently starting their journey in the Web3 industry or are about to start?

Yawn: We often discuss whether Web3 is the next model of Web2 or if Web3 will completely engulf Web2. I think this is a very important question to discuss because it will lead to very different outcomes. A good example is the UK, the empire on which the sun never sets, which should be the inventor of the silver standard, with the pound being the previous settlement currency. After World War II, the US led the establishment of the gold standard, and once they mastered it, oil exchanges became denominated in dollars, leading to the decline of the UK and the pound, which ultimately became a second-rate currency.

I believe that the transition from Web2 to Web3 will only occur through intense competition, mergers, or disruptive strategies, rapidly shifting to Web3 at a specific historical moment. Of course, there may also be more regulatory aspects emerging in this process.

About the organizer Metasense:

Metasense is an investment fund DAO composed of founders or co-founders from projects ranked in the top 300 by CMC market capitalization.