Stadium Gates Issue #8
Welcome to Stadium Gates!
It’s looking like my cadence to publish this newsletter will be monthly at this point. Hope isn’t a strategy, but it’s a good placeholder. I HOPE to publish more frequently, because quite a bit has happened over the last 30 days (understatement). Let’s get to it…
TL;DR
I dropped out of Web2 and joined Web3, officially.
Ukraine is the future.
Cross the Chasm. It’s real.
Bye, Bye, Web2. Burn my Boat on the Beach.
I spent the entirety of 2021 raising a one-year old daughter by day and onboarding to Crypto and Web3 by night. Though I was fortunate to have a relatively early history with cryptocurrency via Bitcoin, I hadn’t paid attention sufficiently to the innovation of smart contracts to fully see the light of where we’re all headed.
Two things converged to attract a lighting strike for me: 1) The GME saga, and 2) Learning about the royalty payment feature of smart contracts. Both of these subjects are too deep to summarize within this paragraph, but the end result was that everything became immediately clear to me at that moment: communities will self organize and sustainably govern themselves.
In that moment (it truly was a single moment) I realized Web2 was doomed in its current format. I had come to a similar conclusion in the mid-90s at the start of ecommerce—traditional retail was doomed in its format of the time. I’ve seen this movie before, and this time it ends badly for rigid foundational establishments. The people will be the beneficiaries of the wealth creation this time around. It’s coded.
Once I became aware of what I was seeing, I realized I had to go as far down the rabbit hole as I possibly could to achieve any level of competency. I was not of the crypto world. I was an opportunist, who had jumped back in and bought the top in 2017 (hodling still). I hadn’t studied the technology properly. I had simply followed the pirate flags around without surveying the horizon for myself (major mistake), so I had to spend the entirety of 2021 reading everything I could just to catch up. It worked. I was able to learn enough to add value to the cause, and that really was the key insight—figure out how to value.
As daycare facilities in Miami began opening to new students during the fall of 2021, I began the process of seeking out a new company to join for Q1 2022. I landed interviews with two significant opportunities, one as CMO of a publicly traded ecommerce player, and one with a NFT marketplace startup in Miami. After the appropriate round of interviews and deep dives, I was offered both jobs during the same week and faced with a life decision. (I’m providing this description humbly to tell the story of my conflict, not to boast about two job offers. I failed with many other interviews.) I wrestled with the question of whether I should continue down the well-worn path of my career and realize its culmination as CMO of a public company, or whether I should start over completely in a new industry and hack away to create a new path? The decision was more difficult than I had hoped. My ego and identity, not to mention professional security, pulled hard for me to take the public company role, but my family and I decided it was the time to break away and jump in feet first to Web3.
I joined OneOf.com three weeks ago as VP of Revenue, and I haven’t been this stoked in 20 years. I will write more about the business itself and the culture of NFT drops in the future, but at the moment I’m just enjoying the experience. I found myself in a situation which required me to make a decision between the red pill and the blue pill. I feel very fortunate to have had that experience because it’s very rare to have the opportunity to challenge ourselves with a choice between an easy path and an unknown path. It’s even more rare during the second half of a career. I’m certainly not Neo, but I did choose the red pill, so let’s see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Please Visit My New Home at OneOf.com
Ukraine is the Future
I’ve been very fortunate over the last few years to build relationships with colleagues in the Ukraine and Belarus. My colleagues in Belarus marched in the streets and were jailed for protesting a blatantly corrupt election in 2020, and now my dear friends in Ukraine are fighting an invasion which threatens their lives. I truly couldn’t have more respect than I do for both groups as they choose to do what they feel is right for their countries.
What Ukraine has going for it in 2022, which the citizens of Belarus did not in 2020, is the rails of Web3. The people of Ukraine are outgunned and out numbered at the moment, but the people of the world are on their side.
Whereas support and defense of sovereign states were previously the domain of allied countries and governments, today an individual is able to support these causes by organizing DAOs to collect cryptocurrency contributions and distribute them directly to those in need via Web3 wallets.
Give that a second read. Individuals are now able to fund their friends and family as they fight in defense of their home against a regime as large as the Russian military. They do not need permission from their own governments, and they do not need to find a banking intermediary to collect and distribute fiat funds and manage money exchanges. They can do it themselves directly in a matter of minutes—no banking hours, transfer fees, ATM visits…just direct transfer of funds between people.
The most successful example of this at the moment is The Ukraine Dao. Their page on PartyBid shows 2,258 ETH($6MM dollars) has been collected and distributed to fund the people of Ukraine while they fight for their home.
You can follow along for updates on their Twitter handle: https://twitter.com/Ukraine_DAO
The DAO website is here:
An aside of this story — the DAO’s wallet address is Pussyriot.ETH. If you are unfamiliar with this punk-rock band from Russia, you absolutely should read their history here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pussy_Riot
https://twitter.com/pussyrrriot
These women were jailed by Putin for protesting his actions in their own country of Russia, and now they’re the ones organizing the DAO to help defend their neighbors in Ukraine.
How did Pussy Riot receive its support to join Web3? From being accepted into the Web3 startup accelerator DAO named Seed Club (https://seedclub.xyz/). Seed Club provides mentorship from a wide range of experts and activists to help build projects and foster expertise for new Web3 entrants like Pussy Riot. This piping and ecosystem all came together in a matter of months after years of building, and now people from around the world who have never met are able to organize in support of global events in a matter of hours.
The people of Ukraine have a challenging road ahead. Their aggressor seems hellbent on making some point at their expense, but they are not alone. We have moved beyond the days of “sending prayers” and wringing our hands while politicians and government officials met behind closed doors to negotiate. People are now able to help other people directly. This is new, and if individuals around the world are able to help Ukraine stave off this bully, then we are in a completely new world order of the people’s making.
Lunch with Web2
I had lunch recently with a long-time business acquaintance for whom I have a great deal of respect and consider to be one of the smartest people in her space. Our conversation rolled into Web3, and what I learned was that I have been mistaken in assuming super smart people have felt comfortable enough with the subject to learn the basics of crypto and Web3 to begin onboarding themselves. Indeed, I’m finding the opposite: many of the smartest and most successful people have yet to dive in and gain a strong understanding of the subject.
I want to be a trusted guide for my network, so I’m going to begin including more resources for individual research. The mission of the Stadium Gates community is to “bridge the masses to Web3” and there are a few immediate steps anyone on this email should take if they have yet to do so. I’ve listed a pretty deep well to utilize, but most will find their own path from here. You can’t go wrong with the below, but know it is only a starting point.
Nothing below is an endorsement of a resource or service, and as always #DYOR (do your own research).
Basics & 101
I recommend downloading Coinbase and learning how to buy your first cryptocurrencies with their apps. They are a publicly traded company and a leader in the field, both technically and culturally. Blockfi is a good option as well.
Coinbase: https://www.coinbase.com/
BlockFi: https://blockfi.com/
Crypto / Blockchain
The following resources are dense but important at the right time. I highly recommend starting with the A16z link below and poking around to find articles of interest.
Bitcoin whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Ethereum whitepaper: https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/
A16z Crypto Canon: https://a16z.com/2018/02/10/crypto-readings-resources/
The Bitcoin Standard (book): https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Bitcoin-Standard-Audiobook/B07D7ZRKLJ
Web3
Metamask is the most widely distributed Ethereum wallet and is critically important to download and familiarize yourself with its features. Learn how to fund it with a small amount of ETH from your Coinbase app.
Metamask: https://metamask.io/
Brave Browser: https://brave.com/
Mirror.xyz: https://mirror.xyz/
Get yourself an ENS domain. It’s just like a dotcom domain, except for Web3. I recommend buying your own name and using it as your wallet address. You’ll be able to make your first ETH purchase by using Metamask to “connect” to ENS and buy your .ETH name (if it’s still available). This is a great exercise.
ENS Domains: https://ens.domains/
ENS News/Resources: https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service
The Passion Economy: https://a16z.com/2019/10/08/passion-economy/
NFTs
NFT (non-fungible tokens) is a much deeeeeeeeeeper subject than people buying art and using that digital art as their profile pictures. I recommend starting with the A16z canon here as well.
A16z.com NFT Canon: https://future.a16z.com/nft-canon/
OneOf.com: https://www.oneof.com/
Opensea.io: https://opensea.io/
Super Rare: https://superrare.com/
Foundation: https://foundation.app/
Rarible: https://rarible.com/
Proof podcast: https://www.proof.xyz/
The above resources will require time and discussion to fully take hold for most people. Don’t be discouraged if it seems like the subject matters are the most foreign concepts you’ve ever encountered, because they probably are. We are decentralizing what has been centralized. We are taking on responsibilities which we’ve abdicated to authorities and businesses for decades and centuries. We are disaggregating the aggregated. It’s going to feel weird.
The above will take quite a bit of time to get through, but it’s worth every minute of effort to cross the chasm between the first thirty or forty years of the Internet to join the current evolution.
As always, thank you for reading.