The Future of Culture in Web3

hey guys we're gonna kick things off I'm Mackenzie I'm a tech reporter with CNBC I'm going to quickly go down the line have my panelists introduce themselves and then we will jump right into the topic at hand perfect I'm Matthew I'm a product manager at settle where I build Primitives like um identity liquid staking these kind of things and I'm also an investor with very early Ventures we invest in pre-seats each stage web 3 companies hi everyone thrilled to be here my name is DJ and I was that kid that would run home in Middle School to play RuneScape I've been gaming ever since 07 and I've been in crypto since 2016. I had one of the biggest gaming guilds in 2021 called the metagoons did a lot of work with William Wright the founder of the Sims Manny Pacquiao Tyson Fury and I focus more so on the behind the backstage of what's happening within gaming and a lot of the facilitation and yeah happy to be here that's a little bit about me hi everyone I'm Swan sit I used to be the head of digital marketing and e-commerce at companies like Nike Revlon Estee Lauder during the pandemic I built an audience of 3 million on clubhouse in a year and now I use that to do onboarding and education into the space um now I specialize in bringing Brands and retailers into this web 3 world but also helping web3 projects and companies trying product Market fit hi I'm Kai Henry um I spent 20 years building lifestyle Brands across music fashion lifestyle [Music] um and yeah the last three years I spent as Chief strategy officer at Phase Clan which is uh one of the biggest lifestyle gaming brands in the world and uh last November I started a company called future Studios which is um you know it's a platform where I get to collaborate with content creators and streamers and help them bring user generated content to use our own content um yeah so when we're talking about web3 in a sense the reality is that it is a niche area mostly being led by developers you know web3 was shaped by these technical influencers like vitalik but I want to start this conversation by asking uh how do you think your shaping culture and your respective uh Fields how is it different to what you're doing in a web 2 world let's start there and I'd love to hear from everybody so I think as a Dev um you know the collaboration is the most important part here it's a very open system technologically wise which opens the composability of apps and you know as a leader of developers I ensure that my Dev stick can work on open source projects that they don't are confined to like the the tech that only helps that one company so at saddle for example we also contribute to uh ethereum code to Dev tools which are used across different DVM chains and I think like the collaboration aspect is super important I was gonna say as far as like um gatekeeping and making sure we're creating a inclusive environment for creators for people that want to join and then simplifying the onboarding process because I think we can use the word culture a lot but culture is defined as like family a group of people like for me I I want to give the gaming analogy with RuneScape there's no better feeling that I had as a child than running home to my parents basement and spending eight 14 20 hours on the computer screen um with people that have never met online before and this is huge because we're seeing it happen with crypto and like you know you meet somebody you meet a connection that can change your life instantly and as long as you can provide value we're better in numbers but yeah I'm glad you defined culture first because I think it's a word we use a lot but we don't really Define it and if you actually step away from web3 and Technology culture is yes values how we interact but it's how people self-enforce and reward and incentivize because in early stages of anything whether it's technology a new language you all have to be bought in and culture can't be just pushed from top down it has to be lived by people every day so once you understand that then it's kind of silly to say web 3 culture because we have gaming we have devs we've got fashion like it's so different so I start by just thinking about instead of trying to say the qualities because it's not as like defined as music or Street Wear I think about values and I think values are rooted in accountability transparency community and I think just by even being here right we're all at this conference in a bear Market we're all contributing to that I mean I do it specifically by trying to speak at conferences I still got 42 stages last year all for free about web free about education we all build together in a collaborative way I think you know some of us here might be on a stage talking to you guys but you guys being here are actually contributing to that culture too that's amazing you're a legend for real um I would say like for me just personally um I've been working in particular with like gen Z internet culture um and so you know for just going to what swan was saying when I'm Consulting for Brands whether web 2 or web 3 I'm really focused on building teams that have people that innately come from that culture in particular um because that's really important like you said from the inside out and that lens is really important if you're trying to you know be in my world culturally impactful um and so yeah it goes both ways from web 2 to web three there's a culture on both sides there's a culture to web3 I think a lot of brands that are moving into this space they don't really understand that like the nuancy kind of dance you got to do to really enter in in the right way um and kind of you know tip your tip your hat to that culture when you're walking in um and vice versa so it's a it's a delicate balance so I think you know most web 3 protocols will have this community of token holders that they have to appease to get things done it's a very interesting dimension of web3 you think about AWS Facebook Google they don't have a community of token holders that they have to communicate to they have shareholders that hold their stock that's it any thoughts on this now the first time somebody told me about a Dao but then they told me well we're going to let them vote on certain things but not everything I'm like all you did was just describe a publicly traded company which is exactly what you said and I said on the boards of two public companies I represent shareholders I don't tell the company what to do I represent the people who have faith in them who bought their stock I think web 3 and DOW structures are now like structures are a way to for people to have a bigger voice to have a bigger choice because the way public companies work once a year you get to vote on whether you want that board in there and that's it unless and a ton of people buy the stock and do a takeover which is really complicated and rare that's all you get but web3 with tokens with people unfortunately yes there's still a bias against people who have means who can accumulate more tokens which is why I'm excited to see people be able to earn it in different ways not just through monetary wealth but maybe by Network Capital Social Capital impact Capital but if we can create an ecosystem where we have more fairer representation of the community that that organization is trying to help then actually put them in the right places to help with the right decisions I think it's a far more Equitable universe but I think it's too early to figure out what that looks like I'm fine with calling things dow-esque right now but a full on Dow takes a lot of planning and strategy and it's kind of sometimes Lord of the Flies when you don't have any organization um I'd really like to drill down on specific examples like you guys as like Swan you pointed this out like you come from such different ends of the ecosystem and I just would be really Keen to hear about how you've built up communities in your respective worlds what that looks like is that the idea of community built on this idea of shared ownership whether through tokenization or do you build that sense of community in a different way like how how do you define the respective spaces that you're in and draw people into your worlds so maybe uh chomping over the question and just adding to what you've said before and the question before I think maybe a bit of a contrarian you is a lot of Builders they don't really need to convince token holders or like a community of token holders right because often it's not as decentralized as we want this to be in the future and there are like a few whales that you need to interact with and I imagine I'm not on a board of a public company but I guess it's very similar there that you have like large shareholders with certain uh uh yeah uh numbers of shares that you need to convince and then you know retail they appear once a year at the shareholder meeting and they talk a lot but they don't really matter and I think we're still with many l ones with with many projects we're like in a similar area and maybe in the future that will change and like with specific examples like let's look at for example the the uni swap vote on you know which bridge to use um okay that's a community but in the end it was a handful or so of Voters which which overturn uh the decision and not really like thousands of individuals could you repeat the question I just like how are you like how do people feel as though they are a stakeholder in the work that you're doing do they derive that sense of uh Community from holding a token like what what builds that sense of belonging this isn't token related but um I I owned a very large gaming guild and we had thousands of players and basically what we would do is we would acquire gaming assets for them and allow them to use these assets and we actually provided a lot of value for them and gave them the ability to make supplemental income that actually allowed people in the Philippines in countries in Africa in Brazil to actually provide put food on the table for their families and even buy cars homes and it made a huge impact on their lives it changed their lives so I think as far as like building this community it's it's about impact and value that you're able to actually provide to them separate from the finances but yeah it blew up and I mean I think we're going to start to see that more but even also to go to add to what you were saying Swan I think the Dow model is very early but it's powerful so powerful so I think in the next maybe five to ten years what we're going to see with all of this technology all of the newcomers like all of the bigger companies that are starting to kind of come in we're going to see a lot of change and shift and I'm excited for it but I hope that answers your question to some degree yeah I mean I I think you know again I think from in my case it's just been about um building brand um and staying close to that it's really hard to balance brand and commerce um and so I think you know if you keep your head in that in that kind of in that kind of Zone and you have a malleable mind as far as like what your business is versus what your brand is then you'll get the you know Community engagement you're looking for I think with the Dow systems in general um you know it's crazy because it is it functions as a publicly traded company but it's like also having you know earnings calls 24 hours a day 365. so it's a little different in in that regard but um it's very interesting you know what I mean and again like I said building Community it's it based on what you're trying to do what you're trying to achieve it's it you know I think the the ultimate thing that I've always tried to do is just like strike that balance between Commerce and brain I like to think about community in two vectors commonality of purpose meets frequency of touch you have to believe in the same thing but this is the part that everyone forgets interact often enough to feel included so take the woman's March right it was definitely a movement huge commonality of purpose but we all marched for a couple weeks and then it never came back so I'd argue that was a movement but not an ongoing community if you take frequency of touch Instagram Facebook Tick Tock high frequency of touch right people open Tick Tock 19 times a day but I wouldn't say tick tock is a community right you don't care what Tick tock's Tick Tock account is doing that day there's sub communities and dance and gaming and music but it's a platform not a community and so if you think about you have to believe in the same things and you have to create places for people to interact that's how Community starts forming and self-propagating and the one unique thing about web3 is that you have to make a collaborative and participatory web 2 Brands which some of us spent our lives in told you what to think how to dress what was cool and the difference with web 3 just by the inherent DNA of how this new community is formed you have to let people speak up whether it's in a dow whether it's in Social gaming people want a voice that's changing with or without web3 but web3 just gives us technical tools to apply it so the last time I saw Swan I was in Paris and we were talking about the intersection of fashion with the metaverse and how it's transforming uh as you said like people participate in these decisions around um Brands and fashion tell me like yeah I mean you did such a great job about just now speaking to like the overall philosophy of how things change when you migrate to from web 2 to web 3 in fashion but let's drill down and talk about some of those specific examples of how your work has changed from when you were working in a like with a web 2 brand and then onboarding them into this space sorry um so what Mackenzie and I talked about this summer was fashion and the metaverse and I said I'm happy to chat with you I mean CNBC my God right but if you want me to tell you that putting fashion into the metaverse as pixelated cartoons works I'm not coming so the funny thing is I gave her this vision of creating a mirrored metaverse where you have a fashion show in real life then you've got a seamless wall with a metaverse happening at the same time it's like that's what I would build if I were doing it right where you stream the real fashion show into the metaverse with texture movement color fabric but you create an equal world where if you're in the front row of the real world or the front row of the metaverse you're getting shipped to that VIP gift bag in the mail here's a red carpet with Paparazzi in real life and in the metaverse there's a seamless wall where if you're in a non-influencer in Webster you're talking to a celebrity in real life we did that at New York Fashion Week a month ago so I haven't even caught up with you did it for Vivian Tam we built a metaverse mirror the metaverse was super simple It Wasn't Cool Tech it was a website that people could walk through backstage the runway the audience but it was an exact replica and we treated people the same we sent gifts in the mail we sent booze everyone got a PO app that got 4.4 billion Impressions organically in the media because we were like wow we finally get it so my work is really about helping what's you guys are amazing Builders we're building world-changing technology but we have to make the normies care we have to help them understand it it's not going to be through talking about wallets and Seed phrases it's about going to a website and feeling like even though you're in the virtual world you're an equal and a small plug I'll do a talk with a full video at two o'clock on the main stage today so you guys can see the full rollout but what I love about the space is I work with some of the smartest people on Earth but I help them find a fit for where this cool Tech goes you know one question that I always get uh is at least on the mainstream coverage of the crypto spaces what distinguishes the so-called web3 Community uh from an online fan base like is it the fact that all these people own some digital thing that connects them to other people in the community like is is that what distinguishes it or is it the fact that they have much more working ownership than other fan bases I'm just trying help me answer this question I think it's I think it's the latter but I think it's they have more say over what actually happens within the project or the organization like even for the for metagoons for the guild that I had in our in our server or wherever we would would post our ideas as far as like what we were thinking of doing we'd leave it up to the community to decide always and I'll let you go in a second my bad but I think people knowing that a project or an organization is willing to put them first over themselves is what draws people to I believe web3 communities in Dallas I 100 agree and I think for the developers it is even more extreme right because you're not on a Discord giving feedback and hoping that other people will implement it it's all open source you can deploy your own contracts and leverage existing contracts it's all open and you can just build on top of that and then it's available for everybody else and I think just as once you said um it's about frequency of interaction and the value that is being generated so right on forums like that's how you build a community you need to reply quickly and get that interaction flywheel going and then people realize that you know you actually understand what the community wants you review PR's quickly like code gets shipped whether it is from the core team or from outside contributors and then that's how they develop power to actually shape you know what is builded as as code well I have you one thing we were talking about yesterday is like this idea of culture also within the different Dev communities that exist and you know with decentralized protocols like ens git coin Lido they have these token holders that make up the community and they all have a very distinct Vibe and distinct way of approaching the tech uh the way they behave online their online Persona how they are in person like can you give us a rundown of some of like some of these communities and yeah I think like when people ask about hey what is web 3 culture just as you said you know it's not one homogeneous thing it's a every Community has a different vibe and I think for example ethereum and the broader ethereum Community like um a Lido or giveth and uh Bitcoin and so on they have very much the vibe of collaboration of being there for everyone of just building the the overall uh um common value and um helping out but then there are also other very deeply crypto rooted communities which are less collaborative I would say and just like you know libertarian you're out in the wild and you're responsible for your own thing and you know you can make it or not and it's it's less collaborative and more uh independent and I don't rely on other people but nobody can take away anything from me like you know I'm self-sustainable more like the the people that like are ready for the next World War and you know or Preppers let's say I see both of these yeah it's like an anthropological exercise going to different conferences getting different groups of people um you know we were touching on this a minute ago but it does seem like you know luxury Brands were among the earliest entrants into the space or synergies with the way um you know the business model worked in web 2 and how you how you migrate that but I wonder what are some of the um you know the bottlenecks like what are the issues as you as you bring these collaborations whether it's gaming whether it's fashion into this web 3 space like yes there are tools that kind of open up your ability to connect with communities in different ways but what doesn't exist right now that makes your job harder the onboarding sucks in what way the UI just as far as the tutorials as far as how people are able to set up wallets people are getting confused when things are on different Chains It's hard to teach people how to um have access to uh to these chains and and how to sign up and just the process is it needs to be streamlined yeah I I totally agree UI and jargon are two main factors um I think that you know just for anybody that's not in this space just being able to pull out your phone in just one click away like that's what like that's what I'm used to like if I'm interested in something I just want to pull my phone out and get there right so I think closing that Gap is is one when it comes to luxury brands in particular in web3 uh curation I think like when you're talking about digital products goods and access on that level with these Brands there's there's no level of curation you don't when you go to these different marketplaces it's just it's all over the place you know what I mean and especially when you have trending columns that are you know maybe projects that just happen to be you know doing a certain amount of volume they're sitting right next to something that if I'm new to this space those two things don't really sit together you know from a curation standpoint and so I think there's a huge lack of curation so on the agree with usability curation Tech has to solve a problem don't lead with tech because most people don't care so when nft when Brands come and say I want to do an nft I'm like well what do you want to do and they're like I want to do an nft I'm like well do you want CRM and loyalty do you want a digital asset that's traded and collected and they have no idea so it's like saying like if I ask them what's your favorite music they don't say MP3 they say rock or Jazz and so saying nft is like saying my favorite music's an MP3 so what I try to do is just step way back on education right because they're both curious and skeptical at the same time which is really frustrating so I just remind them okay when you talk at brands most of them personally would never buy anything online I'm like well did you Uber today because if you ubered you not only bought something online you got into a complete stranger's car or if you Airbnb you slept in a stranger's bed so when you start conversations like that that reset the thinking now Tiffany sells diamonds for over a hundred thousand dollars online so you have to find a use case for what that technology serves so Tiffany selling those diamonds was reaching customers who couldn't make it to their few stores a metaverse for fashion meant by the way that show was during the Super Bowl no one was leaving the Super Bowl or their parties but they could second screen on a computer so once we start having these great Technologies find the problem to solve and the impact that you'll drive so on the on the Builder side I would say there are two big issues one is that the tech stack is just evolving so quickly it's really hard to stay on top and the other the place of communication so with the tech stack right I mean this is a very new area of development and three years ago people deployed with truffle and then two years ago with heart uh hard hat and now we're using Foundry and then the next thing is coming and every day new lips are developed and if you're not spending like all of your time here it's very hard to break in and know what is the the the stuff that is working at the moment and what will be maintained for like you know the next half year or year or so and then regarding place of communication right all these projects they have their discords their teaching groups then there's a forum there's a GitHub discussions and um you don't really know always where to go and where you will get the replies fastest where do you get the devs hanging out and not some marketing manager you know funneling your asks back until 10 times and you will get a technical answer so yeah that could be done better interesting I think content there's no content either like there's no content supporting what the storytelling is you know like I think the communication platforms is one thing and but that's the only type of Storytelling that anyone's getting right now and I think that's really difficult so content is a is one of the biggest holes as well everything that we're seeing right now is constantly being recycled and what about uh you know on the social media side of things as you said the communications platforms getting things out there there's been this push into decentralized social media you've got things like lens Noster Blue Sky these like Twitter Alternatives it's not the best ux experience right now it's it you know get building up scale like the centralized players could just invest a ton in marketing to push that scale quickly those parallels don't exist in a decentralized social media and this is its own conversation but I guess my question to you guys is how important is it that we get uh social platforms into this decentralized web3 ecosystem to drive scale and the work that you're doing are you using traditional web 2 platforms to bring people into your space like how are these web 2 versus web 3 social media tools serving you right now and What needs to change honestly I think Twitter is still the best yeah Twitter I was able to learn so much in 2016 from just all the ogs just all of the thought leaders all the Pioneers um also for anyone that's trying to get involved and has not has no not prior knowledge I would highly suggest that you would go read one of Andreas antonopoulos's books mastering Bitcoin in the mastering ethereum it's uh it gives a very very good overview of crypto in general but uh back to what you were saying uh Twitter I think Twitter as far as like converting people and as far as like educating people and just the amount of value that you're able to receive from spaces from threads um and actually connecting with people like vitalik or or people that are leading the change um in the ignition in the market and the technology I think is being able to connect with them is huge uh I think maybe top down if your content creator and that's your business I think that I don't know we're kind of seeing the tail end of like the ugc era of making money ancillary on someone else's platforms and like you're seeing the actual algorithm produce less and less money for the content creators just like in the music business from 1999 2000 you start seeing royalties decline you go from you know selling singles on Apple to streaming and then that algorithm starts you know causing a problem for songwriters and creators all the way to almost nothing right and so I think that right now we're going to start seeing people waking up and understanding hey let's use these you know ugc platforms as a catcher's mitt to migrate my audience my community over to something that I own where I own my own data I own my own relationship with with my community and my audience um and and that's a that's another that's another exploding business that's ahead of you know ahead of everyone so I think it's I think it's really important to migrate from user generated content to use our own content I think the future is going to be web 2.5 when we got the internet we didn't stop going to stores or going to conferences it's Choose Your Own Adventure based on your preferences or your needs now there's no doubt the industry's broken right if you sell 35 nfts at point one ethereum each of your music you make more than one million streams of your song on Spotify and YouTube it's even worse I think it's like 25 streams or sorry 25 nfts at point one East is a million views of your video that's a lot of freaking views so the industry is broken and being able to own that audience is hopefully the future but the reality is you still have to find those people somewhere where are they hanging out and it is the web 2 platforms so I think the future is going to be a blend of both right I mean I did three mil on clubhouse but now I don't hang out on clubhouse anymore it is painful rebuilding it on Twitter or Instagram Etc but I still use those to Source them but I think the future is going to be a blend of things and I think that's a good thing I don't think everything needs to be in nft not everything needs to be decentralized do not throw tomatoes at me but certain things like creators and ownership and the work that they do absolutely have to thank you to the panelists and to eat Denver for having us up on stage today and that's that thank you Mackenzie [Music] [Applause]