“Couldn’t make it in Web 2”

Most people in Web 3 are either young kids for whom much of Web 2 is totally irrelevant, or Web 2 veterans tired of talking about (and building within the constraints of) the same FAANG-ish companies currently going senile internally.

People who’ve definitely ‘made it in Web 2’ are jumping to Web 3 almost as a midlife crisis.

Finally! The excitement and untrammeled frontiers that they knew earlier in their careers, once again.

It’s like reliving your youth, vs. staying in Web 2 retirement community.

To put it in a less flattering way, consumer Web 2 right now is like Taco Bell launching a new product: it’s always some combination of the same five ingredients marketed like it’s terribly novel and exciting.

Who wants to work on the ‘Gorditas’ of the Internet?

I just raised a sizable seed round to build something in Web 3. If you gave me the same mount of capital to build in Web 2, I’d return the money: there’s nothing worth building I think could make the necessary VC return.

When Jobs quipped about ‘why join the navy when you can be a pirate?’ that piracy no longer refers to his company or Web 2 more broadly.

The pirates (often literally) are in Web 3.

E.g. the North Koreans hacked a Web 3 game to pay for their nukes and subs. That’s disruption.

What do the Web 2 boomers think the future will be like?

Everyone trying to eke out the last bit of overlooked value from putting this or that consumer experience on a mobile app? Yet another combination of mobile video/ranking/sharing/etc. you hope catches on?

That’s it?

Anyone who builds anything interesting will rapidly run up against the barriers thrown up by incumbents and crushed.

Can’t comply with GDPR? So sorry.

Don’t have a massive ops team to do ‘content moderation’ from day one? Sorry.

Gonna have to downrank you in feed too.

A new Facebook or Google or Apple wouldn’t make it among the present-day Facebooks and Googles and Apples.

The next Zuck won’t be living under the current Zuck’s shadow. The next Zuck will be doing something else entirely, in an arena big enough for his ambitions (and ego).

FB hasn’t shipped a new experience it didn’t copy or acquire since I was there.

Companies like Airbnb, Twitter, Dropbox, Box, Google….they all launch this or that new product with a phalanx of marketers…and we all yawn. The alpha is long gone (and deep down they know it).

At this new venture, we hired an anon data scientist who builds these brilliant case studies of web 3 ecosystems.

He has a day job in Web 2, but this is like his dirty nights-and-weekend habit.

Working in Web 2 is duller than dog shit, so it’s a cope (and we’re glad for it).

(My pet theory about why there’s so much hate from the web 2 boomers it that they know they were once edgy, cool and disruptive, but now nobody really cares about what they’re working on. It’s all become a utility, like PG&E. So they seethe at the attention web 3 is getting.)

Even if Web 3 converges to a consumer experience much like Web 2, it will have been worth it simply for rebooting the Internet, demolishing the sclerotic FAANG giants, and recreating a new technological frontier.

We’ll be stuck, bored, in the Web 2 End of History otherwise.

Via: Antonio