How I'm Going All In On Web3: Business Playbook

Today we are going to talk about my playbook for going all in on Web3 and how you might think about it for the future. But before we do, my name is Eric Siu and I'm here to help level up the world. So let us get into it. So if we take a look at my— actually, before I pull it up, just to call it out right now, if I'm looking at my personal behavior, I am buying NFTs, I am using DeFi, I am engaging with a lot of other people in Discord groups to talk about what's going on in the world of Web3. You can call that crypto, DeFi, whatever. And so my own, my own personal activity shows that there's something here. Not only that, though, forget my activity for a second. If we just look at activity on the Ethereum blockchain as an example, because a lot of transactions are happening there right now. If we take a look at what's happening in the world of Ethereum, those of you that can see my screen, this is over a period of basically 365 days. Right. So you can see in the red line over here. The 200-day moving average for the price of Ethereum, it keeps going up and up and up. Right. And the pricing in the green over here, this is the Ethereum price. It has gone up. Right. It's obviously volatile, but it's continued to go up. But, you know, what I look at is developer activity. Right. So I want to look at, you know, how, you know, are developers still actively contributing? And, you know, that's in the pink over here. That's developer activity contributors count. And you can see that here. And, you know, there's a big dip over here. Something happened. You can see the development activity in purple also dropped as well. So you can see other than that, it's been pretty consistent development activity. You can see that big drop over there. It might have fallen off a little bit, but it's not— it's basically kind of been more or less the same, right? I mean, it's dropped a little bit over here recently, and that's in the— let's call it from, you know, October till December now, right? But also keep in mind, I mean, you know, I'm not a technical person, but, you know, some changes have been made to Ethereum as well. This might have been— I mean, the change over here where, you know, Ethereum actually started to become a deflationary asset might have happened around the drop. Right. So you're going to have to look into that yourself. And I'm not the technical one, but I'm really just going off of what I know so far. So, you know, when I look at that, I look at people participating in buying Bored Ape Yacht Clubs, right? You know, going to these NFT conferences, going to Art Basel. I see the activity there. There's the dinners that I do as well. There's a lot of activity in the space right now. Adidas did a partnership with Bored Ape Yacht Club. PrettyLittleThing did as well. They signed something with, uh, Universal and so to help with, uh, character development. And so, and then you have a lot of celebrities, right? That, and that's just one example of an NFT. So a lot of people are starting to become onboarded into the world of Crypto in general, right? So to me, you know, the other signal here is I'm freaking wearing a hat that's related to a WhatsApp group that I'm in called JPEG Morgan. And I was at a lunch last week during Art Basel. And I remember going into— I was in the restroom and one of the guys came in and his name's Ralph. And, you know, we're just talking about how he's like, this feels like 1994. And it's funny because the past couple of weeks I've been saying, guys, this feels like 1995 because 1994, 1995, that's really when I started to get into the internet. But it felt like the frontier, the new frontier, the wild, wild west, right? 2010, mobile came out and it felt like mobile was going to be a very big thing, but just nowhere near as big as kind of how we're— how the internet's being retooled right now for the future, right? And so, you know, I've even gone as far as to, you know, after looking at the activity around kind of crypto gaming, DeFi, the events that I'm going to, NFTs as well, This is just really the beginning right now. And I think, you know, a lot of this stuff is— I mean, if you're in the space right now, it's— you're very early. So I even wrote this Web3 memo for my team. If we take a look at my screen over here, you know, I kind of put here a couple of resources, right? So here's a good example of what it means to be kind of Web1, which is read-only. Companies create and companies profit. Web2 is read and write. People create and companies profit. So Example would be like Meta or Facebook or Alphabet or Google, and then read and write. This is Web three. People create and people profit, right? So you can see what's going on in the world of NFTs right now. That's a really good example. And in the world of DeFi too, it's really the people that are putting in the money. They're collecting the transaction fees. They're maybe staking, right, and getting a yield off of it. That's what makes DeFi work. So there's just a lot of interesting stuff that's going on right now, and I think it's just really the beginning. The Constitution DAO, right? I got to you know bid on on that one. And then what's happening with the with the world of Bored Ape Yacht Club, right? So there is just I mean activity in this space right now is it's undeniable, right? And so it's it's gotten to the point where I wrote this Web three memo for my agency, which I had actually stepped out of the day to day of, but I'm actually coming back in to specifically help with the Web three side of things, right? Because nobody else you know it's still so new right now, so nobody else really knows. kind of, um, you know, what's going on in the space, right? And when I say nobody else, the vast majority of people, that's what I really mean. And so that to me seems like a really, um, good opportunity. So, you know, how can I capture the most opportunity here? Well, to me, the thesis hasn't really changed from the holding company model, right? Or the investment model where it's, you know, how can we own cash-flowing assets and then take the profits from that and then deploy it ideally into Web3, right? Into the future. And so that doesn't mean I won't invest into— like, I've invested into like some language, you know, tech this year, some health tech this year as well. But I've also recently invested in some Web3 projects, right? Like, you know, in the world of DeFi, you know, different platforms. So I'm, you know, I'm basically all in on this stuff right now. And what better way to go all in than to use kind of the business assets that I already have? And so, you know, that means me kind of jumping in almost like a little, you know, as like SWOT team, helping put together the core offerings, helping position our agency as kind of the Web3 agency out there if people need marketing help in that world. And then I can jump back into kind of and put my investor hat back on, right? The content-making hat back on, because that's really where my zone of genius is. So, you know, sometimes it's worth it to, you know, jump around, right? You might be in different seasons. And I think right now there's a huge opportunity to really be kind of that de facto Web3 marketing agency, and I think there's a lot of business available for for anybody, right? I mean, you know, and if you're thinking about that, I mean, think about how you can position yourself for for that, right? Especially if you're starting out. And you know today, like I hadn't gone on a sales call in maybe years, and today I was like, okay, I'm going to take a couple of Web3 sales calls, right? Because we're getting all these leads right now, and they're refreshing. And and you know when you get on those calls, they don't know what they want. They just know that they raised a bunch of money. It's kind of similar to the 1990s, right? Where people raise a bunch of money for their startup. They don't know what to do next. Hopefully things don't come all crashing down. But, you know, that's what it is. So, but the other thing I'll say is in terms of how I'm going all in on Web3. So what's very obvious to me is using the agency business that I have and just focusing all efforts there because that's clearly what's working. And, you know, acquiring other assets where it makes sense. And other cash flowing assets could be like SaaS, whatever. But, you know, that's how I look at it. And on the relationship side of things, you've heard me, those of you that follow this channel, you've heard me talk about the ROI throwing dinners, right? So I'm going to keep throwing dinners, Web3 dinners. I did one at Art Basel last week. I did one at NFT NYC about a month ago. Doing podcasts. I'm going to try to interview 2 people in Web3 every single week, maybe even more than that, right? Just to try to build relationships that way. I'm in a lot of different chat groups right now. I talked about this WhatsApp group. I'm in a Telegram group as well. I'm in a host of other just these chat groups where people are just talking about Web3 and helping each other out. I'm in some iMessage groups as well. And so it's really dinners, events, podcasts, joining these groups. But, you know, at the end of the day, it comes down to relationships because people like to do business with people. So if you can get in front of the right people, they'll probably start adding you to the right groups. They'll probably start inviting you to the right events. And, you know, if maybe you're an introvert like myself, I started with a podcast 9 years ago, right? In the very beginning, I didn't really have much going for me. But now's a really good opportunity for you to, to get ahead of all this, right? So that's how I'm getting into, getting into Web3 or going all in on Web3. This is my playbook. And leave a comment with your thoughts below. Let me know what you think. Is this crazy? Is there anything you think I missed? And don't forget to hit the like and the subscribe button because it helps us grow. And we will catch you in the next video.