This content was created by Max Brun. This content was uploaded by Max Brun. This is a YouTube clip titled "Opportunities In Web3 For Marketplaces (D'Arcy Chat Clip)" (published January 10, 2022). It is an interview-style conversation between an interviewer (labeled SPEAKER A) and D'Arcy discussing opportunities for marketplaces in Web3 — topics include community ownership, token incentives, examples like Braintrust, Uniswap, Coinbase and Gitcoin, the idea of Web2 → Web3 (and “Web 2.5”) transitions, and the need for Web3-native product design rather than skeuomorphic copies of Web2 products. The excerpt appears to be a short segment of a longer discussion focused on product and marketplace strategy in the crypto/Web3 space.
Chapters
So you have some really, really, I would say, incredible experience and also too insights with working with so many marketplaces. So are there any specific opportunities that maybe you're excited about that we could look into as founders?
I mean, I think obviously Web3 is kind of like an interesting trend and whether they're kind of marketplaces or whether they're ending up being their own kind of their own hybrid between crypto projects and marketplaces and communities. TBD what any of that looks like, but I obviously think there's a big opportunity figuring out what some of these products and services would look like in a Web3 world. And I don't think they're going to be the one-to-one match. It's not going to be, I'm going to build Uber plus a token. I don't think that's going to be the way it actually plays out, but the way Web3 is structured, the way there's community ownership, the way you're able to use some of the incentive structure to make sure that your users own the platform, make sure they're incentivized to use the platform, make sure they're incentivized to promote the platform. I just think there's a bunch of really interesting products that are going to be built. around that, that again, we may not think of them as traditional marketplaces, but I think they're going to be— there's going to be— it's not going to be a copy, but there's going to be a lot of similarities between things that are built there. I think Uniswap and Coinbase is a really interesting example of a Web3 equivalent to a Web2 product.
Yeah. I'm glad you brought it up. So it's definitely something that a lot of us are discussing. We have a Web3 space also in the community and We had Gabe from Braintrust on too to kind of do a deep dive.
Yeah, I mean, Braintrust is a great example, right? It's, you know, you're not just taking a talent marketplace and saying like, I'm going to like attach a token to it. You know, it's saying if I was going to build something from the bottom up using the kind of pillars of, you know, the Web3, kind of like how would I build the talent marketplace? And, you know, Braintrust is great. Gitcoin is great. There's a handful of really interesting projects in that space. And so, yeah, I think there's kind of Web2, there's Web3, and for lack of a better term, Web 2.5. But I think there's going to be some cool stuff built there.
Yeah, I think something that we've kind of discussed a few different times I've seen is people thinking about, how do I kind of build this from the ground up, as you mentioned, versus like, hey, I run an earlier stage kind of Web2 marketplace. how should I potentially think about the transition into Web3 and what that could look like?
Yeah. I think the— I mean, Chris Dixon, who knows more about crypto than I think anybody in the world, has a great kind of content stuff on this. And his perspective is always that in the first version of a product, you always end up with the skeuomorphic ideas. So it's like the idea when the internet came out, people put newspapers on the internet and they literally— it was like a newspaper. It looked like a newspaper. It had columns and everything like that. And then as the technology evolves and as the kind of thinking evolves, people end up building things that are a little more native to the platform. And so I think we're still— I don't think we're totally in that phase, but I think people are still thinking about these ideas in a little bit of a skeuomorphic way. But I do think once people start to think about it in a little bit kind of Web3-native way, that it will end up— the solution space just gets a lot broader. And then I think the kind of the product innovation ends up being a lot faster and a lot more interesting.
Yeah. Yeah. You guys definitely have some great minds when it comes to, yeah, I'd say Web3 and crypto on the team there. So I'll have to cut myself off right now too. So that way we just don't go into a whole rant about Web3 here on the call.
Down the rabbit hole.
Right, exactly. So we don't have enough time for that.
