[9] The Web 3 Renaissance
Endless experimentation in Web 3
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Today we are going to explore why during some periods in time, there seems to be endless experimentation. This is particularly true today in Web 3 — a lot of new ideas across a lot of sectors. The question is “why.”
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Periods of endless experimentation 🧪⛵️🏔
Renaissance periods are periods of hyper growth where innovation has both breadth (innovation across many sectors) and depth (step change innovation in a particular sector).
The actual Renaissance was one of these periods, where every sector was innovating. Think about that for a second: it was a time period where every sector was innovating and changing. Sectors that are fairly unrelated, from art to finance to science to mathematics to culture.
Another hyper growth era that comes to mind is the (rise of the) Internet era. Everyone started going digital and every sector needed to think about how it was going to compete in the Internet era. This brought about the Internet Renaissance where every sector needed to innovate to stay relevant.
Today, I think we are in the Web 3 Renaissance.
Many experiments are taking place in Web 3. Everyone seems to have a new idea that they want to build and try. I’d argue that it’s still probably early, but the introduction of new ideas and experiments are definitely accelerating… the crazy thing is that we probably haven’t even hit the acceleration part of the curve yet.
Like most things, I don’t believe the amount of innovation and experimentation happening in Web 3 is by accident or random. There are things that need to be in place for these magical time periods of endless experimentation in history to take place.
Web 3: Building the building-blocks to build on top of 🟦 🟥 🟨
So at heart, what we are talking about is creating an environment for growth, creativity and for a bunch of people across sectors to experiment (i.e. innovate).
Let’s look back at just the last few years of Web 3 as an example (you can extrapolate as far back as you want).
If you joined Web 3 in 2016 to 2018, many people in the industry were building blockchain infrastructure to scale blockchains.
Blockchains are too slow, how can we make them faster?
That was what most people were building because it was the biggest problem to tackle. Laying the groundwork of infrastructure was something so fundamental to Web 3 that until that was figured out, most people would’ve said Web 2 solutions were still better and therefore the de facto winner. But once enough infrastructure was built in Web 3 for others to use (since most things are open-sourced in Web 3), this unlocked a bunch of building blocks for new builders entering the Web 3 space.
This enabled the next generation of builders to take all the great thinking from the previous generation of builders and build on top of it.
In 2019 and 2020, if you were building a Web 3 project, you didn’t have to worry as much about scaling and transaction throughput on blockchains because the folks in the 2016 to 2018 vintage solved some of these problems for you. This is building on top of the “previous generation” and using their innovation as building blocks.
And in 2021 and 2022, you now have enough infrastructure and well thought-out primitives from previous generations of builders for this generation and vintage to start building consumer applications that everyday people can potentially use. So on and so forth.
Each generation of builders stretches the art of the possible in a space.
This is not a new concept by any means; sciences have worked this way. Ada Lovelace, the woman who invented the first algorithm, was a pioneer in the field, but she didn’t really believe that AI (artificial intelligence) was possible. Then Alan Turing, with the knowledge and the work of Lovelace to build upon, made the claim that one day artificial intelligence can indeed exist. But he was still too early. Today with more data available, a new generation of builders in AI is pushing us closer to AI being a possibility.
Where one sits in history is interesting.
They get the benefits of all those who came before them so that they can add more building blocks to progress an era forward.
Web 3 in hyper speed 🚀
Compared to other innovation eras in history, things feel like they are moving at hyper speed in Web 3. You can look at it in any way — new projects, new concepts, new people in the space — it’s all progressing at hyper speed by any metric.
The question is why?
Endless creation, experimentation, innovation is a function of “can” and “will”
Can (can change): Do we have the ability to change? Do the tools exists for us to disrupt the status quo? Can we easily access those tools for experimentation?
Will (want to change): Do we want to change? Is the status quo worth changing? Is there a culture and motivation to change and therefore experiment and innovate?
We CAN (ability to) run a lot of experiments: Web 3 is building on top of the learning and primitives of Web 1, Web 2 and every innovation cycle that has come before it.
We WANT (desire to) to run a lot of experiments: The culture and ethos of Web 3 is to disrupt and change the status quo… to (hopefully) imagine a better world and solve massive problems across all sectors.
Let’s unpack both.
The first is easy to understand, but there is a nuance. The Internet Era enabled hyper growth because of the free flow of information and technological advances. In Lovelace’s time period of the 1800s, information was hard to circulate. Even though someone else in the world had probably built some foundational building block she could have built on top of, getting that information was difficult.
But the internet opened the floodgates to information: if you can access a screen, you can find an endless amount of the world’s information and knowledge. Open information is a key building block in Web 3...i.e. you can access most of what others have built and plug that into the product you are designing.
The second piece is as important as the first. People building in Web 3 want to build and further the Web 3 space as whole.
Why?
It all comes down to culture.
Web 3 culture is simple: it’s about being open, building in public, being transparent and more importantly building towards a common cause: a better world. That’s why you often see many projects open sourcing their innovation so that others can build on top of it.
The open culture in Web 3 is accelerating the growth rate of the growth rate of new ideas.
No, not a typo…I do mean the growth rate of the growth rate…
In Web 3, you get feedback quicker, you experiment quicker, and users are more incentivized to jump in to help. This creates an environment for people to try, build, share, and more importantly learn together… it’s a massive flywheel for innovation and new ideas.
Instead of hoarding insights built on top of information, you are sharing those insights. In Web 2, information is not the advantage so much as insights on top of the information. You keep the insights because that’s how you build a big business. In Web 3, insights are openly shared. You build a big project by having the most believers (i.e. the strength of your community).
And you are never building from scratch.
Web 3 is Culture as much as it is technology
I imagine a big driving force behind the Renaissance was that enough people must have had the desire to change and innovate first.
We often focus on the technology side of these Renaissance periods or innovation eras, but the culture and vibes of these times are equally as important.
Web 3 is people and vibes all the way down.
I don’t know what will come of it, but there are Renaissance vibes in the air.