110 - The Internet Reset | Alexis Ohanian

Internet culture is culture. Everyone is online and spending most of their lives there. You can even argue the metaverse has been here, not just with obvious examples, like World of Warcraft and Fortnight, but even Instagram. There are people already buying assets, they're buying the Louis Vuitton purse, to take a photo of to impress a bunch of digital people with their digital asset, which just happens to be a photo of them wearing the purse, that 99.999% of people will never actually see them with. So, the metaverse is here; it's just not evenly distributed.

I think everyone or a material number of people are going to participate in a DAO over the next 5 years. They won't know it; they don't need to know what it's called. Remember, the average person doesn't know what a hypertext transfer protocol is. They don't need to ... We should be thinking about NFTs the same way; we should be thinking about DAOs the same way ... The average person only cares about user experience.

Social media as we know it... is probably going to look like a weird transition. I think, in the grand scheme of the Internet, it's actually going to look like a blip, because it becomes an intelligence test once you provide ownership as to why you would ever want to participate in a scheme where you don't actually own the things that you produce.

I believe, wholeheartedly, the online identity, the digital identity, which will more often than not be pseudonymous, is going to be more valuable to more people than their government name.

My north star here... still always comes back to user experience. What ends up winning 1,000 out of 1,000 is along those lines of a user experience and making something people want. That is the motto of Y Combinator for a reason.

If I give someone the chance to sell... 1 ETH or an NFT worth 1 ETH, they will be more likely to sell the the 1 ETH ... Non-fungibility is, actually, for our species, a lot more valuable than we realize. Is it rational? No, but humans are not rational creatures.

From an Internet standpoint, I do think the Internet's best years are ahead of it. And I really do believe that, in 50 years, we will look back on web2 as being a blip ... We made some mistake, and now we get to spend the next few decades, hopefully, writing them.

We have, again, long-term greedy incentives to bring more women in to web3 ... The things that we need in order to get web3 into the mainstream will only happen with women.

I'll tell you my cheat code ... I visit the nascent Reddit communities, if there are them, if they exist, for the things I'm investing in, because that's a great barometer. You can't really fake community on Reddit.

There are plenty of things, though, where a properly incentivized and connected decentralized community will outperform any centralized group a million times out of a million.

Stay away from quick cash grabs. Being long-term greedy in this environment is going to be so much more selfish and such a smarter move financially than being short-term greedy.

The advice I find myself giving CEOs more often than not is to think of communication on the Internet just as you would communication offline.

The idea that web2 was read and write and now we've moved to web3, which is read and write and own, is really meaningful.