Produced | Tiger Sniff Technology Group
The author | Zhou Zhou
The header image | IC photo
"Just wait for byte's year-end bonus to be issued, I will go to [Web3 company], and a friend from another department of Byte will join me." Byte employee Zhang Beihai said to Tiger Sniff.
As the youngest and only Internet manufacturer that is still growing rapidly and has great opportunities, many employees of ByteDance have chosen to actively give up "beating" and begin to explore new industries. Some of them are technical employees in charge of Feishu, some are visual designers, some are responsible for TikTok business, and some are "technology tycoons" who joined Byte in 2014... They are all post-90s, most of them are post-95s, they enjoy 18 salaries bytes, options with huge appreciation potential, free meals with different patterns, and snacks and drinks.
However, this series of top treatment of domestic and even global enterprises cannot retain their determination to change careers.
Unlike Zhang Beihai, Tencent's senior product manager Plato is not even willing to wait for the year-end award. "I'm not small anymore and don't want to live a life of seeing my head at a glance." At the end of 2021, Plato resigned from Tencent's headquarters and selected the creator economy track of the recent fire, officially opening his own Web3 entrepreneurial road.
Tiger Sniff observed that Ali, Ant, Tencent, Byte, NetEase, Meituan, at least six major Internet manufacturers have "high P" (senior managers or senior technical talents), giving up stable high salaries and considerable options, and actively exploring the Web3 world.
The former big manufacturer "High P" that joined the Web3 track is becoming more, including: Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen, Ant Technology Director Zhao Feng, and Guo Yu, a post-90s programmer who joined Byte in 2014 and retired with nearly 100 million options in 2020.
In April this year, Wang Huiwen changed the instant app signature to: Learning Crypto. Also the founder of the US group, he paid attention to Crypto a long time later than Wang Xing, who was already optimistic about Bitcoin and invested as early as 2013. However, "hearing that dao has no priority", Wang Huiwen has some new cognition of Web3, he believes that the blockchain has torn apart the Chinese Internet, and the main contradiction of the Chinese Internet has changed from the contradiction between giants and startups to the contradiction between the classical Internet and the blockchain. In 2020, he retired from Meituan and started a new track.
Guo Yu is one of the earliest Web3 practitioners, from 2011 when he joined Alipay, he has paid attention to Web3 and shared his experience at the weekend sharing meeting of Alipay's experience technology department, and after he left ByteDance in 2020, he rarely studied the classical Internet and began to focus on the technology and application of blockchain. Zhao Feng is like Guo Yu all in Web3. As a former QQ architect of Tencent mobile phone and product director of Alipay, he has entered the game in 2018 and pulled many colleagues from Ant and Tencent.
From big factory executives to big factory young people, the Web3 industry is constantly attracting Internet talents. In the first 20 years of the 21st century, the Internet was perhaps the most friendly industry for most young Chinese, though people are now complaining more about its problems.
Web3 refers to a decentralized online ecosystem based on blockchain technology, which many believe represent the next stage of the internet. A partner of a traditional investment institution told Tiger Sniff: "The current Web3 industry is very similar to the Internet in 2000. And this sentence is being mentioned more and more frequently.
Looking back at 2000, Baidu Ali Tencent has just been established, Alipay will be in 3 years, QQ Music will be 5 years later, BOSS direct employment 14 years later, KEEP 15 years later, and Douyin as the "last Internet national product" to be born after 16 years, in fact, most of the Internet companies we know at present were born in 2000-2010. These companies and many of their products were accompanied by great controversy at the beginning of their existence, but this did not affect their business value, far exceeding the traditional enterprises.
So, as a "new generation of the Internet", has the latest version of Baidu, Ali and Tencent appeared?
In fact, in the Web3 industry, some products already have the "prototype" of national mobile phone products, such as MetaMask (decentralized Alipay), STEPN (decentralized KEEP), Audius (decentralized QQ music), OpenSea... They already have millions or even tens of millions of users around the world, and 3 companies were even named the 100 most influential companies in the world by Time magazine this year.
Among them, MetaMask is currently one of the Web3 products with the largest number of users. In March 2022, it had more than 30 million monthly active users, up 42% in the past four months. The latest valuation of consenSys, the company behind it, quadrupled to $7 billion.
Rich products, high valuations, a large number of users... All of this reminds people of the Internet, which was in a reckless era around 2000.
escape
"One glance to the end." Nowadays, this sentence has become the voice of many Internet people.
Twenty years ago, a group of entrepreneurs introduced various innovative models of the Internet to China under the condition of unclear policies and risking compliance. At that time, the Internet did not have factions, and there were hundreds or even thousands of companies competing in each segment, and there were new corporate IPOs every month. Cases of a small company growing in three or five years and surpassing the development of traditional enterprises for decades abound.
However, in the past three years, few Internet companies can frequently appear as the current Web3, with valuations that have increased by tenfold and hundredfold, allowing investors to obtain a hundredfold return. This may also be one of the reasons why many capitals have fled the classical Internet and poured into Web3.
Entering 2022, some capital parties' investment in Web3 can be called "crazy". According to tiger sniff incomplete statistics, from January 1, 2022 to April 26, 2022, Sequoia Capital, one of the world's largest venture capital investors, invested in a total of 17 Web3 companies at a weekly investment rate. Sequoia is considered the most successful early venture capitalist of the Internet era, but in the Web3 track, it is facing more fierce competition. Its rival Coinbase Ventures invested in 71 companies in the first quarter of 2022 alone, almost every day, excluding rest days. The "war" between capitals is approaching white-hot.
The big factories worked hard like their predecessors, but they had missed the period of the highest development of the company and the industry, and what was even more frightening was that the layoffs of the big factories were like a plague, one after another, and there was no stopping trend.
"The development of the Internet is getting slower and slower, and the pension is OK." A large factory employee told Tiger Sniff. She compares Internet companies to "nursing homes" for young people, who are paid far higher salaries in traditional industries and enjoy a good working environment, while many employees are endlessly involuted, increasingly lacking in innovation, and doing a lot of repetitive and meaningless work.
A former project leader of a large domestic factory said to Tiger Sniff: "When I first came in, I was an incubation innovation project, but as time went on, the project became heavier and heavier, the whole system also lacked innovation, and began to engage in politics, our boss came from the bank, liked to engage in politics and bureaucracy, the style was also more serious, I was used to the previous Set of free and flat work mode of the Internet, and now the company's environment has no way to let me get a sense of achievement." ”
Since Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1991, the classical Internet has been around for more than 30 years. The classical Internet is still "young", but compared with Web3, its "old" is not only reflected in age, but also in its system, culture, spirit and other levels.
There's a "black talk" in the Web3 world called OK Boomer, which can be said to anyone over the age of 22 who disagrees. If you are in a government position, 35 years old is a young person, 50 years old is the starting point of your career; if you are in the management position of a large state-owned enterprise, 35 years old is just the age to show your skills; if you are in the Internet industry, 35 years old is the age to be optimized; and in The Web 3, 22 years old may not be absolutely young.
In Web3, experience is paramount, and innovation is paramount. After all, it is built on top of blockchain technology, which has only been around for 14 years and doesn't have as many rules and shackles. These qualities make him more suitable for young people.
The trend of Web3 has become so obvious that no internet major dares to ignore it, but they can no longer play as easily as they did 20 years ago.
Tiger Sniff once mentioned in the "Internet Giant "Overseas Battle" Web3" that Ali, Tencent, Byte, Ant, JD.com, B Station, NetEase Almost all major Internet manufacturers have set up teams to explore Web3, and the first three big manufacturers: Ali, Tencent, and Byte have already laid out overseas investment. In a domestic open recruitment channel, Tencent directly stated that job seekers are required to understand blockchain frameworks such as Bitcoin and Etherrum.
But more and more people still choose to leave the factory.
migration
A "great migration" is taking place on the Internet.
Entrepreneurs are like stubborn ants who tirelessly "move" Web2 (classical Internet) products to Web3 one by one. Zheng Xiaoyue is one of the vast entrepreneurs.
He is the CEO of a small and medium-sized Internet company in China, once led a team of nearly two hundred people at NetEase, and now he has developed a product called MetaNotey, all in web3.
MetaNotey (decentralized Weibo)
This product is a bit like Weibo in the Web3 version, and a bit like the Tencent document in the Web3 version. He tried to "move" Internet products such as Weibo or Tencent Documents to Web3 to make it more decentralized. "For most Internet users, the threshold for understanding and using Web3 is too high, and we hope to become a bridge between Internet users Web2 and Web3, and a community platform for aggregating NFT content and user subscription exchanges." Zheng Xiaoyue said.
As a goose factory veteran, Plato started a business twice in Tencent in the past eight years, and has grown all the way to become a senior product manager. Perhaps because of his penchant for reading, Plato's two startups in his spare time were related to "books". Once in 2014, he pulled hundreds of authors from Douban to do paid reading websites; once in 2017, he made a smart bookshelf with Tencent and Tsinghua's friends, compared to the library's self-service borrowing machine, his smart bookshelf has tripled in capacity, only one-third of the library in terms of appearance volume, and the cost is only about 20%, until now you can see the smart bookshelf developed by their team in the Kexing Science Park where Tencent IEG is located.
Maybe the first two book startup projects weren't "sexy" enough, and he didn't choose all in until he met Web3.
Compared with Internet products, Web3 products have some common features, such as: decentralization, immutability, each piece of data is owned by the user, and data can be bought and sold. Decentralization, for example, whether it is Weibo, WeChat reading or Tencent documents, they have the common feature of Internet products: all data is collected, stored and used by an Internet company alone. This centralized Internet product, often with only one or two nodes, once destroyed, this data will also have the risk of disappearing.
On the Web3 version of Weibo or WeChat Reading, every "Weibo" and "book" people post can be minted into NFTs (non-homogeneous tokens), and these NFTs are on blockchains such as Ethereum. Blockchain is equivalent to a collection of thousands of databases, it has countless nodes, so data is difficult to steal and destroy.
Web3's utility doesn't stop there.
Take, for example, Web3's hottest track of last year, the NFT. When a microblog, an article, an e-book is forged into an NFT, they become an asset. When you've written a tweet, you won't be able to know the price of the content you've created as you used to, and every tweet you post is equivalent to a commodity, and it can be auctioned and sold as long as someone finds it valuable. This may give birth to a highly developed digital property society, each section of data will be like a house, a car, has its own value and price, and everyone can easily display, trade and profit the data they generate.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sold for $2.9 million in 2006 when its first tweet was made into an NFT, but lately people don't recognize the value of the tweet, so now the latest offer for this tweet NFT has fallen back to $280, down more than 10,000 times. It should be pointed out that at present, the NFT market is in the early stage of development, so some works are pushed to inflated, which is in line with supply and demand, and as more and more works enter the market, prices will naturally gradually tend to normal levels.
The above two products are the latest attempts by two Chinese Internet practitioners to transform Web3, but this is only the tip of the iceberg.
STEPN (Web3 version of Keep), Metamask (Web3 version of Alipay), Braintrust (Web3 version of BOSS direct recruitment) ... Thousands of Internet products have been adapted to Web3 by entrepreneurs. Predictably, there will be more in the future.
The more well-known product in Web3
Social, musical, writing, finance... Every Web3 track is crowded with a large number of entrepreneurial projects today.
This scene has happened frequently in the Internet industry.
The Internet takeaway platform "Thousand Regiments War" finally left only a few companies such as Meituan and Ele.me. During the competition period of Mobike and Xiaohuangche, hundreds of bicycle companies also emerged overnight. There were countless new tracks that were born in the Internet industry every year, and now they are no longer as good as they were then. The Web3 industry is replicating this hilarious scene.
Just like everyone has countless apps on their mobile phones now, maybe in the future everyone will use countless DApps (blockchain versions of apps) every day.
Break the circle! Break the circle! Break the circle!
The decentralization of Web3 is essentially a quest for an extreme equality, which is one of the reasons why more and more people are attracted to it.
However, the equality of technology may not be really equal, and sometimes even cause greater inequality. Everyone's qualities are completely different. There is no doubt that certain professionals are more suitable for Web3, although Web3 is constantly breaking the circle to attract more forms of professional talent.
Previously, the Web3 industry has exploded many entrepreneurial waves. Bullock, a researcher at OKX, told Tiger Sniff that the birth of Ethereum in 2013 made the blockchain and smart contracts closely integrated, and many DApps (blockchain applications) came into being; the "liquidity mining" game launched by the lending agreement Complex in 2020 detonated the Defi market; in 2021, NFT Summer walked out of the small circle of "Crypto" at the circulation level. All of this has contributed a lot to the Web3 industry in terms of infrastructure and draining audiences.
From the invention of Bitcoin, to the creation of Ethereum, to Defi, NFT, and now the DAO, every wave of blockchain for more than a decade has attracted a group of entrepreneurs and screened a group of people.
The emergence of Ethereum attracted an additional large number of programmers to participate, the emergence of Defi attracted a group of Wall Street financial professionals, the emergence of NFTs attracted a large number of artists to settle in, and the emergence of DAO attracted professionals from all walks of life.
"Very early exposure to cryptocurrencies, Tencent employees spontaneously created two WeChat groups specializing in Web3 investment, and the group group was full, but before it was only observation and did not go deep, until the recent emergence of NFTs and DAO, we have the opportunity to do some projects that can promote the industry." A former Tencent employee told Tiger Sniff.
People who are new to Web3 have the same mentality and are very wary; those who decide to all in web3 have different reasons. Some people like to cut leeks and run away after cutting a wave; some people like high-risk investments; some people are simply attracted by innovative financial models, and some people hope to change traditional industries through new technologies and business models.
It's home to scammers, idealists, leeks and doers. Under the big waves, who is more suitable for growing in the soil of Web3?
A number of venture capital institutions remained.
Although the Web3 model has actually had an impact on early-stage venture capital institutions, there are still a number of forward-looking institutions that have survived, such as Sequoia Capital, a16z, Coinbase Ventures, etc. Sequoia Capital once invested in half of the Internet in China, and a16z invested in American Internet giants such as Facebook, Groupon, Skype, Twitte and so on in the early days, and now they openly say all in crypto. These are the most famous VCs of the Web2 era, who chose and almost all in the Web3 track.
Sequoia Capital changed its "vision" to help adventurous people build great DAOs
Other new-power VCs are not far behind, and some VCs have reached a fierce level of competition, such as the above-mentioned Coinbase Ventures, which invested in 71 Web3 companies in the first quarter of 2022 alone.
The competition of these investment institutions is extremely fierce, and the "origins" of the VCs involved in them are even more complicated.
OKX invested in hundreds of projects in 2021, covering core tracks such as NFTs, GameFi, DeF, etc., and researcher Bullock told Tiger Sniff: "Traditional VCs obtain shares issued by companies through investment, and they often have to exit until higher rounds of financing. Web3 investment institutions obtain the token of the project through investment, which can be sold at any time after the lock-up period, and the exit is more flexible. In addition, institutional investment is an important source of funding for startups, so institutions have more initiative. In the field of Web3, the source of funds for the project side is diverse, and ordinary people can participate in project investment through public offering, purchase token, etc., so not only investment institutions select projects, but also powerful projects will have some requirements for the comprehensive strength of VCs. ”
"Traditional investment has developed for more than 10 years, and a very mature set of value evaluation criteria has been developed for Web2 companies, which is a platform economy, which wins or loses in terms of market share. Web3 is a third-generation Internet protocol that uses technologies such as blockchain to create readable, writable, and value transfers, and returns the value of user creation to users, which may be counterintuitive to traditional VCs familiar with Web2 investment. Web3 is built on the blockchain, to understand the Web3 project, blockchain technology principles, token economy, governance mechanisms and other content must be studied first, with the underlying knowledge structure is easier to understand the feasibility of the Web3 project. Bullock said.
In addition, the Internet elite and Wall Street elite are also "flocking" to Web3.
These two industries have exported a large number of talents and companies for Web3, and in other words, the talents and companies in these two industries are the most active in entering Web3.
Financial giants such as the New York Stock Exchange, JPMorgan Chase, and KPMG are trying the latest game of Web3, and SEC deputy economist Scott Bauguess and SEC official Justin Slaugher have also joined blockchain companies, which has become a very normal phenomenon. Financial practitioners, especially financial elites, are the most important people for their own pedigree and resume.
Internet practitioners and financial practitioners have always been the largest group of people in Web3, and more than 70% of the employees of some large Web3 companies come from the Internet. The channels to enter Web3 seem to be "monopolized" by these two industries, until the outbreak of NFT, people from all walks of life can enter Web3 on a large scale.
Clothing (Nike Adi's virtual shoes) food (Coca-Cola McDonald's NFT collection) live (Sandbox) line (BMW Ferrari and other virtual cars) play ((NBA Super Bowl Disney Christie's)... NFTs are spreading in traditional industries at an incredible rate and trying to change traditional industries. This also allows professionals in other fields, such as painters, sneaker designers, photographers, jewelry designers, etc. to be deeply involved in the world of Web3.
"DAO Thought" and "Web3 Culture"
Blockchain is a technology, DAO is an institution, and Web3 is a culture.
DAO is a decentralized organizational form, which can be understood as a "decentralized company", which is an economic system built on the blockchain, and people with the same concept and consensus can form a DAO. People don't necessarily need blockchain to form consensus. In the Internet world, when people strongly identify with a video or article, even if it is constantly deleted by centralized institutions, people will spontaneously store and reprint it, keeping it on the network. Such behavior actually implicitly matches the idea of the DAO and the culture of Web3.
But the spontaneous consensus of human beings is fragile, without the guarantee of technology + system + culture, these consensuses may exist overnight or for a while, but it is still partial, one-sided, and fleeting. People need blockchain +DAO+Web3 to record and guarantee those behaviors and consensus that we cherish.
In 1915, Chen Duxiu published an article in the "New Youth" edited by chen, advocating democracy (Mr. De) and science (Mr. Sai). At that time, the reform and innovators who stood at the forefront of the times found that the western affairs movement (technology) could not save China, the Xinhai Revolution (system) could not save China, and the new cultural movement (technology + system + ideological culture) came into being.
The same is true of the development of Web3, which is different from other forms of technology in that it is more like a collection of "technology + institutions + culture". If you only "western affairs movement" (only the development of blockchain technology), not the "Xinhai Revolution" and "new culture movement", then such a Web3 is just empty.
This may be evident from the current position occupied by Chinese entrepreneurs in Web3 companies, Chinese entrepreneurs can build the world's largest exchange, but can not invent boring apes, Azuki, Cryptopunk and other NFTs that focus on cultural attributes.
Azuki NFT
Decentralization is the spirit of Web3 and the core of the Internet.
Institutionally, the centralized Internet is increasingly being criticized. Whether it is Twitter, Weibo or Facebook, it has the disadvantages of centralized companies, such as browsing user privacy at will, classifying private data as its own, and killing big data. These problems are determined by the genes engraved in the bones of Web2 Internet companies, and it is difficult to solve them by themselves or blindly through supervision.
Recently, employees of a large factory were pointed out to be suspected of "peeking" at the work documents of the startup company, and after nearly a month, the official still did not respond. Such incidents are not uncommon, and there is no possibility of preventing them, people do not have any opportunity to resist or choose, even if small individuals are violated, they will not get any explanation, and most of the time people do not know that their privacy or data rights have been violated. This is not that Internet companies like to do evil, but their own inherent institutional decisions. And once the situation of "small government, large corporations" appears in society, the severity of these problems will increase geometrically.
How to dissolve the "evil side" of the big factory? Deprive them of overly centralized power.
It should be pointed out that the Web2 Internet is not a completely centralized world, in fact it is more decentralized than when Web1 and the Internet were not born. However, Web2 Internet companies generally believe in the idea of centralization.
The emergence of Alipay, WeChat, and Didi has actually given people more choices. Before the advent of these Internet products, everyone could only use the products provided by the bank, could only communicate by telephone, and could only stop taxis on the side of the road. And the internet actually gives people new options.
From this logic, the decentralization of Web3 is reflected in two layers: one is the social scope, the emergence of Web3, so that ordinary people and entrepreneurs have provided new opportunities, so that the society is no longer so monopolistic and centralized; the second layer is Web3 itself, its core idea is to believe in decentralization, committed to the system of decentralization of every Web3 product.
People are accustomed to the classical Internet lifestyle, thinking that every picture, every message, and every article they post should be freely shared and circulated by people. Data is money, that is, power, which is a truth that every large Internet company knows. However, this truth is limited to large institutions. Data is money, and big companies can turn data into money and power, but individuals can't.
Web3 allows data to flow more deeply, so that the power of data is no longer limited to countries and large enterprises, but returned to everyone.
Each of your footprints on the network may seem ordinary, but when they are gathered, they form value. And when this data can only be authorized by ordinary people to the institutions that need it, people can earn money through their network footprints and even exchange data frequently with others.
Web3 attracts the craziest capital, the most ambitious young people and the most imaginative projects. And what connects them is a kind of trust.
This trust comes from a small life scene.
A Singaporean who wants to buy a home in Australia may need to apply to various departments and it will take a week to succeed. However, in the Web3 system, it only takes a few seconds. Whereas in the past people needed to set up a company to accomplish a complex goal, now they only need to set up a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization).
Web2 (Internet) allows everyone to see the big events happening in various countries around the world, even at home. Web3 creates an independent global economic system outside the current world system, allowing everyone to do a complex business with strangers who have consensus around the world, anytime, anywhere.
Write at the end
In China, blockchain and Web3 remain one of the most controversial industries. Some BLOCKCHAIN COMPANY CEOs, even if they are worth more than 100 million, have more than 1,000 team members, and even appear on the cover of mainstream magazines around the world, have also been criticized by old mothers as "blind streams".
This ideological conflict has been going on for 10 years and will continue to exist. China's evolution from an agrarian society to an industrial society and then to a digital society has only taken 30 years, and looking back, every decade has been a revolutionary subversion.
Children who planted seedlings in the fields at that time would not think that they would work in the factory in the future, because at that time they could not see a factory; children who played in the factory would not think that their future work would be to stare at a screen every day in the skyscraper, because everywhere they could see were low houses; and the children who ran between the skyscrapers, perhaps the future place of work would be in the field, on the sea, underground, and even the concept of work would be dissolved.
The inherent thinking is still lingering in people's minds, but the world is firmly changing. People "poured" into this track from the Internet, finance, art and other industries, integrating blockchain technology into products, putting DAO thinking into companies, and connecting Web3 culture to the digital society.
This is a "migration" that has been going on for 10 years, and the large troops have just left.