How to Operate on a New Web3 World
Web3 is a cultural movement, a whole new philosophy. It goes beyond coding and finance. It is a new world that enables creators and users to capture the value you create, and we need to understand what it means and how we should change our operational models.
The world as we know it is changing fast. Recent technologies are empowering creators and consumers, and their applications are disrupting the value that intermediaries and aggregators traditionally provided. As a result, millions of new web3 users arise, and the speed at what is happening is faster than in the precedent waves.
It is a new abundant and decentralized world; data is the new oil, and developing new distributed ledger technologies and protocols brings trust, data integrity, transparency, and automation. When mixing these new possibilities with the rise of the web2-native generation, the result is that in a brief time, the Web3 applications will be used by billions of people.
The web of reading and writing
The internet and Web2.0 business models have unlocked tremendous value for the world. In the first wave, publishers and webmasters generated the information, and users consumed it. In web2.0, the information is generated by the users.
During that transition, the internet evolved from a web of reading into a web of reading and writing. In addition, the web2.0 business model shifted the value away from physical assets into services, information products, platforms, and ecosystems.
Many incumbents could not adapt to this fundamental shift in the business model. However, some Internet companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon made it, and together with Web2.0 companies such as Facebook, Salesforce, Netflix, Tesla, and Airbnb, have significantly outgrown and overtaken pre-internet incumbents in the consumer electronics, software, advertising, retail, entertainment, transportation, and hospitality industries.
Web3 businesses are primed to disrupt the web2.0 incumbents
Web3 projects are blockchain-native and create value for people who care about them and participate. The new internet is where digital scarcity, creators, and consumers take the driving seat. It is the new ownership economy. It is much stronger on personal privacy.
Communities of developers, creators, entrepreneurs, and users have created Decentralized Protocols, Cryptocurrencies, Smart Contracts platforms, DAOS (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), DApps (Decentralized Apps), DeFi (Decentralized Finance), Decentralized Digital Property, DeSo (Decentralized Social) and much more as we are getting innovations every week.
Web3 blockchain-native businesses such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Coinbase, Uniswap, Chainlink, Avae, and others are primed to disrupt the web2.0 incumbents. They are disrupting the winner-takes-all-aggregator business models of the current market leaders. Web3 business models align incentives for creators, consumers, suppliers, and investors in ways that web2 companies cannot.
We are early on the web3 transition.
The new Decentralized Web and its novel business models are only crossing the disappointment phase of the exponential curve. It is difficult to understand and more relevant for adoption. It is still difficult to use. Think of the early websites from 1996, remarkably simple digital copies of the physical newspapers or physical stores with limited navigation capabilities and restricted user interfaces.
Web3 is still in its infancy but is moving faster than the previous two waves as more developers are moving to work with web3. Now is the time for leaders to understand this new era of decentralized ledgers, how it is transforming businesses, and how to unlock value from it.
Working with Exponential Organizations, we have learned how dangerous it is to ignore those new disrupting developments until it is too late. If we are not ready at the point of the “hockey stick,” we know it will be almost impossible to catch up with the exponential curve.
The ExO Model and the Web3
Many successful web2 businesses have implemented the ExO model to build an abundance-based business model. Our thesis is that every thriving organization will have adopted ExO attributes by the end of the decade.
For traditional organizations to remind relevant, they should examine and update their skills matrix and gap analysis to include 21st Century leadership characteristics and look for solutions fostering a distributed innovation approach.
Many organizations will require a process to change their linear mindset and gain agility, helping create their massive transformative purpose. Others will benefit from ExO coaching to embrace challenges, assess openly and transparently their opportunities and disruptions openly and transparently, and create a roadmap for the future that resonates with them.
Experimentation and learning are built into the methodologies we use with our customers. They enable rapid iterations based on real feedback. Therefore, we recommend practicing incremental implementation based on experimentation and focusing on better experiences, satisfied customers, and happier employees.
For new web3 projects, we recommend reviewing and leveraging six ExO attributes: Purpose, Community & Crowd, Engagement, Experimentation, Autonomy, and Social Technologies.
Web3 is a cultural movement, a whole new philosophy. It goes beyond coding and finance. It is a new world that enables creators and users to capture the value you create, and we need to understand what it means and how we should change our operational models.