All Roads Lead to Rome — My Web 3.0 Journey
This is post 3 of 4 for the Bankless DAO writer’s cohort.
If you read my blog about what I learned from attending two crypto conferences, you may remember one of my biggest takeaways: how diverse the conference crowd was. It was amazing to think how this many different and unique people all managed to end up in the same spot, hinting at the adage “All roads lead to Rome.” Some people may know this saying to mean “there are many different routes to the same goal,” and others may remember it from a subpar 2015 romcom starring Sarah Jessica Parker (if you knew the romcom but didn’t know the saying, I honestly commend you).
From the wise words of a Matthew McConaughey Buik commercial:
“Sometimes you got to go back, to actually move forward.”
Thus, I wanted to go back in time and share my road into Web 3.0 to fulfill the romcom king’s life advice (alright, alright, alright) and hopefully relate to anyone reading this who may have a similar experience.
My journey started during my first year of college. I was an undecided business major partly because I could skip both micro and macroeconomics due to AP credits, but mostly because I needed to choose a new major after seeing what a freshmen engineering schedule looked like. Honestly, though, I knew nothing about business besides a few scraps of information I learned in AP Econ.
Fortunately, a guy on my floor named Will (I hope you’re doing well, buddy) was also a business major, but unlike me, he actually knew something about business. One day, while hanging out in our common room, he introduced me to Robinhood and thus, investing. My high school had a slogan that reads, “We learn to do by doing” (they put it in Latin, though, to sound prestigious), so, with some expendable capital in hand, I started investing.
In hindsight, I was very much a “Robinhood trader,” especially when COVID came around. Examples:
- Put money into Roku simply because there was one on my floor’s common room
- Purchased 2x and 3x leveraged indexes, not knowing what leverage was other than “number goes up or down faster than no leverage.”
- Bought a random stock after a finance friend of mine promised me it would double
On the bright side, this unstable investing nature exposed me to crypto, prompting me to buy ETH on September 9 because its price had 5x since crypto lows at the time. Yes, my start in Web 3.0, a passion for the foreseeable future, came simply from a bet that crypto would go up, not because I knew what it actually was. Even as its price continued to climb, I knew nothing about the technology and only read articles about the price going up.
Eventually, I began to learn what this whole Web 3.0 thing was when GaryVee announced his NFT project, VeeFriends. Few things I learned:
- You don’t own/have custody of crypto on Robinhood or Coinbase
- Metamask (or any digital wallet) is the key to accessing the world of Web 3.0
- What an NFT is and some of its potential use cases
After purchasing a VeeFriends NFT, my journey down the rabbit hole truly began. During that summer, I spent tons of time focusing on Opensea, NFT Discord servers, Rarity Tools, etc. and bought many different NFT projects that garnered hype and attention.
However, the root of this passion for learning was impure; it was all about making money instead of learning and developing an understanding of some of the core Web 3.0 concepts (check out my last blog to learn more). The day I truly began allocating my time, energy, and focus to learning what this Web 3.0 stuff is instead of how I can make money off it occurred when Gil Hildebrand (who I consider one of my Web 3.0 mentors) sent me his recommended educational content.
From this point forward, my perspective of Web 3.0 changed from “this is a whole new way to make money” to “this is a whole new way to change the world.” From his recommended list, I started watching online classes, listened to podcasts (specifically Bankless), subscribed to newsletters, and more. These resources helped solidify my knowledge, belief, and passion for the industry and the technology to the point where I genuinely believe this tech will change the world.
Today, I am working at a Web 3.0 startup based in New Orleans called Nieux Society and am looking for a more long-term position in the Web 3.0 field (hoping that going back will help me move forward and get a job, lol).
Cheers to you if you are someone involved in Web 3.0 and your story is similar to this. If you are involved, and it isn’t similar to this, cheers to you as well; as I said, many roads lead to Rome. If you are not involved in Web 3.0, are interested in learning more, and don’t know where to start, that is cool too! If you are worried that you are already late for this thing, I would suggest two things:
- Ask any of your best friends or family, “How much do you know about Web 3.0 or blockchain?”. I guarantee you that over half of them won’t have a clue. That means you are still early!
- From an old Chinese proverb:
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
If you want to learn but don’t know where to start, comment on this blog or contact me. OR…wait for my next blog, which will be about how to learn crypto in one day (So you don’t have to spend almost two years as I did).
