My personal review of the year 2022
This year has been all about getting more involved with the web3 community and continuing to build new products while growing the family and buying our first home.
In 2018, I started a new tradition of sharing my personal review of the year, covering experiences, achievements, learnings and other important parts.
Read the last editions via these links: 2018, 2019, 2020 & 2021.
In a word, the year 2022 has been “hypersonic” — continuing acceleration from the last year, reaching speeds like never before.
Like a good wine, recent years have been on an uptrend in terms of quality, and the same can be said about this one. I’ve been able to do what I love (build companies) with people that care about it (my family & our community) while also continuing to travel, learn and build a life with my wife & kids.
Among other things, our son was born, my wife and I got our first home, our company initiated a unique and successful event, and I continued to delve deeper into the world of web3 through thought leadership.
Overall, 2022 gave me a chance to meet incredible people and has given me more conviction that everything we’ve undertaken is on the right path.
My highlights in 2022
On February 14th, at 12.04 PM, Alister Hugo Gansen was born. This was undoubtedly my highlight of the year. However, with everything happening this year, I might not have taken the time to fully recognise this change brought to our life. That said, I love Alister, and it brings me delight every day to see him evolve and try so hard to keep up with his older sister.
At the same time, Scarlett is my sunshine — the playfulness with how she embraces life, the sensitivity of how she cares about everything around her and the cleverness she expresses when talking about anything or while playing with puzzles and other toys is what brings me the most joy. She is my princess, and she knows it — calling herself Scarlett Amelia Princess.
In all this, Lele is the foundation of our family. She is the one that holds me accountable, ensures that everyone’s needs are taken care of, and pep-talks me when I need it. Without her, we’d all be a mess… And I appreciate her to the fullest while wanting to provide her with everything I can.
Outside of this, it’s been a blur due to so many incredible things happening throughout the year. As previously mentioned, this year’s highlights include initiating NFT Tallinn, the biggest web3 event in the Nordics & Baltics and buying our first home. In addition, I was also able to spend lots of time at our family ranch, travel to Germany, Italy & the United States (again), meet various fantastic web3 community members and eventually got elected to be the board member of the Estonian web3 Chamber.
Activities 2022 — building phase continues
2021 brought many changes, leading us to launch a new company and a community along with an NFT collection while getting deeper into the world of investing & web3 technologies.
All these things continued to be my focus this year as we kept building our supply chain simulator game, released the white paper for our protocol, organised the NFT Tallinn event and kept growing our community.
A big part of the year was also spent on calls with various supply chain industry builders and experts — resulting in 29 fantastic interviews with some of the leading entrepreneurs in this industry.
And then there were Dcentral, Consensus, NFT.NYC, DraperU Alumni Days, Pirate Summit, NFT London, Metaverse Miami and other events I visited throughout the year, including the company retreat to Italy...
I’ve mostly been so deep in the building phase that I didn’t have time for much else.
I did try to start delegating more to the other team and community members — but it’s not been too successful until now.
Or if it has, then I haven’t noticed any more free time yet…
However, I enjoy working hard, so I’m happy about the opportunity, and I plan to continue doing that in 2023! (with some extra delegation, of course)
First up, we’re preparing to launch a new web3 infrastructure product for game studios, develop our racing game further, and grow the NFT Tallinn event 2–3x bigger — reaching 1000+ attendees, 100+ speakers and 10+ side events. Additionally, there will be much more travelling! My intention is to also spend more quality time with my wife & kids, hopefully having them join me more in my travels as well…
In other numbers, this year, the amount of work-related meetings & video calls tripled to 683. In addition, I attended 60 conferences and events, hosted 107 Twitter Spaces, took 28 flights and was interviewed 12 times.
At the same time, I hosted/attended 15 pre-planned dinners and game nights (which I need to increase in 2023).
Talking about board games, my favourites for this year continued to be:
- 7 Wonders (the original w/ all expansions & Duel version)
- Terraforming Mars (the original w/ all expansions & Ares Expedition)
- Ticket to Ride
In addition, I enjoyed some of the new additions, including A Game of Thrones: The Board Game, Pandemic Legacy: Season 0, Scythe and The Crew.
As for the video games, I spent most of my time playing Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix, Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope, Broforce & Civilization 6 on my Nintendo, and World of Freight & Project Nebula as web3 games.
Personal fitness continues to be important for me, and finally, gyms have re-opened. Still, I only had 78 gym sessions, AKA 1.5x per week.
(I lowered my weekly average, which is another thing I need to improve in 2023)
In all this, my blog has been the thing that got the least attention this year. Essentially, I only wrote four posts in addition to this one, as most of my energy went into hosting Twitter Spaces and tweeting. That said, the blog got 2417 views and 965 reads. (I promise to try better in 2023)
Finally, my investments took a slight hit as we entered into recession. Funnily, I had been preparing for the possibility since late 2021, being more risk-averse and not using any leverage or investment products promising outstanding returns. Still, the portfolio dropped roughly 30% from 415k to 290k as most of it is invested in blockchain-related assets.
(it jumped across the 1M mark in May, so I can say I have been a millionaire)
That said, as most of my investments were initially made with a longer time horizon, I’m still content and believe most of them will reveal some great things in 2023 — regardless of the macro environment.
Overall, it’s been an incredible year!
Defeats & setbacks
Of course, there have also been some unplanned complications — mostly related to the company we’re building.
- We were not able to close our capital raise within the year, although we started the first discussions already at the start of 2022, went full-speed over the summer, and continued after a pivot until the very end of the year.
Initially, we had a complex pitch while being too early stage for most investors in our network. Later, we were too late as the turmoil across markets had already started, and everyone became more risk-averse.
But most of all, we are simply too far away from the capital and not connected enough yet — after all, our concepts get lots of great feedback from industry insiders; we simply lack funding to build it fast enough. - Running low on cash on hand made us change the course, for now, leading to a reduction of our team and thus further slowing the process.
Essentially, some of the original team members could not afford to continue to work alongside us, yet fortunately, there’s no bad blood.
Yet those who chose to remain are feeling optimistic for 2023!
So onwards we go…
My personal development
Like last year, I have continued going deeper into the rabbit hole of web3.
Essentially most of the content I’ve consumed has somehow been related to Protocols, NFTs and web3 technology in general.
Among other things, I really went deep by reading lots of white papers — with some standing out more, including Cardano, Celo, Ethereum, Flow and Polkadot.
In general, I started by learning how various protocols are actually built and how they have structured their organisations and tokenomics, including grant pools. Later, going deep into supply chain-related applications, followed by web3 gaming-related developer solutions.
(happy to share more technical documentation with those who care)
As a result, I’m evermore optimistic about the general future of web3 technologies — yet understand that we still have lots of infrastructure that needs to be built before the end-user applications can really utilise the power of blockchains and various concepts built upon it all.
More so, I’m becoming quite pessimistic about any project promising too much, too fast, as I now understand how early we are…
Yet for those looking to make their first steps within this new ecosystem — start by looking into the same materials I suggested last year:
- Not Boring blog by Packy McCormick (Read: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 & 10)
- Modern.Finance & Proof by Kevin Rose (Start listening from first ones)
Meanwhile, the other sources (outside of Twitter) I follow on this topic are The All-In Podcast, Altcoin Daily channel, Bitboy Crypto channel, Colossus Podcasts, The Daily Ralpha newsletter, Inside Cryptocurrency newsletter, The Milk Road newsletter & way too many Discord servers.
Books to read for 2023
I’m embarrassed to write this, but 2022 has been awfully poor when it comes to reading proper books.
In fact, most of the books I’ve read have been to my darling Scarlett. Together, we have finished 30+ books this year, including Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland, which I immensely enjoyed.
If anything, I can re-recommend something I re-read this year.
- “Measure what Matters” by John Doerr (everything about KPIs)
And I promise myself to do better in 2023!
Plans for 2023
Next year, I’m looking to work more, travel more, read more and take better care of my physical and mental health by visiting the gym more often and taking more time for play-time, both with family and friends, as well as alone.
But most of all, I intend to think and write more, which implies I need to delegate other tasks better, so I would have enough time for all this.
Along this, I expect to see WOF Labs and its projects prosper while I’m looking forward to seeing our kids evolve even more and perhaps being able to spend more quality time with my wife…
That said, I’m super excited for 2023!
