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Greetings all,

In this week’s episode of Ventures, my guest Veronica Satastume from Episode 81 graciously offered to interview me to reflect on the initial 99 episodes. She asked me about the origin story of the show, what surprised me along the way, themes that were/are compelling (e.g. Web3) along the way, advice for others considering starting a podcast, and expanding the definition of entrepreneurship.

Check it out: Celebrating Episode 100: Reflections on the origins of this podcast and the expanding definition of entrepreneurship and Web3

Reflections

I appreciated Veronica’s questions this week and the opportunity to talk about the origin of the show (Ventures) and my perspectives along the way. It was delightful to get a message from her after Ep81 that she wished I would talk more about myself in the episodes, and she offered to interview me for episode 100 (Thank you, Veronica 🙏).

For those who know me, consistently recording and releasing 100 straight weekly episodes - in addition to 100 newsletters - was a very low probability from the mindset and perspective of summer 2020. However, I fell in love with the process, learning, weekly habit, and feedback from you all. Something about direct email to people fits significantly better with my personality vs. social media (at least for now!).

Still, as I talk about often with early marketing teams of startups I work with (who are always much better at it than me), there is massive value in slowly building a body of content for the search algorithms of various platforms to consume and present to users. You never know down the line when a certain topic will become extremely valuable (“organic” traffic takes a long time to build up, but it’s worth it).

Overall, while the themes of the show have been wide ranging (from health science to cybersecurity to everything in between), not surprisingly Web3 became the major topic. This is now obvious to me (and many of us) because blockchains open up a completely new set of markets for entrepreneurs to create ventures. These products/services are consumed by a fascinating and emerging market of people that are exploring the combination of both “using” a service and owning it.

As I’ve hinted at before, I’m personally working within Prota Ventures (specifically our Labs division) on a new set of Web3 projects that I’m excited to share more about with you soon. Thematically, I’m extremely focused on how Web3 can help humans flourish all around the world. If you are working on something in the Web3 and social/global/environmental impact space, I’d love to talk to you.

Have a great rest of your week!

~Will