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Greetings all,

In this week’s episode of Ventures, my guest Mike Sorgenfrei and I discuss his web3 startup, Encore (https://encore.fans). We talk about its origin story, where Encore fits in the marketing software stack for an athlete/influencer, self-sovereign identity for fans, how Verified Credentials are being used, how to build a profile of a fan by allowing them to opt-in their data directly, and the entrepreneurial journey that Mike and his team have taken to get a web3 startup off the ground.

Check it out: Self-sovereign identity for sports fans, influencer engagement in web3, and the Encore.fans story :: with Mike Sorgenfrei

Engineering Web3 for positive ESG

ESG stands for “Environment, Social, and Governance” and has been an understandably hot topic the last handful of years.

In Web3, there is a movement specifically around climate change called SolarPunk that embraces general ESG principles as well.

Recently, I’ve been noodling on the “Can’t Be Evil” concept thrown around in Web3 alot (aside: if you haven’t seen A16Z’s Can’t Be Evil NFT Licenses, you should check ‘em out). Fundamentally, Satoshi introduced “math” in Proof of Work to properly incentivize miner behavior to create a rock-solid and reliable blockchain. This dynamic has been extended into things like Proof of Stake and then into various token/social/governance models (e.g. in DAOs), and I wonder if it can be extended even more.

It’s no secret that leadership and management remains one of the biggest struggles of DAOs, and I wonder if there’s a way to combine “math” (AI), incentive designs, and social/status reinforcement to architect a leadership and management structure that effectively “hires and fires” people - especially those in any sort of leadership position - to maintain quality, effectiveness, and direction toward a shared vision.

If we think back to the founding of a country - say the USA - why did it “work”? In one sense, the governmental structures and checks-and-balances formed because it was life or death for people - or at least some form of oppression vs. “freedom” dynamic - and therefore people had a huge amount of skin in the game.

I’d love to engage in a conversation with you if you have any thoughts/ideas about this…about how “math” and smart incentive structures can be designed to solve the leadership and management problem in DAOs.

Have a great rest of your week!

~Will