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Hi all,

In this week’s episode of Ventures, my guests Priya Baveja, Mike Anderson, Jake Varghese and I talk about Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) structure, governance, incentives, and participation. We are a subset of founders currently launching BanyanDAO (https://banyandao.xyz/), which is growing a community of Web3 entrepreneurial leaders to promote human flourishing. Our first training event - to level up Web2 product managers into Web3 - will be in April 2022 (exact dates TBA). For more details and to participate, join us in our Discord server and follow us on Twitter.

Check it out: Introducing BanyanDAO: Training and supporting Web3 product leaders to promote human flourishing :: with Priya Baveja, Jake Varghese, and Mike Anderson

I’m writing a book about Web3

There is a LOT going on in the Web3 universe. It’s extremely difficult (impossible, actually) to keep up. However, for friends/colleagues that are interested in my approach for explaining what’s going on, I’m writing a book in real-time here over the coming months. As I come across new concepts, acronyms, memes, blockchain ecosystems, etc… I’ll be adding content to applicable chapters and appendices. I’ve opened up comments/suggestions in the doc, so feel free to come join the fun :).

The Semantic Web

While many in the Web3 community may not realize this, The Semantic Web community has been referring to themselves as “Web 3.0” for a long time. Importantly, the term is well-deserved, since their vision is to ensure “a better Internet”, one in which data is structured in a way that machines can ingest and do helpful things for us as a global community.

In short, the Semantic Web’s vision is to help us establish standards for structured data so we can leverage one of the most important aspects of Web 3.0: composability (<-- highly recommended read from A16Z). If we can interoperate between chains and projects, then we can collectively build a better Internet together.

As an example of how Semantic Web principles work themselves into Web3 projects can be found in Square’s recent tbDEX protocol. In their whitepaper, they smartly leverage semantic principles (do a quick search for “semantic” in the PDF) to ensure that machines can properly read/write data in/out of different parts of their protocol (notably, identity hubs and verified credentials).

If you are a product leader in any way, especially if you are involved in establishing semantic data standards and protocols (or you work with them), spending time to immerse yourself in the history and community of the Semantic Web is important.

Have a great rest of your week!

~Will