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Greetings all,

In this week’s episode of Ventures,  I (https://www.linkedin.com/in/wclittle/) record a short screencast walking through initial thoughts about how to teach both Web2 and Web3 software development and product management and design. I talk about how I’ll be pointing students to resources along the way rather than building tutorials myself, and instead act as a curator and opinionated guide for how to best learn product/software development in today’s rapidly evolving environment. I’d encourage you to join us at BanyanDAO to follow along → https://www.banyandao.xyz/. Feel free to join our Discord server → https://discord.gg/95JRuPaTP8 

Additional thoughts and motivation

Because I invest in the earliest stage of software startups - and I have a huge heart for helping as many people as people become successful entrepreneurs - teaching people to code has always been a passion of mine.

When you learn to code, especially for building web/mobile apps, you gain a superpower. Solving problems and/or creating fun applications with code can result in value-creation to the point where people will pay cash and/or attention for it.

This kind of asset is much more valuable than most people realize, because you get the cash flow and the value of the underlying asset (similar to owning appreciating real estate that also generates rental income).  

Thus, I keep coming back to empowering people to code, and the landscape for building web products has changed dramatically in the last few years.

First, it now requires much more knowledge of the types of tools available, from sophisticated web services from cloud providers, to software frameworks, to blockchains, to web browser plugins. This means that to be a “technical product manager” in the modern era requires a lot more of you than it did twenty years ago (or even five years ago).

Second, while it’s fun to tinker with building misc apps of your own from a learning perspective, when it comes time to spend your own time/money on an application that you think people will pay money and/or attention for (i.e. starting a startup), it’s critically important to do market research and demand testing to refine your product. This - on top of learning how to work with brand and visual design people - makes the job of “product management” extremely difficult.

Therefore, approaching a top-level strategy toward product management and software development training - including the roadmap of an opinionated order of events and topics to cover - is my intention for how to write and use the Ventures podcast in 2023.

I’ll still have misc guests on key topics I find interesting along the way, but my goal is to create a solid set of podcasts that complement a written guide for learning.

If you’d like to participate, please join BanyanDAO’s Discord and I’ll see you there → https://discord.gg/95JRuPaTP8.

Have a great rest of your week!

~Will