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Greetings all,

In this week’s episode of Ventures, my guest Mike Anderson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeandersonjr/) and I discuss all-things startup ideation in the modern era. In light of this being the topic of Week 1 of Prota’s new incubator (https://www.protaventures.com/labs), we dive into what makes a good idea, what makes a bad idea, how and why to integrate your idea with your own skills and knowledge of a market, how to reverse-engineer ideas based on what investors and consumers want, why finding startup ideas has changed over the years, and the importance of maintaining vision and grit through challenging seasons of startup life.

Check it out: How to generate compelling startup ideas :: with Mike Anderson

Web3 primers are hard to write

A friend shared with me recently this primer on Web3 written by the folks over at McKinsey. I’d highly recommend it.

I have started writing my own primer on Web3 here, but it has turned into more of an outline of a book. Writing a succinct primer proved extremely difficult, which is why I’m impressed with what McKinsey produced.

Of course, the reason why writing a primer on Web3 is hard is that not everyone agrees on what Web3 is.

While I have an 8-part definition in my writing, McKinsey boils it down to essentially three things:  tokens, smart contracts, and blockchains.

This has me thinking…Web3 really just boils down to blockchains as an additional part of the web  “stack” (servers, IP addresses, protocols, databases, browsers, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc…). With blockchains, you can create various types of tokens and move things around via smart contracts in order to bring to life DeFi products, DAOs, and dApps. Additional talking points - such as open metaverses and self-sovereign identity - are layers of abstraction above these core concepts.

If you are aware of any other great primers on Web3, I’d love to learn more. Please send them my way.

Have a great rest of your week!

~Will