Beacon Podcast: The Essential Traits of a Web3 Founder

Recently, YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon discussed the challenges of being a founder in web3 on the Beacon Podcast with Kenzi Wang, Sachi Kamiya, and Diksha Dutta.

As a web2 founder who successfully made the move into crypto, Gabby Dizon learned that building in web3 is an entirely different experience. With the industry still in its infancy, startups are still experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t. This results in frequently shifting narratives around the goals and direction of the space, that founders must follow diligently and course correct as needed.

YGG has constantly evolved in response to changing market needs, while staying true to its mission to empower players to find success in the open Metaverse. YGG established the Guild Advancement Program (GAP) so that participating in the web3 gaming ecosystem would be a rewarding experience for players, issuing soulbound tokens (SBTs) in recognition of their achievements and to provide them with a headstart in building their onchain reputation. This put YGG in a unique position to be able to capitalize on the reputation-based narratives that were starting to take shape, as well as setting itself up for success when questing started to dominate the meta years later.

On the Beacon Podcast, Gabby joined Symbolic Capital co-founder Kenzi Wang, Sentient Director of Business Operations Sachi Kamiya, and soonami.io Head of Growth and Marketing Diksha Dutta to discuss his web3 founder’s journey so far, detailing the history of YGG, the precedent it set for other Filipino-led firms to establish themselves within the Silicon Valley VC community, and just how different of an experience he’s had in web3 compared to his web2 projects.

The following is an excerpt from their conversation, where Gabby goes in detail about important traits founders need to have to succeed in web3, how narrative-driven web3 is, and how much what web3 gaming is doing stands to benefit the larger gaming industry.

Listen to the full recording on YouTube.

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Kenzi (22:42): I want to switch gears a little bit, Gabby, and talk about your learnings as web3 founder. You've been around the block, you've done both web2 and also web3, and there's a big difference in them from mentality to execution. What are some of the most important qualities that you see for web3 founders to succeed that's different from web2?

Gabby (23:17): You really need to have a lot of curiosity for learning a lot of new things. We're at the forefront here. You can't just start a company and just hyperfocus on what you're doing, either. You need to know what’s going on in the web3 space or in your vertical, and in games. That kind of knowledge is really important, because web3 moves in narratives.

There's the thing that you're building, and then there's the narratives that are forming around it. To have any form of success, your product needs to match where the narratives are going, or you may need to pivot to match it, all while staying true to what your product is. This is very hard for people who are not in web3 to really understand.

Kenzi (24:26): What are some things that web3 founders can improve on to do better on their web3 journey?

Gabby (24:32): This is probably based on being on the earlier side of crypto adoption, but from what I've noticed, a lot of the early web3 founders are really good conceptually. They were good at creating new things, arriving at new concepts, and creating new primitives. While a lot of web2 founders are really good at execution and scaling, I would say that a lot of web3 companies have not yet really been able to scale to a point where you can serve millions of millions of users, which is kind of easy in web2 at this point.

We haven't really found those things that we can scale to maybe 10 million, 100 million users, at least from an application perspective. It's a little bit early for scale, so we need to be very creative on how we apply crypto primitives that matter to people and help them solve actual user problems. People always say, “You know what? What problems does crypto seem to actually solve?” but coming from my world, which is games, solving digital property rights and digital ownership of things is valuable. People might think, “What's the value of owning a piece of land or a sword inside a game?” But the video game industry on the web2 side is actually over $200 billion, so definitely there's a lot of value there. 

Now you're seeing some really good web2 founders start going into web3 and creating new products. But some of the best founders I've seen from web3 are web3-native. Luke of Pixels is a very good example. The founders of Axie Infinity, Sky Mavis, are good examples of that, where they actually haven’t made games before. They're coming from the web3 side, and it's the first time they're applying this to game development.

You can listen to the full recording on YouTube.

Follow Gabby to learn more about YGG’s meta-leading approach to questing.

Follow Kenzi, Sachi, and Diksha for insights on the web3 industry from builders and leaders in the ecosystem.

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