In the piece “Activating Potential Founders,” David Cummings puts an open question on how can we activate founders within a region. For the last 8 years, we’ve been struggling with more or less the same question, exploring startup communities, and trying to create repeatable processes and patterns of work that can be justifiably replicated across initiatives. Despite these efforts, we still managed to get a lower number of founders from the sidelines than we would have liked. And it’s pretty obvious why: in Web2, the typical barriers to entry and incumbent risks are considerably high and the same seems too daunting to the average founder.

But, in Web3, we saw an opportunity.

There is a market for innovation, for new primitives to be set and explored, and for new playbooks to be written. In Web2, the opportunity of turning ideas into reality was largely filtered by who you know and how much capital you have. Internet hegemons had decimated entire spaces from social networks to advertising technology, and from video streaming and paid email to infrastructure. Their economies of scale and network effects mounted significant barriers to competition. But, in Web3, innovation is permissionless. Web3 companies can employ tokens to reward their customers for providing value — something that can lead to a clear upper hand for startups. And over time, as the network becomes more valuable, the user’s stake in the company also enhances thereby creating enormous incentives right from the get-go as long as the network is backed by a strong mission and there are enough participatory mechanics put in place. What’s more, with regulation still being in its nascent stages, crypto companies have some room to maneuver with new financial instruments and access pools of capital that web2 companies cannot.

Beyond these obvious advantages, there is also a real shot for ongoing innovation. We can all agree that open-source software fuels innovation in technology by powering every piece of software and server. And, crypto empowers open-source projects to monetize their innovation in a way that was never possible before. It’s all part of one virtuous cycle — DAOs bind a community of open-source software contributors through tokens; tokens provide an ongoing financial link that aligns long-term incentives, and foundations endowed with token stakes fuel the ongoing protocol development. Together, these elements help balance the capitalism needed to fuel progress with the benevolence intrinsic to the open-source ethos.

And finally, Web3 does away with the notion of a certain “pedigree” that excludes a majority of talented ambitious people from participating in the economics of innovation and limits the ingenuity of people with diverse points of view solving the same problems. With a value proposition being squarely set on the democratization of ownership models, the creators of this emerging technology come with different pedigrees, from all walks of life, with diverse interests and perspectives, and very much representative of the community that is being built for — all in all, a space that promotes entrepreneurship and sustained innovation.

How Halliday contributes to the space

While Web3 bespeaks a new kind of entrepreneurship in so many ways, founders still experience the same apprehensions as in Web2. A major reason that holds founders back is a fear of failure often stemming from a lack of industry acumen or experience dealing with the novel stresses of the Web3 ecosystem.

So, we sat down to address the very questions that needed addressing:

• What’s needed from an education, skills, funding, and community perspective?

• How do we get more people thinking about entrepreneurship in the early stages of their careers or education?

• How do we get more people with existing careers working on side hustles that could lead to a startup?

Based on our study and interactions with founders over the years and based on our industry experience, we, at Halliday, are focusing our energies on getting idea-stage Web3 startups to launch and help aspiring entrepreneurs wedge their foot into Web3. The Halliday and the DGX team have co-founded, between them, venture funds that manage over 1 billion dollars, 5+ startup exits, and a crypto portfolio of 20+ companies. Together, we have been building the ramparts on the sidelines, doubling down on research and acquiring deep tech expertise, building partnerships, finding the right talent, and designing tokenomics and governance blueprints for decentralized organizations.

Our goal is to perfect our mission: to help people with ideas turn them into fast-growing companies. How we do it by creating a competency gap filler — one, with masterclasses held by the most experienced minds in the industry; and two, by connecting ambitious, aspiring founders with world-class experts who know and thrive in the Web3 ecosystem. It is our belief that if we can invest human capital at the earliest stages, we can help those potential founders avoid pitfalls, truly put their vision into the best light, and begin generating traction at the early stages of their journey.

As we back these efforts with the right partnerships with Web3 ecosystems around the world, we see our efforts toward activating potential founders well within our grasp.