I had an epiphany yesterday: the thing that separates us from people at the top of the chain is that we hyper rationalise everything and are married to implementation details while uber successful people are focused on larger narratives that attract relentless optimism and capital. As long as people buy the narrative. they don’t care about the details.

Let’s take the example of DAOs.

We know that the best companies are driven by maniacal founders who are relentless in their vision. Most of their decision making is top town and the CEOs don’t act like they are running a democracy. For example you can take Jobs, Bezos, Travis, Musk, Larry Page, Evan Spiegel, and many other Silicon Valley CEOs. This means that it is almost impossible for a DAO to build the next Amazon, Facebook, Uber. Yes DAOs can coexist, but I doubt any great company can be built through the principles of decentralised governance. DAOs will mostly be tools for raising capital quickly and then finding arbitrage oppotunities. Not for running trillion dollar companies. Happy to be proven wrong.

But you see this narrative everywhere on web3 Twitter: DAOs will eat the world. Every company will be a DAO. We will all earn based on what a smart contract decides.

Does not make any sense, but 100s of millions of dollars is being raised today to make it a reality.

Talking about decentralised decision making, lets take one more example.

Instagram in their early days figured out that a lot of users are in countries with bad internet. The feedback of hearting a post takes time. And people don’t get the gratification sooner. So they decided to update the state on the client instantly once use pressed the button. The change on the backend would happen later. I am guessing that this is the behavior in most consumer products now. State on client gets changed earlier instead of waiting for the response to the API call.

Imagine this decision being taken by a fucking DAO. I can’t stop laughing at the thought of Evan Spiegel brainstorming with DAO members on whether items in the stories section come in chronological order or reverse chronological.

(When I posted this people pointed out that you can delegate decision making now and DAOs will behave most like public company boards. To understand how public companies behave I would recommend you to read Barbarians at the gate.)

Have you also realised how all web 3 content is mostly about what will happen 10 years in the future? Web 3 will do this, web 3 will do that. Same with how ICOs were in 2017. Have you realised now we call them tokens (mostly) and not coins? So that people who burned their hands in 2017 don’t get PTSD. And this whole rebranding of crypto as web3.

I do get the appeal. There are a few legit use cases when it comes to web3:

  • Store of value for people living in 3rd world countries who don’t trust the Government. Bitcoin being more lindy with each passing year.
  • Remittance.
  • Getting first 1000 fans.
  • NFTs for royalty sharing.
  • Tokens as user acquisition and retention lever.

Atleast these make logical sense. But this whole Fintech is just crypto now, Consumer is just crypto now, Gaming is all crypto now grinds my gears. But while I am digging into the details, trying to figure out how this will actually happen, others are raising funds to invest into the future based on larger narratives. Maybe this is what separates us: willingness to ignore the details.