Over the past couple of days, I attended the eMerge Americas 2023 conference in Miami. Having spent most of my past corporate career working on the marketing and business side of tech, I always love to nerd out on tech innovation, so this was definitely the place to be.
Aside from the keynotes, the participation from every tech college and university in the area, and some of the goliath infrastructure and software companies, I like to dive into the individual startups. I love speaking with founders and hearing where they are directing their energy and how they plan to disrupt different industries. With over 100 startups participating in the event, I had so many interesting conversations. Here are a few key takeaways:
Web3 is still a key theme in tech, but the conversations are maturing.
There were talks on cannabis & crypto, why the metaverse matters, a pitch by Magma on their platform to create real estate digital twins, and a presentation by BITMAIN on their crypto mining ecosystem.
What “community” truly means to a Web3 investor.
I attended a really interesting cafecito lounge talk with Abhishek Saxena, Principal with Polygon Ventures, and Liang Wu, Co-founding Managing Partner with Eleven26 Capital and Harvard Web3 research fellow, on how to evaluate a Web3 company vs. a Web2 company. It was interesting to hear them discuss how they placed value on community in Web3. This has become such a buzzword, and as Liang stated, most people think of community in a numbers way. But they agreed that it is far better to have 100 people in your Discord and on Twitter who actively engage, meet up at IRL events, and contribute, than 10,000 people who don’t talk. “Community is hard to measure because it’s not a math exercise” Liang explained. Saxena agreed, stating that they don’t value a company based on community vanity metrics. “It’s about how they use community to onboard more members and reduce the cost of acquiring new users”, he stated. They also count users in “community” since they give you feedback on a product,but, as Saxena explained, it’s when a project decentralizes and the community evaluates proposals for implementation that it truly has traction. “We look at how engaged the community is, but also at what levels they are participating. Is community acting as a distribution channel? Is community acting as customers and providing feedback? Is community providing improvement proposals? Are they participating in the product roadmap?”
How to think about Web3 Tokenomics.
Both speakers felt that when a founder slaps tokenomics onto their project, sets up a Discord channel and claims to be a Web3 company, they’re getting it wrong. “It’s not about having a token, it’s about what it does in the ecosystem. In Web2 you’re building a company. In Web3 you’re building an ecosystem”, Liang explained. “That’s the hard part.” Saxena agreed that when you create your tokenomics, you should create it for the long term. Don’t rely on a bull run. Focus on the supply and demand dynamics of the token, and how it is used. Liang emphasized, “People buy in because the best way to get a token to go up in value is to do work and add to it.”
Web3 is really the next evolution of open source.
“Over 90% of the internet has been built on open source,” explained Liang. “The opportunity now is can we take that and expand it beyond just code. Corporations may question why people would contribute to Web3, except that has literally been the behavior of people on the internet. Now people are just trying to coordinate better and add economics to it, which I think is a powerful concept.” Saxena agreed, “A web3 company is actually just an open source company.”
And one final quote from Liang that I thought was spot on.
“Oftentimes, because we have the history of the internet to fall back on, we evaluate new technologies with frameworks that have existed over decades. I look at a nonfungible token as a medium you can own, and program truly anything you want onto it. People are programming it for more financial use cases, but use cases can address any walled garden. For example, airlines could share loyalty programs, but in Web2, they have no incentive to. It’s very zero sum. But if you have something open that cuts across companies and countries, you can do more. As an example, if your coffee consumption is shared and I want to do something for coffee drinkers, I could run a campaign to reach people with that behavior because the information is all public. In return, the consumer would receive a benefit from having their information open. “ Saxena double clicked on that position with a bit of psychology. “Humans respond to a system of incentives. A token provides an incentive to every party in the ecosystem so they benefit from their participation and act in a way that helps the ecosystem grow.”
The big disruptive theme of so many talks and startups at the conference was AI.
Even though it technically started in the 60s, this clearly seems to be the year of traction. There were talks about ethical AI, about getting on the machine learning & AI train before it leaves without you, and language learning in the age of XR. There were also a number of interesting startups applying AI, including:
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- Builder.ai – offering instant app prototyping
- Admetricks.com – applying AI to assessing competitor ad spend & success
- Wisecut.video – AI video editor
The media presentation with Fast Company, Bloomberg and The Block also steered their panel conversation in the direction of AI. Despite the cautionary tale of businesses who thought they could game Google by loading up massive ChatGPT content onto their websites until they were penalized, all three outlets agreed that the power of AI will be in how we are able to leverage it to make humans more efficient. It is the start of a new way of working.
Robotics continues to be an emerging trend.
I get pretty excited about this given that my daughter is working on her robotics engineering degree, and also because robots are just cool. I think my favorite booth was the disco floor meets dancing robots for the NSU Levan Center of Innovation, an impressive 54,000 square foot maker space, supporting ventures from ideation to post-acceleration. But other robotics startups were present, showing off their own innovations.
Use vanity to activate influencer campaigns.
I think the best marketing tip I received was from Allison Ellsworth, founder of the beverage company Poppi. Rather than split their advertising budget between traditional influencer shoutouts, and billboards, they paid to put influencers on their billboards and buses, who in turn were happy to amplify on their social media at no extra charge, because they thought it was so cool to be on a billboard. Hundreds of other people posted content across thecity,y taking selfies with the influencers’ billboards as well. Overall, the campaign generated 136 million impressions. Brilliant!!
And of course, it was great running into my clients Endeavor and Prospera to catch up on all things tech startups. I’m looking forward to continuing the many conversations started at the event.