Is the Web3 hype over, or is it just getting started? In this episode, we’re joined by Web3 pioneer, investor, and thought leader Ethan Pierse for a deep dive into the current state and future of decentralized technologies.
Ethan pulls no punches, discussing why Web3 hasn’t seen mass adoption, the problem with “recycled capital” , and why the future isn’t about the technology itself, but the problems it solves. We explore the powerful convergence of AI and blockchain, how agentic AI will revolutionize e-commerce, and what it takes for a startup to succeed in today’s market.
Whether you’re a founder, investor, or just crypto-curious, this conversation is packed with unfiltered insights on building real value, the shifting landscape of venture capital, and the rise of the “solopreneur economy.”
Joe Benso (00:02)
Welcome again to the Tokened podcast. Today we’re joined by a true pioneer in the Web3 space, Ethan Pierse. He’s a partner at Borderless Ventures, director of the Crypto Assets Institute, and one of the most recognized voices on stages all around the world like Web Summit, South by Southwest, Viva Tech, and many more. From investing in frontier tech to advising Fortune 500s on Web3 strategy, Ethan is helping shape the decentralized economy across Europe and beyond. And we’re looking forward to having a wide-ranging conversation about all of that. Ethan, thanks for joining us today.
Ethan (00:38)
Thanks for having me, Joe. That was a great intro. I need to pay you better. That’s cool.
Joe Benso (00:43)
We’re paying you on this one, I think. So, I know you’ve been all around the world at events. You’re often doing keynotes and are a true thought leader in this space, having spoken at over 80 stages a year, I think, at one point. And you’ve run into Michael, I know, at some of these events. It seems like it’s kind of a small space still, right? You talk about broad adoption in this space, and what are the things that you’re noticing as you are doing these keynotes, as you’re speaking at these events? Are you seeing some more adoption? What’s the main thing that you’re trying to communicate at these events?
Ethan (01:33)
Yeah, I’d say before I mention the stuff that sounds less positive, I’ll start by saying I’m extremely bullish on Web3 and all the ways that tokenization as a technology can be applied. We see rewards and loyalty, ticketing, music, luxury products, digital identity, and a whole long list of really cool things that Web3 can do. I’m also super bullish on how the underlying technologies of blockchain and crypto can really democratize finance and create opportunities for anyone.
That said, we are probably in a less happy place right now in a lot of things in Web3 and crypto, just because there hasn’t been a lot of new money or new interest in the space for quite a while. It’s mostly recycled capital that’s going into projects. People see their favorite project get cheap, so they buy another one, or something spikes, they make good money on Bitcoin or whatever, and now they’re able to get into some other things.
There isn’t a lot of new interest, whether it’s the reality of the markets itself or, as you mentioned, at the events. It’s pretty much the same crowd, unfortunately, for the past couple of years. If you’re a founder like Michael, I think that’s the big problem right now, the big trouble point that we can dive into, which is that we need more people directly interested in the technologies if we want this side of it to grow.
More importantly, the message I push all the time at conferences is: nobody cares about technology. We need to build real startups in Web3, and startups solve problems. People don’t care about technology; they care about whether or not you’re solving the problem that they have. Part of that is, yes, we need to onboard more people into Web3 so there are more builders, more advocates, and more people bridging over into other spaces in tech.
But the reality is, we just need to onboard Web3 into more people because there’s just not enough interest in the sense that it’s not about Web3. People are just going to download an app and it’s going to do a thing. Like all the other technologies that make it do its thing, people will be happy with the solution. Underneath that will be lots of Web3 and blockchain.
Unfortunately, it’s still a highly technical space. At events, it’s mostly people who are true believers, who’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, and many of them are just lovely and super cool to hang out with. That’s great, but you can’t build a business on a million people in terms of scale. The reality is, we’ve got maybe five to ten million wallets of real people out there playing with this stuff on a regular basis. There are a lot more wallets out there, but we all have dozens, and those wallets are not necessarily active either.
Sorry, that was maybe not the short answer you were looking for, but diving into the idea, I’m really bullish on it. People are building, people are working hard, and people are trying to stick this out. But the reality is, we’ll get to that a little bit later with AI and things, but I think we have a big issue with a lot of startups trying to sell or network the same people together, selling to the same audience. At this point, we’re pretty saturated, I think.
It’s not really a criticism of any of those people or any of those things. It’s just that thinking you’re going to make e-commerce grow because you start a PHP conference or make apps grow on Apple because everybody goes to the Mac and iOS developer conference in 2009 or 2010—it really scales once everybody else uses things and comes to those conferences like a Web Summit, where a small part of the discussion is Web3 or blockchain, but there’s a lot more going on with people solving cool things with apps and insights and stuff like that. Anyway, random answer. My brain’s maybe on weird mode today. I’ll try and rein that in.
Michael Ros (03:59)
Yeah.
Joe Benso (04:37)
That was great.
Michael Ros (05:12)
No, it’s…
Ethan (05:20)
You make e-commerce grow because you start a PHP conference or make apps grow on Apple because everybody goes to the developer, the Mac and iOS developer conference in 2009 or 2010. It really scales once everybody else uses things and everybody else comes to those conferences like a Web Summit or things like that, where a small part of the discussion is Web3 or blockchain. But there’s a lot more going on with people solving cool things with apps and insights and stuff like that. Anyway, random answer. My brain’s maybe on weird mode today. I’ll try and rein that in.
Michael Ros (05:58)
Okay, and what you saw right there is the need to rebuild our first hotel booking platform on blockchain. People are like, so what’s the point, right? So, what solution do you really bring? It’s like removing the middleman; it becomes cheaper. Okay, then it does make sense, but they don’t care at all about the technology, right? And also, of course, the hype changed, right? The hype around Web3, where you first could raise easy money by mentioning Web3 or blockchain, has changed completely, right? Okay, but what kind of AI to implement? And then it becomes cool again because of Web3 Plus—okay, now it’s a bit cooler, right? So, it’s 100% there, and it’s 100% about the solution.
And as you see, you have different people on this page. People really try to build something, and a lot of degens and people just want to get out and have fun, right? So, you see those people everywhere, as you probably see as well, but unfortunately, the number of real builders who really build a solution that can help with blockchain is still limited. I think if you look at the market like two years ago, of course, it was, I would say, the peak of most of the NFT projects. If you’re looking at the Bored Apes, I think they were 100 Ethereum, roughly two years ago, a bit longer. So, a lot of things have changed in the past two years, right? You see things have to become more professional. How do you see it evolving, especially focusing more on the European market?
Ethan (07:17)
Yeah, around that point, I guess maybe three years ago, I was at SLUSH, which is the big general tech event in Europe. It’s based in Helsinki in November. We were at the offices of Supercell, the big video game company. A lot of video game companies are in Helsinki. The CEO asked—we had a roundtable discussion about some different things with probably a dozen or so people—and I asked a question of what he thought about NFTs because the video game space with in-game assets and things like that is a really cool opportunity. Actually, a lot of crypto comes from video games in the historical model of people learning about in-game economies and seeing that as a way to maybe take digital currency outside of that world.
His response, I thought, was interesting when I asked him about NFTs and the video game stuff. He said that he really felt like people were overestimating the importance of NFTs in the short term and dramatically underestimating their importance in the long term. I would kind of echo that sentiment. I think we’re in this middle place where the early buzz has worn out. There are some great projects out there, some great examples of things. I’m wearing my Plane East from Air Baltic; there’s fantastic stuff, but there was also a lot of grift, a lot of people building things of no value.
A lot of people were raising a lot of money with a project who were first-time founders and didn’t know how to actually deploy that capital into scaling a business around a legitimate idea that they had. I think a lot of that, the good and the bad, we’ve gotten past most of that first mode. Now we’re in this lull, and I think we’re going to see people bringing back these technologies piece by piece as a part of a larger solution that tackles whatever a large company or brand is doing, whether it’s rewards and loyalty or the other things we can talk about, like the ticketing thing that will come back huge, or what you’re building.
All this kind of stuff is going to innovate continually over the next couple of years and it will use the Web3 and blockchain stacks to accomplish it, but that will not be seen from the outside. They will probably not exhibit at your favorite blockchain or crypto conference. They will not have a yacht at your favorite DJ activity. None of that stuff is going to be a part of that. It’s just going to be people leveraging these technologies to do the thing that they can do in the midst of a larger technological solution.
I think the bigger piece of that will be AI, especially agentic AI. If we talk about agents being these individual things that do a specific task, if we look at Zapier, for example, or other platforms like that people might have used, where it’s, if I receive an email that’s from this person, write a reply, ask me to check on the draft, send me a message, publish that over here to a Google Doc, put that in my Notion—API-driven steps. If we add reasoning to that, it becomes agentic AI where each of those things becomes a separate little agent.
The reason I bring that up is because I think that the big scale that we’re really going to see in Web3, and especially in blockchain and crypto, is a lot of those agents are going to be, most of them actually, working alone between each other, and the humans aren’t a part of that workflow except at the end and the beginning or maybe once or twice in the middle. With agentic AI, we’re going to need a way to have trust in those conversations and those transactions.
I think some of that data, when necessary, will be validated or at least in some way put onto a blockchain so that we can audit that from the outside in a trustless way. Then I also think a lot of those agents are going to need to do transfers of value between each other for microtransactions, very small amounts of money or larger, but that’ll be stablecoins or some other interesting way to leverage that. Why have it be fiat and why have it be legacy fiat systems when, if it’s already purely digital between agentic AI agents, then that could make a lot of sense?
I think all of that is going to explode in Europe because incredible things are happening in AI very quickly. You saw this at Paris Blockchain Week, where one of the days, half the track of conferences was all agentic AI. Paris Blockchain Week’s organizers in July are doing the RAISE AI Summit. So, they took their AI thing and made it a separate, complete event. I’ve seen this at all the AI events, or well, actually, all of the Web3 or crypto events I’ve spoken at in the last six to nine months.
Joe Benso (11:45)
Mm.
Ethan (12:02)
They all have decentralized AI conversations going on. They all have agentic talks that are talking about Web3 or blockchain. They all have all these pieces married together. I think that’s going to see a huge explosion in these technologies being used. I don’t know that from the outside, we’re going to feel that in the Web3 or crypto ecosystems, because it may start to finally grow up outside of the community of people that care about it and just become a technology that’s leveraged by developers to do a specific thing.
Joe Benso (12:32)
Yeah.
Michael Ros (12:33)
I’m curious there because with Sleep, we launched this six weeks ago together with Coinbase. With the agent kit of Coinbase, we launched an agentic AI agent which actually can book travel on your behalf. So, the agent is booking travel on your behalf and can even do the checkout without even saying, “Oh, you just booked the travel for you without clicks.” But how do you think e-commerce will use and focus on agentic AI, make decisions, and purchase actually on your behalf, maybe even your groceries? They understand exactly what you need and what your patterns are there. They order for you, they do the checkout for you. Do you think we’re moving into this direction with agentic AI?
Ethan (13:13)
Yeah, I think, especially if we keep that conversation tied to Web3, although we can have a full-on AI conversation because it’s a lot of what I do with the AI piece. But if we tie it in, all the stuff around rewards and loyalty, around supply chain, around things related to ticketing, all that kind of stuff where we have some connection to a brand and to a product because we buy it regularly or because we are fans of it or whatever that might be, then obviously the AI workflows that companies are going to adopt in every single vertical of technology are going to, when useful, leverage either crypto in the form of some kind of stable currency transaction.
So, probably stablecoins, hopefully not CBDCs, but if we have sovereign stablecoins and that works, I think it’ll probably be a lot of it just pure stablecoin. It doesn’t matter what value it’s at; it’s really connected to and paying to. I think we’ll see the blockchain used for the pieces of that information we need to just make sure we can trust.
For example, if there are transactions between a Sleep and Booking or Sleep and the hotels or whatever, and we want to make sure that the agent doing that can be audited, then those things will potentially leverage the blockchain in a way where one of the agents in that hundreds-of-agents workflow will put some of that conversation onto a blockchain, not really as a database, but just to be able to audit those conversations, that these things took place at a certain time and that the right amount of trust in identifying who the parties involved in that transaction are is there.
I think maybe ZK proofs and stuff like that will become important. Those are the kinds of technologies to provide some privacy to a lot of that too, so that agents are working on behalf without identifying us constantly through the whole process. There’s all kinds of stuff there where this again becomes very crypto and very blockchain in the agentic conversation.
So, I think for e-commerce, whether it’s every two months Amazon sending me the thing I told it I want every two months, or it just knowing that because my refrigerator told it that I needed that because it’s connected, or is it because I also have rewards and loyalty programs with certain brands and products that in some other way are triggering transactions? For example, I have my nice Oral-B electric toothbrush, and so Oral-B every two months is sending me another set of brushes or whatever that might be. All those kinds of things that are automated now using some kind of an API or just a database and other kinds of trigger things—we’re going to remove as much of the human factor from that and create agents around it.
If you’re technical at all, you’re probably thinking we already do all that. But we do all that in a hardcoded way using APIs or things like we talk about with Zapier in agentics or just that whole process. But adding reasoning to it, allowing the ability for an LLM to come in and just say, “Hmm, what do I do now?” It’s just the evolution of that piece of that. And that is going to dramatically change a lot of stuff around e-commerce where it’s going to just maybe have a better idea of what we need at what point in time.
I would say, not quite a direct answer to that, but really still in the same subject, it will be about the marketing around e-commerce. The ability for us to target so much better the right people on Insta or TikTok or YouTube or anywhere else through social video for product sales is going to become even more specific and more targeted because of AI.
Things as simple as Canva right now—you can, on the enterprise version of Canva, if you’ve got a template of an image for an ad, you can actually, instead of having the different texts and the image of the person and the background and the colors and all that hardcoded, you can actually select each of those elements and make them a part of an API call. Now what you can do is you can have an agent that’s reading a whole bunch of stuff from your personas from a HubSpot thing or a Google Doc or whatever. Now you could actually make a different ad for Joe, for you, and for me and push those out with directly targeted text to our interests to Insta, for example.
That stuff is absolutely crazy, and it’s already here. So, that ad is only used once, or it’s used at least for a very tight demographic around me specifically or whatever that might be. That’s going to blow up the e-commerce space because it will dramatically increase the relevance of the ads I’m seeing. So, I want to see this content. In fact, this content will not be an ad; it’ll just be content because it’s stuff I want to see anyway. I just happen to buy something from it. But it’s also going to create—the conversions are going to be even more significant with those technologies.
I think all of that is a huge piece of where this goes. And obviously, we can see the pieces in there where it could be blockchain or Web3 pieces tagged in, but it won’t be a Web3 thing. It won’t be a blockchain thing. And I mean, we might say it’s an AI thing, but all it really is, is going to be a marketing thing.
Joe Benso (17:58)
Yeah.
Michael Ros (17:20)
You.
Ethan (18:19)
Because it’s stuff I want to see anyway. I just happen to buy something from it. But it’s also going to create—the conversions are going to be even more significant with those technologies. I think all of that is a huge piece of where this goes. And obviously, we can see the pieces in there where it could be blockchain or Web3 pieces tagged in, but it won’t be a Web3 thing. It won’t be a blockchain thing. And I mean, we might say it’s an AI thing, but all it really is, is going to be a marketing thing.
Joe Benso (18:39)
Yeah. Right. It seems like these technologies are converging together. They’re very synergistic. AI kind of filling in the gaps of the usability that blockchain kind of had. It’s detractors for overestimating in the short term how valuable blockchain or NFTs can be, possibly due to the lack of really technical user interfaces and rails to really get the promise of what blockchain can deliver.
You mentioned the marketing side of things. Do you see that the adoption of blockchain or NFTs or fulfilling the promise of what this technology can do was more of a marketing issue or problem, like just getting the word out about what’s the value of blockchain, like Michael said, “So what?” And now with AI being able to target very specifically messages and messaging people on their direct interests, especially in an e-commerce way, which is what blew up Web2, right?
So, when we think of AI and blockchain, it’s all going to be part of Web3, and we won’t, like you said, even need to call it Web3. It’s just this next iteration of how we interact digitally. Is this a marketing issue? Is this a technical issue? Is AI solving both of those things and filling that gap? And are we in for something that’s going to scale up all these innovative promises that we’ve been waiting for? It seems like for so long, we keep saying we’re still early, but how early do you think we are now with AI coming on and solving some of these problems and filling these gaps?
Ethan (20:28)
Yeah, I think what’s already here in a lot of ways is definitely usable. I have four different agents that now run my life that I’ve built either hardcoded onto a server. I use things like n8n, which is a platform for building stuff. It’s kind of like Zapier, but more the current version, especially the agentic piece from everything around my scheduling, my tasks, content. It reads my life. I’m sorry.
Michael Ros (20:54)
But you’re real, right? Just to make sure we’re recording now. You’re real, right? You’re not an avatar this year, right? Okay, just want to make sure it’s not another agent or anything like this. Okay. Just checking. For sure.
Joe Benso (20:57)
Are you real?
Ethan (20:59)
Yeah, exactly. No, I sent you three photos and just my head. So, there’s no—it’s all good. Well, actually, to be fair, that’s not far from that either. In fact, you wouldn’t know the difference except you would just catch every now and then. So, no, we really are already there where this could be completely fake. I actually saw one the other day where a guy posted a video of him on a Zoom call. And then it showed that he was actually sitting in a chair over in the corner. But all he’d done was he had a little app that was using his avatar, and it looked just like him. It was perfect.
Joe Benso (21:25)
Yeah.
Ethan (21:26)
So, no, I think we actually are already there. But yeah, we’ll see. There’s so many rabbit holes we can go down with so many of these things. No, I think the big part of your question, Joe, is around why this didn’t work or why it didn’t really take off in the same way it could have given all the promise of these technologies.
Michael Ros (21:32)
Okay.
Joe Benso (21:34)
We cleared that up.
Ethan (21:54)
Honestly, I think it’s because Web3 has just been a mix of too many things, meaning you’ve got pure crypto stores of value and currencies like Bitcoin. You’ve got application framework places like Ethereum, where you can just build anything, and it’s the ecosystem, it’s the fuel, it’s the tech, it’s all of it. That’s super cool.
Joe Benso (22:03)
Yeah.
Ethan (22:17)
You’ve got meme coins, or you’ve got all kinds of coins first, which were maybe because people wanted to do a blockchain a different way. Maybe it was just to make money—different versions of that. Then you have NFTs, which serve very interesting purposes. But in the beginning, they were primarily digital art and then community-driven digital art projects, like Bored Apes or Pudgy Penguins or whatever. Then you had the meme coin thing.
Joe Benso (22:39)
You.
Ethan (22:43)
We’ve got all the other amazing uses of NFTs, the real uses of NFTs in a lot of ways for me, like what you’re trying to build, Michael, with tokenizing the booking process and everything around travel. The problem is we lumped all of that into one single thing, and that’s not going to interest anyone except a few of us for all of that stuff to be a thing. Even in crypto, you don’t find people—there’s only a subset of us that care about all of it. So, that’s a hard sell when you’re trying to package too many of those things together.
I think it was unclear what the value proposition was of these technologies because there were too many things tied together. You try to explain NFTs, but people were hearing crypto, and because they have to, you have to explain that a little bit or whatever mix of that. So, combine that with the fact that, again, I’m in love with this space. I’m in love with these technologies.
Joe Benso (23:26)
You.
Ethan (23:39)
But there has been so much grift and so many bad people come through this space that has short-circuited a ton of the scale opportunities because every time something seems to go right, some new thing tanks the whole thing. Like, we were on target, and this would be my only political statement of the whole thing—I’ll rein it in—but we were on target maybe to have a much more friendly regulatory environment in the United States, which is probably going to be the case, until, of course, the president rugs everybody with a meme coin.
The number of people that got screwed and that will never touch anything that’s tokenized again, if they understand that, that will never look at another NFT or good meme coin project or anything—that’s just not okay. Again, I’ll probably get fried for that on the politics of it, but it really, to me, isn’t even political. It’s just about the fact you can’t do that.
Joe Benso (24:12)
You. Yeah.
Michael Ros (24:29)
You.
Joe Benso (24:32)
So, you’re not a holder.
Michael Ros (24:33)
Ha ha ha.
Ethan (24:38)
In the sense of, we can’t want mass adoption and screw everyone along the way. That has not worked out very well. So, I think that’s why I believe that most of this is done in a lot of ways, that these technologies will be used in the context that would have been the smart thing all along, which is they’re just leveraging blockchain and crypto like stablecoins or the NFT space or whatever to be part of the technology stack of a solution, which is how all technology scales.
It’s just Web3 and blockchain and crypto have stuck themselves still in our world of being all about the technology of it. So, I think that the only way to escape a lot of that negativity, but also confusion around it being too many things that don’t interest—like if I’m giving a workshop to, I give workshops to a ton of the fashion and luxury industries because they were very interested in Web3 for rewards and loyalty and other things.
They want all of the NFT goodness, and they want none of the crypto, and they want none of the degen, and they want none of the whatever. And that offends a lot of people in this space, but it’s not how tech scales.
Joe Benso (25:47)
Me. Yeah.
Ethan (25:55)
This is not about the five million people in the world that give a crap about crypto or degen stuff. This is about the eight billion people in the world that we could build solutions for. So, I think that’s what stuck us there, Joe. Sorry, I got stuck on the first part of your question about why this hasn’t scaled. But I think it’s really important because it really gives us the next—how does it scale? Which is the opposite of that. We leverage all these amazing technologies and talent to build things, but we add in all the other tech that needs to be used, like AI.
Joe Benso (26:17)
That’s a great point.
Ethan (26:25)
And then we package that, and we sell a solution.
Joe Benso (26:27)
Make it useful.
Michael Ros (26:28)
You do a lot of advisory work. You just mentioned you’re advising different fashion companies, you’re advising different startups, which is amazing. But another part you do as well is investing, right? You have Borderless Ventures; you’re investing in early-stage companies. Can you share more about Borderless Ventures and maybe also what your focus is now? Has your focus changed in the past years? And because you see, I think, hundreds of pitches per week, I think, passing by as well. Do you see some changes there as well?
Ethan (26:58)
Yeah, I think I get around a dozen pitch decks a day on LinkedIn cold. I get at least 20 emails a day for something. And here’s the secret no one wants to hear: I don’t read any of it. And I’m not an important investor. So, if you imagine what I’m—
Michael Ros (27:02)
You.
Joe Benso (27:14)
Does your agent, AI, read it?
Ethan (27:25)
Exactly. Maybe in the future, that would be—I’ve actually thought of that a little bit. And you better believe that the funds, the big funds, are very agentic and very, very data-driven because they also can’t process all of what’s out there or all the submissions, but also need to be making, they need to be seeing the opportunity behind the opportunity by reading the data.
When you’re doing early stage, you don’t have a lot of data to work with. So, it’s more of a feeling about founders than it is about whether or not the thing makes sense. But most early-stage doesn’t work out. And that’s just—nobody can see that coming. Maybe the data can see it a little bit better, but a lot of that’s just human.
So, yeah, Borderless is, well, first off, it’s really just a family office. So, it’s more about our investments. But it also has a syndicate activity. The shortest version of that I can do is: imagine if you’re raising funds as a founder, say you’re raising a million dollars, and the smallest ticket you want to take from an investor is a hundred thousand because you don’t want to have too many investors. You don’t want to take 20 or 50K tickets because you want to keep each round to around 10 investors or so. I’m painting a very broad picture here. Obviously, there’s lots of detail here I’m skating over.
This means you’re saying no to capital that you could get access to, but it’s smaller. But in aggregate, depending on what you’re building, those smaller tickets can actually add up to a decent chunk of money. 10, 20K tickets is still 200K. So, what I do in the syndicate space or SPVs, if you’ve heard of those, if you’ve heard of AngelList in the US or other platforms, is I come in and I want to make an investment. Instead of making it about an angel investment into that idea, what I can do is I can drag along my network, drag along my community, and help you also then drag along your community, and all those tickets that are under that minimum ticket, whether it’s provisionally a thousand euros on up to that hundred K number.
We package all of that capital together into one single investment. I become the manager of that investment, and then you get all the capital. We raise, so I raised 200K with a syndicate, and we raise it from 40 or 50 people anywhere between a thousand, 2000 euros on up to 20, 30, 50K. But we get, say, 40, 50 people to invest, and we hit around 200K or something. You’ll get your 200K. There’s fees there because it’s a process that has to be done. But you don’t get 50 investors; you get one, you get that syndicate.
That really cleans up your capitalization table, which is the list of all your investors. And that makes it easier for you to deal with because I’m the manager of that SPV, of that syndicate company. That company just does one thing: it takes the money from the investors and it gives it to you. And then it just sits there and waits for some moment in the future where either you give me back—
Michael Ros (29:55)
Yeah.
Ethan (30:21)
—happiness or debt, depending on which one of those works out. And then I pass that happiness or debt back on to the people because it’s just a pass-through structure. So, they’re getting their investment return, whether it’s positive or, again, debt, because that happens a lot in early stage, that they can write off, you know, they can use to offset their wins. So, that’s part of the process.
Joe Benso (30:22)
Not a poll.
Michael Ros (30:22)
Yeah.
Ethan (30:46)
Because there is a ton of capital out there that is smaller. And it’s actually not even about the money. Sometimes, today, there’s just a lot of really interesting people who have great networks. Maybe they’re a researcher, maybe they’re a corporate executive, maybe they’re a partner in a fund, but the fund’s not ready to invest in you yet, but the partner is willing to throw 10K your way. You want those people involved, but you can’t necessarily take them as a direct investor. So, in some ways, it’s more of a human tool than it really is a financial one in that sense, creating community and all that.
So, that’s the investment activity really of what I can do—bringing the capital, you’re discovering that you can’t leverage, and me finding it. But I’ll put this out there right now: it doesn’t really exist right now in Web3. Raising funds is really hard. There’s not a lot of people. Basically, people are always saying, “Well, you know, it’s a bearish market, so I don’t want to spend my crypto because it’s undervalued.” And then the crypto pops up to something really interesting, and they’re like, “It’s a bullish market. I don’t want to spend my crypto because I’m making money off of it.”
So, it’s basically, we have this BS conversation where nobody ever wants to actually cash any of that out and put it into new things because they just are hoping for a 100X on some other meme coin crap that is just Las Vegas slots. So, you know, no opinions shared there at all. The idea being that—
Michael Ros (31:43)
Yeah.
Ethan (32:07)
It’s a great tool, but it’s a hard thing to do if investments aren’t being made in general, which is, you know, there’s money moving, and you can obviously see people, big investments being made, but for the past two years, it’s still been really, really, really hard for companies to raise money on the early stage. And so, that affects what I would do as well.
So, that’s what Borderless does on the investment side. And it’s focused primarily on AI, Web3, creator economy-type things, because, for me, they all glue together into actually the subject of my book, which is coming out later this year, called The Solopreneur Economy. It’s about how, basically, non-tech business people, founders, entrepreneurs, or non-businessy entrepreneurial developers can now, using LLMs and agentic, generative and agentic AI, basically—
We are entering into a world of small-team entrepreneurship, whether it’s one person or it’s three to five people or it’s eight to ten people. They are creating seven-, eight-, and now nine-figure revenue companies without hiring hundreds of people and without necessarily raising any or much capital. And that is powered completely by AI on much of the scale of that. Some of the back end of that will be Web3 and blockchain for all the ways it can glue those things together for the reasons I mentioned before.
If we need those microtransactions, the trustlessness of it, if there’s community engagement, especially to be made, then that’s a huge thing. And then it’s in that creator economy business model. In a world of 8 billion people, if you can find a thousand people in the world that’ll give you five bucks a month, you make 60K a year. You double the amount of people or you double the five bucks a month, now you’re making 120K a year.
I just bought a piece of software from a guy on Twitter earlier who was so proud because he’s created this screen capture tool that he coded. He’s a developer; he’s been doing stuff for 10 years, and he coded it, and he’s selling it for, I think, 30 bucks, and he’s made 1500 bucks in the past three days or whatever and was super excited about this thing. That is amazing, and that’s actually why I care about crypto and Web3. I believe in the democratization of finance and opportunity.
Michael Ros (34:23)
That’s—
Ethan (34:33)
It’s the AI thing that glues that all together that’s going to actually create the opportunity. And that’s what I’m interested in backing.
Michael Ros (34:41)
That’s very interesting. First, to go back to your syndicate, the first investment we did in Sleep was also a syndicate, which makes sense, right? It’s very early. It’s risk, right? It’s risk capital, and people prefer to share this one. And now, of course, we have some good traction, and we completed a new investment round in the past two weeks, which is great. But yeah, you just have to go through this first phase, to go, okay, and how can you get support? Building and keeping a clean cap table is crucial; a clean cap table is so important for the future as well.
I think what is also interesting is that now people looking at investors are looking differently, right? Before, you could create and get money, funds, by creating a hype. Now, of course, it’s resolved; it’s low cost, it’s just need efficiency. And it’s the same with what we have. Like, before Sleep, I had a different booking platform, which was a pretty similar product, not as sexy as what we have now, but we had 100-plus people to run a hotel booking platform. Now we have nine, right?
So, it’s like, if you just make the calculations, the cost is actually one—it’s less than 10%, actually, at what you had before. And basically, the biggest cost was employees. And then you become much quicker, profitable, you have better forecasting, etc. So, it’s so important indeed to implement AI where it can. And AI does a lot for us, right? So, 100% agree there, and very interesting, of course, how you’re just looking into startups, supporting them, and then doing it also differently with your syndicate.
I want to go back a bit to where you share the stages. Well, I know when I see you on LinkedIn, you said, okay, my home is Paris. I don’t think you’re much at home. If I see where you’re speaking, I think you’re always on the way. So, if you don’t speak, it’s always very interesting. And, of course, very great to have you here as well, where you shared your insights. Now, if you go into, like I said, different conferences, of course, there’s different kinds of focus groups, right?
If you go to an NFC Lisbon, where I’ll probably see you as well next month, it’s a different audience than next week at Web Summit. In general, what do you see a bit now, and what is shared in the conversations, what you share a bit on stage? I mean, in general, do you think it’s—you already mentioned before—AI has become much more a hotter topic, right? But if you’re looking still, going back a bit into Web3 and blockchain, what do you think really has the future there, and what do you see as well on all those events where you’re coming?
Ethan (37:02)
Yeah, I definitely think if you split those events between events that are actually blockchain, Web3, crypto events, or general tech events, then you see two very different conversations. I think at all of the blockchain and crypto-type stuff, you’re seeing the AI conversation become a very big piece of it just because it’s the natural progression of where this is going, and so much of that’s going to grow because of the marriage between these two technologies.
Just two weeks ago, I guess I was in Riga in Latvia for Unblock, which was their first—they just launched this conference. It was several people from the ecosystem and the Latvian government that basically wanted to create an enterprise kind of crypto, blockchain, Web3 conference for Europe. So, it wasn’t—there was no degen side to it at all. There was no, you know, it wasn’t about the community aspect of that. And when I say, when I talk about that stuff, I’m not against the good communities. I’m a huge fan of the good communities, and there are some really wonderful ones, but community is a funny thing, and it doesn’t resonate with everyone, especially when those communities go bad or if they’re toxic or if they’re in some way grifty.
That has created a lot of drama. I’m not against the good ones in any way. But again, we’re marrying two things together, and that stuff doesn’t really fit enterprise people who are coming from a large corporation or dealing with historical finance industries, if they’re government regulators, if it’s any kind of the stuff of the business, business-type things—those things don’t mix either.
So, they started this conference, and they asked me to write a special keynote to open it. There were 500 people in the room, which was super cool for an event like that. I think there were around a thousand, maybe 2000 people that came to the conference, but for the opening keynote, the room was packed, and that was really interesting to me because it does show that there’s a lot of interest in the application of these technologies to the future of finance.
That particular thing is also because Latvia, like other countries, is trying to position themselves well ahead of MiCA adoption in Europe. So, MiCA is the Markets in Crypto-Assets framework. Without going into detail, it basically just means if you have a license to be an exchange, for example, in Latvia, then you can have customers in Lithuania. That does not exist today in Europe. Right now, you have to have your license to do that financial services activity in every country that you want to have clients in Europe.
So, MiCA comes into play next year. Latvia, like Estonia and others as the smaller countries, want to be a little bit more fluid and flexible and try to be aggressive to take that. France has done a pretty good job of that, which is why we’ve got Binance and Circle and OKX and Crypto.com—there’s a whole bunch of them that have come here to get their MiCA stuff basically in order for the rest of Europe. That’s an interesting conversation. We’re seeing a lot of this movement in that space where people are like, you know, some of the rails, a lot of the rails of our financial systems are going to get more blockchainy.
Maybe there won’t be big hashtags anywhere or anybody super excited about it, but it’s happening. The stablecoin conversation, whether it is a CBDC because it’s a sovereign thing or because it’s just we need stable transfers of value and it’s not going to be about using Bitcoin or Ethereum or other things that are not stable, that are very useful for what they do, but we need something we can maybe trust the value to stay solid a little bit if we’re doing transactional stuff in finance. There’s a lot of those conversations in parallel happening. So, I think that’s a big thing right now that’s being discussed.
We could see that, I mean, almost everybody in the room was Latvian. And again, there were a thousand people, and 500 came to see a keynote on the history of money and finance and why that showcases how crypto and AI are going to be massive innovators over the coming years. That was pretty cool.
I think if we look at general tech, we see a very different conversation, primarily AI-driven, I would say a lot of what’s happening at the tech conferences. But again, a lot of it is still—most of it will still be about: look at the innovations that are happening in marketing or looking at the innovations that are happening in finance or in SaaS or in the creator economy or in whatever. And it will just be underneath that that we’ll be talking about AI or the other technologies.
So, yes, it’s a lot of AI, but it’s not—the AI isn’t necessarily the big item. It’s the fact that it’s what’s being used. So, Web3 and crypto will be a part of that conversation a bit, but again, it’s—you have to be careful right now. It’s dependent on who you’re trying to sell something to or raise money from. If you bring up any of those keywords, it can maybe be problematic. And so, a lot of people that are building solutions in the space are being very prudent about their word choice.
Michael Ros (42:02)
You.
Joe Benso (42:11)
Cautious.
Ethan (42:13)
Of the technology stack that they’re using. And so, I think that’s a bit of what’s going on at the general tech space. And then the last one is, I would just bring up another version, which would be Non-Fungible, a conference in Lisbon, which has really evolved to be a mixture of—it started as the community thing around digital art.
And then it became more the community thing around including stuff like Pudgies or other communities like that. And so, those two kind of grew together. Then last year, it became a lot of meme coin and AI conversations. So, it kind of became three or four events. And so, this year, it will be an extension of that, a growth of that, where it’s just these things are all in parallel, but at the same event, which I think is pretty smart.
It’s fun to watch the people mix with each other because it’s definitely different worlds, some of these things, and that’s been fun to see. You’ve got the film industry, which is, you know, they had the AI Film Awards last year at Non-Fungible. So, I think we’re going to see that kind of continue, but it’s still pretty much the builders talking to the builders. It’s the inner crowd. It’s not—there’s no criticism in that, but that’s not—
You’re not going to see a hundred thousand people show up at a conference like that because it’s mass market. You’re going to see a couple thousand people who are the ones building the stuff using these technologies. But a lot of those people are wising up to the fact that their market and their opportunity is not that room. And so, we’re seeing a lot of growth and a lot of founders like you who are pulling back a little bit and kind of saying, how do I scale to the size of the opportunity? Because I cannot preach to the Web3 crowd only. That’s not a big enough market share.
Joe Benso (44:08)
So, it’s great to hear you kind of distill such a broad spectrum of what’s going on in the tech space. AI went through all of it, kind of converging on itself and being able to kind of, you know, sense the bright spots of what’s coming in the pipeline and what areas of interest. If you are a startup entering, you know, AI, Web3, any of these today, you know, really excited to see, to take a look at your solopreneur book, because I think all of these things are, you know, very powerful.
We live in a very kind of opportunistic time where, you know, entrepreneurs can be solopreneurs and 10x, 100x their productivity, where you could not have done that, you know, even a couple of years ago. If you were just starting out today as an entrepreneur, solopreneur, where are the bright spots, and what would you say you absolutely have to nail down right now if you want to raise money or grow a business? What would you be looking at? You talked about the creator economy. Where is it?
Michael Ros (45:13)
Short answer.
Ethan (45:15)
Well, you know, my job is professional networker, and I think everybody needs to realize everything is sales. Everything is not so much the people you know, but the people that know you. Whether it’s trying to sell your product, trying to land that great employee, whether it’s trying to make sure you get that office space you want from that particular person, everything is about selling that moment in time. And so, I think that’s a skill set everybody needs to work on.
Joe Benso (45:41)
This pen.
Ethan (45:43)
In a big way. And I think the next one would be, it never hurts to learn how to code a little bit because all of this low-code stuff that is the basis behind, you know, I mentioned the AI, mentioned the Web3, I mentioned the creator economy and the solopreneur or small-team entrepreneurship. It’s all glued together by low-code, basically. It can be full-on developers, but a lot of this stuff, like with n8n and the platform.
You don’t have to know anything to glue it together, but each of those nodes that you’re constructing in a workflow, you can actually put JavaScript in to customize or to really do even better. You can also click the little AI button and tell it what you want, and it writes the JavaScript for you. But all of this stuff is a hundred to a thousand times better if you’re able to actually understand the code that’s being presented and tweak it or tell it where it’s off because it’s doing its best to understand what you want.
So, I think learning to code in even a basic way—Python and JavaScript—is massive, but here’s the real answer to your question. Today, you need to be a product manager and a community builder. Tech is no longer the moat of startups. It is no longer the thing that protects you because I can take anybody’s website or anybody’s app, feed it to LLaMA or Gemini Pro, and it will spit out a copy of the thing. Is it scalable? No. Is it perfect? No, but code is no longer going to protect you from somebody who wants to build the same solution and take on your demographic.
So, what protects you? It protects you because community cares about what you and your solution offer, so they stick with you. That one, you’ve got to work hard to get, and you’ve got to work even harder to keep, but it’s the thing that protects you. And also, being product-focused, being a product manager, a product developer, is about realizing there’s a problem that people have, and I need to create the solution for that problem.
Being able to define that using all the language of how product managers work, like PRD documents or all these things where you define all the things you need to build, all the resources you need to build them, all of the process of that. If you can do that and then you give that to an AI, whether it’s Gemini, whether it’s LLaMA, whether you’re using Cursor or something like that with some of the AI stuff behind that, great. It will produce massively better code because you’ve given it that kind of an outline in a detailed way.
So, today, I think people need to realize, first and foremost, they create products, whether it’s a service or whatever, it’s product-minded, and that community is the only thing that will protect them. I think that’s a big thing. And to maybe also realize that that’s going to iterate. So, maybe you’ll have the market for two or three years, and somebody else will have the market for two or three years. Maybe you’ll come back with a different thing or a similar thing.
It’s clear that this is kicking venture capital’s ass because people don’t need VC money in the same way. And they also don’t necessarily—they’re not targeting hundred-million-dollar or billion-dollar companies. A lot of amazing entrepreneurs and developers are finally figuring out that building something that makes you a half-million dollars a year or a million dollars a year or that you sell for $5 million is pretty good because most people don’t make any money from the bigger startup dream, no matter what you think about the numbers and all the big success stories.
And those smaller successes are very attainable in this solopreneur, small-team entrepreneurship world. But it’s about building defined products that solve real problems for a community.
Michael Ros (49:21)
Perfect.
Ethan (49:23)
Sorry, I don’t do this. I try, but I’m just not capable.
Joe Benso (49:31)
Quick fire.
Ethan (49:39)
I’ve got, if you want to have a few more minutes to do, we can do a few of your questions if you want to edit them down into social or whatever, but if you’ve got enough, we’re good too.
Michael Ros (49:48)
Let’s do some quick-fire questions, so a quick answer and some fun questions. So, Bored Apes, Pudgy Penguins. Okay, the most underrated Web3 startup in Europe right now.
Ethan (49:51)
Great, I promise. Pudgy Penguins. That’s unfair. Underrated. I know I’m supposed to say you, Michael, and you’re pretty cool, but I’m going to say The Miracle because I believe what they’re building as a platform to connect brands to community is super interesting. You can go check out The Miracle to learn more about what they’re building and why it matters to Web3 and brands.
Michael Ros (50:07)
No, no, no, no, no. Not allowed. But I agree there.
Joe Benso (50:08)
Yeah.
Ethan (50:28)
Web3 and brands.
Michael Ros (50:30)
We’re partnering with them as well, Kriven, and they are amazing guys, 100% agree there. Then, a coffee with Vitalik or dinner with Beeple.
Ethan (50:38)
Yeah, that one’s a tough one. I saw it on your list. Shoot. Gosh. So, without it being the shortest answer, the backstory of a lot of what I felt, and I’ve been in crypto since 2015. I think in 2016, I saw Vitalik give, like, a meetup in Singapore when I was there. And he spent two hours going from what is a blockchain to sharding and all kinds of other things. And it was perfectly clear, incredibly focused and pedagogical, and he was brilliant.
So, as a thought leader in this space and about how we can take these technologies to the world and save and create so much value and change so many things, I think Vitalik is just always amazing. I’ve had a few conversations with him and just seen anything he speaks from on stage, I think, is massively interesting.
To be fair, if you want a touchpoint on what’s happening in culture, then you just can’t pass Beeple. So, I’m thinking a beer with Beeple has to be a fun time. It has to be pretty cool. A lot of anecdotes and, yeah, very interesting. It has to be really interesting. But I also think that just listening to Vitalik talk about the promise of these technologies is inspiring.
Michael Ros (51:42)
I had a few with Beeple last year in Lisbon; that was good fun. Joe, you’ve got some closing questions?
Joe Benso (52:05)
Yeah, actually, Ethan, really excited about what’s coming in the pipeline for you, the solopreneur book. Maybe you can just tell our listeners any links that you want to share where people can find more about what you’re working on.
Ethan (52:19)
LinkedIn is always the best one. I think finding me on LinkedIn is the easiest one. My name is unique. It’s P-I-E-R-S-E, so I’m super easy to find. And that has all the links to anything you might need if you want to get on the pre-order list for the book. That’s the main link at the top of the profile. I post—you always see where I’m speaking at. So, I’m always happy to meet people at conferences. So, always do say hi. I always organize some kind of a meetup at things.
Joe Benso (52:40)
To come out.
Ethan (52:49)
I’ve done a bunch of communities over the past decade or so in different places—first with the French tech, then with some crypto stuff. And now the next one is called Llamapreneurs. I love llamas, and it just so happens that’s our spirit animal for everything LLM. So, Llamapreneurs is—we just had one in Riga, we just had one in Paris. We’ll do another one coming up in Vancouver for Web Summit. Then we’ll do one during NFC. I’m looking at doing one, and then also a huge one during Viva Tech and then much more.
The idea there basically is just local community around anybody who is an AI-first founder or entrepreneur, maybe AI people who are using AI in startups that are interested. Maybe they’re a hacker, like an indie hacker-type person. Maybe they’re the solopreneurs, and it’s about just putting those people into a room and letting the magic of networking happen. So, first of all, I would love to come in and throw one of those in your city. So, feel free to reach out if that sounds interesting.
And if you are a super connector in your ecosystem, I’d love to talk about having you be the Llamapreneur in your space. So, I try to be super reachable on social. I get a firehose of DMs, so I try not to ignore people, but do reach out, and I’ll do my best.
Joe Benso (54:06)
Put those agents to work.
Ethan (54:08)
It’s in process.
Michael Ros (54:08)
You.
Joe Benso (54:11)
Ethan, thanks a lot for taking the time today. Lots of ground covered and super valuable information, and looking forward to getting this out, and, you know, thanks a lot.
Ethan (54:22)
Thanks, guys. Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Joe.
Michael Ros (54:22)
Perfect. Thanks for seeing this one.
Joe Benso (54:26)
Excellent.
