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The recent article from Packy McCormack - Crypto Bezos - will be looked back upon in the same vein as Marc Andreessen announcing that "Software is Eating the World".
Software has eaten the world.. a while ago...
Crypto/blockchain / web3 is changing our world, as I write…. and fast…
The story of how Jeff Bezos started amazon.com has been told many times, but I love trying to get back into his mindset in 1994, looking at the opportunity in front of him. You can just see how much conviction he had about the internet and e-commerce even in 1994.
In 1994, the internet looked like this:
My eyes, they are melting…
This was the amazon.com homepage back when launched. This is how early an adopter Jeff Bezos was to wanting to build a company online in e-commerce. There was no Shopify, there was no 3rd party logistics, no FBA, etc.
But the data didn’t lie. He saw the adoption of the internet. And it was game-changing. He had a thesis of the future.
He was working as a hedge fund analyst at DE Shaw and saw the adoption rate of the internet, it floored him, he couldn’t believe it… And had to jump into it, give it his shot, to make sure he didn’t regret it.
his Regret minimization framework.
So… He quit his high-paying job to start an e-commerce company before it was even feasible.
He knew people would just want a better way to buy stuff, more convenient and easier.
And he has changed the world.. I can go on my computer like I did last night.. Compare some products, read reviews, and made a fairly large purchase in 2 minutes.
That’s what he envisioned.
It just took a long time to nail down the logistics since that’s in the real physical world.. That’s the hard stuff.
And it has caught up, it’s amazing… That I can get an item in 2 hours now.
They talk about Bezos' wedge, and how new companies can gain a foothold into a bigger market, he used books as his wedge into a huge new market, a beachhead, a toe hold if you will.
He knew books were not the biggest category he could get into, but… it had a unique market. Since there were 3 million different books / SKUs at the time, so the product options were the highest of any category.
A store could never carry 3 million books. Retail space just doesn’t have room.
So logically the internet made books a great first beachhead product.
Then CDs and movies were the next categories with huge individual product numbers / SKUs.
So those naturally flowed into it.
So by him looking at what products lent themselves to e-commerce AT THAT TIME… was he able to get good traction and build the foundation to then be able to become Walmart online.
Become a department store online.
Then allow 3rd parties to use his brilliant infrastructure.
Rest is history.
The recent article Crypto Bezos is fascinating and amazing since it’s trying to get into Bezos's head back in the mid-1990s to understand what he might look like as an opportunity now.
Since there are many parallels to the internet boom of the 90s and the crypto / web3 boom we are just starting to see now.
The videos of people laughing him off on 60 minutes and quite frankly making fun of his cheap little empire, made me laugh at how society usually is either confused or pokes fun at new things or toys and the oddballs/nerds that understand them and are excited by them.
THIS IS NOW.
This is web3 tech, people are still laughing at it.
Crypto is still "nerdy" and a “toy” and mocked by boomers…
Mainstream financial and business leads still are confused and laughing at some of the odd behavior that is not their "normal".
We are on the verge of this next technological shift and boom.
Web 2.0 the social web, absolutely changed how society functions. Social media has changed everything.
Web3 is a total rewiring of so many institutions and how business can get done.
It’s a streamlining of so many things that are cumbersome and clunky now.
It’s a digitizing of the physical world quite frankly.
It’s the digitizing of those colored pieces of paper in your pocket that you exchange for goods and services.
It’s going to unlock how our world works in fascinating ways.
It’s more than just a worldwide currency, the blockchain is the key, that will transform almost every industry.
Especially the older slower-moving ones.
All the gatekeepers and intermediaries that skim so much money off the top of the world economy, will wither and die eventually.
In web3, they slowly will die.
Granted some will adapt and utilize further technology to be relevant, but their business models will be forced to change in a big way.
For me, like Bezos, I am trying to look at what would best benefit the consumer.
How can we make the customer/consumer’s life easier and simpler?
Amazon.com has made life fundamentally better for people who want to buy most anything but especially physical stuff.
It allowed both the internet and a huge logistics dream, to let people order almost anything, at any time, anywhere, and get it in like 2 hours on their doorstep.
This is sci-fi in real life.
And I want to take a brief pause here… and ask you to all think about how amazing technology has made your life.
Sure there are major downsides, and some things have been very negatively affected by technology, but on the whole, we have some absolutely magical new ways of living that make life better for us.
Realize you should be as giddy as Bezos was when talking about how amazing life will get in even 10 years.
We can summon a personal chauffeur anytime anywhere in an instant with one touch on our glass screen in our pockets.
We can order anything in the entire world, and get it sent to our home in hardly any time… By touching the glass computer in our pocket.
We can chat with anyone in the world via a video call at any time, instantly.
We are living through vivid sci-fi, and I sure as hell hope you are grateful and stop letting it become "normal" I didn’t grow up with this stuff… So I know times before these amazing new advances.
So the crux of the thinking here is what is going to be the most impactful way you can make customers’ lives better with blockchain?
This is the mindset to get into.
What things are still so broken and cumbersome now?
Like having to go down to Borders and ask a store clerk what section for a particular book, only to find they don’t have it in stock… was frustrating and cumbersome and just how it was.
What industries need a reboot that is vitally important?
One industry and category that I cannot help but gravitate towards as an opportunity to change is real estate and mortgages.
Real estate is a 280 trillion dollar asset class, it’s the largest asset class in the world, were talking about all the physical world. Land, homes, apartments, retail centers, industrial, self-storage, every physical property.
And it’s incredibly broken and inefficient at every single turn.
My whole career has been in real estate private equity and development so I have lived through the pain in this industry.
Its BROOOOOKEEENNNNNNN.
So many layers and intermediaries that siphon off so many fees and profits and bleed people dry. Make processes take months and years instead of minutes and hours.
I've never seen anything riper for a revolution.
And, what's a typical consumer’s most important and biggest asset/transaction they make in life??? Real estate. Typically buying a home.
So not only is real estate the world’s biggest asset class by far, it’s also the average consumer’s biggest purchase, their biggest expense in life and It holds most of their wealth… It’s an extremely important industry and category.
Its TAM would make even Softbank's head explode…
It’s just so freaking important in so many ways.
And yet, it’s so cumbersome, so annoying, so not easy, such a bad aggravating frustrating anxiety-filled experience for the customer now!
So….. like having to drive down to a huge store, spend 20 minutes navigating aisles, pushing a cart, asking a clerk where a certain product might be… Walking all around a huge store, only to find they are out of stock.
Then waiting in line forever to buy a few other things you needed and driving back home.
It’s a trip to the mall vs a 2-hour amazon delivery to your home.
Real estate in 2021 is a trip to Mall, then through a dark, dank department store, through into the mall, then finally into your specific store in the 1990s.
Bezos saw that the customer experience was SHITTY. He himself could identify, he was a customer. He experienced how things were done then.
He saw how the internet could transform this bad experience into something magically easy and much better.
I foresee the biggest impact that web3 could have is on the entire real estate ecosystem.
Mortgages and loans
Fannie Mae and Freddie mac
CMBS - revolution into commercial mortgage-backed tokens
Tokenization of homes
Tokenization of every single physical property asset on the planet
Title work and history moving to the blockchain
Surveys and legal physical reports can and is being digitized via GPS etc
Investing in commercial assets as tokens and fractional shares
Environmental reports and records
Zoning laws and entitlements can and will be digitized and straightforward
Property management
Development
Purchase and sale contracts
Each item has even more subcategories that all need disrupting.
This is not the job for one company like amazon, but many, many new companies will pick off certain aspects of this problem to solve in unique ways, and they will all be sort of Legos built on top of the blockchain.
Each new advance will make other advances more relevant.
If you solve title work, it makes so many other things easier.
If you solve purchase and sale contracts, it streamlines so much.
There is exponential growth once each item is better handled by a new way of doing it.
As many in web3 / crypto are fond of saying, it’s actually the combination of these new legos that makes for a much better end process for the consumers, and the specific legos themselves.
The value adds will be how people can combine these streamlined pieces to make the overall process easier and simpler and fast and better.
If Bezos were looking at what ways can you make a customer’s experience simpler, and what will the web3 / blockchain help to make so much better, real estate is one of my top industries that he would go into.
Finance and DeFi is the big shift happening now, and real estate is tied in pretty close with finance, it’s the largest asset class in the world.
This feels like it has synergies with many of the innovative fintech firms sprouting up with crypto / web3 tendencies.
Bezos would be in nerdvana, nerding out on how insane this opportunity is, and he would be laughing like he was in his 1990s.
Laughing… all the way to the crypto wallet…
The recent article from Packy McCormack - Crypto Bezos - will be looked back upon in the same vein as Marc Andreessen announcing that "Software is Eating the World".
Software has eaten the world.. a while ago...
Crypto/blockchain / web3 is changing our world, as I write…. and fast…
The story of how Jeff Bezos started amazon.com has been told many times, but I love trying to get back into his mindset in 1994, looking at the opportunity in front of him. You can just see how much conviction he had about the internet and e-commerce even in 1994.
In 1994, the internet looked like this:
My eyes, they are melting…
This was the amazon.com homepage back when launched. This is how early an adopter Jeff Bezos was to wanting to build a company online in e-commerce. There was no Shopify, there was no 3rd party logistics, no FBA, etc.
But the data didn’t lie. He saw the adoption of the internet. And it was game-changing. He had a thesis of the future.
He was working as a hedge fund analyst at DE Shaw and saw the adoption rate of the internet, it floored him, he couldn’t believe it… And had to jump into it, give it his shot, to make sure he didn’t regret it.
his Regret minimization framework.
So… He quit his high-paying job to start an e-commerce company before it was even feasible.
He knew people would just want a better way to buy stuff, more convenient and easier.
And he has changed the world.. I can go on my computer like I did last night.. Compare some products, read reviews, and made a fairly large purchase in 2 minutes.
That’s what he envisioned.
It just took a long time to nail down the logistics since that’s in the real physical world.. That’s the hard stuff.
And it has caught up, it’s amazing… That I can get an item in 2 hours now.
They talk about Bezos' wedge, and how new companies can gain a foothold into a bigger market, he used books as his wedge into a huge new market, a beachhead, a toe hold if you will.
He knew books were not the biggest category he could get into, but… it had a unique market. Since there were 3 million different books / SKUs at the time, so the product options were the highest of any category.
A store could never carry 3 million books. Retail space just doesn’t have room.
So logically the internet made books a great first beachhead product.
Then CDs and movies were the next categories with huge individual product numbers / SKUs.
So those naturally flowed into it.
So by him looking at what products lent themselves to e-commerce AT THAT TIME… was he able to get good traction and build the foundation to then be able to become Walmart online.
Become a department store online.
Then allow 3rd parties to use his brilliant infrastructure.
Rest is history.
The recent article Crypto Bezos is fascinating and amazing since it’s trying to get into Bezos's head back in the mid-1990s to understand what he might look like as an opportunity now.
Since there are many parallels to the internet boom of the 90s and the crypto / web3 boom we are just starting to see now.
The videos of people laughing him off on 60 minutes and quite frankly making fun of his cheap little empire, made me laugh at how society usually is either confused or pokes fun at new things or toys and the oddballs/nerds that understand them and are excited by them.
THIS IS NOW.
This is web3 tech, people are still laughing at it.
Crypto is still "nerdy" and a “toy” and mocked by boomers…
Mainstream financial and business leads still are confused and laughing at some of the odd behavior that is not their "normal".
We are on the verge of this next technological shift and boom.
Web 2.0 the social web, absolutely changed how society functions. Social media has changed everything.
Web3 is a total rewiring of so many institutions and how business can get done.
It’s a streamlining of so many things that are cumbersome and clunky now.
It’s a digitizing of the physical world quite frankly.
It’s the digitizing of those colored pieces of paper in your pocket that you exchange for goods and services.
It’s going to unlock how our world works in fascinating ways.
It’s more than just a worldwide currency, the blockchain is the key, that will transform almost every industry.
Especially the older slower-moving ones.
All the gatekeepers and intermediaries that skim so much money off the top of the world economy, will wither and die eventually.
In web3, they slowly will die.
Granted some will adapt and utilize further technology to be relevant, but their business models will be forced to change in a big way.
For me, like Bezos, I am trying to look at what would best benefit the consumer.
How can we make the customer/consumer’s life easier and simpler?
Amazon.com has made life fundamentally better for people who want to buy most anything but especially physical stuff.
It allowed both the internet and a huge logistics dream, to let people order almost anything, at any time, anywhere, and get it in like 2 hours on their doorstep.
This is sci-fi in real life.
And I want to take a brief pause here… and ask you to all think about how amazing technology has made your life.
Sure there are major downsides, and some things have been very negatively affected by technology, but on the whole, we have some absolutely magical new ways of living that make life better for us.
Realize you should be as giddy as Bezos was when talking about how amazing life will get in even 10 years.
We can summon a personal chauffeur anytime anywhere in an instant with one touch on our glass screen in our pockets.
We can order anything in the entire world, and get it sent to our home in hardly any time… By touching the glass computer in our pocket.
We can chat with anyone in the world via a video call at any time, instantly.
We are living through vivid sci-fi, and I sure as hell hope you are grateful and stop letting it become "normal" I didn’t grow up with this stuff… So I know times before these amazing new advances.
So the crux of the thinking here is what is going to be the most impactful way you can make customers’ lives better with blockchain?
This is the mindset to get into.
What things are still so broken and cumbersome now?
Like having to go down to Borders and ask a store clerk what section for a particular book, only to find they don’t have it in stock… was frustrating and cumbersome and just how it was.
What industries need a reboot that is vitally important?
One industry and category that I cannot help but gravitate towards as an opportunity to change is real estate and mortgages.
Real estate is a 280 trillion dollar asset class, it’s the largest asset class in the world, were talking about all the physical world. Land, homes, apartments, retail centers, industrial, self-storage, every physical property.
And it’s incredibly broken and inefficient at every single turn.
My whole career has been in real estate private equity and development so I have lived through the pain in this industry.
Its BROOOOOKEEENNNNNNN.
So many layers and intermediaries that siphon off so many fees and profits and bleed people dry. Make processes take months and years instead of minutes and hours.
I've never seen anything riper for a revolution.
And, what's a typical consumer’s most important and biggest asset/transaction they make in life??? Real estate. Typically buying a home.
So not only is real estate the world’s biggest asset class by far, it’s also the average consumer’s biggest purchase, their biggest expense in life and It holds most of their wealth… It’s an extremely important industry and category.
Its TAM would make even Softbank's head explode…
It’s just so freaking important in so many ways.
And yet, it’s so cumbersome, so annoying, so not easy, such a bad aggravating frustrating anxiety-filled experience for the customer now!
So….. like having to drive down to a huge store, spend 20 minutes navigating aisles, pushing a cart, asking a clerk where a certain product might be… Walking all around a huge store, only to find they are out of stock.
Then waiting in line forever to buy a few other things you needed and driving back home.
It’s a trip to the mall vs a 2-hour amazon delivery to your home.
Real estate in 2021 is a trip to Mall, then through a dark, dank department store, through into the mall, then finally into your specific store in the 1990s.
Bezos saw that the customer experience was SHITTY. He himself could identify, he was a customer. He experienced how things were done then.
He saw how the internet could transform this bad experience into something magically easy and much better.
I foresee the biggest impact that web3 could have is on the entire real estate ecosystem.
Mortgages and loans
Fannie Mae and Freddie mac
CMBS - revolution into commercial mortgage-backed tokens
Tokenization of homes
Tokenization of every single physical property asset on the planet
Title work and history moving to the blockchain
Surveys and legal physical reports can and is being digitized via GPS etc
Investing in commercial assets as tokens and fractional shares
Environmental reports and records
Zoning laws and entitlements can and will be digitized and straightforward
Property management
Development
Purchase and sale contracts
Each item has even more subcategories that all need disrupting.
This is not the job for one company like amazon, but many, many new companies will pick off certain aspects of this problem to solve in unique ways, and they will all be sort of Legos built on top of the blockchain.
Each new advance will make other advances more relevant.
If you solve title work, it makes so many other things easier.
If you solve purchase and sale contracts, it streamlines so much.
There is exponential growth once each item is better handled by a new way of doing it.
As many in web3 / crypto are fond of saying, it’s actually the combination of these new legos that makes for a much better end process for the consumers, and the specific legos themselves.
The value adds will be how people can combine these streamlined pieces to make the overall process easier and simpler and fast and better.
If Bezos were looking at what ways can you make a customer’s experience simpler, and what will the web3 / blockchain help to make so much better, real estate is one of my top industries that he would go into.
Finance and DeFi is the big shift happening now, and real estate is tied in pretty close with finance, it’s the largest asset class in the world.
This feels like it has synergies with many of the innovative fintech firms sprouting up with crypto / web3 tendencies.
Bezos would be in nerdvana, nerding out on how insane this opportunity is, and he would be laughing like he was in his 1990s.
Laughing… all the way to the crypto wallet…
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