During the pandemic, unemployment in the Philippines hit 40%.
Thousands of Filipinos without jobs—like Howard, pictured here—turned to blockchain-based online games as a way to make money.
Here's how it happened 👇
It started with Axie Infinity, a popular blockchain game with cartoonish creatures called Axies.
Axie is what’s called a play-to-earn game: if you win battles you earn a resource called Small Love Potion. You can exchange SLP for the cryptocurrency ETH & then convert to dollars.
This man used to drive a taxi, but he had no customers during COVID.
He started playing Axie and making up to ~$300 a month. For reference, minimum wage in the Philippines is about $170 per month.
In this community in Cabanatuan City, about 68 miles north of the Philippines capital of Manila, over 100 people make a living playing Axie.
Here's a 66-year-old grandmother playing Axie Infinity.
Play-to-earn games have been life-changing for members of the community.
One 75-year-old man plays from 4am to 10pm and says, "This is my only entertainment."
His wife adds, "We’re praying to the Lord that Axie doesn’t go away. It’s how we pay for our medicine."
This concept—earning money playing online games with cartoon creatures—may seem silly, but it's putting food on the table for these people.
Play-to-earn games foreshadow future labor structures—structures that will be more common in an increasingly digital, borderless economy.
One problem with Axie is that it's expensive to start. One Axie costs ~$100 and you need 3 to get going. That's $300 most people don't have.
Yield Guild Games solves this by buying digital assets in games and *leasing* them to players. That way, anyone can get started.
Yield Guild hires community managers to recruit players. Here's how the economics break down:
• Players keep 70% of the money they earn
• Their manager takes 20%
• The Guild takes 10%
Yield Guild has moved beyond Axie & now leases out digital assets in other virtual worlds.
Yield Guild's founder Gabby Dizon likens his organization to "settling the metaverse."
Just as settlers explored the American frontier in the 1700s and Singapore in the 1950s, gamers are settling digital worlds.
They're building robust, thriving digital economies.
In the metaverse, labor is borderless: workers can make money from anywhere—all they need is a smartphone and an internet connection.
Play-to-earn games reward players who have time & skill, rather than those with money. This creates a more equal & meritocratic digital economy.
At this moment, people in the Philippines are earning 2x minimum wage by playing an online game.
These Filipinos are an unlikely place to look to glimpse the future, but they embody a new digital economy—one that’s borderless and one in which labor flows as freely as capital.
These Filipinos are showing what can happen when technology unlocks access and reinvents outdated economic systems.
Taylor Swift's Eras tour is set to make her the highest-grossing female artist of all time.
I've been thinking a lot about Taylor Swift as a businesswoman.
Let me geek out for a minute about Swift and what we can learn from her:
First, it's no secret I'm a massive Taylor Swift fan. Billy Joel said it best when he called her "The Beatles of her generation."
This is partly an excuse for me to write about my favorite artist. But you also don't have to be a fan to appreciate Swift as a savvy businesswoman:
Taylor Swift is only 33, but she's already the only woman to win three Grammys for Album of the Year.
She holds the record for most songs to ever chart on the Billboard Hot 100 (188 songs), and last fall became the first artist to own the entire Top 10 simultaneously.
A question I think about often is: is brand a moat?
My answer has always been yes, but the recent deterioration of digital advertising makes the answer even clearer.
Brand is a stronger moat than ever, and that's not a good thing:
1/ To step back, marketing, in its modern form, essentially didn’t exist before the Industrial Revolution.
There was such little product differentiation that it wasn’t necessary. Then manufacturing exploded, and production became cheaper & faster than ever before.
2/ New entrants crowded the market & marketing became essential.
Today, marketing is often *all* that distinguishes a product.
In America, kids as young as 2 can recognize brands on shelves, and by age 10 kids have recognition of 300 to 400 brands.
1/ One interesting shift: the globalization of culture.
From 2017 to 2022, 47 of the 50 most-streamed songs in the world were in English. But that dominance is slipping.
In India, Indonesia, & Korea, the share of English-language tracks has fallen from 52% to 31%.
2/ In Spain and LatAm, the share of English-language songs has slipped from 25% to 14%.
It's the same story on TV: in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, only about half of the most-watched shows are North American. In Japan and South Korea, it’s only 35%.
3/ We see the globalization of pop culture in what audiences are consuming:
• Squid Game (Korean) became the most-watched show on Netflix
• Khaby Lame (Senegalese-Italian) is the most-followed person on TikTok
• Bad Bunny (Puerto Rican) is the most-streamed artist on Spotify
The most powerful trend in tech right now: "The TikTokization of Everything"
How it's reshaping literally every industry:
To back up, there have been two major forces powering tech for the past decade: mobile and cloud.
Mobile facilitated the rise of massive consumer internet companies: Uber & Lyft, Instagram & Snap, Robinhood and Coinbase. Each was founded between 2009 and 2013.
Digital advertising rapidly shifted to mobile in the 2010s, and desktop-era companies like Facebook had to scramble to reinvent their businesses.