Wealth in the USA: a birds-eye macro view in Charts

Americans hold $153T in wealth... 👇🏾 $32T of that is in retirement accounts

Crypto-native, wallet to wallet messaging is broken.

and yet, messaging is the highest daily use consumer product. it's a huge opportunity.

Crypto's "You've Got Mail" moment is coming.

Let me explain ⬇️
mercebent.medium.com/the-future-of-… Both individuals & dApps want it

Imagine you find the wallet address that owns a NFT you want. You want to ask if they'll sell, but you don’t know the owner. So you go to discord, post the NFT, & hope the owner sees it

DAOs resort to google forms to gather info from members

9 crypto native consumer products of today + tomorrow

medium.com/@mercebent/the… 2/ Every major tech shift has brought forth a new wave of consumer tech companies.

web1: the internet led to AOL, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Netflix, Pandora

web2: mobile led to Twitter, Uber, Facebook, AirBnB, WhatsApp, Snap

15k people at ETH Denver. i just returned from the largest year EVER as crypto goes mainstream

people still ask, why all the hype? what does blockchain actually solve?

7 problems that blockchains actually solve 👇🏾 1. Security for Scaled Blockchains
Blockchains that reach critical mass are hard to hack. Communities validate new additions, so in PoW models, you need 51% of validators' computing (hashing) power to control which txns post on-chain & unconfirm txns. In PoS, 51% of staked tokens

One of my absolute favorite topics is how people learn

Improving your speed of learning is also a top professional skill in a world that ain't changing any slower

Here's how to improve your speed of learning:✌️🏾 TL;DR: the top 3 things you can do to improve your speed of learning are:

1) shorten cycles to reach new learning levels
2) schedule learning flow states
3) treat learning like exercise

As a VC, I constantly have to learn about new areas

Here's a list of 10 things you can do:

the next gen of consumer entertainment experiences are being built on web3

in web3, consumers become co-creators

Here’s some of the most exciting Entertainment X Web3 I’m seeing and where there's opportunity 🧵 2/ any entertainment / social experience that had an audience or community in web2 can make the shift

the key is re-imagining your audience as co-creators, not just viewers

shift from passive>active

in web3 era of choose-your-own adventure, there is upside for getting involved

We can all agree that the metaverse is having its hottest year yet

I used to work in VR and thought that was the path to the metaverse

Here's why I was wrong and why this time is different 🧵 2/ first, some context. the metaverse resurgence kicked off in April 2021 if you look at google trends

April was when Epic announced their $1B in funding (disclosure: we are investors) kicked off the 2021 metaverse frenzy and it hasn't abated since

web3, crypto & blockchain are making waves in art, music, and fintech today

How will web3, crypto, and blockchain affect edtech & learning?

Here's what I'm seeing so far 🧵 2/ today I'm seeing early efforts in a couple of areas:

learn to earn
DAOs as universities or learning DAOs
career funding: creator coins, securitized music
freelancer networks
credentials, transcripts

let's dive into each of these 5 and where there's more opportunity

for international women's day I went on @cnbc today to talk about the gender investing gap

the gap is very real: women make up 35% or less of users at many retail investment products, and women save less on avg for retirement (also due to wage gap)

what's going on? 2/ two apps with higher women percentages have a more passive investing focus: Stash and Acorns

this may be because men trade more. studies show men traded 45% more than women - this reduces men’s returns

women do reach parity on budgeting & money management fintech apps

Was on a call w/a 16-yr old talking career advice. The best advice i shared (& have not 100% followed) was:

Don't email someone asking for a job. Start doing the job and email asking for feedback on what you built. (more👇🏾) 2/ Why this works:
- People have something to react to
- It shows you understand basics of role & ready to refine higher skills
- You speed up hiring by starting with "interview assignment"- flips process
- Can use what you built to filter for companies that share your values

1/ We're thrilled to announce @lightspeedvp's Series A investment in Forage (@InsideSherpa), the future of job search. Here's more on what makes Forage so special:

medium.com/@mercebent/mee… #edtech #career 2/ What if employers told you exactly what they’re looking for, and then hired you based on how you performed?

Forage theforage.com does just this.

Forage is so special because: