Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Be a B2B Leader.
Speaker: I'm your host Felicjan and I'm a marketing manager who wants to learn more about business, marketing and leadership.
Speaker: Today my guest is Armin Zadagvar, the president at European Web3 Organization and CEO at the Armin Bar, a boutique digital agency.
Speaker: In this episode, you will learn from Armin the role of Web3 in today's businesses.
Speaker: So let's get started.
Speaker: Hi Armin and welcome to the show.
Speaker: Thank you for having me.
Speaker: Hi.
Speaker: So Armin, let's dive straight into the topic.
Speaker: Please tell me and the audience what is Web3 actually?
Speaker: Many people talk about it, but not everyone understands it.
Speaker: So the easiest way I can explain that is to just, let's put it in this way.
Speaker: If it's called Web3, that means that there was a Web1 and a Web2, right?
Speaker: So if we understand this evolution, we would easily understand what is the Web3 and why this is something important that we need to pay attention to.
Speaker: Let's say around at the end of the 80s, 1989 or something, that's a time that the internet became commercially available to the public.
Speaker: Around that time until like 2005 or so, which was the birth of social media and the whole concept of user-generated content economy.
Speaker: During this period, the internet, as we remember, or at least people who are as old as me that they remember that era, it was a very aesthetic internet, meaning that you could just only consume the information that someone had put it there on a specific website.
Speaker: That's why we call it, quote unquote, a read-only internet.
Speaker: You could only consume.
Speaker: Then from 2005 until now, the internet that we have, especially as I was saying with the rise of social media, then YouTube came in, then Facebook came in.
Speaker: So you would be able not only to consume, but also create, but also participate.
Speaker: So this became a big shift from read-only to read and write.
Speaker: Now you can also participate.
Speaker: And then the situation, especially we saw it in the last few years from
Speaker: some cases in the political spectrum to some in the medical spectrum, some in, for any different reasons, as we saw, if you look at it objectively and you put your,
Speaker: let's say, political and social points of view assigned, what happened was that some politicians, some doctors, or some content creators in general, they were silenced, or it's better to say they were censored by the platforms.
Speaker: Again, put your political, social, social,
Speaker: perspective aside.
Speaker: What happened here, it was like, okay, wait a minute.
Speaker: I was creating that content.
Speaker: I put that video on YouTube.
Speaker: I put that tweet on Twitter.
Speaker: It's a content that I create, that this is my content.
Speaker: But this was a very clear example showing that it's actually, no, you create it, but you don't own it.
Speaker: The platforms own it.
Speaker: You have access to them.
Speaker: They give you access.
Speaker: So this was a big problem over here for a lot of the technologies.
Speaker: And then we also considering we can also dig into the digital identity part, which is a very fascinating topic for me.
Speaker: We started seeing the new version of the internet coming to the place that it's not read-only,
Speaker: It's not read and write, it became read, write and own.
Speaker: So now within this new version of the internet, you can consume the information that is on the internet.
Speaker: You can put your participation, your contents on the internet, your data on the internet.
Speaker: But who is going to be the owner?
Speaker: Not a website that should put it on, but you are going to be the owner of the data.
Speaker: And that is a very fundamental change, a shift that we see that is happening thanks to the blockchain technology.
Speaker: And that is the future that we're going towards.
Speaker: It's a huge shift when you compare it with the first years.
Speaker: Overall, the internet as it is, it changed the world we live in.
Speaker: Nobody can argue with that.
Speaker: If it was not because of internet, me and you, we wouldn't be able to even know that such person existed.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: But Armin, why is Web3 important for businesses and business leaders?
Speaker: It's like saying that why the user generated content is important for businesses in 2006, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12.
Speaker: It's the same concept.
Speaker: Because if the shift of the internet is going that way, you need to adapt as well.
Speaker: And in this case, and this also the same thing that happened with the Web 2, it not only allowed you to have to have an interaction in a different way with your consumers or clients, let's say even B2B with your clients, but also created new revenue streams and a lot of new businesses that
Speaker: thrived and they created new bit.
Speaker: You're talking B2B over here.
Speaker: How many B2B companies that they also even became a billion dollar companies became unicorns?
Speaker: They were
Speaker: created thanks to the infrastructure that the web 2 gave them that web 1 was not able to give them companies that they were able to create SaaS products that help companies for their sales funnel that you connect them to different social media channels for example
Speaker: With Web1, you were not able to do it.
Speaker: Same concept.
Speaker: There are new ways of interacting with your clients and there are new opportunities to even build new businesses or new business units.
Speaker: So can you give me an example of a new way to interact with the customers?
Speaker: So think about it in this way.
Speaker: If you're... Imagine you're...
Speaker: let's go for trying to give you an example that is more practical, tangible.
Speaker: If you're an artist, you're in a sense of you're a singer.
Speaker: If you're a singer, because I have some friends that they produce music and
Speaker: With the current situation, the way that it works, they produce the music, then there is a middleman normally, apart from the management, then there's a recording company, then there's distribution, then there's these platforms like Spotify, and then for every stream that you have, then you may get a fraction of a dollar.
Speaker: And then in order for you to make some money, you created the art.
Speaker: But the majority of the value goes for the people in the middle that take your art and give it to the end user.
Speaker: So with this situation, what happens is now you would own your...
Speaker: piece of art, be it your music, for example, in this example, and then you would be able to, and your fans can be able to buy the piece, the original piece of art directly from you.
Speaker: And the best part of such a thing for the creators, it becomes the royalty part.
Speaker: Which is, let's say you're a manufacturer of... An example, I see you're wearing glasses or you're wearing a watch.
Speaker: What happens to the second-hand market, some of the... It's a very big market here in Milan, for example, for vintage sunglasses or second-hand watches.
Speaker: If you buy a Rolex watch for, let's say, $10,000, and then you go and in the secondhand market, there is a demand for it.
Speaker: And then you go and sell that watch for $20,000.
Speaker: That $10,000 that an individual over here had over a
Speaker: value that was created by the creator in this example rolex what percentage of it went to rolex zero yeah
Speaker: And then this transaction can go from 1% to so many others in the future as well.
Speaker: And the manufacturer in this example only h ad a piece at the very beginning, at the first sale.
Speaker: With this new technology, what you can create, you can put a percentage of
Speaker: which we call them the royalty fees, that when you sell the item for the first time, you define this is the price of the item.
Speaker: And the price of the item includes 10%, 5%, whatever you define, the creator defines, 5% royalty.
Speaker: What does that mean?
Speaker: That means that if you buy it from me, I'm the artist, you buy it from me for 10, then if you sell it for 15, out of that 15, 5% automatically will go to the creator.
Speaker: That guy who bought it for 15, if he sells it, again, even for 15, 5% will go to
Speaker: To the creator.
Speaker: For every transaction, 5% will go to the creator for perpetuity forever.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This is something that that's why the term also smart contract comes into place because these contracts, these agreements are smart.
Speaker: So, and there is nobody in the middle say that, oh, did you sell that?
Speaker: Let me see what percentage goes where it's all through the software.
Speaker: It's three nights, the whole process.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's perfect for creators, but yeah, I wonder how it will look like for service businesses.
Speaker: For a service business, imagine, for example, you're doing courses.
Speaker: You would be able, and then there are people that they participate in your course to get a certification.
Speaker: You would be able to also register those certifications on the blockchain.
Speaker: And this is something that can be verified without... Nobody can copy your certification anymore, for example.
Speaker: Because this is something that can be verified if it's an original piece or not.
Speaker: Very easy.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: And Armin, what are the tactics that people can use to leverage WIP3 in their business?
Speaker: Like, if they want to start?
Speaker: I think there is no...
Speaker: one size fits all answer.
Speaker: But what I can do is what I can tell to you or your audience in this case is to
Speaker: Think Web3 as an infrastructure.
Speaker: Let me give you an example, because the last few years I've been doing a lot of corporate trainings, working with mostly marketing sales teams of different corporations, mostly in Italy and France.
Speaker: There is this concept of digital transformation that this digital transformation has been a very sexy term.
Speaker: And it was sometimes very difficult for people to comprehend.
Speaker: I can give you two examples and then I'll connect this to the vocabulary.
Speaker: Okay, sounds good.
Speaker: Two concepts, digitalization and digital transformation.
Speaker: What is digitalization?
Speaker: Digitalization is the idea, is the concept that technically you digitalize whatever processes that you have.
Speaker: So it's not a new process.
Speaker: It's not a new thing.
Speaker: It's just whatever you had, you digitalize it.
Speaker: It's good in so many cases.
Speaker: It saves you time and hassle, but there's nothing groundbreaking over there.
Speaker: You're doing the same thing, but now in a digital version.
Speaker: Digital transformation, on the other hand, is not that, okay, whatever we were doing, let's just add a layer of digital to it.
Speaker: They're looking at digital as an infrastructure.
Speaker: What can we do now that we were not able to do before?
Speaker: A very clear example that makes it very easy to comprehend is when you, for example, try to rent a car.
Speaker: Have you ever rented a car in your life?
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Obviously.
Speaker: There you go.
Speaker: 10 years ago, when you wanted to, 15 years ago, when you wanted to rent a car, what you had to do, you had to open, depends on your country.
Speaker: For example, in the US, you had to open these yellow pages to find the phone number of the closest, find which rental office is close to you.
Speaker: Then you have to call them during the working hours, of course.
Speaker: But then if they're not busy, they would answer.
Speaker: Then you have to go, hey, I want this.
Speaker: I want a car for this period.
Speaker: Okay, for this period, we have this car and this car.
Speaker: This is the price.
Speaker: Okay, can you give me your credit card information?
Speaker: They would type it down and then they would maybe fax you something to sign and fax it back.
Speaker: And then you go there, you fill out some paper.
Speaker: This was the process.
Speaker: Nowadays, how it's going to work.
Speaker: You go on the website of that car rental company, you choose the closest
Speaker: office that you have to you or the one that you want.
Speaker: Then you see what cars they have available.
Speaker: Then you choose that car.
Speaker: Then you put your credit card information and your driver's license information.
Speaker: And then you submit it.
Speaker: They receive an email over there.
Speaker: Then you go there to maybe also over there, sign something.
Speaker: They check your documents and you pick up the car.
Speaker: It's the same process.
Speaker: Nothing changed.
Speaker: We just digitalized it, which is fantastic.
Speaker: Don't get me wrong.
Speaker: It's fantastic.
Speaker: Now at 2 a.m.
Speaker: in the morning, you can decide to rent a car.
Speaker: You can do it.
Speaker: You don't have to wait for the working hours to make a phone call.
Speaker: But it's the same process.
Speaker: Nothing groundbreaking happens here.
Speaker: But if you look at another company...
Speaker: I don't know if you're familiar with, for example, there's this company, you see it in New York, you see it also here in Milan, in Rome, it's called Car2Go.
Speaker: Car2Go, they realized something.
Speaker: They were just like, wait a minute, in big cities now, a lot of people don't have a car, don't own a car, but they may need a car for a short few minutes, 10 minutes to go places.
Speaker: And then these people, all of them, they have a smartphone in their hand.
Speaker: If they have a smartphone in their hand, it means that they have a GPS.
Speaker: If they have a GPS, we can also put a GPS on the car so we see where the car is.
Speaker: There is also IoT with the NFC chip.
Speaker: We can also, or Bluetooth, we can have them open and close the door of the car.
Speaker: And if they put the registration once with their credit card and the driver's license, we know who these people are.
Speaker: And they created a business that 10, 15 years ago was not even imaginable.
Speaker: What they did, they used the new technologies as an infrastructure to build something that answers the needs of today.
Speaker: Doing a full circle...
Speaker: Coming back to Web3, what we need to do, because that's what I was saying, that it's not one size fits all.
Speaker: I don't know your business or his or her business.
Speaker: Everybody's business is very different.
Speaker: What you can do is to understand what the Web3 characteristics are and see how you can apply these characteristics to your business.
Speaker: And the more you understand these characteristics, the more understand the concepts in the Web3 world, then you would be able to better answer the fundamental question, which is, what would my business look like if I would have built it today?
Speaker: That's a very good question.
Speaker: And I like the point you made about the fundamentals because it always ties back to that.
Speaker: Like if you get the fundamentals right, if you understand them correctly, then you can set yourself up for success.
Speaker: Like that's how it works.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And for whoever might be interested as part of the European Web Theory organization, one of our main goals is to provide free education to European citizens.
Speaker: And if you go to europeanweb3.org, over there on the resources section, you can find the ebook that we prepare.
Speaker: It took us a lot of time to simplify these concepts.
Speaker: It's called Web3 Made Easy.
Speaker: You can download that for free.
Speaker: That's a book that I suggest whoever is interested into Web3 world.
Speaker: That book is going to give you the fundamentals.
Speaker: And when you understand the fundamentals, the next step, okay, I want to try to see what new business model or what new business unit or a completely new project.
Speaker: I want to try to build that, but I don't have the tools to better understand how to do it.
Speaker: We also developed a free tool over there.
Speaker: It's called Web3 Business Design Canvas, similar to Business Model Canvas, but vertically designed for the Web3 world.
Speaker: That, again, on the resources part of the European Web3 organization, you can download that for free.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: I will include the links in the description of this podcast so people can just open it and find them.
Speaker: Beautiful.
Speaker: And I mean, what do you think, like, what will the next five years, let's say, look like when it comes to Web3 and the more traditional businesses?
Speaker: So let's say we have banks, we have old manufacturing companies, like how will they adapt?
Speaker: The fact is there are two layers.
Speaker: The layer, one of the most important parts that we're focusing right now is
Speaker: is the education part.
Speaker: The education on... Because there are two fronts.
Speaker: Individual citizens, companies.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Companies need to understand the basics and then hands-on working on tools similar to what we're providing to see what they can provide for their customers, B2B or B2C.
Speaker: On the other hand, the education for the individual citizens, the reason we're pushing that is a lot of regulations are coming.
Speaker: especially on the European level.
Speaker: And people are not even informed what's being regulated.
Speaker: They don't even understand what's being regulated.
Speaker: They may not be informed
Speaker: in favor of some of these regulations, but it might be too late by the time that they're being informed about it.
Speaker: So one of the reasons that we're pushing right now, we have this saying, we say, education before regulation, is to make sure that enough people understand it.
Speaker: So if there is going to be any regulation, they at least can say, yes, no, I want this, I don't want that.
Speaker: Or if a politician suggests certain regulation, they can at least understand the motives of that.
Speaker: politician.
Speaker: On the other hand, one thing that I see, it's a very, very fine line.
Speaker: One thing that I see a lot of companies get stuck in is that, oh, we need to educate our customers.
Speaker: We need to... Wrong.
Speaker: Wrong.
Speaker: Because you don't need to educate your customers on Web3.
Speaker: The only thing you need to do, you need to create a very, very simple to use product that they're just hooked on the product and you don't need to educate them how to use it.
Speaker: One of the main reasons, in my opinion, that all the shift and the hype, which I'm happy a lot of the people that they were in the hype of Web3, now they move to AI.
Speaker: So just like cash grabbers and whoever was following a trend was for one major reason, which was ChatGPT.
Speaker: ChatGPT,
Speaker: The breakthrough that ChatGPT had was that it was so simple to use.
Speaker: It didn't, they didn't, OpenAI didn't try to educate the market, oh, what is AI?
Speaker: What does machine learning can do?
Speaker: They just create a very simple product that everybody can use.
Speaker: We're still missing a ChatGPT in the Web3 world.
Speaker: And a lot of people put their focus on educating the people instead of creating something simple that can be used.
Speaker: by many.
Speaker: Does that make sense?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: It's a brilliant point that you brought up.
Speaker: Because ChatGPT, everybody is talking about it.
Speaker: But I was thinking that in Web3, we missed something like that.
Speaker: But actually, there wasn't anything like that yet.
Speaker: There was not.
Speaker: And either it was a bubble of nerds
Speaker: or it was become something too complicated for the masses to use.
Speaker: So that's why I'm saying like, there are two layers, education, but education that we are doing for the public is something, education we're doing for the corporations is another thing, but the corporations, companies, they don't need to focus on educating their customers.
Speaker: They just need to focus on creating something easy to use.
Speaker: This doesn't only apply to Web3 as you see with AI or any other thing that you do.
Speaker: You don't need to educate your customers on the technologies you use.
Speaker: Just use that technology to create something of value for your customers.
Speaker: Yeah, like the fact is that the people who care about technology, those are mostly the developers.
Speaker: Like nobody else looks at it.
Speaker: In sales and marketing, we say don't try to sell the features, sell the benefits.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Because features is something you care about.
Speaker: They don't care about the features.
Speaker: They think like, what's in it for me?
Speaker: What can it do for me?
Speaker: I don't care how it works.
Speaker: Is it gonna help me in any shape or form?
Speaker: So, Armin, I love the whole conversation, but please tell me, what do you think?
Speaker: Yeah, what's the biggest takeaway you would like the audience to have from this?
Speaker: The biggest takeaway is that Web3 is not a fact and it's not going to go away.
Speaker: It's not all the negative stuff that you see, the scams of FTX and stuff.
Speaker: Look at Web3 as an infrastructure.
Speaker: Web3 is not only monkey JPEGs that you can register on the blockchain in the form of a non-fungible token and trade them for millions of dollars.
Speaker: Look at Web3 the same way that I was explaining the concept of digital transformation.
Speaker: Look at it as an infrastructure, understand the fundamentals, and then see how you can apply it to your business.
Speaker: Or the question that we have, what would your business look like?
Speaker: if you would have built it today with the information that you have today, with the technologies that you have access to today.
Speaker: Brilliant.
Speaker: I really loved it.
Speaker: So Armin, the last question for today, where can people find you and how can you help them with Web3 and everything else?
Speaker: Well, LinkedIn is the best place.
Speaker: And also I have a very particular name.
Speaker: So if you Google, my name is not that easy to find me.
Speaker: And in terms of how we can help, as I said, like through the European Web3 organization is a non-for-profit organization.
Speaker: We support European citizens and European professionals in this process.
Speaker: I'm also a part of this company called Glam Blocks.
Speaker: that we do for companies who are interested, we do kind of custom consultancy.
Speaker: We perform a course and a workshop hands-on, making our hands dirty with companies in order to understand what are the possibilities, what they can and cannot do in the Web3 world.
Speaker: And then if needed, we're helping them also to build the solutions.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: So I will include all the links in the description.
Speaker: There will be quite a few of them, but yeah, it will be easy to find Armin.
Speaker: So thank you very much for today and for explaining the whole topic and giving so many examples because it really, yeah, you explained it in such a way that I think everybody will understand the role of Web3.
Speaker: This is the whole concept.
Speaker: This is the whole concept.
Speaker: And last thing I add is...
Speaker: What we understood, especially for the education to the B2B world, majority of the people in the B2B, these are people that are very smart.
Speaker: If they build a company to be where they are, or if they're a manager of a company at a certain level, that automatically shows that they are smart people.
Speaker: But if they're smart people, it doesn't mean that they know everything.
Speaker: I always try to think of like, if I have my cousin who's a pharmacist, who's brilliant, he's even smarter than me for sure, but like he doesn't know anything about Web3, how am I going to explain Web3 to him?
Speaker: This was my whole concept, like coming from the educational background, because I have been teaching in different universities the last 10 years, coming from corporate trainings, understanding the language of corporations and managers in different levels and understanding the technology,
Speaker: putting all these things together we created this whole the book and stuff we i found myself in a position i called it a bridge yeah you just instead of scaring people with some uh crazy technical word buzzwords and try to show that oh i'm look i look sophisticated and stuff try to just simplify it so they understand that they can create value with you yeah
Speaker: it will be much easier to get the buy-in this way.
Speaker: Like, first you have to make people understand and then they will follow.
Speaker: You just need to, in terms of the companies, as I was saying, the companies need to understand the fundamentals.
Speaker: Then they need to make their hands dirty to better see what they can and cannot build.
Speaker: Then what they create for their customers needs to be the easiest thing for the customers to adapt and use.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: I think that's the perfect spot to end this conversation on.
Speaker: Thank you once again for today.
Speaker: Thank you for having me.
Speaker: See you on LinkedIn.
Speaker: Cheers.
Speaker: Thank you for listening to this episode of Be a B2B Leader.
Speaker: If you liked this episode, make sure to leave a review in your favorite podcast app.
Speaker: Also, if there is something you would like to learn, let me know.
Speaker: After all, we are building a knowledge base for B2B.
