The Metaverse - Basic Intro

I get asked by lots of friends, family members, and work connections, “what is an NFT and what’s this Metaverse”? Shortly followed by,” it’s all mad, doesn’t exist does it, it’s all nonsense”?

Often the saying ‘Bees don’t waste their time explaining to flies why honey is better than ??’ pops into my head, but I usually respond with watch ‘Ready Player One’, it’s a pretty cool film!

YET, some genuinely really do want to know the basics and understand why so many people are talking about it, why so many companies are embracing it, why so many employees are leaving web2 for web3, but still don’t want the tech jargon.

So without going full nerd, this may help as a very very very basic intro:

To set the scene – there are enormous opportunities for income and vast wealth within the Metaverse (creators, users, and investors alike).

To understand WHY, it’s worth highlighting how wealth is often created in the first instance (excluding inheritance of course), ‘wealthy’ (cash not the quality of life) people often use ‘Leverage’ to remove their individual labour from making money. There are typically 4 ways to do this!

The first two are ‘permission-based leverage’: the oldest and most difficult one to manage is labour, this is the hardest to scale as each new employee has to want to work for the business and of course, they have to be paid.?

The second type of ‘permission-based leverage’ is capital, using other peoples money to generate wealth (think taking out a loan to buy a buy to let property), but this is also difficult because people have to give permission to use their money and it has to be paid back to them in the form of interest.

This brings us to ‘permission-less leverage’, these are how modern-day billionaires have been made, think Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Larry Page & Sergey Brin (Google), and Jack Dorsey (Twitter). Two types of ‘permission-less leverage’, ‘software’ and ‘media, scale for a very little additional cost and can access a theoretically unlimited amount of people (for example the cost of selling SaaS to 1,000 people is virtually the same as selling it to 10,000 people and the cost of following someone on Twitter or Tik Tok doesn’t even cost a single penny).

That’s why today's biggest companies (Facebook, Netflix, Google etc) all sell SOFTWARE THAT SERVES MEDIA.

This is where the Metaverse comes in (and I mean the Metaverse, not web3 as they are two different things), it will democratize these two types of ‘permission-less leverage’ and give the people that understand it early, enormous opportunities, because now any company can take advantage of infinite scale at virtually no additional cost (for example a current day estate agent is bound by the geography that they live or operate in, each new client takes time and money to service, however, if this same estate agent decides to sell digital real estate in the Metaverse they can now access a virtually unlimited amount of customers at virtually no cost. Now extend this to all businesses, for example, if you were selling apparel in the metaverse, you could create new units at almost no cost (pure profit) and access an unlimited customer base, and one that is so entwined and engaged (community). As the Metaverse sees mass adoption, companies and people will be taking advantage of unprecedented economic opportunities and not just tech companies like Google and Facebook (or should I say Meta), any company will be able to take advantage of this ‘permission-less leverage’.?

Don’t get me wrong here, it’s still super early days and it’s still extremely fragmented, just like the early days of web2. However, if it’s adopted on a global scale which undoubtedly it will (a case of when not if), we’ll see a wealth creation event unlike anything else we’ve ever seen and that includes the internet!!!?

The question then is, ‘are you ready for this digital transformation and how are you going to take advantage of it or do you think it's going nowhere?