Ready. Set. Go.

Coming back from Paris, after spending days with my straight-shooting lovely wife, my always life-enjoying friend Nizzar, and many other crazy-optimistic-weird people, something new has re-awakened inside me. Something I last felt years ago while spending a summer in Silicon Valley and then again when travelling the world to build up a global robotics ecosystem.

I'm feeling truly excited about 2024 and 2025. It's like a mix of having butterflies in your stomach for not knowing precisely what will happen while knowing with certainty that this year will be crazier than the previous ones.

Losing and finding clarity. There and Back Again.

Ever since I was a kid, I've always been a techno-optimist who believes that the evolution of technology is the One thing that brings peace to the world and gives power to every hardworking person to enjoy life. If I were to apply labels, I could probably even call myself an effective accelerationist (e/acc).

Yet along the way, especially after the challenging year of 2023, I lost that spark. There was the failure of our supply chain protocol fundraising, the fall of our racing game and the money loss of our big event last year, which all played a role in this, as written in the 2023 wrap-up. That said, 2023 was hard for most people, and the only question ever was who would keep pushing and who would give up.

The good thing is that I kept going, put together a new team and started working hard again. All this didn't let me stay down for too long, while I always knew I had no such luxury anyway, being the Provider for our Family.

Still, our small successes in the last few months didn't completely get me back on track. The trip to Hong Kong for ApeFest almost did, but it was followed by the Christmas period when nothing ever happens and everyone gets lazy again.

But now, returning from Paris, having less than two months until our next big event and some newly found clarity in general, I couldn't be more optimistic again. Full of new energy to get cracking.

How shall we use this energy, and what makes us unique?

For now, I've been in tech and startups for over ten years whilst starting my first entrepreneurial pursuits in 2007. During this time, I've built products, set up marketing campaigns, raised outside capital, met with industry leaders, and even successfully completed one M&A process.?

But throughout all this, I haven't fully understood my strengths. Of course, I kind of did - but some clarity has been missing.

Mainly because whatever has needed to be done, if no one claimed the task, I just took care of it.

Not at 100% accuracy, but getting at least 80-95% there.

Designing, Development, Event Organising, Fundraising, Legal, Marketing, Sales, Testing - whatever needs to get done, I get it done. Learn how to use the tools and do it.

And for the longest period, I figured every entrepreneur does that. However, the longer I keep playing this game, the less I'm inclined to believe this now.

Yes, the most outstanding founders I've had the pleasure to meet or read about seem to act similarly, but most like to find their lane and stick to that. Which isn't necessarily bad and is probably something I should also be doing - as long as it’s not too comfortable one. So, what is my lane?

Last week, Nizzar may have answered it for me. It was our 1st anniversary of meeting IRL. And from the moment we did, there has been this feeling in the air that something connects us.

The reality is that neither of us are experts in anything. Instead, we are wild, crazy and untamable experimenters driven by new ideas. And we love to listen and learn from others to be able to merge different ideas and pull other crazy ones together.

And this is our strength. Being the crazy ones. The experimenters.

Of course, there are actual skills we excel at which enable us to design & build products and projects, but these are all acquirable. Whilst being driven only by progress is our superpower. Progress builds momentum, and momentum attracts builders.

The only question left standing is which quest is most suitable for us.

Choosing a good quest. Aka, where are we going with all of this?

My long-term quest for as long as I have been building startups has been building the information superhighway. To enable the free flow of information between all businesses and consumers.

Wait, isn’t this the Internet, along with Indexing, Search, and, these days, everything under the umbrella of the term AI?

Well, yes and no.

On the one hand, the Internet is exactly everything I have always cared about. But at the same time, most of what we know as the Internet today is primarily the consumer-facing layer. However, I believe the whole concept is still underutilised in most business-to-business relationships. As a result, we can publish and search for info, message others and sometimes purchase products through the Internet, but for everything else, we still have to rely on face-to-face meetings, phone calls and even the postal office.

That said, I now know that this is too big and hard of a quest to embark on at this very moment. After trying to do this via supply chain digitalisation-focused startups for eight years, I understand that you first need the scale of an Amazon-like business and a much more extensive network of connections to have a chance for success.

However, this doesn’t mean something shouldn’t be done in this direction. More so, this is precisely the vision that first attracted me to blockchains, or more specifically, decentralised computing, as I genuinely believe it to be the cornerstone for the future of a truly connected Internet.

But when it comes to blockchains, everyone likes to say we’re early - which is entirely accurate. We are still using this technology primarily to build a more optimised finance system whilst most degens try to squeeze life-changing gains via airdrops and market manipulation. Still, there seems to be some early success in building solutions that go beyond financialisation and experiment with new-age connection, loyalty & personalisation concepts. From metaverses to Stamps while constantly optimising the underlying protocols.

And this is the playfield we intend to spend our next years. More so, that’s the game we’ve been playing the whole time. It’s just a more clarified path for us now, and it’s where we see the market pull. Aka, the companies are more inclined to experimentation here as it’s the fastest path for them to increase their bottom line.

There are still some discussions we need to have internally, but the early ideas we have are building on top of our strengths and the infrastructure we’ve built through the Events and Banana DAOquiri, which is why it makes sense to double down on this.

So what’s exactly going to happen?

You’ll have to wait and see.

But know that the upcoming BananaConf Tallinn and Web3x[Indsutry] events have a huge role to play in all this, while it’s our goal to involve as many as we can from the Banana DAOquiri in the whole process.

So, if you are looking to test out new products or experimenting by creating some yourself and want to connect with potential buyers, keep close. We’re here to truly connect. And the first significant place we’re doing that is at the BananaConf Tallinn on April 22-24.