How Gen Z’s in Web3 are making the biggest bets on the ecosystem
We sat down with Jakub Rusieck to learn about the origin and evolution of The Symmetrical. It all started with a passionate co-founder yearning to own and eventually group-buy a World of Women NFT. Today, The Symmetrical has transformed into the premier Gen Z Investment Club, empowering a generation deeply affected by the shortcomings of late-stage capitalism.
As they reflected on their execution, they realized the importance of dressing their actions in words that resonated with a wider audience.
Gen Z’s were born into a world of smartphones, forever connected to the digital realm. Their unique perspective made them invaluable as product testers, content creators and trendsetters. The Symmetrical understood the power of harnessing Gen Z's understanding of internet culture and their ability to make noise online.
But what truly set The Symmetrical apart was their belief in creating authentic experiences. They strived to be transparent and genuine while experimenting with different content formats, from educational videos to entertaining product roasts.
With a deep understanding of the web3 social landscape, The Symmetrical realized the need to support and nurture the app and middleware layer. While many investors focused on infrastructure, they saw the untapped potential of consumer-focused startups. A contrarian approach led them to establish an Venture DAO dedicated to supporting and funding these emerging ventures. The Symmetrical's story is one of continuous evolution and relentless pursuit. It transcended its initial investment focus, transitioning into a catalyst for change within the web3 landscape.
Checkout the full Symmetrical Interview here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTm-BGSUpi4
Check out a few quotes below:
How has the process of what you're executing changed over time? What is The Symmetrical focused on today to get to that end mission?
The actions that you need to make have to be dressed up in words that a lot of people can get behind -- the call to action. Empowering gen Z in web3 is this perfect umbrella term for a lot of things. We started as an investment club, pulled capital together and started group buying on chain assets.
That was an ‘aha’ moment for us that as a community, we were very attractive to founders and we were thinking “could we possibly try and raise a small fund or a small venture DAO and start investing as like these gen Z young investors and collectives”. At that time I didn't really have much of a network. So I was cold DM-ing. Some of them decided to take the calls with me and what they suggested is -- you need to start creating more of a track record for yourself to be in that position of launching a venture DAO and that's why we raised the grants program.
We empower gen Z through investments, we actually distribute grants focused on solely on web3 social, which is such a huge thing for us these days. Aside of that, we've been working on a cool series about "Where's The Money in The Creator Economy" where we're trying to establish whether it's economically feasible. We try to give as many opportunities to our community as we can.
Do you screen members up front to ensure that they are actually gen Z or is anyone allowed to join?
I no longer think that like being gen Z is necessarily the case for you have to be of a specific age, it's more about your mentality. I wouldn't say we would probably welcome someone that's like, say 50 or 60. Because it's completely different generations unless they exceptionally know the internet culture that we've been brought up with. There's some leniency. There's a lot of terms, we've actually dug into what are the specific age gaps for gen Z? There's a few ways of looking at it. We try to find people that have a young spirit and I'd say 95% of the community passes the age requirements. Then there's a couple of members that are just young people at soul.
Why get Symmetrical involved in your cap table or your product process. What is gen Z really bringing to the table there?
All of us were born with a smartphone or at a very young age we already had a smartphone in our hands. We're like chronically online. The difference between a gen Z crowd and perhaps older generations, is that we're great product testers. We've been doing a bunch of beta testing for various projects. We understand the internet culture. We're good people to have as users and also on your side because we know how to make noise on the internet.
We had some marketing jobs with a few projects that we've consulted. The underlying thing for gen Z and how has marketing changed and we can even look at current fashion marketing, how much this has changed from the ideal of a person that's tone and fit and slim. I think gen Z is all about honesty. That's the approach here -- is just to be very transparent and be honest with things. That's kind of how we differ. At some point we were writing everything without punctuation and literally like no capital letters and things like that. This is like a slightly younger subset of gen Z that still like does that not necessarily the type of community members that we have. We're kind of targeting the older range of gen z either already serious enough to actually get some work done.
You are taking the stance that you think web3 consumer adoption will come from video. Do you mind expanding on that concept?
That's actually a partnership that we have in flight here. That's one of these opportunities that we have opened up to our community and the way we think of this is 80% of internet bandwidth right now is video.
And within web3, we're still lacking good video apps with a great user experience. We're way behind TikTok YouTube, etc. This is the most digestible and easiest content to consume for people. That's why we think that's where the sort of the large unlocked or when we finally have some good mobile apps, for example, where you can view the content and the content abundance is going to be sufficient. Right now, it's just a huge disparity between what you see and the amounts of content you can find on YouTube.
Between those channels let's start with the content format, which of those content formats do you think are the best ones to invest in?
So for us, I think it's a mix of both long and short form content. For a long form content that's when we do educational videos. For example, "Where's The Money In The Creative Economies"? “What is web3 social? How does it work to be web3 native content creator. What are the apps there?”
And that's something that won't necessarily work in short form. In short form is kind of like scam is like how to make a million dollars just using AI. That's the kind of content that I see on TikTok that is like short form. It's like this magic pill that you get and like in 10 seconds they can tell you how to become a millionaire. I would try to stay away from that. Some things require a lot more time to talk about on the other hand, short form, competent is purely for our entertainment. More of the more entertaining stuff that is informative, so not necessarily educational, but one thing that has worked well for us in terms of short form content is these minute videos, which are product roasts.
And I have roasted Lore as well and these are perfect. They're entertainment. I think it's like a win-win it's both entertainment for people to watching it and seeing us taking a stab in a project. But at the same time, this is very informative for the projects that we roast. We ask - what do we actually like?
We've had some incredible situations where we were pointing out the mistakes that founders are making and like within a week or so they've updated their app.
You mentioned that on Twitter that you think we're in the “Farmville era of web3 social” between Farcaster, Lens and all these other protocols that are coming up. Could you describe what you mean by that?
I think we're on the brink of that era. I think there's still a lot of work to be done. I've been looking at the space from an investment perspective for, quite a long time now. What we're starting to see finally is hyper casual gaming coming into social graphs. So as we look at onchain games, like play-to-earn games, they are very much require you to be deeply immersed and spend a load of time there.
Not a lot of people have been thinking about the hyper casual gaming space, which important because so many people play these little games, like candy crush, etc and they make a ton of sense when there is a social graph integrated with them, when you can see what your friends are doing. How, for example, are you performing? And can I overtake you and in the rankings and perhaps we could, you know, integrate a token into that, and then suddenly you start a competing and being able to also have a monetary incentive. That's one part of socialfi is these casual games and why I said we’re in the Farmville era, because Zynga is like this gaming studio of the early Facebook era. And I'm sure a lot of us played Farmville and all of these other games. And I think something very similar, but potentially better with referral sources and some financial incentives is going to happen in web3 social.
Zynga totally took advantage of the Facebook social graph. To embed a game in there, and I see the parallels.
You know, what they say history kind of doesn't repeat, but it rhymes and I could totally see that happening. So we dove like right into web3 social on this specific use case. I would love to get a sense of what you define as web3 social and your breakdown of the landscape and how you're seeing these different categories.
The way I see the space right now is that first of all, there's these social graph providers Lens, Deso, Farcaster, CyberConnect. All of them kind of provide the infrastructure for developers to be able to build out applications. The upside here for all of these builders is that you can suddenly plug into a social graph, that it has a hundred thousand users already. In terms of the cold start problem, you have a bunch of people that are already onboarded. All they have to do is download the app. They don't have to fill out any details.
They already have an identity built up within that social graph. The way we look at it right now is that there's these protocols and the infrastructure. Then things that we're particularly excited about the way we see it as these social graphs incredibly well-funded. The app layer and the middle, where they are is where actually funding is much shorter. But these social graphs will not have much sort of a value without a thriving ecosystem. So things within the app layer things such as mobile apps, front ends and things such as Orb, Favor, Yup.
We're looking at anything related to like content consumption, like live streaming stuff, podcasting. We're looking at also projects like the hyper casual gaming and I think Social-Fi and that's something that we've been thinking a lot about lately is the fact that like web3 social as it is, is a bunch of clones, mostly.
But I don't think many people will come to web3 social to have a very similar experience. Rather with a much smaller group of people that can actually reply and interact with you I think it's it. They have a place in this ecosystem, but what I'm particularly excited on the app layer is these novel, web resource or experiences. And if given it a lot of thought to that and what crypto does well is transactions. So combining transactions with social experiences is where we're super excited. So things such as hyper casual gaming if you can like play people in win tokens. I think these are kind of the early innings where we had these cool coordination games. Where finances also embedded into this and I think that's going to be the killer use case. That's when people that are not web3 native are going to actually come and like use a web3 application is because this delivers an experience that they couldn't have had before in web2.
So you don't think people will come for the ethos of decentralization. No, I'm just joking.
I agree. I think some people will, but there isn't enough of them. If we want to reach that critical mass, it has to be something brand new. But another part of things that we're looking at is middleware. So it's protocols, it's application layer and middleware. Things such as analytics we're looking at like novel marketing tools, like in web3 social, because we own our identities finally. We're going to have the possibility to actually have an upside and by being targeted by ads. So if you have a lot of followers and you open yourself up to see a specific advertisement, you should have an upside to that and I think one project called Waves recently rebranded to surf. We've given them a grant and what they allow you to do is embed a micro-transaction into a post on Lens and you can sort of choose. Let's say I set it up as anyone that has about 300 followers and mirrors this post they'll get one magic for me. That's how you can have an upside just by amplifying posts by kind of being a curator. Lastly, one thing that I'm super excited about is that we'll finally be able to have full control over the feed that we see. For example, the way Lens structured is you've got algorithms and there's going to be huge marketplaces for these algorithms. And we're talking to a couple of projects that allow you to for example, deploy algos as smart contracts, but like, think about the use cases here. So, first of all, I think marketplaces of DAOs selling to their DAOs members, their algos to see like more of DAO related stuff, more of their community.
Secondly, I think crypto traders will be selling their algorithms to spot the next coin, etc. I've actually spoken to a founder of a large centralized exchange today and he told me, when I was telling him about the ideas, he's already got a crypto trader and is trying to like figure this out with him to share revenue from sending an algorithm. But on the more high level note, we are going into a censorship resistant social network and if we want to have traditional brands coming in, that care about their PR, we need to have any form of moderation to guarantee that let's say Coca-Cola ad is not going to be displayed next to hate speech and I think algorithms are truly our best bet here.
I also wanted to talk about this new product that The Symmetrical is launching - a web3 social investment DAO. Can you share with the world here first what that's all about?
So as you've already learned about our history of The Symmetrical and like the things we've done to finally get into this position. We've got really involved with the social space by testing products by roasting them.
By producing content and actually using these applications what we saw is that precisely social graphs have a lot of funding. And now the application middleware layer are incredibly underfunded. And what we decided to do is actually launched an investment DAO that focuses on the app and middleware layer. So we're social graph agnostic. We actually have a bunch of social graph participating in the investment DAO but actually being contrarian in a moment where every investor is very conservative with their checks, because the way we feel about it is that right now, the founders that haven't raised huge rounds in the past during the bull market - these are the most relentless people building new things.
And we wanted to start supporting them. So we're launching social graph ventures. It's going to be an investment DAO. Currently in the fundraising process with a huge help from hydro ventures. Which is an investment DAO structured as a fund of funds. We are targeting to deploy about 50 investments into the app and middleware layer. We've already actually deployed in the angel check into the Orb. They will be warehoused as for a steal of a social graph ventures.
As a consumer led consumer focused company, we feel that we end up building up a lot of the infra to actually make our consumer experience possible.
And I think that makes a lot of sense, but consumer experiences are really what brings the next billion users into crypto right and we already saw it with, with Opensea and Uniswap. They had to build a lot of infra to make that experience possible. And that's just the state of where the industry's at, but like, ultimately you need to own the customer relationship.
I think it's very fruit of you to be countercyclical to what the VCs are thinking right now. And be early to invest in those consumer startups and trust me in six months they're all going to jump on your bandwagon.
I think a lot of intelligent VCs and investors in the space of have already decided to get involved here. I think we all see that the next major catalyst is going to be web3 social, for many reasons. One of them is how many people understand DeFi versus how many people understand social networks. It grabs the mind of a much larger population and the other thing is that we think that with web3 social will sort of rejuvenate a lot of spaces. I think a lot of things are very much single-player and yes, you can go into etherscan, or even like you zapper interface to see what is your friend doing? On chain. But this is still a very fragmented experience. So we think that even DeFi is going to have a moment where I can see what my social graph is doing and like, “hey let's do a liquidity pool together”. So we think that social will make a lot more of the things, much more multiplayer.
One of the benefits of web3 social is the portability of content and your social graph. But that kind of makes it more important to create a community or really create a moat around your product. So how do you think about that in terms of like growth and community building?
I think obviously community is super important. When building a product in web3, and I think what web3 social is making it even more significant because right now, if you're on Lens and you're building an app, people have a concert theater. And they decide to actually start using a different app. They take all of their followers. There is no siloing. All of the following account goes to the new app and they can start producing completely different content. It could be from text to video. So I think all of these applications do realize that I think some of them will sort of try and create a moat around the distributing a token at some point, but I think the way we see it right now is, how are these projects defensible. If there can be a new project that's better funded and just delivers a better experience, but in a very similar niche.
Actually a lot of these projects are probably going to be subscription-based. So I think for example, these mobile apps are going to work on the specific subset of functions and catering to a specific niche and start actually getting a subscription fee for using these features.
A good example could be a project that focuses on content creators. It gives you the best analytics out there. It helps you like understand your revenues and also easily distribute content.
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*If you’d like to share community building insights with us, reach out on Twitter to get on the Shared Stakes show.*Lore is the ownership platform. Lore helps groups spin up a shared vault, pool resources, co-purchase NFTs, and use them together in a simple, safe, one-stop-shop platform.With co-ownership, collectives can access NFTs they couldn’t before, crowdfund creative projects and even play web3 games together.