Gamechanging Insights No. 12:
Boris Wertz in Conversation with Candice Faktor
One of the core tenets which inspired the founding of Gamechanger is our overwhelming passion for creating the future we want.
Creating the future has taken on an unexpected new meaning in the wake of COVID-19 and has shown us that our education, work, and value systems will evolve much faster than previously anticipated out of necessity. Our recent conversation with Boris Wertz, founding partner of Version One, provided great insights into these areas as he unpacked his theses on the future of education, work, and finance.
1. Future of Learning
The Pandemic is a force function for the adoption of online learning. Leading up to the end of February 2020, there were c. 0.3 billion online learners, whereas by the end of March 2020, the number jumped to c. 1.38 billion.
Boris emphasized that the pandemic has shown us that schools can be much more flexible than we thought. It also showed us how much innovation is still required to enable a collaborative, two-way experience, as opposed to a one to many experience with limited interaction. Online learning is at version 1.0 just like the first online experiences of the internet— they were carbon copies of the offline world, translated from one medium to another. Society has a growing need for retraining in the post-COVID-19 era on account of record unemployment rates and rising automation.
He predicts that unlocking online learning will be the only effective way of addressing the global training crunch and we are likely to witness similar dynamics take place in education that took place in retail and e-commerce.
There is not much room left in the middle—educational institutions that don’t have a brand, don’t have scale, or are not specialized will fail. Above all, Boris foresees an immense opportunity to democratize access to education through the next wave of innovation in online learning.
2. Future of Work
In the shift to remote working, Boris emphasized that the biggest issue with remote work is replicating those serendipitous things that usually happen in real life virtually.
For teams that already have strong relationships with coworkers and product roadmaps in place, the transition to remote work has gone smoothly. These relationships and ideation processes will need to be replenished which is much tougher to do in a virtual environment with the current tools available.
The things which Boris noted we lose in the current environment are those opportunities for discovery such as ideation, spontaneous interactions, and meeting new people. Boris does not believe that the future of work is all virtual, all the time.
3. Future of Finance
Boris has been one of the earliest investors in the applied crypto ecosystem, with a focus on decentralized finance.
Boris noted that with the strength of the US dollar and US economy, we are unlikely to see a strong surge in inflation due to Fed policy: this will precipitate a flight to digital assets and currencies. However, he contrasted the U.S. with emerging markets that don’t have a central bank that has the resources and reputation to print money in the economic fallout of COVID-19, such as Venezuela and Argentina.
In these emerging markets circumstances, Boris predicts that currency crises will be on the rise and individuals will need to access digital currencies as a secure store of value. Most importantly, he emphasized that individuals in such emerging markets are mainly interested in stable coin projects, such as USDC and USDT as a way to own the US dollar in a frictionless, digital way.
Boris highlighted that decentralized finance is disrupting every single layer of the centralized finance system, from debt, equity, derivatives, insurance, and lending.
In protocols like Ethereum, Boris shared how they involve radically different approaches to how participants can actually benefit from them and how they can be involved in terms of governance, token ownership, and DApps (decentralized applications) development.
4. Big Tech and Creating the Future We Want
In discussing the role of big tech’s power and control, Boris noted that over the last decade we have witnessed FAANG platforms genuinely control and commoditize supply—whether it be content producers in the case of Google and Facebook or marketplace participants in the context of Amazon.
Boris highlighted that many opportunities have been taken away from individuals. In creating the future we want, Boris showed that there is two ways to counter the imbalance.
First, encourage more companies like Shopify that are on the side of the creator, supporting and partnering with the merchant and small shop owner. Second, encourage decentralized protocols that provide an opportunity for contributors to benefit from the value they create by owning tokens of the protocol.
Our conversation ended with Boris encouraging more kindness in our ecosystem. “One of the kindest things you can do for somebody is to “put them in business” and believe in them when nobody else does: Hire someone into their first job, Be the first one to buy someone’s new product/service. Write the first cheque for a new start-up.” We hope you enjoyed these insights from our session with Boris Wertz.