#Ep. 47: "Can't be evil" - Why we should care about Web 3!

Richard Muirhead is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Fabric Ventures. Our host Ahmed recorded this episode in sunny London at the Fabric Ventures office. With an established career in engineering, entrepreneurship and investing, Ahmed was intrigued to find out Richard’s core and to see what influenced him to become the person he is today. Richard shares parts of his childhood experiences when growing up and how his post-university experiences, particularly in building companies, has built much of who he is today. This led him to believe that developers and computer engineers are the primary driving forces behind successful businesses. Moving onto Web 3 and its construct, Richard talks about why Web 3 is his focus touching on the intersections of easily architecting software that is easily interwoven in our lives, how the world currently works and how start-ups succeed. As Google came up with the motto “Don’t be evil’, Fabric Ventures thought about this differently. Their motto is ‘Cant’ be evil’ and Richard discusses the story behind why they came up with this motto and concepts such as privacy by design. As Fabric Ventures are currently fundraising, Ahmed was intrigued to find out how Richard and the team are trying to convince the wider investor community and traditional LP’s to invest in this new wave. The ideas surrounding Web 3 are great, but how can you rally traditional investors to back you? Richard articulately lays down the the things that get the investors excited and things that they should avoid. Ahmed shifts the conversation to the types of entrepreneurs that Fabric will typically back. If you’re a Web 3 entrepreneur reading this or listening to the podcast, make sure you listen to what Richard had to say! Enterprise and tech titans - how are they looking at this and will they be adapting? Ahmed and Richard discussed whether or not the current incumbents will be able to change their business models to the new world of Web 3 and the new value chain that will emerge as a result. Richard draws interesting comparisons from history citing the move from IP to cloud (around 10 years ago) created lots of software applications and resulted in huge value creation. He argues we may see something similar when we move from IP to an architecture whereby people and companies all hold their own data and share it at their will in an interwoven system. Finally, the two touch on regulation to see how GDPR and Open Banking will be able to aid this nascent industry in moving forward! All this and more is discussed in the week’s episode of Encrypted! Special Guest: Richard Muirhead.