Somehow we find ourselves near the end of 2021.
This has been another year full of trials for us all and overcoming obstacles in the face of uncertainty. I’ve come to learn that early stages in building a startup are an initiation. We hear that 95% of companies fail, and that is because it requires a lot of fortitude and problem solving. That has certainly been the case each year I’ve been a founder. You don’t really feel the weight of those words until you’ve taken it on.
November will mark three years since I started Crucible - despite the challenges, I can say truthfully that I am more confident now than I ever have been in what we are creating and more sure of why I am doing this. I’m still all in.
For those of you who don’t know our story, I spent a decade in LA working around innovation broadly and 2 years in Japan helping establish digital economics. I have been a part of catalyzing web3 communities in LA, Tokyo, London and now Amsterdam.
I was given the privilege of meeting the people tasked with building the future of nearly every industry and was taught the important lesson of exponential technology by Peter Diamandis - who sought me out to lead and map out web3 for him as an entrepreneur in residence - and he quickly became a mentor and a friend to me.
I can recall a day where Peter and I flew to San Francisco and met with people leading quantum computing, virtual worlds, holograms, robotics, autonomous cars and human lifespan longevity - all in a single day. I worked directly with Peter for a year.
In between my life in the US, I spent many months in Tokyo working with both private companies and government to help them understand and adopt blockchain technology. That time spent nurtured my love for their culture and philosophy behind identity, and the way avatars are fast becoming a part of society in Japan.
This kind of peek behind the global curtain was something significant and formative for the way I shaped up a personal thesis for the future - something I modeled into The Open Metaverse. The result of exponential technology can be concerning because of how quickly it outpaces us. Currently our system is designed on incentives to benefit shareholders of the companies creating the closed form of technology, but the individuals who use it - and their well being - are an afterthought. Open source software has been the subculture behind the internet since its inception, I recognized how important this was and traveled around the world to find the working groups of those shaping the way identity and economics work on the internet to benefit individuals and end users. These open protocols and standards hold the keys for many of the decentralized solutions that we need to be embedding into the Open Metaverse.
The internet has been architected by web developers and it has scaled through mobile web. The metaverse is another step change and it will be built by game developers. This will touch every person on Earth and be worth trillions, and is far too profound and powerful to be owned by anyone. It must be owned by everyone.
Crucible is the action plan behind that.
This was years before Covid, and the word metaverse was only being mentioned because Ready Player One was in theaters. The only other person I saw saying ‘Open’ and ‘Metaverse’ on the world stage was Tim Sweeney at SIGGRAPH.
Fast forward now, the word metaverse is the dressing on a buzzword salad, and Open Metaverse is mentioned throughout our web3 community. I won’t take credit for this alone, dozens of brilliant and dedicated people have gone through this paradigm shift and we’re all doing this together. I’ve just planted the seeds.
Now is the time to give those seeds some water and sunshine. I am now 8 weeks into working with my new team - a small full stack army of brilliant designers and engineers around the world. They have delivered some of the most exciting web3 projects of this past crazy vortex of a year. Products that have broken out of our crypto echo chamber and become a part of culture.
We are currently set to have a tested first iteration of product by the end of the year, which means I can target a release by the end of January.
Here’s roughly what you can expect:
PRE SEASON
Now - November (PRODUCT ENGINEERING + EARLY BUG TESTING)
December (STORYTELLING + COMMUNITY/CONTENT)
EMERGENCE SEASON ONE
January (CLOSED BETA + MINTING DAO MEMBERSHIP)
February (TENTATIVE RELEASE OF EMERGENCE)
From this point on, you will all be an important part of the process.
Now, for the fun part.
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Ryan Gill
Founder & CEO
Great read. Awesome journey and stoked to see what comes next
Amazing to read this and see we're both still on similar paths. Looking forward to them crossing again. 😊