Passionware Refresh

"Crypto is so unique that it's not possible to reason by analogy to history."

We would go a step further - crypto will even make recent history look like the anomaly.

We first coined Passionware in November 2020 in our blog called The End of the Workforce Era, The Rise of the Passion Economy and the Birth of “Passionware”

The Passion Economy represents the intersection of entrepreneurship and the concept of a “job”, with huge implications for the future skills and capital required. This creates a new mindset for both employment and entrepreneurship, and the need and comfort to be your own “lean start-up”. Moreover, these new entrepreneurs will take a different approach to their users, as they stimulate their fans to turn their own passions into revenue-producing businesses. The new wave of tools  enable everyone to be an entrepreneur, run their business to earn a living and at the same time, chase their passions.

Human evolution, taking us from the savannah to creating economic order in every corner of the globe, manifests in all of us an  aspiration to control our own lives and be free of dependence on others for economic livelihood.

We want to be capital - not labor.  We are all entrepreneurs by our very nature. That was the norm since the Sumerian craftmen counted tokens 5000 years ago.

It is  only the lack of infrastructure capabilities to start, grow and scale a business that has driven the 9-5 job as the (recent) historical norm. We posit the concept of Passionware 2.0 driven by the Digiverse (enables everyone to be an entrepreneur) is a return to the real "norm" and the workforce era is the anomaly.

Until very recently it was considered a "novelty" to prefer being a solo entrepreneur or (even crazier) a start-up founder. Now with Covid accelerating changes, people want to work at home, earn with their passions and any type of skill, such as play-to-earn environments like Axie rather than be an assistant, waiter or menial worker.

Why? Because we can. The dominance of corporations, fiat money and all middle-men will be seen as a short-term accident of history, swept away by the dual power of technology and human ingenuity creating larger and more efficient economies.

This has major implications for how markets and economies are created and how venture investors can access this new world.

The VC Opportunity: Macro View

For venture capital, hardware represented the investment basis from first VCs in the 1960s until software became the basis for VC investing in 1990s.

VC investment in software exceeded $100B in 2000 largely due to the omnipresence of the Internet. Today, software and tech are the basis for almost all VC investments - reaching almost $300B in the first half of 2021 alone.

Benson Oak posit that Passionware will be the parallel to the hardware and software "uber-categories", represented by the digital revolution, with blockchain and decentralized systems at its core,  and NFTs as the operating system of this revolution.

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Just as software ate the world, "blockchain will connect the world" unleashing true Passionware at global scale, reach and magnitude, resulting in new definitions of both entrepreneurship and consumerism.