💡Inspiration

An inspiration story why we create WEconomy

The Visionary Behind WEconomy

Pistis, the visionary behind WEconomy, embarked on a journey to address a deeply ingrained societal issue that has impacted him since his youth. His unwavering determination, coupled with his extensive experience as a solo entrepreneur and startup founder, fueled the development of WEconomy as a revolutionary platform designed to empower those marginalized by traditional economic models.

Pistis meticulously explored every aspect of the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) landscape, delving into topics such as remote collaboration, task management, builder incentivization, decentralized crowdfunding, labor liquidity, labor value capitalization, and the intricacies of co-building a capital-generating entity. His comprehensive understanding of these critical elements has been instrumental in shaping WEconomy into a transformative force in the realm of Web3 innovation.

Inspiration

Pistis gained experience on 3 important career paths before building WEconomy. The first was through his work as a coder and programmer in the tech industry. He studied to develop professional skills regarding data structure, big data system construction, statistics, and analysis. He had been through countless hours of product reviews and technical seminars and had encountered times where he was either stuck waiting for a new task or working excessive hours due to a time crunch, sometimes to the point of forgetting to eat.

He reflected on his work, and compared it to his rewards...and he realized that some things just are not fair. He devoted his wisdom and thousands of hours of work to his occupation. Yet, no matter how hard he worked, a pay increase or benefits never seemed to come. Meanwhile, along with company IPO and increasing the value of stock, shareholders and managers can generate more than ten times the income of those ordinary staff who are paid with fiat. It was his first glimpse at the gap between rich and poor.

He had many internal struggles with this observation as he was going through his twenties. This was the starting point which motivated him to think about the gap between rich and poor, the problem of labor income and capitalization of labor value. Fortunately, through this job experience, he was introduced to beautiful Bitcoin. But not fortunate enough to see what Bitcoin would lead to, and before he knew it, it was too late to be an “early” investor.

He soon started his second career experience being the founder of a mobile internet startup that provided digital healthcare service to customers. Here he found another aspect of the corporate world to be troublesome: raising funding. He did not have enough money to lease an office and hire a full-time staff before launching his startup. And it is extremely difficult to raise money from traditional venture capitalists; you have to spend a large amount of time making elaborate slides for road shows to demonstrate to investors your worth. It is almost a formalized version of begging. What was worse, he found that most investors do not understand the startups being pitched. Their job was to sit and watch founder roadshow seven if they were not interested. He still fortunately managed to raise money from the traditional venture capital path to build his startup, however he then ran into trouble hiring full-time staff.

He found there is always a structural contradiction between employee and company; the staff always think that they should earn more no matter what their salary, while the company always strives to pay less to their staff to increase their profits. He also found that a startup cannot hire high-end talents from different locations with startup investments; there is not enough capital to entice the best of the best to move for a startup job. So, those people who are in a different city or country are lost because the traditional management model cannot support remote collaboration.

Along with staffing, there are all kinds of office services that need to be taken care of like office leasing, office facilities, landscaping, etc. These are large cost items but they are not necessary to actually run the business. The location you are in also has huge human cost variance because of labor liquidity limits in different countries. For example, the fixed salary of a full-time IOS engineer with 5 years experience is about ten thousands dollars per month in America. Compared to five thousand dollars in China, and only less than two thousands dollars in Vietnam or India, there is huge income inequality because of location limits. With all of these problems conquered and knowledge gained, he sold his startup after 4 years.

His third career path was to invest in TMT startups as a venture capitalist. From this he gained a great deal of experience on the inner workings of venture capitalists. Two years later, after investing 20 million dollars into 5 tech-startups, he realized just how powerful the venture capitalists were. Almost all startup entrepreneurs have the same mind set, which is that they cannot launch their company without someone backing their funding.

What he realized was that even though an entrepreneur failed to raise money from a venture capitalist, it does not necessarily mean that their startup is bad. It just means the investor did not invest. Maybe they had a bad morning and spilled coffee on their favorite tie, or maybe their dog died last night or their kids are having trouble at school. There are many factors that could influence a decision, and unfortunately that could mean even a good idea does not get funded. The current model is not fair to most talents just because they cannot get seed funding or failed to secure angel round investments. Some ideas may have been missed that could help people all over the world if the investment decision was different.

Beyond just the venture capitalist barrier, our current economy leaves all of our data in the hands of big Web-2 companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. They use our data, selling it to advertisement companies that plug the data into AI algorithm systems to selectively sell us garbage. Meanwhile, the common person’s money is in centralized banks, who then take our money and lend it to the rich, earning income of their own while regular citizens are left to deal with currency inflation. And to get out of that cycle and start our own businesses, we have to get permission from our governments or other massive corporations before we can launch. And then after getting permission, we are again at the mercy of the rich as we have to raise money from venture capitalists in order to hire full-time employees, lease an office, etc. while dealing with the labor constraints of the city or country that we live in. All of this is to say that the current economy is not friendly towards ordinary citizens who want to make a difference in the world with their ideas.

Solution

With all of his experience in the current economic system, Pistis devoted himself to fixing the problems he had seen while in the workforce, and began to construct WEconomy, a permissionless economic network. A new economy is needed, and WEconomy is the key.