In movies, screenwriters always include a moment known as the Promise of the Premise. It’s the part of the story where the audience settles into the new world they’ve entered.

One of my favorite examples is in the first Harry Potter movie, when Hagrid takes Harry to Diagon Alley, the magical shopping district that introduces him (and us) to the world of wizards.

So far, web3 has paid off on the Promise of the Premise: open source software that runs live on the blockchain.

“It’s still much easier to develop a Web 2.0 app simply because the ecosystem is mature and has a large and thriving developer community,” said Devin Abbott, who specializes in design and development tools, React, and web3. applications.

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According to Abbott, the web3 development community is approaching “a turning point where our own tools are getting pretty powerful,” but “that doesn’t mean Reddit is abandoning its Web 2.0 cloud servers.”

So far, most of the hype for web3 has come from investors and journalists, so Abbott’s perspective as a developer makes this a worthwhile read.

Most early use cases of web3 don’t interest me. But then again, I’m not a developer, so I didn’t really appreciate the value of mobile gaming, GPS, and cloud storage until they reached a product-market fit and integrated into my smartphone.

Today I wouldn’t think of buying a device that can’t help me find a restaurant or hotel. If it comes up, I suspect web3’s great app will be useful in the same way.

Thank you for reading,

Walter Thompson
Editorial Manager, australiabusinessblog.com+
@yourprotagonist

3 ways to recruit well for your startup

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For aspiring startups, “this may be one of the worst times to hunt for talent,” said Champ Suthipongchai, founder and primary care physician of Creative Ventures.

Opportunistic hiring managers might surmise that widespread layoffs tipped the balance in their favor, but “those were generally not core workers.”

Usually, startup recruiting resembles scenes from heist movies where the characters team up: It’s an accelerated process designed to fill gaps in knowledge or experience, not necessarily to find the best fit.

“If possible, it is much better to slowly integrate a great candidate as a consultant or part-time contractor and let things play out,” Suthipongchai writes.

“Just as a customer tests the product, companies should test their key employees whenever possible.”

8 questions to answer before your startup faces technical due diligence

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Outsiders study multiple facets of a startup to determine its value and quality, and codebase health is one of them.

A pitch deck is only part of the story, writes Matt Van Itallie, founder and CEO of codebase analytics company Sema.

After the technical due diligence has begun, no amount of stories can hide the secrets buried in GitHub and Jira.

To help companies prepare for TDD, Van Itallie has written an introduction with eight questions that inception teams should be able to answer with confidence. Tomorrow we will run his detailed TDD checklist.

To better fend off ransomware attacks, startups need to get the basics of cybersecurity right

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Creating systems that are resistant to ransomware isn’t the top priority for startup startups, but many companies don’t even follow standard best practices, which is to their disadvantage.

“Turn on multi-factor authentication (MFA) on everything you have,” said Katie Moussouris, founder of Luta Security. “Enable it for every account you have.”

Last week on australiabusinessblog.com Disrupt, Moussouris and Brett Callow, a threat analyst at Emsisoft, spoke about the need to invest early in shutting down their systems, starting with MFA.

“It’s a matter of layering security layer upon security layer,” Callow says. “MFA coupled with staff training – coupled with other things – all serve to reduce risk.”

Black startup founders raised just $187 million in the third quarter

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The downturn appears to be disproportionately impacting the black founders’ ability to raise capital.

“When the venture capital industry catches a cold, underrepresented founders get pneumonia,” said Tiana Tukes, an investor at Colorful Capital.

In the third quarter of 2022, Crunchbase reports that Black’s founders raised just $187 million, “a staggering drop from the nearly $1.1 billion they received in the third quarter of 2021 and a significant drop from the $594 million they received in the third quarter of 2021.” million that the cohort raised in the second quarter,” writes Dominic-Madori Davis.

Investors are sitting on mountains of money: where will it be used?

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No matter what happens in the public markets, bees are making honey and venture capitalists are raising money, it’s just what they do.

But since the “extreme valuation revaluation” in public markets, VCs are accumulating more and more dry powder, write Irving Investors’ Jeremy Abelson and Jacob Sonnenberg.

Even more frustrating news for the founders: Investor fundraising “is on track to close the year at $172 billion,” but capital stakes are way down.

“The dollars are flowing and will continue to flow, but it will be more capital for fewer companies,” they write.

As traditional SaaS has become too expensive and secondary saturated, sectors like web3, life sciences and agtech will attract more investors, they predict.