EP15: Building crypto native products, with Qiao Wang, co-founder of Alliance DAO, the leading Web3 accelerator and builder community

Paradigm Shift

Qiao Wang is the co-founder of Alliance DAO, which is the leading web3 accelerator and builder community. In terms of impact, Alliance has helped accelerate 10% of the top crypto projects by market cap. Their most cohort had 30 companies building web3 products across DeFi, Social, NFTs and Gaming. Before Alliance, Qiao was the Head of Product at Messari which is a market intelligence product that provides advanced analytics for crypto.

Special thanks to Roberto Riccio and Brian Ma for providing questions for this conversation.
In today’s episode we discuss

1. Crypto Landscape
   1. What led to a perfect storm for decentralized technologies?
   2. How has pace of innovation progressed vs expectations?
   3. What could web3 native social networks/products look like?
2. Opportunity Areas across DeFi, SocialNets, Gaming
   1. What are opportunity areas where Qiao is seeing startups get traction?
   2. What are some examples of interesting projects in different verticals?
   3. What are the main motivations for people playing games like Axie?
   4. What are some opportunities for financial products to build social experiences?
3. Getting Messari off the ground to provide advanced analytics for crypto
   1. What was the unique insight when founding/building Messari?
   2. What were the first products / features that got PMF?
   3. How much to rely on intuition vs user feedback/research for crypto products?
   4. How did they approach pricing for their paid plans?
   5. How did they approach governance and tokens?
4. Accelerating web3 with Alliance accelerator and community
   1. What is Alliance today and how did it start?
   2. How big is each cohort and what categories are most projects/companies in?
   3. How does the accelerator work and how does Alliance accelerate teams?
   4. What makes for a great Alliance founder?
5. How to build Crypto Native products and companies
   1. When and how to launch a token?
   2. What are regulatory implications?
   3. How to fundraise for web3? How to vest?
   4. How to manage trade-offs between PMF and Tokens?
   5. How do SAFEs and SAFTs work?
   6. When and how to decentralize without losing vision and execution leadership?
   7. How to leverage DAOs in an effective way?
6. Future of DAOs as Digital Nations
   1. How might DAOs re-shape society?
   2. What is the core value proposition of a DAO?
   3. How to build the right incentives with tokens and DAOs?
   4. How might DAOs enable digital nations with property rights and laws?
7. Crypto and web3 trajectory
   1. What has to go right for crypto products to continue to go mainstream?
   2. Has crypto and web3 reached escape velocity? What are the biggest risks?
8. Closing thoughts
   1. What are your superpowers that you like to lean on day to day?
   2. Who are some people that have given you a meaningful break?
   3. What books (or articles or podcasts) have had an outsized impact on your life?

Links

• Apply to the next cohort of AllianceDAO
• Follow Qiao and AllianceDAO on Twitter

Hit subscribe to keep up with new episodes!

Follow Ashish and Zane on Twitter for summaries

Click here to give feedback — it only takes a minute.