The 18-year-old guy raised 30 million US dollars, how wild are the Web3 entrepreneurs?

Author | Eric

Edit | Azusa

Zhang Ailing once said: Be famous as early as possible.

In the Internet world, the age of entrepreneurs is becoming younger and younger, and the time to fame is also shortening.

In the Web1 trend at the turn of the century, China’s Sohu has become a bright new star. At that time, Zhang Chaoyang, who was at the helm, was already in his thirties as a post-60s generation.

In the later golden age of Web2, the new face who quickly became famous in a short time was Zhang Yiming. In fact, before ByteDance, he started his first business in 2009, at the age of 26.

At the moment when the wave of Web3 is rolling in, there have been many teenage entrepreneurs.

Especially in the United States, where the tide is more turbulent, we have seen many entrepreneurs who have not completely faded away from their youth, showing full maturity, energy and wisdom in the process of joining Web3.

The afterlife is terrifying and becomes their collective label.

Community Labs: 18-year-old founder raises $30 million

Tate Berenbaum, 18, founded Community Labs, a software startup related to crypto projects, and raised $30 million in funding.

This achievement is undoubtedly outstanding among his peers.

The beginning of the story happened when the epidemic was severe. At the time, Berenbaum was not watching TV shows or playing games online like his peers, but writing code in his basement.

There, Berenbaum built development tools for Arweave. Arweave is a decentralized Web3 platform known for permanent data storage. The underlying logic of Arweave’s operation is to organize people with hard disk space to share their resources in a decentralized network. After raising $8.3 million in 2020, Arweave has established itself as a leader in decentralized data storage.

Based on the Arweave platform, there are many development tool gaps to be filled, which also makes Berenbaum smell a huge commercial space. He simply established Community Labs, officially opening the road to entrepreneurship.

Community Labs, a software company dedicated to supporting crypto projects on Arweave, seeks to bring more functionality to Arweave. Currently, Community Labs has 8 employees worldwide.

In the process of founding the company, Berenbaum gave up a lot. For example, he suspended his studies at the University of Virginia and moved to New York. He publicly stated that there is no plan to go back to school at present, and he is quite a bit like Bill Gates who dropped out of school to start a business.

Berenbaum, who has no plans to return to school, has a lot to do right now. In addition to expanding Arweave’s data storage capabilities, he is also working on other uses for Arweave to function more like blockchains like Ethereum.

Financial use is one of the important functions that Berenbaum is working on. He has built a service called Verto on Arweave, a decentralized exchange for trading tokens. Additionally, he is interested in improving Arweave’s consumer-facing applications, such as non-fungible token storage.

Berenbaum’s series of business moves quickly attracted the attention of capital. This year, Lightspeed Venture Partners led a funding round for Community Labs, which also included investors such as Arweave, Bain Capital Crypto and Blockchain Capital.

Samuel Harrison, a senior advisor at Lightspeed and founder and managing partner of Lightspeed Faction, said in an interview that his team is still interested in supporting projects such as Community Labs despite crypto winter.

There are two reasons for this support. Will Leas, trading partner at Lightspeed Faction, said Arweave is well-positioned to become a “critical piece” of Web3 infrastructure. And choose to support Community Labs, in part because Berenbaum is the “thought leader” of the Arweave community.

For now, Berenbaum declined to disclose Community Labs’ valuation. According to its current growth momentum and Berenbaum’s development potential, the valuation may still have a lot of room for growth.

YC Coinbooks: 21-year-old founder raises $3.2 million

Like Berenbaum, Arnav Bathla, 21, dropped out of college.

He moved to the US from India and founded Coinbooks. This is a San Francisco-based Web3 startup that develops accounting software designed for cryptocurrencies.

The reason for choosing to cut to Web3 from the accounting field is because Arnav found that many cryptocurrency companies had to deal with the books in a very manual and repetitive way, which was not only inefficient but also cumbersome. Therefore, most of them do not want to handle the accounting themselves but choose to delegate and outsource.

This means that accounting is a sector that needs more iteration and innovation in the field of cryptocurrencies.

However, looking at it, there are not many solutions on the market to help Web3 companies solve this pain point. Arnav keenly grasped that this was a huge opportunity and created Coinbooks to meet the market demand.

The process of fulfilling the needs is simple, customers first connect their crypto wallets and integrate their existing account software, then Coinbooks will handle transactions and accounting in the background, and finally customers can tokenize and account for transactions with just one click, Simple and fast.

Currently, Coinbooks already has clients such as Layer3, ThirdWeb and Pointer, as well as partnerships with bookkeeping and tax preparation companies such as Fondo and Metacounts.

Capital clearly has a strong interest in Coinbooks. In just 6 months since its founding, Coinbooks has raised a total of $3.2 million, backed by world-class investors such as Lattice Capital, Founders, Inc. Multicoin Capital.

At just 21 years old, Arnav has created considerable business success. Today’s success may have been planted when he was a child.

Arnav says he has been fascinated by computers and technology since he was 13 years old. Inspired by the entrepreneurial stories of Zuckerberg and Jobs, he wanted to impact billions of people around the world by creating his own products. So he chose to drop out of college last year to start a technology company to pursue his dream.

At least at the age of starting a business, Arnav stood on the same level as his idols – Zuckerberg dropped out of school in 2004 to start Facebook in his sophomore year, when he was only 20 years old; Jobs was also in college After taking a break from school, he started a business in his garage at the age of 21.

Like idols, Arnav’s life path before he officially started his own business was also tortuous. For the past two years, he has been thinking and exploring different business models, but almost none of them can solve the problem of “crypto company accounting”. In the process of groping hard, his bank account was only 0.5 cents at one point, and even basic survival was in jeopardy.

Arnav never lost hope, though. Through this difficult period, he developed an important quality – perseverance. Perseverance, he believes, is a must-have skill for all founders. In addition, he always believed that he must start a startup company, which is why he never gave up.

It is with perseverance and confidence in the future that Arnav founded Coinbooks and started his entrepreneurial journey. When asked about his ten-year vision for Coinbooks, he said: “To be the financial infrastructure of the crypto industry.”

Why does Web3 frequently appear younger entrepreneurs?

In the Web3 world, the first teenage celebrity to appear should be Vitalik Buterin (V God).

He co-launched Ethereum with Gavin Wood in 2014, when he was 20 years old. Today, Ethereum has become one of the underlying platforms in the entire blockchain world, and Buterin has also become a well-known Web3 boss in the circle.

Since then, there have been more and more young entrepreneurs in the Web3 world, and they are showing a trend of being younger than Web1 and Web2. What is the reason behind this?

The author believes that it is essentially because Web3 and the current capital environment have lowered the threshold for entrepreneurship.

In the early days of Web1, computers were still new to most young people, and it was difficult for ordinary people to come into contact with the virtual concept of the Internet, let alone start a business.

In the Web2 era, young people have more opportunities to start a business than Web1, but they are also more difficult. Because many Web1 giants have mastered a larger territory and become more centralized, many entrepreneurs can only survive in the cracks.

In short, in Web1 and Web2, most of the platforms are centralized, and in the end, most of the revenue obtained by the platform will flow to managers or shareholders. For young people, in order to participate in Web1 and Web2, they must obtain enough resumes, contacts, resources, etc.

In the era of Web3, this is a completely different decentralized world from Web1 and Web2. Whether it is for senior industry veterans or newcomers, the opportunities in front of them are equal and transparent.

For example, as a young programmer in the Web2 world, he can get matching income incentives in Web3 according to his contribution, he can participate in the ecological construction of development systems such as Ethereum and Solana, and go to open source software platforms such as Gitcoin. Submit your own project, you can also participate in the development of the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). These actions are open, fair, and visible to all.

Another example is in the financial field of Web3, some young people may not be able to participate in the wider financial world because they do not have enough assets or credit. But without these “unequal treatment” in the field of cryptocurrencies, anyone can participate in the global financial wave through the Web3 network.

In addition, many entrepreneurs in Web3 are mostly Generation Z crowd. They have been natives of the Web2 era since birth, and Web2 is already a traditional industry for them. In contrast, they like to work in more cutting-edge and cooler fields, creating personal value. With more equality and transparency, the Web3 world can obviously help them achieve faster personal value enhancement.

Moreover, capital is also pouring into Web3 more and more intensively, bringing raw capital to young entrepreneurs there. Blockchain startups raised a record $25 billion in venture capital last year, more than eight times the previous year, according to CB Insights.

Web3 is still a nascent industry, with new technologies and models emerging one after another, an area that excites young people. There will undoubtedly be more and more young entrepreneurs, which will inject fresher blood into the entire Web3 field.

No one is 18 forever, but there will always be 18-year-old entrepreneurs in the Web3 space.

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