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A reckless victory, Web3 is the largest grassroots team

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This world is made up of grass-roots teams

Source: DeepTechFlow

Recently, whether it's on WeChat Moments, Weibo, or Twitter, you can always see a sentence "truth" - this world is made up of grassroots organizations.

"After I started working, I realized that everyone is just a makeshift team. The government is a makeshift team, the companies are makeshift teams, and I am also a makeshift team. We all make do to earn a living. A company may look like a luxurious car racing on the highway, but inside it's just a few people pedaling a shell. All the cars on the road are like this, and no one wants to expose the truth."

The passage copied onto the notebook years ago is simply intangible cultural heritage. It is recommended that everyone memorize the entire passage.

When did you realize the truth about the "grassroots team" in this world?

Before, Li Guoqing took the official seal from his ex-wife and carried it with him everywhere, as if it were his own external organ.

Later, there was infighting between well-known blockchain companies, with both sides vying for a business license.

By the way, there was a man and two women who forged the official seal of Lao Gan Ma and successfully deceived Tencent into providing them with free advertising for a year. They did it only to obtain QQ Speed's gift redemption code.

In the magical world of encryption, this year everyone has a more direct understanding of the 'grassroots team', as 321 DAO joked on Twitter X.

Recently, I watched FTX's hearing for a long time and fully realized that they are not as high-end as I thought they were in reality.

They directly loaned themselves billions of dollars from the company and cashed out;

They set insurance premium numbers by generating random numbers;

They embezzled customers' money as if it were nothing;

They bought and sold recklessly and acted recklessly.

In 2021, everyone believed that Wall Street would take over the cryptocurrency industry. FTX and DCG were once mythologized, until the myth was shattered and their true nature was revealed. FTX and DCG are just makeshift organizations, and so are Terra and 3AC. Who in the cryptocurrency industry isn't just a makeshift organization?

However, in the author's opinion, "草台班子" is not a completely derogatory term, but a kind of disillusionment. The world is not as exquisite as it seems, and the so-called large organizations are not so "high-end". Actually, it's all about "one person carrying the beam, and a group of people carrying the pole."

Recently finished reading the entire biography of Elon Musk, and the biggest takeaway is that both TESLA and SPACE X were also startups, and Musk was the biggest pioneer of these startups.

SpaceX encountered problems, and Musk fired executives and took over himself. Feeling that traditional aerospace materials such as carbon fiber were too expensive, Musk boldly suggested, "Why not try stainless steel?" In the end, it turned out to be quite effective.

During the final check before a rocket launch, the SpaceX team discovered two small cracks on the skirt edge of the second stage rocket engine.

Everyone at NASA believes that the launch will be delayed by a few weeks, as typically in this situation the entire engine is replaced.

Musk has come up with another crazy idea, "What if we just cut off the torn skirt edge?" The rocket completed its launch mission as planned the next day.

In terms of management, Musk also emphasizes the principle of "unconventional moves". Whenever Tesla encounters problems, Musk pulls people from SpaceX to come over. After acquiring Twitter, he immediately laid off 80% of the staff and directly transferred dozens of people from SpaceX and Tesla to work at Twitter.

As a world-class company with a market value of $44 billion, Twitter is just one example of many where "looking good on the outside but making do on the inside" may be the norm.

As for the cryptocurrency industry, it is the biggest stage for grassroots players. Nowadays, the most well-known cryptocurrency tycoons are mostly former failures.

OKX founder Xu Mingxing's first venture was a group-buying website called "Wan Tuan Wang", which ended in failure. His second venture was co-founding Dou Ding Net with a friend, but the performance declined significantly and Xu Mingxing left as a result. Xu Mingxing even attempted to start a food delivery business, but after several months of consecutive losses, the venture failed again.

Until watching the third season of the American TV series "The Good Wife", Xu Mingxing became aware of a previously unfamiliar term "Bitcoin" from the line "bitcoin is the future, real is gonna change".

Li Lin failed in the social networking industry and his "Friendship Network" closed hastily. Later, he explored the O2O and Internet finance fields before ultimately going all in with Huobi.

Before founding Binance, CZ was just a small figure in the Shanghai capital circle. In the early days of founding Binance, financing was not smooth, and ultimately he proved many investment giants wrong.

In 2009, with the aftermath of the financial crisis still lingering, Wu Jihan, a graduate from Peking University, did not follow his classmates to large investment banks or commercial banks such as China International Capital Corporation (CICC). Instead, he went to a small investment firm to do venture capital. It wasn't until 2011 that he encountered Bitcoin.

There used to be a gathering place for the encryption industry in Beijing called "Garage Cafe", hidden at the end of Zhongguancun Entrepreneurship Street.

As a co-founder of Moji Weather, Zhao Dong left the company due to internal disputes among the founders and became the CTO of Garage Cafe. It was here that he met Wu Gang and other early players in China's Bitcoin community, who gathered in a community called "Peace Hotel".

At the garage coffee shop, you can occasionally see an "English teacher" preaching about Bitcoin. This is the famous Li Xiaolai, and many OGs in the coin circle have purchased Bitcoin at a price of several hundred yuan due to his preaching, truly living up to his name as a teacher.

In 2013, Baoye, a beef seller from Shanxi, encountered a bottleneck in his business. He came to the Garage Cafe to learn how to sell beef better and unexpectedly learned about Bitcoin. Later, he built the world's largest mining farm in Inner Mongolia for a period of time.

The Chinese community is like this, and the European and American communities are no exception.