Since Web3 is a new domain, it is tough to find talent, according to Dr Vilma Mattila, Co-Founder of 5ire Chain, a sustainability-driven blockchain company.
“It is not building a Web3 company or raising funding, but finding talents is the biggest challenge,” Mattila said during a panel discussion at a Web3 event organised by Nasscom in Bangalore a few days ago. “When you are building something new, people always want to take reference of something past. So finding talent is very challenging, not from a skill-side, but from the mindset and behaviour side.”
Shaurya Agarwal, Founder of Flam, a 3D avatar-based social metaverse company, agreed. Since Web3 is so early and everything is new, you must find people who can take first principles. “So the way the interfacing or design happens is like first principle thinking. So finding talent is the biggest challenge we face.”
“Talents are very expensive, too,” Agarwal shared. “It is hard to find people who are good at Perception Engineering or understand Game Engineering. Game artists and even design hires are hard to find and expensive. I was talking to someone working with Facebook (Meta) the other day. He mentioned that at one point, Meta started hiring almost everyone in the AI space. So if you want to hire someone in AR or VR, Meta has already offered them something, making it even harder for companies like us to hire.”
According to Dr Mattila, the best talents can be found in India, Vietnam, the US, France and the UK.
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“We are also finding talent from Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam. Vietnam has a fascinating ecosystem where we can find 3D game artists and designers. We have also found people who understand Web3 in Vietnam,” added Agarwal.
The panel discussion, titled ‘Fund Raising in the Age of Web3.0 and Metaverse‘, also touched upon the other aspects of Web3 and Metaverse. According to panellist Ajeet Khurana, Founder of Reflexical Pte Ltd, it is tough to raise funds for Web3 investors in the current environment. “Until the markets turned down with the first interest rate hikes by the US Federal Reserve, it was extraordinarily easy to raise funds. However, with the market downturn, it has been challenging to raise funds.”
Ankur Choudhary, Research Partner at Woodstock Fund, a Web3-only fund in India, shared a similar sentiment. “The market downturn is one factor that has made raising capital very challenging. Besides, Web3 is an emerging space; not many people understand this space, and this is a big problem. However, time will solve that. Regulatory clarity is the other challenge. Regulations are currently quite fuzzy, and clarity about this will go a long way in helping people become more comfortable,” Choudhary noted.
Woodstock is an early-stage Web3-only fund that has made around 65 investments since its launch in 2019.
Choudhary further said he observes three megatrends in the Web3 space globally: convergence, financialisation and virtualisation. “Convergence is where we believe you will have communities, cultures, technologies, and economies coming together. In financialisation, we see DeFi being one of the major things. More regulation will come and should come in for it to play a larger role. On virtualisation, we have the metaverse and gaming.”
“As a Web3 fund, we will invest in the intersection of these things. We mostly tend to focus on the infrastructure and tooling to help bring brands and consumers onto these various worlds and metaverse that have been built.”
The session was moderated by Anirvan Chowdhury, Vice President at Premji Invest.
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