How I got into Web 3.0

As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. The pre-pandemic decade was an interesting one, with numerous twists and turns. I turned entrepreneur in the year 2010, with my dot com portal, selling home accessories online, which soon pivoted into a B2B gifting company, given the onslaught of e-commerce companies like Flipkart and the OG behemoth, Amazon leaving no room for self-funded smaller players like me.Good move I say! I started traveling across the globe for trade shows related to gifting, from a dozen trips to Hong Kong and China to the US, UK, and Germany and found myself taking an extra couple of days to check out the destination as well, even if it was a place I’d been to before.On one of my solo trips to Australia (following a personal setback), I had my Eureka moment - why not add a content arm to my line of merchandise? My gifting product line, perhaps subconsciously to an extent and partly by design started veering towards travel-related merchandise, and my travel show, Plush Places dovetailed into my line of travel accessories at Plush Plaza really well. A cool brand story.Soon I was working with tourism boards, and some of the top corporate clients, supplying my brand of travel merchandise. By this time I was also attending travel-related conferences - from TBEX, which is really popular among travel content creators, to ITB and WTM, renowned travel conferences for the trade.During one of my travels in Sweden, I met a small group of guys who were into crypto. Decentralized networks and decentralized money seemed like a bit of a joke at that point, especially for a non-technical person like me. I was intrigued but frankly, I dismissed it (which I would regret later!), as I was so preoccupied with traveling across the globe for my own travel series and arranging meetings with clients overseas for my merchandise business. But that bit of information somehow stayed at the back of my head, and the connections I made on this trip would turn out to be god-send a few years later.Soon enough, my travel series was paying on airlines as part of their in-flight entertainment, ride-hailing services, and OTT platforms. I was also frequently contributing to some of the top travel publications.A brand like Air Asia had commissioned me for a travel series and by the time 2020 came about, I had 7-8 shoots lined up for the year in different parts of the world. Not bad for someone who had started this journey filming on a Blackberry phone!We all know what happened in 2020. As the world went into lockdown, one country after another, my world crumbled. All I had worked hard for over the past decade had gone up in smoke. There was no sign of when this ordeal would end. Thinking it was a 2-month affair initially, I curated my own MBA program of sorts, taking all kinds of business courses I fancied on platforms like Coursera, Udemy, and edX.Some of these were blockchain courses. Of course, some of these courses on these platforms are a bit outdated, but I found myself going down the rabbit hole, reading more and more on the subject.In October 2020, a chance exchange of tweets with one of the guys I had briefly met during my travels made me realize that this guy was deep into the Web3 space. This guy, Pratik literally spent hours, guiding me every step of the way, at a time when I probably had somewhat decent academic knowledge but zero practical knowledge of the Web3/blockchain space. He helped me set up my MetaMask wallet, guided me as I took tentative steps towards transactions on protocols like Uniswap, Compound, and Aave, and has been a solid sounding board since.In January 2021, when most businesses were still in Work-From-Home mode, I requested a friend to let me use his fancy office space to shoot a video on bitcoin.My skills as a content creator and presenter were finally being put to good use, and that video became my ticket to work in the crypto space.In no time, Web 3 protocols started approaching me to help them with their content, and I started working with a couple of them, also assisting them with business development, growth and marketing given my background as an entrepreneur.I was also hired as Consulting Editor at Moneycontrol, one of India’s top financial news platforms to cover crypto as well as travel.Since then, there’s been no looking back and I’m hoping to build upon my skills, and enable more Web 2 companies to adopt Web3 tools.