How to Grow Your Portfolio Career
This is an especially exciting time for young people just starting out, but there are opportunities for people at any life stage, especially in Web3.
People donât have to get locked into a lifetime career as a teenager, invest a fortune to study at college, and stay committed to that career foreverâpaying it back along the way.
No, this is the time when you can invest in your interest areas. Make smaller bets based on your curiosity, and explore them. Find what you like, what you donâtâand if you're smart about itâmake a little money along the way!
Letâs take a closer look at the options and how you can actually get started.
We must give a shout-out to Ja-Nae Duane (CEO of the Revolution Factory and bestselling author of The Startup Equation) for inspiring this succinct list of ways to earn. (Listen to my podcast with Ja-Nae on Designing Distributed Autonomous Organizations, DAOs)
Weâve added our view on each approach from both the conventional and emerging Web3 ways to earn to help you get inspired and give you actionable steps you can take right away to build your portfolio career.
Work-To-Earn
The standard model of full-time work is still a good fit for many people. You show up, maybe get a salary and get paid.
This model mostly pertains to primary contributors focused full-time on the project or organization. Itâs simple, straightforward, and an incentive system we all know.
Contribute-To-Earn
Take a contract to provide a service or deliver a piece of work. Because the work is part-time, you can have multiple clients simultaneously and thus diversify your income.
Sometimes this model can be a competition where the best submission gets the rewardâa.k.a âbounties.â In open-source, the bounty is rewarded with credibility, or knowing your code is core to the project.
Web3: You can explore bounties on Gitcoin or join a more organized platform like the RaidGuild. In the latter case, contributors self-organize to take on portions of projects and work their way through levels of the organizations by merit. Bounties on many platforms are developer-centric. However, on RaidGuild, there are also opportunities in legal, content creation, marketing, sales, and more.
Invest-To-Earn
Buy stock in a public company via bankers, brokers, or more recently with trading apps like Robinhood.
Investing is seeing newer pathways of equity crowdfunding to own pieces of earlier-stage companies. You can use an accredited platform to buy shares in private companies via Indiegogo, StartEngine, and others with as little as a few hundred dollars.
Web3: The most common engagement in crypto involves buying or staking coins for profit. Purchasing coins may not only give you value as a speculative investment, but it can also give you the power to vote on the decisions of the community. For example, if you own ApeCoin or Uniswap, youâre able to contribute (relative to your equity holding) in voting on platforms like Snapshot.
There are other ways to invest as well: you can purchase NFTs to hold and invest in much like art or even buy land in Decentraland as a speculative investment.
Create-To-Earn
Create value-add assets for a project, organization, market, or your own community.
Entrepreneurs looking to build their own company, like Jaime Schmidt, founder of Schmidtâs Naturals. She started in her kitchen and a few years later sold to Unilever for over $100 million! (Get inspired by my podcast interview with Jaime.)
Web3: This model is Ideal for art-related DAOs, agencies, or independent artists. If youâre a creator, or want to be, Web3 offers great new ways to fund and get paid for your work while keeping more control and ownership.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are blockchain-based digital files that can support a variety of media from visual art to audio to video. For example, the Kings of Leon released the first NFT album ever in March of 2021.
You can mint your own NFT on platforms like OpenSea and SuperRare. There is a cost involved, which can vary depending on which chain you use and other factors, but itâs a great opportunity for creators.
Now we start to get really innovative and on the bleeding emerging edge of ways to earn.
Play-To-Earn
A real-world marketplace for in-game assets has existed for some time (e.g. purchasing World of Warcraft gold with dollars). However, itâs been a workaround and is typically against the terms of service.
Web3: Crypto games have blurred the lines between in-game and real-life value. This model rewards players for playing and reaching goals within a game and creates a new level of peer-to-peer market for virtual assets.
Axie Infinity, for example, has had players spend over $3B USD on the platform. As players win battles, collect, and even breed axies, theyâre gaining real-world value. Any in-game asset can be traded based on player demand.
Meanwhile, in Decentraland, while checking out a âmetaverseâ concert, youâll often come across slot machines and other gambling games where you can bet MANA or DAI.
Participate-To-Earn (Web3 only)
Get paid to participate or interact within a network. For example, early adopters of decentralized apps (dApps) are rewarded for their engagement on these platforms. Itâs common for the organization to spontaneously gift users of their platform rewards such as tokens. These are referred to as âairdropsâ and can be based on several factors such as:
ownership of assets like NFTs
on-chain transactions (swapping, buying, selling, staking)
time spent
Timing (if these actions were taken earlier than other users, you may receive more in your airdrop).
Airdrops are distributed based on the wallet you were authenticated through as you participated. Kyle received an airdrop from the NFT platform SuperRare for buying and selling works early on in their existence.
Recently, the popular project Bored Ape Yacht Club initiated an airdrop of APE coins to NFT holders. There were holders making $90k+ overnight. We even saw some sophisticated moves like loaning bored apes to claim the airdrop and then returning the bored ape to its original owner.
Learn-To-Earn (Web3 only)
Most of the time, people think they have to pay in order to learn. But there are often ways to flip that on its head and get paid to learn, especially in areas of high innovation and growth like Web3.
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) will often pay members for learning a specific skill valuable to the DAO. This is much like a company paying for a certification or more schooling.
There are also platforms and organizations that will pay you to learn about Web3 and prove your knowledge such as Coinbaseâs learning platform.
*Bonus: Attend-To-Earn (Web3 only)
As NFTs gain more interesting utility, thereâs a category surfacing around concepts like POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol). These digital badges or tickets are enhanced for attending something in real life.
The vision is that there are multiple opportunities. For example, fans may be given special rewards for their indisputable attendance at events. Also, some badges or tickets may actually hold collector value, for example, if you attended the famous FalconsâPatriots come-back superbowl.
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