“It’s not just me, there are many people leaving the big tech giants and traditional finance to enter the space. “Crypto is one of the most exciting industries to be in right now,” he said.

Varadhan sees more similarities than differences in looking at Web3 compared to the Dot Com period. I like the idea of being in control of how much of my data gets shared and who it gets shared with. That utopian shift from users being the product to users regaining control is something that I hear repeated in many of the conversations I have around Web3. Most of the progress in Web3 has been around that restructure of control.” When built correctly, we can have the benefits of the internet, without handing the majority of the power to a few powerful companies.

“You can break away from the world where having a social media account means having your personal data sold to advertisers, or worse. “At its core, it’s about giving back power to the users,” he said about the Web3 trend. In an interview with The New Stack, Varadhan explained how, in his view, “Web3 is different from previous generational shifts.” While I’m always extremely skeptical of the finance side of blockchain technologies, I can see the benefit of removing many of the fee-generating layers of the current payment infrastructure that are required for building payment solutions today. One of the core components of Ripple’s business is eliminating all the intermediaries in the payment process. It ultimately evolved into Ripple the company, building technology solutions on the XRP Ledger, which is a layer one blockchain with all the core functionality of alternatives like Ethereum, Solana and Bitcoin. Ripple was born out of a belief that there was a better approach to cryptocurrency than the Bitcoin approach to mining. I wanted to find out why someone who spent the majority of the last 20 years at Amazon opted to make the leap to Web3. I recently caught up with Dev Varadhan, who left his role as Vice President of Delivery Experience at Amazon at the end of 2020 to join crypto company Ripple as an SVP of Engineering. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, and Alphabet, Google’s parent, are both signaling impending layoffs, which makes a career in Web 2.0 less certain. Web3 currently lures people from the perceived safety of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Another commonality between that early period of Web 1.0 and Web3 is the siren song drawing people from their “safe” jobs inside large companies, like IBM and Microsoft at the time, to pursue something completely different. While there were certainly losers during that time period, the aftermath saw many of the tools we use on a daily basis now grow rapidly - like Google and Amazon. This uncertainty draws comparisons to the Dot Com crash of 2001. The Web3 economy has been sending signals that leaving Web 2.0 jobs might be risky since sometime in May 2022.

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