My personal review of the year 2023

In 2018, I started a new tradition of sharing my personal review of the year, covering experiences, achievements, learnings and other important parts.
Read the last editions via these links: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 & 2022.

In a word, the year 2023 has been “bananas” — being somewhat silly, decaying when left alone, and yet gathering communities & smiles.

As intended, I ended up working and travelling more this year while also being able to increase both my gym & playtime. Meanwhile, I increased the time spent with kids as Alister grew more independent and Scarlett’s curiosity about her surroundings continued to evolve. And we celebrated our fifth anniversary with Lele!

However, the start of 2023 introduced setbacks that carried with me throughout the summer. WOF Labs’ potential merger with a fellow game studio failed, our flagship event suffered financial losses, and I wrote the post-mortem for Supplain while also having to pause World of Freight. Looking back, all this completely derailed me for months.

Fortunately, I did not completely stop — instead, I continued to travel, attended various web3 conferences and initiated our new venture, BananaCorp. Thanks to all this, I crawled out from my self-made pit, and now we are more energised than before.

Overall, the year 2023 was one for a total recall — allowing me to stop doing things that did not work while introducing me to plenty of new friends with whom we can start building for a bigger and bolder future.

I am grateful for many things, the most important of which was the increased time we spent with my wife, Lele. This year, we celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary (and 10th year together) while starting to travel more together again — visiting Paris and Hong Kong.

The last few years, with lockdowns and the kids being born while our parents live in different cities, have kept us closer to home. But with Scarlett and Alister becoming old enough to be left with the grandparents for a week, we can continue investing time in ourselves as a couple.

At the same time, witnessing Scarlett and Alister grow up has been a magnificent experience. Their curiosity towards the surroundings and their utterly upbeat outlook on life keeps me buoyant and gives me the force to continue pushing regardless of what happens. Most of all, I cherish the moments when they ask me for help with anything when they want us to learn together — or whenever they want to watch the same toons.

I really do continue to love them more and more.

In addition to family-related highlights, I am grateful to the newly founded Banana DAOquiri community we assembled at the last BananaConf (formerly known as NFT Tallinn), with whom we are now building our new venture(s), as well as all the opportunities to travel and for being accepted into a boardgame group with whom we gather 2–3x per month.

Like 2021, this year can be divided into three nearly equal parts.

Part I — Fall

After failing to raise the capital needed to continue building our vision for supply chain connectivity protocol and our gaming infrastructure, I knew we should’ve called it quits — but my pride and honour didn’t let me do so.

So when I got introduced to another struggling web3 gaming studio with great developers but less marketing power, I figured we should combine our forces. Their team agreed to give it a shot, and for the next few months, we worked together towards saving both of our projects.

Unfortunately, we both had run entirely out of funds, and unlike me, they did not have enough personal savings to give this more than three months. Eventually, this did not give us sufficient time to refuel the engines, and we had to call it quits while still at the starting line.

Fortunately, I also continued organising the 2nd Edition of NFT Tallinn with our team at the same time.

This got me travelling to Paris, New York and Helsinki for promotion, contacting hundreds of outstanding builders and recording 35 NFT Tallinn Talks. (most of which have been uploaded as podcast episodes — here)

Ultimately, we made excellent progress, growing our attendance by 1.5x (while most other web3 events saw a decrease), tripling our sponsor support (growing from €40k to €120k) and turning the event genuinely international with people from 52 countries present.

Even more, people attending called it their favourite conference of all time, promised to return with friends for future editions, and supported us by forming a global Banana DAOquiri community.

However, by the end of it, I was already burned out and incapable of acknowledging the success at that time. On the one hand, I had just worked so hard for this that I did not take much leisure time for months. But more so, even all this success was not enough as our costs nearly quadrupled — leading us to take a 50k loss, primarily financed via loans.

So, after four months of work, I was in a worse financial position than before and did not have much power left to continue…

Part II — Struggle

The following months continued with hardship as I was dealt with the financial mess while being supposed to start working towards the event in 2024, with no real strength to do so.

At that time, I wanted to give up and hide from all my responsibilities. However, my parents taught me to know better — so I knew I had to dig through this shit with whatever it took. I did not know how yet.

Thankfully, my mentor and friend, William Entriken, had made me schedule a call-to-action email to all the speakers of NFT Tallinn.

A thank you letter mixed with potential future plans and question whether any of them wanted to get involved in all this.

To my surprise, over half of the speakers wanted to do so, with some (e.g. Nizzar & Armin) wanting to step up even more. And that is how we got started with the Banana DAOquiri, BananaCorp and more.

Still, this did not fully get me back on track — giving me just enough energy not to stop (yet also not accelerate).

Over the subsequent months, I went to Lisbon, Cologne, Paris, Biarritz, Miami, Copenhagen, Lugano, Berlin, Milan & Bilbao — always bringing together our newly founded Banana community while working towards our first BananaCorp project — Web3xFashion.

Although one might ask how all this travelling and building towards new projects can be a struggle, the reality is that I did not want to do any of it. None of this was bringing in any money; I did not fully believe it was worth it; it took me away from my family, and I would have loved to just take time off after the almost two-year-long marathon. But I am so happy I did it.

In the end, all these people I kept meeting around the world with their own dreams and struggles gave me the power to stop holding myself back and get back to work. And especially the success we had with Web3xFashion gave me the belief that there is actual potential to be unlocked in everything we had built until that moment with NFT Tallinn and the Banana DAOquiri community.

Talking about numbers, we gathered 120+ people from 22 countries to the Web3xFashion event in Milan. Of those, 40% work for the fashion industry in companies such as Dolce&Gabbana, Prade, Valentino, etc, while others build various tech solutions for the brands. One of the biggest praises we got was that the event did not focus on digital fashion but on real-world use cases for web3 tech, which is what the brands actually look for.

Learn more about the event via this Decrypt article.

I feel it is also necessary to mention that if I had not previously saved and invested as much as I personally had through 2020–2022, I would not have had the opportunity to continue pushing. More so, it is primarily thanks to ApeCoin staking rewards that I could finance this period.

Part III — New Beginnings

Although we had already started working with Armin & Nizzar in the early summer, our collaboration as BananaCorp took off after the success of Web3xFashion in Milan.

By that point, we had tested our first hypothesis that the web3 technology is entering the minds of luxury brands, but they do not like most implementations out there. More so, there is not enough communication between brands & builders — aka, there is room for industry-specific events where brands go on the stage to share how they are looking to utilise new technologies so that startups could build better solutions.

On the basis of that, we had agreed to turn NFT Tallinn into BananaConf, an industry-wide event focused on bringing brands and builders together, and introduce Web3x[Industry] events concentrating on industry-specific use cases.

In addition to that, we still have two more hypotheses we need to test:

By introducing brands with builders, we will learn which builders we should invest our time & money in as advisors and capital allocators. Along the way, we will also learn what the additional missing puzzle pieces are so that we can build these ourselves.

Exciting times are ahead of us, and we have already started seeing early interest from both brands and builders to work with us.

Here’s what you can expect from us in 2024!

February 2024 — BananaDAO 90s music party at NFT Paris March 2024 — Web3xSupercars (TBD — Miami or NYC) April 2024 — BananaConf Tallinn & ETHTallinn May 2024 — Web3xWine&Spirits in Paris June 2024 — Web3xWatches&Jewellery in Zurich September 2024 — Web3xFashion in Milan

Learn more about these events and how to get involved — link here.

Other than BananaCorp, there have been other positive notes as well.

Lele and I went on our first kids-free vacation in five years, visiting Hong Kong for ApeFest and Hong Kong Disneyland. Lele and I also achieved Gold-producer in our N21 business — one step, and we are at the Platinum level. A friend reached out, interested in helping to revive World of Freight, and we got it running again.

So, whereas the year started with a downward cycle, I have managed to change its course with the help of the people around me, and now our path is again upwards and onwards.