The Brightest Detroiters in the Town Are Teaching Us How Web3 Turns Almost Everything Into Gold
At VentureX in Detroit's Financial District, A New Generation Builds, Scales and Sells Businesses for Fun and Profit
Friday, March 24th, 2023 at 3:31 PM
Yorkshire Woods
Detroit, Michigan
VentureX Detroit makes a home on Congress in the Financial District of Detroit. One could go to an earlier dinner at the 1938 gem, the London Chop House, located in the Murphy Telegraph building. One might go across the street to a different steakhouse in the Penobscot Building, the Caucus Club, which opened in 1952. .Better, one might ask Vik Panchal, owner of the VentureX Detroit franchise. Panchal would know all the exquisite restaurants in the area, including the ones that deliver to VentureX. His space reminded me of a great restaurant I once visited in Sausalito on San Francisco Bay.
Panchal welcomed in a conversation with Detroit tech leaders, organized by the Michigan Ethereum Meetup and Macro Visuals Media to discuss the future of business in Detroit, fueled by Blockchain and Web3. I found the Detroit Blockchain Center, but I didn’t find a Web2 home for the Michigan Ethereum Meetup until a leader of the MEM pointed it out. The MEM meets frequently, and the members greet one another with hugs more often than not. Are they too busy making money in Web3 to worry about a Web1 or Web2 presence?
As for Macro Visuals Media, the owner has a list of gold chip clients and connections with every fancy restaurant in downtown Detroit. Amy Hang, a personal chef as well, asked her friends at The Shelby Detroit to help put together a sake tasting and a spread of nibbles to go with the rice wine. Hang frequently caters the meetings of the MEG, making sure the attendees appreciate the freshness and delicacy of the hand selected fruits, grapes and blueberries and melon, oh my.
Perhaps the MEM could outfit an American James Bond with technological tools. A member handled check-in with a Web3 enabled application. It worked as smoothly as silk. The web app even let me chat with all the checked in guests. The app issued me a ticket for a raffle. What proved even more interesting was the places where that app led me. [NEWS FLASH ! I’m happy to report that John Gulbronson, product development lead at Benzinga, designed this amazing application!]
First, it belongs to BuildDetroit.xyz. That’s connected to the Detroit Blockchain Center. Which does have a Web2 web page. But why the extension XYZ?
Second, it led me to an Instagram for Detroit Art DAO. DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. It’s similar to General Motors, but it doesn’t have any employees. A smart contract or contracts make all the decisions.
So Detroit Art DAO can buy art, sell art and hold art, but no one holds open the door at openings. I was happy to see that Jordan Garland and Kobie Solomon know about the DAO because I know they are real people. Garland has recreated Detroit in the metaverse. Check it at As Detroit’s Own. Solomon painted the Detroit Chimera, which probably has been animated by an artificial intelligence program by now. Solomon made nothing on painting the mural, so I hope he cleans up on the NFT, short for Non-Fungible-Token. That’s more Web3 making the cognoscenti rich.
The app gave us a tech calendar for the next year, including an invite to Bitcoin and Beer at the Detroit Beer Company. The Meet-Up is organized by Nate Roflmao. Don’t be offended if Nate rolls on the floor laughing. In the Web3 space, it’s common for denizens to have pseudonyms. The Ethereum billionaire who bought the Beeple NFT, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, makes use of the name MetaKovan. Or did until his big reveal. That’s the name Vignesh Sundaresan gave to Christie's Auction House. Plus a giant sum he paid in Ethereum. A sum in eth equal to USD 69,346,250.
Third, the check-in app welcomed us to explore another Web3 application, DetroitILove.com. I think it’s Web3 because it’s surprisingly comprehensive and extensive. The results load without pause or effort. The content items come curated by local rocker, Steven Reaume, who has a relationship with Detroit Electronic Quarterly.
Thanks if you are still reading. Just know that whenever you dig into Web3, Blockchain, Internet of Things, Big Data and the Metaverse, the world resembles the Land of Oz fast. These Web3 technologies attempt to address the true complexity of the world. So sorry for taking all of you down the rabbit hole
Thank goodness Elizabeth Hansson took the microphone to introduce the panel. Hansson made us all wonder which Detroit News Channel was missing a news anchor. Make no mistake, Hansson's first post out of the University of Michigan required the writing of code for the M1 Abrams tank. That code had to empower the M1 to stop uranium tipped shells cold. Hansson now serves as the Chief Technology Officer of Blockchain Exploration Corp. It might be a DAO? One product transforms a data feed into an NFT, which is like turning music into gold. A second product empowers users to explore Blockchain transactions, all of which are open to inspection.
Hansson introduced Yevgeny Khessin. Khessin helped to found DIMO, a company that empowers drivers too monetize all the data created by driving a personal vehicle. Fleet managers make even more by using DIMO to manage a fleet. DIMO has people signing up for the service now, which helps because investors have put up millions of dollars for DIMO ownership.
Even a former GM President, Rick Wagoner, has bought into the platform. Members of the platform earn a Crypto currency called $DIMO. As the DIMO network increases, the value of $DIMO should increase. Why just burn fuel driving your car when it can produce Crypto and data? Think of DIMO as a modern form of those hoses one ran over when the MDOT tried to figure out how many cars used a road.
Right now, a market exists for $DIMO. If I’m reading the chart right, the pot of value in the $DIMO house holds 61 million. Every mile driven by a DIMO enabled car adds more to the pot.
In honor of Women’s History Month, Hansson introduced Marsai Matchett. Matchett made Detroit women’s history as the Director of Customer Success at Benzinga, a Detroit unicorn. Going head to head with Bloomberg, Benzinga can be thought of a gateway drug for news junkies who use data to win big in markets. Benzinga has a connection to Masterworks.com, a market platform for investing in high value art. Matchett made us wonder if another Detroit network had to present the news without their anchor.
As Director of Operations at Detroit Ledger Technologies, Matchett has led the DLT team by helping spin off companies that employ ledger technologies. Blockchain uses everywhere present ledgers to keep track of blockchain transaction6. Matchett introduced one of the recent spin-offs, a company that makes it practical to monetize digital assets by coining NFTs.
As if on cue, up popped Robert Konsdorf, CEO of Facings, a programmer with a red beard that probably would do well if minted as a NFT. Konsdorf explained how the programmers at Facings built up equity in the company by agreeing to equity pie slicing. The more one contributes, the bigger the slice of equity pie. Looking for a generation of women hoping for equity pie, Matchett invited every woman in Detroit metro to come to a special event, Women in Web3. No experience necessary if one has willingness to learn.
Hansson welcomed Jenny B, an a program manager in autonomous vehicles at Ford Motor Company. Jenny B. knows all the details and the big picture of what’s happening at Ford’s new mobility campus in the lovingly restored Michigan Central Railroad Terminal. We could ask her about the autonomous driving lanes coming to Michigan Avenue between Detroit and Ann Arbor. We could ask her all about the street on the mobility campus that charges batteries after capturing the energy of cars passing over it. Jenny B has it all in her well-informed mind. When Jenny B. decided she wanted to climb the ladder faster at Ford, she earned a second masters degree in an engineering discipline. She came with a teammate, ready to answer our questions.
When Hansson introduced Shanlee Soubjaki, we were pretty sure that all the Detroit stations had given their anchors the night off to attend our event. Soubjaki can be thought of as a double talent. To law experience, Soubjaki has added years of experience in flipping real estate, maybe as many as forty properties. Soubjaki earned this law knowledge in the trenches, coming out as a leader in the paralegal field. A serial entrepreneur, the top paralegal has started a place to find the perfect paralegal called Hire Paralegals.
I remember a Native American entrepreneur, my friend Dee Tadlock, creator of Read Right. Tadlock can work for days without sleep. The same might be the true for Soubjaki, who mentioned her Native American heritage. Adding to her knowledge growing up, my guess, Soubjaki earned a Masters in Medicinal Plant Botany with a focus on Alternative and Complementary Medicine from Cornell. Short to say, Soubjaki can see the herbs for the weeds. And without the help of this real estate agent, part of Max Broock in Birmingham, you’re going to buy the wrong commercial property in Detroit.
Soubjaki brought an entourage, including JP Kush, a partner who recently cashed out of the insurance company he built into a three hundred agent powerhouse. Soubjaki yielded the microphone so Kush could tell us all about it in a handsome voice. Together, the two produce seminars on building, scaling and selling business at high multiples of sales revenues. We were cordially invited to join a seminar Friday, March 24th at the prestigious Masonic Temple, given half off for showing up at VentureX. More events can be found by visit J.P Kush’s website, Build, Scale and Sell.
Andy Mazzola rounded out the evening, sharing a basic understanding of smart contracts. Smart contracts make distributed autonomous organizations work by making decisions. It’s like a robot judge in code that makes decisions, hopefully without bias or delay, as soon as the right questions have been answered. Mazzola specializes in a programming language called Solidity, Many smart contracts use Solidity as a language. Mazzola will empower Teller Finance to make reliable banking decisions around the clock, thanks to smart contracts written in Solidity. The company has moved from the seed capital round to the venture round, so watch this space.
The networking after the show felt supercharged. A team of entrepreneurs from Global Empowerment Ministries took time to tutor me on the prosperity gospel. The ministry grew so fast that the congregation just completed a move from Van Dyke and Seven to Lahser and Seven. I was impressed by all the elevator speeches, and now I want to know more about the Switch credit card. My Coinbase credit card doesn’t seem as cool as the Switch card.
I think I found the advance guard of the Detroit Economy.
Best article I’ve ever read. Amazing job covering everything
The event was cross-posted at the Michigan Ethereum Meetup group, not sure why you referenced the Detroit Ethereum Group multiple times while then failing to link to the actual group that helped publicize the event:
https://www.meetup.com/Michigan-Ethereum-Meetup/