How web3 tools are enabling a better way to hire

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web 3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode gm gm what's up friends welcome to web3 academy it is the weekly spotlight where we bring on somebody that's crushing it and doing big things in web 3 and today we are super excited to have with us lacey lacy i'm not exactly sure how to see your last name i think it's keilani is that correct got it lacey keilani is with us and as always co-host kai is on the podcast too what's up kai what's up friends good to be here

so a little little intro on lacey before we uh get her to jump in here lacey's a two-time startup founder with a background in hr tech uh her last startup was venture-backed and placed thousands of jobs then she sold it and now she's working on meta intro which is what we're here to talk about today uh meta intro is the professional resume for web3 uh and if you're not exactly sure what that means we're going to dive into that because it's pretty innovative uh ditched the old pdf resume we got something new coming for you in web3 that's really exciting and long term really the goal for meta intro is to reduce the time to hire for job seekers and employers and they're also backed by near and ave

so some big backers behind the project really exciting uh and earlier uh before jumping on the podcast um i jumped into their discord which is one of the most active discords to find a job in web3 so if you're not there and you're looking for a job you're definitely going to want to hear more about that discord uh and a couple random facts about lacy because we always love to have fun on the show she's also a dog mom and a semi-pro soccer player running startups i don't know how you have all the time lacie welcome to the show thanks for having me that's that blurb that entry blur makes it all sound great and i i have to turn off either remember to turn off my discord otherwise you're

going to hear the pings like non-stop throughout this chat which would be really which actually gets really annoying uh well it's nice to be here thanks for having me guys yeah yeah so let's let's start rewind uh before meta intro what did you do before meta intro give us a little bit of the background story of lacey kelani yeah so my last startup like you said was an hr marketplace in the media and entertainment space venture back grew to thousands of users placed hundreds of jobs it was a wonderful ride and eventually we made the decision to sell and around that time i read one of matt ball's first essays on the metaverse and

i don't know if you've had the chance to read those excellent collection of essays definitely recommend if you have the time and after reading it i thought you know this guy's crazy yes what is he talking about and that also at that time i had never seen uh be player one like i had no context and after reading i found myself at some of these on decentraland had a party on roadblocks you know buying my first nft downloaded my you know my metamask wallet and along the way got me thinking a lot about the future of work and what work can look like in the next 10 20 years and something that i was never able to solve for in my last startup was

reducing the time to hire that's truly the pain point in the hiring process all of these web 2 companies are trying to solve for filling the top of the funnel with applicants which is great but that doesn't solve the issue the issue is how quickly can we get a qualified candidate into the role and working so that the project can continue to build in excel and so after that really busy weekend of dabbling in web3 products i thought well what what would happen if credentials lived on chain what could that look like and what could that do to the future of work and that was kind of the genesis of meta intra

well i'm excited to hear about what it will mean to put credentials on chain to be honest so we're gonna dive into that but uh let's let's sort of hold on to that thought for just a second i'm just curious when you first learned about web3 and you read i guess it was matthew matthew ball right he's got a book coming out i think this summer on metaverse as well but when you first read that what was the thing that excited you or like got you going like oh wow this is like game changer this is going to be huge anything in particular um well it was actually a podcast that i had i've listened to right after i had read that read those essays because naturally i wanted to learn more and he did this podcast back in i want to say

late 2020 and it was about ip and the metaverse and how that's going to change the entertainment landscape and the relationship it has with its audience um and that at the time because i was building in the media and entertainment space was super super interesting to me um there and if you listen to him he's just so you know well refined and everything he says is just like god's birthday on web 3. and so that's what really got me interested and hooked into the web 3 space behind that i have been in the crypto space for about five years just as like a normie trader

but nothing beyond that um and i didn't really understand the connection in the beginning between crypto and the metaphors and web 3 and nfts and blockchain like that still was very foreign to me um just investing in crypto was kind of something all of my friends did so all back to probably that podcast and that and that collection of essays was really the genesis of it interesting and do you do you remember like a line or anything specific from that that podcast or that essay that really cued cued your your interest i don't i wish i did i wish i could quote it i don't i should go back and read it um

but there's so many good things to be reading to be listening to nowadays totally i will read his book when it comes out and i think a lot of people when they hear about blockchain they hear about web3 they're like oh we should put everything on the blockchain right there was like the ico boom yeah from 2017. and and so you're saying okay well let's put our resumes essentially on the blockchain um which is something i've been thinking about for a long time and i actually think has a lot of utility in it and could be really cool i'm interested to hear um sort of can you just talk about how how web3 can sort of change the way that we're hiring and what what is the utility of a blockchain in terms of you know a resume or whatever you want to call it like how are you thinking about

that yeah so in the hiring process today when i'm talking about reducing the time to hire the the issues as to why the hiring time takes so long is validation that can be validation of work education references work visas and skills and if those credentials lived on chain as a hiring manager i wouldn't have to go through the traditional vetting process i wouldn't have to call your previous employer i wouldn't have to you know make sure that work visa is a-okay i could trust it because it lives on chain that's the long long-term thinking obviously we have a long ways to go in terms of that being a scalable

business and like you know way of doing things amongst everybody in the web3 ecosystem but the genesis idea of it is well if credentials live on chain we don't have to spend time validating and you know that can reduce that time to higher so you mean like in terms of let's say i don't know you complete some course or whatever and you get a credential it becomes like an nft and that's held in your wallet and so it's like very easy to um to validate that what about things of like i don't know you you mentioned proof of skill and you mentioned proof of or some of the other things um proof of work uh again proof of education like a diploma just easy to put that on the

blockchain what about the other things that when we're hiring we're looking like can you do these skills or have you done this in the past like how does that work on chain yeah haven't completely solved for yeah i haven't completely solved for that yet um skill skills as you could probably imagine are subjective a lot of the time um and the expertise or that level of skill can range significantly and again it's subjective and so a lot of our thinking in the background is as we're building our roadmap we're like okay the lowest hanging fruits to build first are the proof of education proof of work having a previous employer validate that you worked at from x-state to x-state doing x super easy but how do we

eventually put skills on chain and then on top of it skills are continuously uh updated you grow as an individual as as a job seeker and how do we account for that let's say when the first iteration of your skill that proof of skill lives on chain whether that's like an assessment test or um i don't know a link to your github and it's rated you know there's a few different ways it could work but then what happens when you level up what how do you um go back to that uh nft badge if you will and update it i mean you could i mean that's that's probably a pretty simple step but the subjectiveness of it is

the big question mark we have with it right now and who who's to say that that skill you're proficient in that skill so we're thinking about it but it's something that needs to be solved for because if you could find the secret sauce with that you can have like that's that's just a great company if you can figure out how to do i mean you could kind of see it if like it's almost like linkedin but all of the the things you have on your resume there are actually verified and verified blockchain almost like how on twitter you can verify someone's profile picture right and you can do that basically through linkedin with you know credentials being on the blockchain so that makes sense the other way i thought about this and i don't know if this applies to all jobs but um you could

almost do like proof of performance with the blockchain in the sense of like let's say you're trying to get a job as a investment person or a trader or something they can literally just go to your wallet and look and be like oh you bought aborted yacht club at this and you sold it for this like you were profitable and you can do this for every trade because it's all open and transparent so like i completely get it in terms of a trader or a research analyst or something for your track record i wonder how we can do that for other skills that are not to do with with trading i don't know if you have any like ideas or things that you can paint a picture for us if not that's okay but i i just i kind of want to see the the the

you know 10 years ahead how's this going to end up looking yeah that's that's a good point there's definite and that varies by role right like for an analyst or anybody in finance there are milestone markers within your portfolio that can equal x in terms of expertise but what about like a community mod um what about a product or a project manager i guess completion of those products for that project but that still doesn't tell a hiring manager that that person was uh you know super skilled or okay job or did a really shitty job you know can i

whatever um that's the classic rating right there that's performance review 101. yeah and then also on top of it like so you have community you have product management and then then what like what skills all the skills that go into making those roles are also all super subjective everybody's resume looks different and everybody comes to a different conclusion as to like you know these skills make me uh a community moderator make me a product or project manager so uh big big question marks to solve for does it answer your question not quite sure okay working on it

so is is is the path to somehow create a standard for measuring those skills or is it more to rely on the still rely in that area to still rely on the hirer or the hiring manager or the hiring employer to to just validate those so it'll be on chain but it'll be on chain with the caveat that like this was um rated out of their own rating system right yeah kind of like an uber system in a way like imagine if hiring managers you know who did the assessment test with candidates were able to upload it on the back end and

that all went into some sort of rating system that went on an individual's profile um it's a it's a big i know that it doesn't sound like it but that's a big ask for hiring managers to make that a standard um and to make sure that you know what if there's biases that go into that into that assessment what if uh that assessment was out of that individual skill set to begin with like there's all these different factors and i'd want to be careful of um placing somebody a rating on somebody's profile that's unfair but on the other hand sure there might be a way to create a standard within the industry i don't know anybody that's solved for that in

web 2 so there's not quite necessarily like a road map for that but is to say there might you know we're still in the beginning of web 3 maybe there is who knows find out i want to get into a lot on hiring actually and a lot about just like the the um the job market in web 3 but maybe before we do this might be a good time to just tell us about meta intro a little bit and sort of like what you guys are currently working on how far along are you what problems are you currently solving and sort of just like walk us through that process so far yeah so meta intros professional resume well for web3 it's a multi-chain custodial wallet that holds proof of

work for skill proof of education tbd on skill um eventually one day so um ideally with you know replacing the pdf resume uh so we're we're backed by near and ave we're still at the beginning stages of building our product but like you said earlier our our community is pretty massive i call that our mvc you know that minimum viable community um to prove out that job seekers in the market uh actively want web from jobs today and they're willing to use a wallet uh that will help them uh take on trained credentials and help them reduce the time to hire and get hired quickly communities big we

post jobs from anyone around the web3 ecosystem pretty much every 10 minutes across technical and non-technical job opportunities we also have interview resource section web3 education section and funny memes posted every so often of course because it's not a web 3 discord if it doesn't have that so i remember go ahead sorry no go for it i want to hear what you remember now um i remember the first meme that somebody made from our community i woke up in the morning and that's never happened like in my web 2 startup no one was creating memes for us

no one was like i mean i guess that's the difference of finding product market fit and not i i remember waking up and seeing this like hilarious meme about web3 jobs and meta intro and i uh i texted my boyfriend i was like i think we have a fan oh my god this is so exciting what do we do so that that's evolved and now we have a whole community that makes memes which is pretty pretty special that's amazing so you have the discord is where you're posting all the jobs in that is there a website as well like are you building on a website or are you just going to do meta intro is you're going to build this sort of wallets and and that and without a website for this

job posting and job hiring stuff yeah i don't want to build another labor marketplace i'll be really frank with you it takes a lot of capital a lot of resources and i think uh people underestimate the amount of um effort that goes into building a labor marketplace and so second time around i was like not doing it too expensive it's going to take a lot of manpower what about discord and discord which has costed us zero dollars to build and scale has sufficiently served as the job marketplace and it's really evolved over time to be broken down and easily searchable and you know uh kind of

replaces the need for a traditional job board so i think going forward unless our community is screaming at us like we need a job site for whatever reason then we'll bake it into the product roadmap but not now uh now we're just focused on building the wallet well how far are you into this wallet are you guys like is it is it usable yet is it soon to be usable or like um what's the timelines there on the wallet yeah soon to be usable uh plan is to have the first very early mvp uh released to our community sometime early summer and then of course we'll iterate and eventually release to the general public maybe

end of summer maybe fall okay and any idea what kind of features will be available at the first at the first release it'll be super basic so think metamask but resume version so the features in the beginning you'll be able to customize organize different badges and sections just as you would your normal resume you'll be able to add basic description uh just like you do on your resume um profile pic add contact information um and that's about it they'll be super super vanilla but the idea behind it is does it work are people going to use it and do people understand what the product is and then on the flip side

making sure that employers are going to be using it as well so on the employer side the way that it works is let's say you're going through a native job application like a board house and you're going through uh the basic questions first last name email address tell us about yourself and you get to the section where it says upload your pdf resume instead it would say connect with your med intro wallet and making sure that employers are using us they understand the product um that's going to be like a really big focal point in the beginning what is what does the employer then see you connect with the wallet and it just remains connected now and they can just look at it any time or is it like take a snapshot of the wallet at that moment or

how does that work that's a good question i actually haven't thought through that if it's if they'll have like access indefinitely or if they'll just get a snapshot probably will end up being indefinitely because oftentimes unfortunately unfortunately job posters will post jobs that they're not necessarily ready to hire for at that moment um maybe they're thinking about hiring that candidate a few months down the line and that candidate's resume may up most likely will update in some shape or form especially as we're beginning to roll out so most likely indefinitely but there should be a way thinking out loud for that job poster to see who's seen their wallet

and maybe revoke or sustain access yeah yeah maybe kind of like a doc send where you can see in the background who's looked at it for how long when where maybe having that information would be helpful to a job seeker that is a good question to pull in our community here we go we're building the product [Laughter] now so will this wallet also in the future have the ability to interact just like a metamask wallet where like you could go on uniswap and buy and trade tokens for whatever reason or will it stay as like this one's just meant for resume type wallet and

like and it stays as that and then you have your other wallet for other things it'll most likely in forever be two separate things um the only way reason i'd see any type of crossover is like let's say you're an analyst or maybe better you're an nft designer and you want to showcase your collection in your wallet which might be uh a very common use case that we come across then we'll have to figure out how do we connect how do we bridge the two um but we'll we'll see as as we go down the road these are all great questions yeah i was gonna well that was one of

the things i was trying to figure out was the interoperability part of it because the thing i noticed with web3 is like i have a million wallets and i feel like everyone has a million wallets so like what if i'm doing a course and i bought it with a different wallet and then like my credentials go into that wall how does this like integrate there's gonna have to be some way to sort of um i don't know share the information from one wall to another yeah that is a good question do you use one wallet over another or is there a reason you have a ton of wallets um yeah so just security reasons like one i have you know kind of a cold wallet that i use to store i have one that i used to interact with applications um one that i used to

interact with nfts so i kind of separated out just i don't know if that's the right way to do it i just i'm scared yeah can you um walk us through the difference of you know i know you're not deep into this web 3 business yet but i think a lot of our listeners are have a web 2 business and they want to build a website business what is it like building i mean you've built a web 2 business already and now you're in the process of building web 3. what are the differences you're finding what are the challenges like can you walk us through yeah um i quickly my mind quickly goes back to uh the first vc or the first couple of vcs i talked to when i had this idea

and the thought process was like well let me go and try to raise on an idea and not knowing as much as i know now about the web3 space or more specifically the hiring space within web3 which is like even more niche and the conversations were completely different with a web 3vc over a traditional web 2 vec and during that time i also talked to web 2 vcs because you know they're probably looking to expand into web 3 as well and web 2 vcs no idea what i was talking about lost them first five seconds they were like so what is the metaverse

what is good and um it was it was just so interesting because that that beginning exercise for me just taught me a lot about what i need to know and where i need to be an expert in before i can be ready to go out and raise um but in terms of the differences of running a web 2 startup versus a web 3 web 3 you're most likely dealing and receiving funds in crypto it's a completely different space your payroll doesn't isn't in augusto you're you know and uh what do taxes look like uh how do you pay employees what do benefits look like um i wrote this twitter thread a few

weeks ago on the difference of benefits of web 2 versus web 3 for employees completely different um and will most likely be the difference between you recruiting top tier talent versus not that includes like tokenomics you know and making sure that the employees get a share of the token if you're releasing a token um etc nft access whitelist all that good stuff um other differences in being web3 i've found that people are much more friendly and web free other founders that's nice uh do you guys notice that yeah absolutely much more collaborative yeah he's gonna say more open and yeah absolutely accessible yeah

yeah everybody's super nice everybody wants to collab everyone wants to kind of help each other out which is super amazing um i had a lot of sort of friends that were web 2 startup friends but here in web 3 everyone's like how do we work together how do we grow each other's communities how do we share resources um like for instance the only reason that i found out about ave for first grant was because i was talking to another web free startup vendor that was like no no no don't go raise venture that's not how you do it in web 3. you go and raise a grant first um and i wouldn't have known that unless someone shared that information with me so um

people are much more friendly than web 3 which is really nice so was your your raise was completely in crypto yeah wow and and then you pay completely crypto as well like there is no fiat in here no um i feel like i'd be kind of like a fraud if i was doing a little in fiance right um and i feel like if even if i did it like on low-key someone eventually would find out about it and like you know poked me for it so um i converted earlier this year my entire bank account over to crypto.com so now i have like a debit card that i can't pay in fiat um like you know to go get coffee or pay

rent and do those types of things which unfortunately my landlord is not it's not too crypto yet um and then also like paying bills like how do you pay your startup bills right because not uh i'm trying to think of like products that we use that are web too like uh discord for nitro do they take crypto i don't know if they take crypto i think so um canva to make like our digital assets uh that's not crypto yet so um it's weird being between the two and then also talk about like the safety of holding that crypto um that's super scary like getting that grant money and thinking what if somebody hacks the hacks the

account what if um the market dips oh my gosh when i got my first grant the market dipped and i was like wait did they actually send over the grant money [Laughter] i was like i think they only center for half and then like a few days later the market just like skyrocketed and it almost doubled my investment and this is all before i even like put my transfers like what you know like startup transaction on so um you know there's weird things that no one there's no like yc startup school for this quite yet right it's funny what in in web 3 you're basically forced to become like even if you're just a user or you're an

entrepreneur like you're forced to become an investor right because all of a sudden it's like well now i have these tokens because i need them to use it or because i'm that's what i got you know my investment in you're like okay do i sell it in the usdc do i like keep it should i try to time the market like these things actually matter it's like everyone is forced to wear multiple hats it's kind of interesting the it's actually funny you said that because the the first client that we um that we ever uh that paid us in crypto they paid us in like litecoin for some reason and uh and we didn't realize that they had paid and so like the market had gone down and like four days later whatever it was we realized that it was already down like x percent we're like damn it

no oh yeah it's such a different it's so different when you're when you're everything's in crypto but now knowing that how do you deal with clients paying you encrypt do you take it out right away or do you convert it um it's a great question we have like a percentage that we um we keep an eath and or we put into eth and then we have uh the other percent that we put into usdc so it stays stable because we pay our team in in usdc well some of them in usdc so um we just kind of keep it there and why do you use eth over other currencies just bullish on eth it's like you want the long answer

yeah [Laughter] just i mean it's like we're bullish on youth but also it's like it's less risky than a lot of the other stuff like you would bitcoin and ether kind of like the the least of the risky of everything so that's kind of where we we keep it and we're big fans of where eath is going and what they're doing so that's where we've decided to keep a certain percentage of our of our earnings yeah have you thought about taking a percentage of that and invest i guess investing off of your off of your uh what what am i thinking off of your balance sheet [Laughter] we do it we have some i mean we have some that's invested and it's there just

kind of long term which profits and i think um it's it's a good way to play it if you're getting into the space right like if you're building in web3 you're probably pretty bullish on web3 so why wouldn't you have some exposure to that right um that was the way that we saw it anyway yeah just trying to figure out well for ave and near like they paid in two different coins and it's like right which one do you hold both i mean yes in my case yeah i'm holding both um but what happens as i get hopefully more grants or more tokens you know into into the business account am i holding all different coins um i guess it just kind of depends on

the agreement you have with the company that you're taking funds from right it's it's an interesting new thing you have to think about as an entrepreneur in web 3. so um i think a lot of people don't don't really think about that right but it's super important especially if you're getting paid or have to pay in in this so um yeah really interesting are you using good i'm i'm thinking what we might need to do is uh a like a web 3 startup podcast uh maybe maybe a panel and get get you back lacey and then get a couple others as well and uh dive deeper into because this is super interesting i wasn't even

expecting us to go into this conversation today but it's it is really interesting and there's so many people who are curious about this yeah well it's also super applicable if you're freelancing like i have a ton of individuals in our discord that are freelancing and they need to set up their llc and somebody for instance came to me a few weeks ago and was like how do i invoice a crypto company that's like that's a really good question so i and like how do i protect myself um you know do i put some funds into escrow like what you know how how does it work and i was like i would be back with an answer and so you know did did some some

research and there are a ton of web three companies that are popping up that are solving for this problem and also like on the low quickbooks and into it are moving into the crypto space because i see them hiring for web 3 positions and they're hiring devs they're hiring analysts like they're gearing up but will they be able to win that web free market who knows but that's all just saying like there are these tools that are starting to pop up it's just like there is no i think there is kind of like a product hunt before but free but you know like there's no sheet there's no one telling you use request finance for your invoicing you know use a hot and cold wallet like there needs to be

the abcs of being a startup founder in web3 because it's only going to help the community so if you want to do that podcast yeah no definitely we're going to do it we're going to do it for sure uh if listeners out there if you guys want it drop us a line let us know we'll make it happen uh i'm curious when you have somebody come to you with a question like that which is obviously a question that many have are you guys producing guides and resources to to answer this for the masses how do you communicate and teach all of your community these things um two ways first we have a newsletter that goes out twice a week it's more of

like an hr newsletter that lists jobs but there's always a section in there that educates on some topic within the web free space and then i write twitter threads i love writing twitter threads um tagging different products in the community tagging different influencers who are writing other great threads and combining that into one massive thread um and then i'll share that in our community and the like learn web3 education section but you know it's tough like i could also have a blog on top of the newsletter like i could also you know there's so many things that you can do it's just how many hours do you have in the day what's most impactful where your listeners

or just write about it on twitter and write startup idea anybody solving for this i know i start the founders you know right right on it so um and hope somebody else solves for that problem the this is the most exciting thing about web3 is it's like it's this whole new like whole new surface area and so like someone creates something to solve a problem and then from that you're like oh but now we gotta solve this one and this one this one's like more businesses get started as a result of that and it's just like this never ending chain uh and i absolutely love that it's really cool this is why you can go down the rabbit hole for forever in the space yeah you totally could i uh and there's so many problems too as like a web 3 startup founder that you incur that like

you just you need a like you are willing to be the first paying customer for it you're like please somebody give me a product uh that can solve for this issue um like for instance uh i don't know how how busy um your discord inboxes but mine is slammed like 50 you know deep every morning when i wake up and everybody has a question everybody wants to say hello everybody wants to tell me the status on their interview process which is amazing but i don't have a crm for my discord like there's not a hub spot for and i can't filter i can't archive i can't move things and like i went to twitter i was like

who is building like uh something that solves for this issue it is an actual problem for teams that are moving their customer service onto discord um so if anybody's listening and is building a discord crm please send it my way i will pay money for it so there you go i love that so let's shift gears a little bit into into the whole hiring market in the job market in web 3. can you sort of zoom out for a second just give us the the outlook um what are you seeing in web three trend wise is are there is i mean i'm gonna assume everyone is hiring in web three are there lots of people looking for jobs in web three like what are you seeing just

since you're kind of the the high level view overlooking your discord channel where everyone is yeah so i think number one biggest uh is everybody's hiring a developer everybody and their mom needs a developer solidity rest go long if i see one more go long job and can't fill it it's going to break my heart um you know front end back then full staff qa um all of those senior level jobs everybody needs to hire for unfortunately there's not a lot of junior level positions which makes it really tough for developers who are coming into the space and wanting to make that transition but can't quite make it because nobody has a

junior level position open we do have a junior dev jobs channel in our discord but it's not as active as the dev like the normal dev jobs channel um so when i see that happening i'll push people towards some of my other favorite sites like learn web free you know crypto zombies um you know build space is another great one so pushing them towards resources and telling them to participate in hackathons do some bounties do some bug bounties just get some more stuff on your resume so you can feel comfortable applying to those more senior level positions from there uh everybody's hiring like a product project manager

that's a hot job in the space i'm thinking through the channels that are super busy right now analysts and finance everyone's hiring an analyst everyone's hiring an accountant the legal side of web 3 is completely taking off i'd say over the past 90 days the amount of like council jobs or paralegal jobs that i've seen pop out in the space 10x at least um so if you're a lawyer looking to move into the web free space like now is the time everybody is hiring a lawyer or in-house counsel um underneath that marketing you know it's more obvious like social media partnership management

and then community jobs community everyone wants to be a community or a community moderator that's definitely like a hot position right now but not everyone's hiring for one or they only need one on their team and so whenever i see people coming into the community they want to be a discord mod or a telegram mod um i definitely encourage them to open up their resume to social media manager or i don't know partnership manager an ambassador just to kind of have more places to send their resume because community jobs are hot like you can't wait on them if you save that job to the weekend to apply you're not going to get it they're going to have 500 applications to go through so

and then lastly underneath that interns i have a ton of interns in my discord like in college right out of college looking for that first like web free opportunity but similar to junior dev jobs um internships are slim in the web 3 space and they're really with like i call them the legacy web 3 companies like coin base open c kraken um you know those those bigger companies that have been around for like a year plus two years plus um and so they're hiring interns but um it's tough to get an internship in the space as well and are other than the dev side of things because i know that we just don't

have enough devs uh in web 3. are the other so it sounds like there's a lot of demand for these these jobs is there enough supply yet like what about this these like law um and lawyer jobs like are we getting a lot of lawyers moving into web 3 or is it scarce i think it's pretty scarce and i think the issue is lawyers don't know that there's so many job openings in the webspace quite yet and then also the buried entry is what constitutes a web3 lawyer obviously like crypto knowledge but is a year enough in the space to like go after a job like what are those required skill sets i see some of the requirements for these job opportunities sometimes i'm like you're nuts you're never gonna you're never

gonna hire anybody and sometimes i'll tell job seekers or employers that are coming into my discord they're like i want a celebrity dev you know with five years experience i'm like whoo there's luck so do i yeah and like also it's not necessarily always about like the length that you've been a solidity dev more so the projects and the quality of projects that you've worked on but i think lawyers are gonna see the same issue i think analysts are gonna see the same issue it's like these employers have to lower that lower that like barrier of three three years in the crypto space as like a senior council like the only company you've probably worked for is

like blockchain.com you know what you know who you worked for so um here's friction but it'll eventually even itself out how do you think we get there is it just we need price to go back up so more people get interested in web three and they come back into the space or or is it like like what do you recommend employers do that are hiring i mean there's so many hiring do they like you said lower their standards and just go with the interns and the young younger kids and kind of mold them themselves and teach them themselves or do they there's a dog or do they um try to like i don't know educate their industry so let's say they're trying to hire lawyers you go and educate a bunch of lawyers about web3 and hopefully you

pull some over like i don't know what are your what are your thoughts yeah so i sp um i spoke to the guys over at unstoppable domains uh a few weeks ago wonderful team hiring like crazy and they have a really cool program where they actually almost prefer to look for web 2 job seekers and they have an educational program i'm totally showing them but they have a great educational program where they put like that new job seeker almost through like a web 3 boot camp before they can start their job and i think that's kind of the way of of hiring especially if you're a large company and you're hiring at scale like some of these companies like polygon for

instance has like 80 plus openings that's insane to be able and then think about that let's say 100 to 300 candidates per per job um employers are going to have to open up that like i'm only hiring a web free person like they have to be willing to take a chance on some of these individuals who are coming over from the web 2 space have applicable let's say product management skills and web 2 have worked for companies that want to make that career transition um that's where the friction needs to like die down um and maybe build like internal programs like unstoppable that help educate um because oftentimes your

web 2 skills are applicable it's just the context of what your the company you're working for is different what's the pay like in web 3 for swept too is it more and i got to assume it's more if they want to get these people over but i don't know what do you find i know lacy's smile is telling a story here depends i talk about pay all the time um and we have a pay scale in our discord because like i don't know like you could probably ask for a tenant like a ton of capital or ask for like like a nice share of tokens um you know you can really negotiate your package uh in the web 3 space i think devs have a ton of leverage if you're an employer listening to this don't hate me i'm so

sorry but devs have leverage and i've seen you know devs start off you know at that like hundred and twenty hundred and fifty range just as like starting um and that's steep for a startup you know not all startups can afford that unless they've raised like a nice nice you know ground from who knows you know some talk to your friends but um it can it can range and then on the opposite end i see web free companies taking advantage of employees all the time i have people that will dm me and say like hey lacey do you think like 25 a day as a community mod is okay i'm like what

no the amount of people like no give them flip them off and like go find another job yeah like not cool i mean granted i'm dealing with people around the world so um but their like minimum salary might be significantly different but it's still not okay like if you're a web 3 company and you've raised funds you should be paying market salary like u.s market salary you shouldn't be paying somebody 25 a day working seven days a week um so it it ranges it definitely ranges you talked about uh you're you're working with people from all over the world one of the beautiful

things about web3 is that it's global and it's open and especially if you're paying in crypto there is no there's nothing stopping you from hiring anyone you want around the world right in the web 2 world using the old payment rails like you wouldn't be able to hire someone and use like i don't know upwork or whatever that's in iran or that's in certain countries right um for example because of sanctions and that um but in web 3 you can it's just fully open so do you see just it's fully global in your discord and what you're seeing or is there certain countries that are more involved or what's that dynamic like fully global um and i'd say 90 of the jobs in our discord are remote um unfortunately like there definitely still is bias towards hiring um across different countries depending what

country that what free company is in um so i encourage individuals if the job is remote you know in your resume instead of putting i'm in brazil but that you can work in x time zones you're comfortable doing that because if the job is truly remote that hiring manager should only be concerned with the fact that you can work in that time zone communication skills are there yada yada um but everyone's remote and it's like the beautiful thing about web3 because that means you can have access to talent that you wouldn't have normally had um and you get and that and that unlocks all these great things which might help most likely will help accelerate your startup

let's let's chat about the talent side so we've talked about the the employer's side uh what are the main challenges you see the talent facing in terms of getting a job in web 3 you know you said you get 50-plus discord vms a day what are the questions what are the what are the common threads that you're seeing um [Music] number one question is probably um how do i make my resume applicable to the web3 space there's definitely things you can do to web 305 your resume um turn it into a wallet is that the answer there you go boom done yeah um

or like even making a portfolio i think online portfolios are great and uh hiring managers don't want to have to download pdf resumes anymore because it's super sketch i don't download pdfs anymore because i don't want somebody hacking into my computer sounds paranoid but it could happen in the web 3 space or even with space um and i don't know who i'm communicating with on the other end so i got to be careful um other questions compensation is a big one that comes up um interview questions interview questions are a little bit different in the web 3 space obviously because of the context of what you're working on so sometimes people will chat me asking for like interview prep help like hey can you

jump on for 10 minutes on voice and you know kind of run through a mock interview with me which i'm more than happy to always do i'm trying to um what else those are like the common common questions that i get give us the i'm curious now what's what is the typical web3 interview what are the what are the different questions and uh let's let's help out the listeners that are looking yeah yeah yeah i'm gonna be prep right now yeah um well it's good to know what web 3 is before you go on a website yes you should probably know what blockchain is and you probably should know what like nfcs and crypto you know are and like how it interacts at just a very

basic level um like if you can talk to your mom about or your grandma about it like that's usually like enough um i think it's also important to go into interviews like having an opinion on your favorite projects that are in this space why they're your favorite projects um that could be nft projects blockchains uh just general web three projects d5 projects um it's good to kind of like have a favorite like if you're going into uh inter interview at a shoe store you should probably know like what your favorite shoe is i don't know stupid analogy but you get what i'm saying um and then beyond that it kind of it'll it depends on the type of job that

you're interviewing for so i've written written a few threads on interview questions based on roles so like community mods interview questions kind of like how do you run a discord what bots should you be doing how do you secure the safety of that discord um how do you interact with customer you know with new users how do you get them back or get them coming back to re-engage um those are typical interview questions um i wrote a thread on product management a month or so ago and questions and that where they're like what tools do you use in web3 as a product manager um what

product or you know what uh project you believe launched and failed and why in the web3 space um little things like that you know are definitely common questions you'll get yeah yeah i also have an opinion right it's uh i'm watching super pumped right now uh the uh the show that's a story of uber and uh the one of the things that comes out in that show is that they asked everybody in the interview are you an which says a lot about the culture of uber but it made me wonder if like does everybody in web3 ask are we all gonna make it [Laughter] like what's the what's the what's the com the uh the transferable question for that

should we pull that i like it [Laughter] what about uh what about somebody who uh because we we get this lot i find um so the more junior levels right like i think the the senior levels probably know have lots of experience interviewing they probably have got that down packed but i think we see this wave of young talent and particularly a wave of talent of global talent where their education system and their background might not be as strong that they're coming with a real skill set to offer which i think is why we're seeing so many people interested in being community moderators because it is something that you can pick up rather quickly and you know and offer that skill um but the

one thing that i always see is people being like hey how do i network how do i meet more people in web 3 right i don't have they don't have any connection and i think a lot of people are joining discords but they get lost in discords and they struggle and discord can just be a mess so i'm just curious if you have any advice around you know how to network and how to actually build real relationships in web three not just join a millionaire yeah i i can totally empathize with that because that was me in the beginning i was like i don't know how to use discord is it okay to like dm the mod like you know who is the mod the person that i need to talk to um i always recommend people like hopping in on twitter spaces i think that's a

great way to meet people raise your hand um you know have an opportunity to go up on stage introduce yourself talk to the people that are on the stages other great ways to network hackathons a lot of people don't know that in a majority of the hackathons there's codeless opportunities like writing go to markets building go to market strategies a lot of people think hackathons are just for jobs and they're not in fact there's um a codeless hackathon specifically no code um that happens i think once a quarter or so um and that's a great way to network meet other people that are jumping into the space and trying to build skills and like maybe even earning some crypto at the end

um signing into people's dms on twitter again like what we were talking about earlier people are super friendly um i always say yes whenever somebody wants to you know hop on a quick discord chat like i'm like yeah let's chat how do you what can i tell you um unfortunately not everybody's like that but like if you shoot 100 shots like at least 10 percent are gonna get back to you and say yeah why not um and then i think also keeping up those relationships super important um kind of like this may sound stupid but like kind of like on linkedin where you congratulate people for getting new jobs like interact with people's you know twitter posts like i do all the time that's how i maintain my relationships because i

don't talk to those people every day but like for instance you guys i'll follow you on twitter and like you'll see me you know write something on you know a post that you've written you know over the next few weeks just to like remind you i'm here and you know i want to keep the relationship that's all good things to do um and that's good ways to network and you never know somebody might have a job for you or might want to build a hackathon team or you know that might just be a relationship that's good to just have another friend so we actually we just hired someone um that is i think he's 20 22 or whatever he's young just go to school he's not even graduated school he's like going through it right now to graduate and uh and we spoke to him months ago

when we put out a job posting um but he followed us on twitter and he's just engaged with us for the last few months and we were like wow this guy's like super out there and he's like he's very wise like he had some great tweets that he would tag us in and like include us in on conversations and so like he just stayed top of mind and so when we were ready to hire again for the next roll um he was like he didn't we didn't even have to play again we just like we reached out to him because he was just always there um and so so it works right like we we see it right away so that's really cool um i have one other question i know we're getting close to time where we need to wrap up but um since we're

talking workforce we haven't really touched this yet so i'm interested to see if you have any um ideas about this but dowse to me dowse is something that's going to completely revolutionize the workforce in a way where you're not even applying anymore you're just contributing and then all of a sudden now you have a role um have you put much thought into daos have you ex put any like i don't know if you've been a part of any dows um but how do you see that changing workforce or what are your thoughts there yeah um i'm a doubt contributor um i love i would be in 20 dads if i could but not enough time in the day and it's also important like i think people get so excited about wanting to be a part of a ton of dows but you have

to think about the quality of your contribution at the end of the day and like there's no way that you're going to contribute meaningfully and get paid meaningfully to 20 different dows it's just not physically possible um dows are great um i know the guys over at cleoverse super nice guys uh they're kind of building that dow work platform where i might be butchering this so don't shoot me if you guys are listening but uh they do they like collect uh a ton of dows and the dows put out the contribution opportunities and if you're in the clever ecosystem you can like interact or apply to those contribution opportunities i don't know i think i got it right um but uh they're kind of

building like that future of work in the dao space which is super exciting um i wha what's interesting to me like in our discord uh i don't see a ton of like specific contribution opportunities coming towards us but i see the larger companies that have daos um looking for like governors and it's like a very specific thing um i'm trying to think the white person like polygon i think is hiring for like a governor or a treasury manager like there are those like senior positions um that i see more like happening in the hiring hiring full-time space um but dows are great i think it's an

incredible way to create job opportunities that weren't there before um and great ways to achieve like really bizarre missions like buying an mba team or like you know like i was in i was uh creeping on like the blockbuster dao like all of that so cool i want to buy blockbuster i want to be a part of that wait is there a dow that's buying block the last remaining blockbuster video store i haven't heard about this yeah they i don't i haven't kept up with them because that discord was nuts like nuts um and they had to put together like a proposal to i think it's like who owns them like comcast or 1850 or somebody's comcast yeah yeah yeah

they wanted to buy i'm butchering this but buy blockbuster and turn it into like a decentralized streaming service of course i'm on it in fact you know i'm i'm behind that sure it took my money so that that would be one of the best comeback stories of all time it really would be i mean like uh radio shack making a great comeback lime wires making a comeback yeah a lot more yeah i could i could see a future with i'm going back to your wallet because i got more ideas for you for your for your company but i could see a future where a dow needs i don't know let's just say they need an image created by a graphic

designer and they just put out a proposal and someone just connects their wallet proves that they have x credential where they've passed some course by canva or whatever so proves that they have it they automatically get awarded that that role or that project and then it's like once they finish and complete the project they hand it in and so long as it's good then boom they click approve and the money goes right to the wall immediately and it's like there was no hiring process at all it was just kind of like you put out a proposal you connect in and it just works and then they get paid and they're done you move on to the next thing that's how i can see freely if you build that platform we'll come okay i'll get started today okay

any more questions kai can we can we move to the speed round questions to to wrap before we wrap up here let's wrap it up anything uh anything else you wanted to touch on uh lucy no that was a lot i think we touched on a lot well first tell us where we can find you because it sounds like you showed a bunch of twitter threads that you do uh and so i'm interested to go check them out i'm sure many listeners are where can we find you uh on the interwebs specifically on twitter um yeah so twitter uh we're at minute intro um discord link is in the bio and i try to pin or pin the good tweets the good threads so if you scroll

through the top you'll see uh the tweets that i was or the threads that i was talking about cool and uh we'll try to um collect some of those threads and throw them in the show notes along with some of the other links that you mentioned uh okay we like to finish up with a fun little lightning round just hit you with some quick questions um let's start out with uh favorite person to follow on twitter uh probably alexis ohanian it's probably my favorite of course cool if you meet him tell him i say hi [Laughter] if you meet him tell him we say hi

former founder of reddit and now running what's the vc that he's running now 776 or something like that yeah and he's investing in all of these but three startups yeah yeah investor in uh moon birds they just put in i think 10 million into moon birds yep chilling my new favorite project yeah total show totally showing my bag uh best thing you've purchased for under a hundred dollars does not have to be web 3. i purchased a candy bar the other day that's like the first thing that came to mind what what kind of what kind of candy bar like a hershey's chocolate cookies and cream

you know does that count yeah sure yeah i don't know if it's the is that really the best i really like my chocolate so yes probably um other than other than your discord favorite community online um favorite community either the dao that i'm in which is an all women led dao called blue dao or um or near near has some really good stuff in it like if you're i'm not just saying

that just because like we're backed by them but they have a really active discord and developer information no code information super helpful if you're building on near so i probably jump into that uh discord a lot yeah quite a bit during the week cool cool we'll we'll throw both those in the show notes okay last question um project upcoming project you're most excited about could be a dow could be an mft it could be a protocol no limit to what type of project it can be um project because i just use them at request finance is probably my favorite right now um incredible platform to pace and invoices but they're in their like

mvp baby stage still and what i was able to do without paying any fees was i would prefer that over quickbooks any day um so i'm definitely rooting for them right now and keeping an eye on what they're doing is that lame is that a lame answer that's a great one no that's actually an awesome answer i'm i'm going to look at go look at them immediately after this show because i manage our finances so i'm interested okay amazing lacey this has been a blast thanks so much for coming on the show well thanks for having me this was a lot of fun to talk with you jobs and start of life so my two favorite things

lacey thank you and when you get um meta intro launched uh we will we will have you back on to talk about what that process was like and how that's going et cetera so looking forward to to part two in the future sweet me too and we'll definitely do the uh startup panel as well and i'm i'm pumped up about that we'll get that one in the calendar for the next couple months okay have a great afternoon thanks so much for the time thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web3 journey if it does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we

ask questions where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the description below and finally a quick disclaimer nothing in this podcast was financial advice crypto and web3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one