The Invisible Labor of Creating Community

Transcript

[music] >> We are now ready for our last talk for today. And this is going to be a special one because Simona is, instead of speaking, going to be interviewing me. And this is going to be a live recording of the Human Protocol podcast. And we're going to be covering a bunch of things around how we see this space moving and evolve moving and evolve and the history of E Global. So, please welcome Simona from the Human Protocol on stage for this live conversation.

>> All right. Welcome everybody. This is a live recording of the Human Protocol podcast. The first live recording that I did was at ECC for the launch. This is our second live interview. And for Have you done an interview like this? You're normally >> This actually might be my first podcast ever. >> Wow. Yes. We love a first. All right. So, what is the Human Protocol podcast? It's all about the personal side of building big things. I decided to start this because I really, number one, wanted to chat to friends and people who I've known for a very long time.

But also really capture their stories and what it feels like to build here and do all of this for most uh most of the people that I've interviewed, 9 10 plus years. So, Kartik, welcome to the Human Protocol. >> Thank you. And I'm excited to be excited and honored to be here. >> Excellent. So, we're going to start with the beginning, pre-crypto times.

You studied astrophysics and mathematics, not computer science, not finance. What does studying complex systems at the greatest scale possible teach you? Or why were you interested in that? >> Um personally, I wanted to be an astronomer. And that's kind of how I got into physics. That's when I kind of really honed in on, "Hey, I really like math.

It works for me. I can get it. I don't have to try too hard." There's a limit I found where I did have to try a bit hard. But that was kind of the origin of like why that was my degree. Um through all of those things as part of kind of doing courses, understanding how tech is evolving, I got more and more into programming. And that's when I really realized that this actually is way more fun. And it has almost the same concepts that I have to apply, but a much faster feedback system.

Um if I had not done what I do now, I would have been a professor. And I'm very glad that that's not the route I chose. And that's kind of where everything came from. So, I was just naturally excited about just understanding complex problems and just also looking at things in a more generalized way. And that's kind of the the history and the origin of like where most of my interest and and fascination to this comes from. >> Okay, so you were going to be a professor. What then kind of changed that trajectory slightly and you were at SV Angel when you were 20? Like, what does that being in those rooms

with consequential early-stage bets on tech at that age, What does that do to how you see the world, to how the trajectory really shifted? >> It's a pretty consequential impact. So, um through university, I got more and more into software, so I started doing anywhere from kind of internships to open-source projects and really just building in in the open. And this is we're talking like from 2010 to 2015. >> Mhm.

>> The early days of just kind of I feel like tech was still in its prime. And that's sort of the world where I started learning more and more about startups. And this is me in Canada still. So, I've never been to kind of Silicon Valley until then. And the more I kind of talked to people, saw what was going on, built stuff, and got feedback, I just kind of keep on realizing that everything is happening in Silicon Valley. >> Okay. >> And that's sort of where majority of my interest of being in tech came from and the proof points.

The the part that was interesting for me was that I managed to get an internship at SV Angel, which was and still is one of the most prolific investment funds out there. Um and I got in there as a software engineer. And my goal was to literally parse what's happening on the internet and see what is about to become big. >> Okay. >> So, we were looking at all of the social media data, we're looking at what everybody says, creating a giant graph, parsing all live tweets in real time, and trying to see basically is there something interesting that people are excited about, whether it's a new company or a new product, or something going viral, can we detect that early, and see if we can invest in

those things. And that sort of became interesting to me because the rest of the company in the fund was looking at it from the point of view of investment, and I was looking from the point of view of this is like amazing data. How do I like run the math on it to find all these things? Um and as part of that, I started to become more and more active in pitch meetings. And this is one of those things where that's kind of the exposure I got into the investing world where you were in the rooms when people were just two ideas and nothing else and companies, some of them are just massive names now and you were just having a pitch with them and they had no idea how big they will be. We had no idea how big they could be. And

what it really does to you is sort of give you a pretty distorted view of the world in two two good ways. And this is all positive. One is you basically are living in the future cuz anything that you saw would be already 3 to 6 months before anybody else would find out about it because even somebody's pitching to you, they haven't really built those products just yet. It's so early. So you don't really get to see any of those things outside. Second part was you kind of had a crazy bar for what good is because all you saw was absolutely incredible founders after like multiple times a day. So you had a high benchmark of hey, this is what good

should be. This is what traction looks like. This is what progress should be. This is where you should be as a company 3 months in, a year in. And that's sort of like puts you in a really interesting moment where you know that this is what it means to compete at the best level. And I feel like that's kind of the part that sticks around to me where like I know what good is or I know what good enough is. Um and what what isn't good enough, especially. Um and and that's kind of a lot of the motivations of I would say the last decade. >> Okay. So that definitely applies to what you >> anything you do.

>> anything >> Cuz you are benchmarking yourself against the best companies in the world. >> Does that dip into, let's say, your personal life? Do you have very high high standards? >> Well, yeah. Yeah, I think so. Uh absolutely. >> Okay. >> I think it's just the the phase you're in. Um one of the things that uh I stopped keeping track of this, but um I started there in 2014 and it was tracking how many pitch meetings I've had.

And uh I kind of did a normal I like I was just I was just count them and I stopped counting in around 2018 or 2019, I believe. But at that point in those 5 years, I had taken over 8,000 pitch meetings. So, you kind of have a really massive spectrum of what good, bad, worse, great looks like and it really affects you cuz this is now how you think and there's nothing you can do about it. It's just Yeah, I don't have a checklist, but like this is now >> part of how you evaluate >> it's part of my uh decision-making framework on everything, whether it's personal or professional. So, yes, I would say very much so.

>> Interesting. So, very formative. Okay. And then with that in mind, when you started because you have the hackathon concept for you predates ETHGlobal. We're talking Hack the North. We're talking Wait, what was that? Two? No. How long before ETHGlobal did you start Hack the North? >> Uh 2014, so three three years before.

>> Three years before. What is it with this framework of for excellence and what is good enough and what is excellent and so on? What does this format of the hackathon specifically, why did it interest you? And what do you feel it brings like this two-day constrained um idea to execution in that speed. What Why is that appealing? >> I think there's kind of two answers to this. One is like what is personally exciting to me, and then the second one is like what is it that I think about when I'm doing it for somebody else, which is kind of the global lens. Uh part of the reasons why kind of hackathons have been interesting

is that the tech industry is actually pretty young. Um And not only that, where we are now it's it's less than 20 years old from like kind of how things became actually simpler. So, what I mean by that is until about 2011 2012 it actually was hard to even get a server to deploy an app. Things we take for granted now are just like things that you had to like prep for, pay a lot of money for, and just was nothing were not common things. Um so, people were still new to these ideas, and kind of starting if you go back 15 years ago where when it really kind of started the

thinking about that point was, "Hey, we actually want to give people accessibility to what's actually happening on the ground and the latest version of what's going on in tech." Which meant that if somebody launched a new framework, if somebody launched a new way to build something, um chances are if you didn't already have money or if you're not employed at a tech company, you would not really be able to do this on your own. You would not be able to try things. You would not be able to get any hardware. And hackathons became sort of a way to in a way crowd-source that access. And kind of examples are like this is We started things when Oculus launched as a company.

>> Mhm. >> And they would have maybe a few hundred units entirety of kind of their availability. But if we could we would go to them and say, "Look, we have a thousand people here. We're excited to build on these things. Could you give us 20 for the weekend. >> Okay. >> So, people can get access to something years before they were publicly available or just you get to see what's going on, but also you get to make things better for the product because if 20 people complain about this exact thing, this is how you actually make a better product. And we wanted to introduce those feedback loops. The second part of it was uh we we did this at university. And all of us were students, and we did it for students too.

>> This is Waterloo. >> This is Waterloo. So, Hack the North was uh Canada's biggest hackathon that I found we started in Waterloo with my co-founder Liam. Um we also started Hack the North Global. And the part that made things interesting for us there was the gap between what computer science is in university versus the reality of working in tech. It's a pretty big gap, which means you're not learning the same languages, you're not even learning the same concepts. You still can't if you were to just join a company after graduating, you will not be ready to actually contribute to the code base or actually solve a bug or add a feature.

So, we wanted to actually introduce more practicality into people's real kind of computer science education, which meant that if you were asked to make something that others can see, this would really put you in the position to like see things, try things, understand like what is good and what's not. And you won't have that incentive otherwise to kind of just get better at things. And this is going to help most people get jobs. This is how most people kind of started companies. And that's kind of the incentive saying, "Hey, like we think we can just make education better by making it more fun and personal to that person instead of learning from a textbook, what if you solve something that has been bugging you for months? And if you simplify that and somebody else likes it, too, that's actually a way better endorsement than

acing your exams." >> Mhm. Was that something that both you and Liam kind of did for yourselves as well? >> Yeah, we did. We we used to attend other hackathons, and we basically said, "Hey, we think we can do a bunch of things better than others, so let's do it ourselves on our campus this time instead of going there." So, that's where a lot of the improvements came from and um and that's kind of the same philosophy, which is that we think for ETHGlobal 2 a big stance we've taken is that we think that some things are not ready for developers to build um easily.

>> Mhm. >> And either you do that either you solve that problem by complaining to the party that should be fixing it um saying, "Hey, this is fix this this is broken." Which is keep on adding bug reports or asking for updates. Uh and that's kind of how most companies work or you actually open it up and increase the volume of feedback so that people can prioritize better, but also you get to now measure the time to getting started. And you've kind of been in some of those early days, so if you look at something like ETHGlobal London that we did in 2020, that's 6 years ago.

Um at that time the developer tooling was still so bad that it took on average about 2 hours just to get a basic project running. And that's the feedback loop we wanted to start. It was 2 hours then, it was much longer 2 years before that when we actually started. >> Mhm. >> And now it takes less than 60 seconds to copy an app and just run the button and just press the start command and you have to do nothing else. And that's kind of the the latency we want to measure, which is that how easy is it to start creating where somebody takes care of the infrastructure or how easy is to just not worry about the scaffolding but focus on what you want to do. And if you want to create a good platform

you have to have that latency as low as possible. And this was kind of our goal, which which was basically saying we think Ethereum is not good as a developer platform, but we can make it better. And this is the only way we think we can do it. >> Do you feel cuz I remember those hackathons in the very beginning and I remember Austin Griffith being >> We would do workshops and this is kind of how we improved everything and then over time these became standard libraries. >> Yes. >> And this is what we needed. >> Do you feel the hackathons that you've organized have contributed to projects improving their documentation, everything else just through sheer feedback?

>> This is the most common thing that happens. >> Okay. >> Uh anytime a hack a hacker submits a project, they also are asked to comment on what was easy and not easy to work with a protocol. And that's sort of the feedback that we give to our partners and they improve things and people are getting feedback and and not only that, we kind of see actual reports being fixed. Like we've seen edits to Solidity, the language itself from these events. We've seen bug fixes in MetaMask. We've seen actual SDKs from our partners getting fixed and improved in over the weekend in real time because no matter how hard you try, one thing we found is that if you just open it up on for feedback just on an online forum,

you don't really get the right feedback. And not only that, it's the distillation of it that matters. So, somebody saying, "Oh, this is too hard to build." is not specific enough. You online, if they come to you and say, "Hey, I'm trying to do this thing and it's airing out on this place." or or until you talk to them you realize that they actually misinterpreted what you said on your documentation cuz you thought this is what they should do, but they understood differently, you don't actually get that real-time feedback and that's what actually improves a product. And uh and that's kind of where most of our time and energy went, which is let's make it better for everybody because we want the ecosystem to win, not just a single company or not just leave global.

>> Speaking of time and energy, how frustrating was it for you as the organizers when these things were not smooth? And we're talking, let's go way back like >> I don't think it was frustrating. I think it was more about basically understanding can we do extra work to reduce that time? Um one of the things that we sort of haven't really changed in 15 years is the time for a hackathon. It's been 36 hours. You start Friday evening. It goes on till Sunday morning. Um And what that means is that any time you

waste basically is taking off time that you could spend making your product better. So, if you had to spend 2 hours 5 years ago just on the setup that's 2 hours you could have done something more productive with. Um now it's a few minutes, which is great. And what we kind of had to do was figure out like well, how do we figure out how to cut this time? So, we've done anything everything from getting Austin to create a repository that we fork and nobody has to start to saying hey, like literally back in the day, I don't even know if this is a problem anymore. Um but back in the day if you were to run a local RPC node you had to wait a few hours for all the blocks to sync even locally.

So, we had to tell people, hey start downloading your RPC Thursday because it'll take you 7 hours just to be ready to build on your computer, not even the internet. And that meant if somebody was starting at 9:00 p.m. on Friday, they basically lost quarter of the time. Uh so, we would do And we And the best thing about all this was we were also engineers, so um especially the early Google team more than half of us were developers. So, we got excited about fixing these things ourselves. So, we would do anything from we would download the blocks for people have them on hard drives and give it to people saying, hey, look, we just saved you 6 hours on the sync. Copy this so you can start from only an hour ago. We cut down time. We would create Docker instances so people can just clone

things. Uh we would just create a server that people can use and multiplex it, so we give people time back. And we got excited about that too cuz it was fun for us to fix problems, too. Uh but that's going to what we wanted to do, which is like, how do we maximize the time somebody has to build something? And what mattered is And the answer was different every year. So, the first few years what mattered was, can we improve building on Ethereum, which meant that it didn't matter what comes out of it. As long as it's a good experience to build, that's what's the optimization should be.

>> Okay. >> After that, it became, okay, we think we have a good enough version of how you can build a smart contract. Can we build something that's useful? Um and that meant just trying things that could be products. And that was kind of the 2019 to 2021 wave. 2021 to 2024 became, let's optimize everything, which meant can we save gas costs, can we go to layer twos, can we multiplex things between different chains, how do we make things cheap? And and now kind of the direction we see Eth Global going and just what we want to do is basically entirely focus on building products that people can use.

>> Okay. >> We think tooling is good. It's good enough. We think it's not the barrier anymore, and the limitation is what is the idea that's being implemented because everything else has been 9 years of hard work on making sure that people are never stuck on the setup phase. >> Okay. What cuz we you went back to the 2019 2018 2019. Some of the earliest and the biggest, and you'll give me more examples, I'm sure, but CryptoKitties was prototyped at Eth Waterloo.

>> Our very first hackathon we ever did is where NFTs were invented. >> Yeah. >> Blows my mind that this is how >> You were there. >> I was there. >> What did it look like? What did it feel like? Did you know what you were witnessing? What was happening? >> Nobody could have guessed that. Um it was a Pokémon game. That was the demo. I remember seeing them. I remember guiding them into the judging room. >> Okay. >> And they had physical Pokémon cards they were giving to the to the judges to show how it's going to be and the whole demo was, "Hey look, we have cats on the internet." And this is a game we let you breed cats and here's like this is what it looks like. So they kind of wanted to show off this is a digital version of a physical

card. But a month after that is when they kind of standardize the specs to saying, "Oh, these things actually can be immutable and and we should call them non-fungible." Um and that's kind of the paper came out and this became ERC-721 and that's what it started the wave. Um and uh and there's just going to want examples. Like nobody could have foreseen things. Uh there's a couple of other stories from just the very first one and and one of the best things is that even like now I end up finding out about a new story every year that I did not know from just that first event. There's like hundreds of those for every single event. And kind of a couple ones that I have are um the Gitcoin founders met for the first time there.

>> Yes. >> Which I did not know until a couple years ago. And uh and it kind of still blows my mind cuz I also thought like they were around before us but turns out no, this is kind of how they also met in person. That's how things started. Uh one of my favorite ones from from that time was somebody was trying to use MetaMask uh Web3.js um and uh they wanted to use it in their web app so they couldn't figure out this uh with the wallet connect or you know like wallet connection on the Chrome extension and they just kind of kept struggling and then they got so frustrated they basically said, "What the you, MetaMask. What's going on? How I cannot connect?"

And then the person behind him was the developer of MetaMask that did that feature. And then he turned around to see what was going on and he said, "Oh, I know exactly what's going on." 1 hour later he fixed it on MetaMask so he could use it, but also it was a patch to MetaMask itself and there was kind of those days where you actually could move projects and that fast and really change how things get better. And that's just like from just the first event. There's so many versions of this thing. Obviously, one of my favorites being 1inch became this massive company from just a hackathon project. You can see the whole trajectory of them trying ideas to finally six or seven events later realizing, "Hey, this actually is the best version of what we can do with

our skill sets and optimizations." And that became this massive successful company. >> And to your point, there are so so many stories like this and you know, at this point you have over what 150,000 developers onboarded and the companies that have emerged from these hackathons probably raised, I don't know, 200 in excess of 200 million in funding. What does that prove to you? Not just about the hackathon, but what does that prove to you about this community? What does it prove to you about what you're doing and what does it validate for you?

>> I think the most obvious validation has been that this space belongs here and it needs to exist. Cuz anytime these types of things happen, the first question you ask is, "Is this a fad? Is this a long-term thing? Will it continue?" And when somebody's crazy enough to say, "I'm going to change all of money and sort of replace banks or replace governments." You probably don't take that as seriously as you would um for any sane person would would never kind of add some discount to it. But one of the things that we wanted to be sure of is not only is there a pretty impressive set of promises that you can receive if this were to go the way

everybody wants, but also as developers, we got excited about the tech part of it. Uh the fact that you can run code that never needs to be maintained or you never have to worry about scaling it or adding more servers if it gets busy. It's a pretty unique concept and we're like, "Oh, this is actually cool." And we think there's actually massive website and creating this infrastructure. And this is going to what got us to where we are now. Uh and this is a Zcash global. Um so, we were passionate about the fact that there actually is promise in this world computer vision.

And that's kind of what kept a lot of our internal efforts going. But secondly, the big piece was that without seeing a lot of these proof points, which meant people anywhere from finding jobs to creating companies, you would not have been able to prove that this actually is a place that should exist and should belong as a category. And and you had to do that hard work to really see all these things through and show people that look, there are massive companies here. The fact that Uniswap does more volume than Coinbase on a daily basis most of the time is a pretty impressive statement on its own. And that thing is just 8,000 lines of code that they deployed in the last version and that's all it

takes. So, you can still be massive and create opportunity for others and you kind of had to go through that. So, that's kind of what was exciting about it. So, the proof points were like, "Look, the fact that 100,000 plus people showed up in person, built things, got jobs, started companies." Some of them did not work out and that's totally fine. Still made it possible for them to consider that seriously. >> Speaking of people showing up, you've done at this point events through all of the bear markets.

>> We have seen every bear market in crypto that has ever been. >> Correct. And people still show up and they still build, including this one, right? And what do you see? Like what is the difference? Because you've also seen the bots, right? What is the biggest difference between the people, the qualities that you see in the people who show up when things aren't as rosy price-wise versus the ones that show up when things are sweet?

>> I keep going back and forth on this answer. Um price is important. Um even if people are doing something for fun, ultimately they have to still think about what does it mean to have a career? Um and kind of make sure that they can do anything from pay for their cost of living to any luxuries that they they want to afford. But the part that I feel like is very unique to this global ecosystem is the fact that one, we kind of never changed our metric for who we think should be in this room.

Which meant that from 2017 to now, I review every single person who applies. >> Okay. >> If we have 5,000 more people applying, it doesn't change how we let people in cuz we still look at who is trying to come here and and if this is the best thing for them. And that's kind of what you want to keep consistent for an event like this because what we're really trying to do is we're trying to make sure that people who are interested in this category have a way to find others who are also interested in the same place.

And crypto is still a bubble. Um and this is in a way the good and the bad version of it. Bubbles are not bad, but it's not big enough that it's socially acceptable to basically not socially acceptable. It's not like commonplace enough that everybody can just be in this space or this opportunity. So, which means that people are still in those early phases of I have to figure out what is it that I want to do. People are still going back and forth between crypto or AI or any other category. And when you have a small group of people, you really want to make sure that they have the ability to see who else is in this space and exchange that info ideas to just make sure that they can

have that same journey together. And I think that's kind of what keeps people coming back. And that's kind of the key piece. The second piece is a lot of what we have to think about is at what point do you play a short-term versus a long-term game? Okay. Anything that would come out of ETH Global, I think will take at least seven, if not more, years from that day of that event. Um NFTs were invented in 2017. People found out what NFTs are in 2022.

Um and that's a pretty long cycle. And there's been so many versions of these things where so many small inventions, even fun ideas, or Polymarket came out at the same time. Like that only became relevant a year and a half ago. All these things take a lot of time, and building a company is even harder. And the thing that we have to do is we want to make sure that we get to understand and not control, but actually set the tempo on what the sentiment should be in this space. If we get to say that, "Look, there is still a lot of things happening." and we get to show that, this is the proof point you need because honestly if you see anything about crypto on the internet, it's never really positive.

Um and this is the reason why we started things because we wanted to show that look, this is it's not all hacks, it's not all scams, it's not just people ripping each other off. There are things that are being valuable valuable things are being created and this is where you want to be to find out what actually is is all of that and the goal especially in bear markets is to show that there are still a lot of people who believe this opportunity, whether they want to start a company or join somebody who's building something. Um you get to make sure that you don't end up spending time on the wrong things. And and that's the social consensus role that these events will play during these times and we want to optimize with those types of things. Um And that's kind of like the framework

for for a lot of those decision makings and when we look at a bear market, we get excited because what it really means is that all the noise is cut on what people should play with or not play with and people who are coming really care about this space and they would actually spend the extra time and effort to make things better, whether it's for themselves or others or just the anyone from a product to develop tooling. And if we can just get a few more of those moments, the compounding of it is what you're betting on. >> That's really interesting that you mention that focus during the bear markets because it does it is a very very different I've judged

pretty much alongside >> I'm in this room I I know so many people from just the last few years and they come back and they win prizes that definitely counts, but also there are still improving things and I hear more stories during the I have heard more stories over the last 12 months of it was like, oh, I just got feedback from this person and they told me to like change this or not do this thing cuz they're they don't think it's going to work out or they did this 6 months ago, so they won't us to spend time on it and that's kind of the time saving you get. And this is kind of the the early roots of another big sort of wave and and that's kind of what we are hoping for.

>> Does that cuz I um what I was going to mention is judging during a bear market is very very different than a bull because to your point people are actually are more focused on real solutions to things and it's really interesting that that comes out um at these times. Was there Do you use it in a way to confirm to yourself that you're also on the right path? >> Yes. Yeah, I mean, we as a team review every single project that comes out of it just to see if there's anywhere from real things being built >> Yes.

>> just what is the actual continuity of these things and that really helps us confirm too cuz sometimes we're like, oh, this actually did not work out and we have internal reports where this actually was like okay event cuz we didn't see too many things that we wanted to see not that we can announce what we would like to see but yeah, we we do these temperature checks all the time and they help us define what we should prioritize and in-person events that we do are obviously very generalized but especially we do our online events, they're very specific to an idea. So we have one just agentic payments or just on like NFTs or just just this DeFi liquidity and that really helps us understand like what's missing or what's in a way like overcompensated for and these things help us really see where

our time should go because we want to help companies in this space also get the right feedback. So we use that to find companies for the next wave saying, oh, look, turns out that everybody's excited about let's say ZK. Let's bring on more ZK people cuz they will benefit off the the the next kind of group of feedback the most or let's see who are the best researchers improving that tech. Let's bring them on as speakers and have them talk about what they're focused on. >> But I'm also curious for you personally, does it also confirm that you the effort and the energy that you are putting into this and have done for so long and traveling everywhere and running the show and obviously you have a wonderful team that you have built, but for you personally, does it confirm that you're

on the right path and did you ever throughout all of these bear markets have moments where you were like, "You know what? This may not be the thing. I This is hard." Cuz it can get very hard. Were there those moments and how do you get through them, past them if there are any? >> Uh so far, no. >> Okay. >> Um I would say we've gotten lucky a bunch of times. >> Okay. >> So >> Lucky how?

>> Um lucky by effectively being early in some situations. So, um ETHGlobal, I don't I think most people know this at all actually, but ETHGlobal was started by a grant from the Ethereum Foundation. Uh this is 2017 or 2018 when we officially incorporated the the company and we got a $200,000 grant from the EF to start doing events all across the world for the year 2020. And uh one of the things that we were really firm on and we still kind of have this is that we want to keep everything free because we want to just get the smartest people in the room, which meant that if you had a barrier for payments or anything else, that simplify or makes it harder. And also, the reason why we go everywhere is because we don't want to add another another barrier for

people to come to us. We're better off going to them and meeting them where they are. Um so, $200,000 is when we started. We received the the grant in ETH. And uh two days later, things started going down. >> Yep. >> A lot. >> Yep. >> So, Ethereum went from $1,400, which was our 200,000 to 160.

>> Yeah, it was like over 90%. >> So, that entire amount was our budget for the year, which ended up being about $70,000. >> Yep. >> Uh we obviously started selling some in the middle, but we got lucky at that time because what people know as ETHGlobal was not the same version of ETHGlobal before. Our bigger events at that time were still closer to 3-400 people. >> Yeah. >> So, things were a lot easier to do. And also, there were a lot more companies in the space that helped us kind of offset the sponsorships cuz they also wanted to get that feedback and reach the audience. So, that was kind of like the part where we were the only player in town, and we sort of got into a good spot.

Other times, what we've seen is effectively kind of the other side of this problem, which is when we went online, especially during COVID, things became 10x more than what we could expect. Now, an average event was a few thousand people. There's a time where uh we did right after COVID ended, we did an event in India, which was our first event after COVID in um in 2022, two. I believe. I could be off by there or maybe three. Um it was the first time in Bangalore after COVID. And for that event, we had 20,000 people apply in person.

>> So, wait. The first one that you did in India was 20,000? >> people. >> 300 people. I remember. It's still one of my favorite. >> later, 20,000 people applied. >> Wow. >> And they were all developers because we make them connect their GitHub. So, it's not even just like random people finding about crypto. It's like, no, like we intentionally make the application hard so that not everybody just applies to show up. And 20,000 people applied, which meant that probably 2x the amount of them started to to kind of drip to that completion phase. And we had now a whole different set of problems, right? And that's where like we see the other side of oh, is this like too crazy? Are we able to handle this thing? Does that mean like we should now make the events 10,000 people moving

forward? So you you kind of go into those situations. So we haven't been in that situation just yet where I feel like I feel down about oh, this is like going to or when things have really changed like that hasn't happened yet. I do think we're in like the phase right now where the question that I feel like is unanswered is all the shift for institutional that we're seeing now >> Mhm. >> will it be a temporary thing or permanent? >> Okay. >> And if it's permanent, that changes a lot of things about the ecosystem all together. And as part of that change, we will definitely be affected.

>> Okay. >> And that would really start that question of like well, does that really mean we continue what we've been doing or do we adapt or do we disagree with what's going on and tell others about how do we how we think things should be? I think we may get there next year, but so far, I don't think we have I have not been in that situation where I feel down or not excited or it feels like a chore. >> Okay. So what would you say inspires you or keeps you going? Or is there anything cuz again, there is a lot of let's say less than positive sentiment that we have experienced in the last few months. Things are changing, funding

models are changing, companies and projects are winding down, okay? Others are starting up. What still inspires you and also what do you feel is the point of balance that we have reached after this period when it settles? How do you think it will settle? So, that's a combined thing there. >> I only have theories. That's the hard part, which is that we have to see it through and >> Is this a personal view, Kurt?

>> This is only This is only a benefit of hindsight type of a type of situation. So um my version of what I think is happening is that I think there is a very expected and and this is not a bad thing. A a clash of ideals versus reality. Right? Um businesses have to survive. And if they're getting attention from a different group, they'll try to see if it makes sense for them to to go there and we're kind of seeing that activity happen for basically everything in the institutional side.

>> Yeah. >> And that means if you lean towards that as a company, and this is me talking about other projects in this space, um you have to decide whether you want to add to that or you want to not do what you're doing now and and change all of your effort send time to go to the new thing. And as part of that, you have to kind of really pick where does your team's attention go? Where does your priorities lie? Um and and that's kind of the wave that's defining all the stuff that we're seeing. I think the part that to me is interesting and what I really at least my version of this is that I think we are going to be very sinusoidal on how companies will behave in this space,

which is that we'll see a pretty big wave of everybody going to the big players trying to integrate. >> Okay. >> And then they'll come back and realize that actually they should have done more grassroots development because everybody's trying to be a platform and the product route really has pretty brutal zero-sum dynamics. And kind of just I mean, whether it's philosophical or just we have so many good examples from this open source world. The best time to start building a community is now.

>> Yep. >> Uh and I'm not even just talking about just people. It's the fact that like things compound over years. So, if you wanted to be a good developer platform, you wanted people to build on top of you, even if you were a enterprise only solution, but you had an open source element or an on-chain element, the best feedback you'll get is from developers who are trying to use things for their own creative use cases because one thing that's specially unique in this ecosystem that I still have not found a good comparable anywhere else is the time to invent every part of a business has gone down so much

that you effectively have to be ready to support any part of the stack. And what the stack what what I mean by that is that a smart contract can be everything from your company. It can represent legal entity to accepting money to handling payments to being ready for every country at the same time, >> Yep. >> managing scalability. If you have a billion users suddenly, you don't have a lot of additional work you have to do. Guarantees on non-reversibility of any actions.

And effectively pretty good hedge against any other factor that would block you from being successful on just the logistics of running a business. >> Okay. >> And that is a pretty massive opportunity because I can give somebody a company in a box now that is just a piece of code. And before that was a multi-week to multi-month long process. And it still exists it's still the still case. So, what I get excited by is the fact that like we're introducing all these tools and people are creating all these parallels, but everything is becoming software for how we run businesses and how we invent really crucial parts of our day-to-day infrastructure.

>> Mhm. >> And that opportunity is massive because it means that you are going to have a new wave of things that were not possible before or were not efficient enough to to be done. That creates hundreds of new types of companies that are equally big. And and kind of the analogy, which is not always the best way to think about things, is that never would have most people in the last few years have thought about AI companies being worth a trillion dollars or companies being trillion dollars. Like Nvidia and Apple crossed a trillion-dollar market cap in the last 5 years.

And they were massive public companies of 30 years, and we're seeing similar startups go from zero to trillion dollars in private valuations in the last 2 years because of how massive the upside is of the scale of that problem. >> Okay. >> I think those versions of that world exists in crypto-enabled infrastructure. >> Okay. >> And that's the real opportunity where all those things will compound over time. So for that we have to really focus on a robust infrastructure, which is to me the heart and philosophy of Ethereum.

And we have to keep doing this thing because you will not see the resilience on infrastructure unless you really spend the time making sure that every single nook and cranny is addressed. And that only happens if 10,000 people are in this case improving it or trying different variations to see what does and doesn't work versus a big company saying, "We'll just give money into the system and we'll do handshake deals or sign deals with bigger kind of volume, but it's not actually helping improve a platform. It's helping improve their bottom line."

>> So wait, is this the bit that also still inspires you? >> No, it inspires me is it's that like I think that opportunity still exists and that's why we're still doing it because I don't think we've seen even the first wave of those types of companies. >> Okay. >> And and more and more, especially with software being super fast now with AI generated code, you get to see those worlds faster and faster. I no longer have to wait 5 years for NFTs to become ready enough or a smart contract to kind of go through those iterations of feedback and security reviews or audits.

I get to do that in days if not hours. And that means I can really try a big idea and really see if it works. And and that to me is the exciting opportunity for a platform, which you don't necessarily see anywhere else in software. >> Because to your point, and again looking back at the how things have evolved throughout the years, you can really fail a lot faster now and go, "Right, well, that's not a real thing. Let's try something else. Let's try a different >> People I I've seen people try three ideas at the same hackathon because two of them didn't work.

>> Yes. >> This would be unheard of because they would realize that it doesn't work maybe 3 hours before submission. >> Correct. >> They're like, "Oh, I guess I'll do whatever I can." But here you can full reset, try it out, and be ready. And you can if it's working, actually start improving it. >> It's really interesting. There's a um when I did the track with Austin, he said it is the worst time to be a junior engineer, but it is the best time to be an entrepreneur. Because to your point, you can just test so much even in this um kind of short format. Um I know that we are way over, but I wanted to see if there was anything

that you have not said publicly before about anything. It literally can be about anything, but you would like to in this very small safe space. >> You know, this is on the internet, right? >> [laughter] >> Not going to fool me. This is This is going to be on the internet forever. >> Here, we're all friends here. >> I think one of the things that uh uh this is actually related to one of the questions you asked me a few minutes ago, which was how do I feel about a bear market or just >> Yep.

>> are things going to uh getting better or will they get better? Um we work with hundreds of companies in this space uh and that means we also have multiple conversations with all of them every year. We've kind of seen the evolution of how they're thinking about the space to We have metrics on how they're doing because it's facilitated through ETHGlobal for a lot of those developer feedbacks. Um and especially kind of over the last couple bear markets, we've seen very predictable but similar loops of like what matters and what doesn't matter or like hey, everybody kind of says that uh feels the same thing and then like a year later we realize that it didn't matter and they should not have kind of done XYZ.

Um so, there's a lot of repetition there and and kind of we're in that phase right now where I'm hearing the same comments from companies that uh that other companies from 3 years ago said, but they were not around. So, like you have kind of everybody has to go through their first version of this. >> Okay. >> Um and I won't kind of go into the details of like what these comments are, but one of the kind of the distillation of all this thing is that I've kind of said these things privately to a lot of companies and I'll kind of make this slightly more public um is is that one thing that we have really good proxies for is how open source and developer ecosystems have evolved even to like in this day like it's not crypto specific like most

of the internet runs on open source. People use GitHub for everything. Literally, most code is now open source, especially every performing piece of infrastructure that you use. And one of the things that we see always backfire is people trying to do things solo. And the crypto version of what we see all happens all the time is people doing everything from their own version of an event to their own kind of closed system, anywhere from incubators to specific programs. And almost always these things do not work out because they're always a reactionary decision.

Because you feel like you have to really show internally that things are working or we have a better hold on our our community or whatever it may be. I think you're about to interrupt me on something but >> Okay. Continue. Continue. >> But but the comment is we've seen this happen for 9 years, and I can tell you that there are to my knowledge no success stories of those efforts. And what I have to tell everybody from time to time is that if you want your product to get better, you have to be in the same room as somebody else offering something similar, so that you have a much wider surface area to address, and actually capitalism in this way

coming to help improve things. If somebody's as a developer is more attracted to the other party, you have to figure out why, and that should be your incentive to improve things. And not only that, we're still in a place where most people are still building platforms and not products. This is crypto is not a consumer ecosystem. Uh I'm not sure if it ever will be. I don't think giving people a money app is considered consumer. That's that's not the same definition. So, it's it's a definition that's different.

But if you want things to get better, the only way they will get better is everybody is in the same room. And the second you go internal or solo or on your own track, you're bound to just be behind because ideas don't spread that way. You are increasing the echo chamber within your own ecosystem and we've seen time and time that ends up being not a good ending. >> Do you think that comes from a genuine fear that people have that they will be wrong? So, then let's not be up for comparison. Where does Do you think that comes from?

>> Uh and just to confirm the the fear of like why they should go Oh, like the decision to why they want to do something themselves. Um I think it's largely that everybody feels like they have more control over the outcomes, right? So, it's natural. Uh I have It's very easy to follow why somebody would do this. Um but the piece here that matters is that you cannot create silos for a platform that's open. And almost always these things end up creating silos and you end up fracturing the existing kind of dynamics that you have with the ecosystem, whether it's open source projects or other companies or your partners.

And the second you start doing that independently, you end up only optimizing for short-term KPIs. That's not how you create success. And and and that's the part that in a way I bring up every time and also the thing that gets ignored 100% of the time. And then 3 years later, they see, "Oh, this is happening again." And then you have some institutional memory of, "Oh, we tried this and this is what happens." So. >> So, maybe we think the balance on the other side of whatever this is or whatever we're doing.

>> As weird as this sounds, you are better off being in the same room with your competitors than you would ever be on your own. >> Yep. Because balancing short-term with long-term is the thing that we kind of need to learn. We over-index on the short-term. >> That, but also when you are not doing that, you are self-selecting for things that are meant to be measured as easy wins. >> Mhm. >> And that means you miss critical core foundational work that you would have to do.

That you would not be able to figure out in time. But if you were in the same room as your competitor, you may realize that oh, it turns out that everybody's starting with the other SDK way faster than ours. So, it doesn't matter if somebody has been in our ecosystem for many years, and they know how to use it, turns out that that one person got lucky, and that's your edge case. But the five other people you wanted are wasting more time than they would in setup than they would in finding a good product or a good customer or anything else. So, you missed the the actual core layer of how you build your solid foundation.

And that only comes when you have somebody else to put you in check. >> To the player. All right. Well, thank you very much, Karthik. >> Thank you so much for >> know how long we it's been, cuz that's been at zero for ages. >> This has been a fun chat, and I appreciate everybody still sticking around. So, thank you, Simona, for making this a live version of this podcast, and uh I appreciate this. >> Thank you, and I appreciate this being your first podcast. There we go. Thank you. >> Please do me a favor and reply. >> [music]