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00:00:01
Mento Labs & Celo Co-Founder, Markus Franke: So you want to be a CEO?
38 Plays7 months ago
In this episode, I spoke to Markus Franke, CEO and Co-Founder of Mento Labs and Celo.
We discussed Markus’ career journey, why he’s passionate about blockchain and solving the problem of global financial inclusion using Celo.
We spoke, in detail, about the role of a CEO and the skills you need to develop to be successful in Web3. Markus shared insight into what it is like to build a project from the ground up and some brilliant advice for anyone looking to succeed in their career.
Behind The Blockchain is a series of conversations with leaders who have built successful products, teams and careers in Web3. You will get a chance to discover how successful individuals were able to accomplish their career objectives, the skills they have acquired, the mistakes and difficulties they encountered, and the advice they can offer you to help you reach your career aspirations.
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Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the behind the blockchain podcast. Today I'm joined by Marcus Franke, CEO and co-founder of Mentor Labs. Marcus, welcome to the show. How are you? Very good. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm very happy to be here and and talking to you. It's super exciting. No problem. Thank you for for joining me. So Marcus, for people who don't know who you are, could you introduce yourself please? Absolutely happy to. um So as I said, my name is Markus. I'm um CEO and co-founder of Mentor Labs, a company that is focused on giving people everywhere in the world access to local currency stablecoins, in the end, producing infrastructure for stablecoins for every country in the world.
00:00:47
Speaker
We can dive a bit deeper into that in a moment. I'm based in Berlin. um We just moved into a very new and exciting office in inside FullNote in Berlin. um I'm in the blockchain and Web3 space for seven years now, and I'm coming from a traditional finance and um yeah traditional economics background into the space. Sounds cool. Sounds cool. So could you give us ah a bit of an intro or a talk through your career journey so far? Absolutely happy to. So I mentioned I'm coming from a traditional finance and economics background. So I studied economics a long time ago. And then from that, I went to work in investment banking in the economic field. So I work for different investment banks like JP Morgan, Mel Lynch at the time.
00:01:44
Speaker
um in ah the roles of like ah mergers and acquisitions and and related areas. And then um I thought I want to actually dive deeper into how markets work and therefore decided to pursue or to go back to university and pursue an academic career. I started to work on a PhD and started to do research in financial markets. During that time I was both working on research on financial markets but also worked in teaching, like basic economics and finance classes.
00:02:24
Speaker
From there I went back to traditional finance industry and worked as a portfolio manager and was mostly focusing on large portfolios, managing large portfolios from pension funds, family offices. um and focused a lot on managing the risk side of the portfolio. So, I mentioned um i managed a €2 billion euro pension fund and and basically focused on the broader risk allocation.
00:03:00
Speaker
And then a very good friend of mine we studied together told me that they are starting a project called Celo, a layer one EVM blockchain that is focused on giving people everywhere in the world better access to financial primitives, especially in countries where they don't have good access to financial primitives. meaning good access to stable currencies, to saving, to lending, to borrowing, all of um all of these things. And I ah got super interested in Celo, so I joined them and I think in a traditional company, my initial role in
00:03:43
Speaker
Starting up Celo was something like a chief economist, so thinking about all economic questions you you have when building out a blockchain ecosystem, which goes from incentive design, Celo is a proof of stake blockchain, so the proof of stake incentives, but also building out a blockchain platform. a stablecoin platform on that on that blockchain. And um from that, at some point when the cellular ecosystem grew and the mainnet was live, ah we thought it totally makes sense to have a focused company um that um has a team specializing in stablecoins focused on the stablecoin platform.
00:04:32
Speaker
similar for example to how Ethereum Foundation and MakerDAO are separate teams. um We then separated the core team working on Celo L1, soon to be L2 development and the team focused on Staplecoins. So we did a spin-off, Mentolabs is a spin-off from CLabs. C-Labs is focusing on core infrastructure work for the cello ecosystem and Mental Labs is focusing on building out stablecoins for every country in the world. Sounds cool, sounds like a great mission.
00:05:13
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is something that also sets the whole Celo ecosystem apart from from many other ecosystems out there. It's very mission-driven. Celo now has an initiative that it moves back onto the mothership, onto Ethereum, to become an Ethereum L2. um And Celo from the start had this like mission of giving people around the world access to financial system to build out real world applications that enable people in every country of the world to take part in in the digital economy.
00:05:53
Speaker
Therefore, I think what Zello is trying to do is, in the end, scaling Ethereum to real-world use cases. and If you look at usage, Zello already is over the past like many many months, always in like the top 10 to top 5 of the most used blockchains out there. And I think with the move to being an Ethereum L2, this will um help scale and increase this even more. We have projects that are building out of many different African countries, Latin American countries, ah really cool and useful real world applications for day-to-day users.
00:06:37
Speaker
um And this is something that that excites me a lot. and What we at Mentolabs want to do is support these users with local currency stablecoins. I think we see the success story of dollar-based stablecoins and I think dollar-based stablecoins are really cool, especially in countries where you don't have access to stable currency because of high inflation, because of currencies that lose value against the dollar. And with a dollar stablecoin, you actually allow people to save money, for example, in dollar and in making the dollar accessible. But at the same time, in these countries, people maybe want to borrow. Maybe they want they are entrepreneurs and want to get a small loan to build out a business.
00:07:25
Speaker
especially for that you would need local currency because as a small business owner owner your revenues are in local currency and therefore your loan should also be in local currency so that you are able to pay back that loan. Therefore for me Building out local currency stablecoins is really about financial inclusion, something that the whole blockchain scene not only sell or had always on on their missions and on their flags what they wanted to do. And I think with this, it's for me really exciting because we're actually really executing on on that plan, on that mission and and see like adoption in in many countries around the world for these things. So it's super exciting.
00:08:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's brilliant. It sounds like a really, really good mission, to be honest, to be able to, yeah, ah improve that financial inclusion around the world and get people um yeah get people involved, which is which is brilliant. It was actually a very mission-driven project that first ever got me into crypto web 3 back in. I think the start of 2020, a project called Telcoin. I'm not sure if you've heard of them. They're like remittance projects and stuff. We were looking at kind of bringing bank into the unbanked across ah developing countries and things like this. So yeah, look any any project that has a a real solid ad mission is solving you know real problems. I think it was really cool.
00:08:51
Speaker
um So now that's cool. we'll Take it back to something you said um when you explained your career journey, when you became a chief economist at Celo. I mentioned you were there asking or looking at all the different types of questions that you could ask or you could answer. um Did you notice it but there was much difference between the things you you were researching in ah more traditional finance compared to the things and the questions you needed to ask? in Web3 using blockchain and that stablecoin environment, was there much difference? It's a very good question. And I think this is in the end goal goes actually other talks to why I'm so excited to now work in this space. If you're in traditional economics, you do research on how financial markets work, even how money works in some ways. and
00:09:46
Speaker
In every day-to-day transaction, we use money to exchange, to purchase, to save, to lend, to borrow, to all do all of this. and If you look at money um as a technology, this technology didn't really change over the past hundreds of years. In the end, um of course, the basically means of payment changed. Today I can maybe use my phone or I can use a credit card by just tapping it on a device and pay for something. But money itself as a technology didn't really didn't really change. And as a researcher,
00:10:24
Speaker
You are mostly looking at money as like sort of a given and you do research on how then the markets work, how transactions work. But you actually are not spending a lot of time to innovate on money and how it could be used. And this is exciting this is super exciting that this industry is actually now trying to do this and now um We are still, I think, even if it feels I've been in this industry for 400 years now, because it's like a very fast moving industry. We are just at the beginning of really innovating on on money. And I think this is this is the exciting thing. And i think I think this is the big difference between work in, for example, academic research when it comes to economics and working in Web3.
00:11:16
Speaker
And that way you really try to innovate on on, for example, money as a technology. A few examples on innovation is in the field of stablecoins that you could introduce new currencies for specific use cases. You could introduce currencies that can be used as a universal basic income for people in regions that would really depend on that. You could think about new forms of collateralizing money to use, for example, nature or tokenized nature um as collateral for money. You could, instead of borrowing money into existence, think about new ways how money could get or come into existence. You could think about economic features like, for example, demerit that basically
00:12:17
Speaker
attributes value to money only if it's used for transactions, things like this. um You could have like specific new currencies that follow a basket of goods or a basket of different currencies in one token um that you use for settlement problems. So there's so many things to innovate on. And in the end, having then all of these things based on an EBM backend, um on a blockchain, making this really really scalable, making this to make this also very easy to integrate. If you have a new form of money, it could be used in any of the existing wallets. um I think this is really exciting and it opens up a lot of opportunity. And I think here we're just at the at the start, at the beginning.
00:13:07
Speaker
It's a deep rabbit hole when you start getting into it and exploring it. um this might This question might be putting you on the spot a little bit. How do you how do you work out what's needed and what's not? like what what How do you look at what areas you need to innovate on and and kind of go down that rabbit hole and start researching on this and why choose one over another? Or do you try and do it all at once? How do we know?
00:13:33
Speaker
I think this it's a very good question because it goes to the core of decentralization and building with open source ecosystems. In the end, if, for example, we as a project building infrastructure out of Berlin We might know a bit what is but could be needed in Berlin but maybe we don't have a lot of knowledge on what is needed in Kenya or in Brazil or in the Philippines because simply where we're like then more folks here in in Berlin and don't have that local knowledge.
00:14:09
Speaker
um And I think the beauty of of open source and decentralized community is that you not only get input on what you're building from people all over the world, you can actually engage, work together um in a very easy way. since it is open source and since since it is a platform, um people also then in Kenya or in the Philippines or Brazil, use ah stick sticking to these three examples, can integrate your infrastructure, can build projects on top of this infrastructure that are needed locally. um An example for this, maybe trying to be a bit more concrete or hands-on,
00:14:53
Speaker
In Kenya, it was really interesting to me to learn how the lending or loan markets credit market, credit market is working. um Many people there don't have first-hand access to a bank, um but still maybe need a small loan to get a business started. and then often in these markets um they rely on community. They maybe have a messenger group they ah where they meet come and communicate about some of them having excess cash and some of them having need of cash and then you can basically in your community
00:15:35
Speaker
basically have um have a lending circle um where where people then basically um give small loans to each other in a trusted environment. um And I think it's amazing that this works. um And of course, we can only support with some infrastructure that we are building, but building then out the real product then probably needs to happen on the ground by a project on the ground that should also benefit from ah putting in risk and entrepreneurial spirit to build this out. And therefore, I think this is the exciting thing about ah about open source, about decentralized setups that you don't need to basically build something from the Silicon Valley or from from Berlin and and try to conquer the world. It's more like let's engage and find people all over the world that maybe have a similar mission and that also want to contribute to that. And I think this is yeah very exciting.
00:16:32
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. It really helps you enable people in those countries and give them access to the infrastructure to be able to build the projects that they and need to build, which is, ah no, it's cool. It's cool. So obviously, you're, at the moment, CEO at Mento Labs. I guess a lot of people would look at your role now and think, you know what? I'd love to be the CEO. I'd love to be the co-founder of a project. Are there certain key skills that you've learned along the way that have really helped you to achieve the position that you're in now?
00:17:05
Speaker
I think it's a very good question. and um Thinking about like what the key skills could be back at the time at school, at university, during the PhD, during the time of academic research, I was always like focused a lot on like the hard skills that you need to learn to make an academic academic career that you need to learn about certain statistical features or statistics features about certain stochastic processes like really hard skills in math or hard skills in economics that you need to learn that actually make a difference.
00:17:45
Speaker
When it comes to being a CEO or founder of a project, the, I would say, the soft skills side becomes more and more important. And I i always at university thought and like, ah, come on, these soft skills. It's something you can can can build out once you needed them. It's more important to to learn like a very specific model because this is then actually something that you have. um but But now this just changes a bit. um If you think about
00:18:20
Speaker
your typical work or the problems you're facing when starting a company, a lot of them have to do a lot with handling uncertainty. um You don't have a lot of structure in that work because in the end when you start a project you have to implement that structure. There's a lot of ambiguity and this is coming from many different different sides, this like uncertain uncertainty. There's pressure by the market. There are questions by like from potential clients and future clients. There are partners that maybe hopefully want to partner with you. There are tax authorities dead one that want to pay your taxes. There are investors that want to see a return on their investment.
00:19:10
Speaker
There's employees that want to have like a good job and want to work on something that also excites them. So there's a lot of uncertainty, a lot of ambiguity. And I think the core role of a founder or a CEO is actually um adding a bit of like managing the ambiguity, adding a bit more certainty, adding that vision. um In the end, you as ah as ah as a founder or CEO, or you want to hire than people who are the best in their respective areas, you want to have like the best engineers, the best CTO, o you want to have the best product people, you want to have the best business developers, you can't be all of that.
00:19:57
Speaker
But what you have to provide is in some way some guidance in that and and removing a lot of ambiguity there. So I think it's a core skill ah for founders that they are able to work ah in a very uncertain environment, that they are able to work under a lot of pressure um and that um are able to I would say provide a vision um so that you find people that that can help you build what you what you want to build.
00:20:32
Speaker
And I think there is something that is really, really important in Web3 that a lot of projects missed in the past and that contributed actually to the high volatility in the field. And this is actually something that there's a lot of shiny projects out there, but they not always actually build something that provides economic benefit to users. And they are maybe building something that sounds really, really cool and really, really complicated. But if you break it down, it doesn't create a lot of economic value. So basically, the same in this industry, like in any other industry is you have to have a focus on your user to build something that they actually want to use and can use and that provides some economic value to them.
00:21:19
Speaker
And I think sometimes this very simple truth people people forget um because they build something that is really fancy and complicated. But if you look deeper into it, it then doesn't provide any economic value. And I think having that focus is important.
00:21:38
Speaker
Again, this might put you on the spot a little bit. If someone hasn't handled ambiguity before, hasn't been in the situations where they've had to support a number of different roles and things like this, how do you learn that? Is that just on the job experience and you just deal with situations as they're thrown at you? Is there certain situations you can put yourself in to try and improve those skills? what do you What's your take on that? Yeah, I think um there are a lot ah element or many, many elements um to this job that you need to learn on the way. Because if it's your first company you're starting, um they many prop you might be an amazing
00:22:22
Speaker
engineer and might build beautiful code, but you never actually um incorporated an entity or you never actually ah put a payroll process in place. um and If a lot of these things are like maybe not the coolest tasks, when you're excited about building code, you might be really bought by engaging with local regulators and authorities to incorporate your your entity. And therefore, I think as a founder,
00:23:00
Speaker
um You really need to take care of these things because this is often something um that you need um and therefore you should be relatively flexible in handling these tasks and then finding also people that can help to build and and so on. So yeah, when we started the first company, I also never have ah incorporated an entity and therefore I had to to learn on the job. And I think here founders need to be really, really flexible. um I think the core skill then is basically again,
00:23:35
Speaker
being able to work in uncertainty and being flat but flexible and and trying to to solve these these problems. Because if you're the best entity in corporate, as an entrepreneur you don't do this very often, you only do this three times. so Like that skill doesn't help you a lot because it's not really scalable scalable thing to just incorporate entities. So I think there's like many things that are thrown at you and you need to in some way be flexible and come up with it solutions to them.
00:24:12
Speaker
um I think it it sounds a bit over oversimplified in in in many cases, but keeping that flexibility is really, really important. And also very different to the work in a traditional large company. If you work in like a large organization, there are many things that are more important to this. Maybe you work on a very small like part of the overall um organization or and you have to focus on that maybe you are in such a big organization that also the politics in how to engage with different stakeholders are really really important um so ah yeah this is very very different most of the times you have much more structure when you work in a large organization than when starting up a new company so if you like that structure
00:25:09
Speaker
I think it might be better to then also join a company where you like the values, where you can actually um see that you can contribute. Not everyone has to be a founder or CEO. And I think also and good CEOs realize that they have to be in some way a servant to their to their team um and and enable the team to execute um what they are working on. um I think if you've never started a company maybe it looks from the outside a bit different but actually your main job is to serve the people that that work at your organization.
00:25:53
Speaker
ah Did you always know that you wanted to be the CEO or founder of a project or business? and No. And I think in the beginning, I was like more focused on, yeah especially in the beginning when I worked in research on economics, on how financial markets work. And I didn't care too much about like the organization itself, if it's like a research institution, a university. or a ah traditional company that I work in. I wanted to work on um economic questions, for example. I think um with this knowledge in this space, um I had an area where I could contribute. Of course, there's especially in Web3, there are a lot of brilliant people
00:26:42
Speaker
um And therefore finding your area where you can contribute something was really, really important. That this then at some point also led to a spin-off and led to starting a new company and leading that company in in some way as a CEO was more of a by-product of like I wanted to work on on really fun economic um problems. So, and I think I didn't always know Especially since also the work as a founder or as a CEO is not like a very typical work. Every day can be very, very different. There are days where you basically need to be part of brainstorms, where you go really, really deep into problems. And there are days where you just have one meeting, one after the other.
00:27:33
Speaker
um And you just need to, in some ways, survive all of these meetings that you can actually then get back to the computer and answer, open emails and and messages you received. So it's not basically the typical CEO your work, I would say. And do you you briefly touched on it a second ago, but do you think that anyone can be a founder?
00:27:56
Speaker
I think um to to be successful, I think it's it's clear that or it's important that people um think about how they can add value. um And if they can add value by bringing a team together by creating a vision that more people want to follow. I think then, of course, they can also be good good founders. If people realize that they can create amazing value by building beautiful code, maybe ah they should rather be not a CEO, but maybe a CTO, or by leading an engineering team, or be part of an engineering team where they contribute with beautiful code. So I don't think that
00:28:43
Speaker
Also in traditional companies, I don't think that everyone should and needs to be a manager. And I think often with traditional organizations, this is actually a trap they fall into that they basically promote talent away from the job. So it could be also in finance, for example, that you are the best portfolio manager. and you create like the best outcome for for the investors and you are amazing at that job. But in order to have like a good career in the company you work for, um you will be promoted to at some point then lead a team and then instead of managing a portfolio, you all of a sudden have to manage like people.
00:29:27
Speaker
which is a different, very different um job, but you have to do this to basically have a good career and earn more, which is not really clever. I think those who are really good in managing people should manage people and that are really good in in managing portfolios should manage portfolios and those are really good in in building code and writing code should write code. You shouldn't promote them away from that and therefore I think People should try to like find out what are the core skills and that doesn't necessarily mean hard skills like they are best in writing solidity. um they If the core skills is bringing people together or engage partners, maybe business development is perfect.
00:30:15
Speaker
If they are basically in some way want to manage teams and bring talent together and serve these teams, maybe then like either an organizational role or a CEO role might be might be perfect. Yeah, you're you're right. Completely right. and I speak to so many engineers that ah they may be senior engineers and they think the next step is going to be a team lead or an engineer and manager role. They go into that role, work there for six months, realize they hate it, hate the management side of things, really miss coding, and then end up going back to being you know an individual contributor somewhere else. And also, you see it in recruitment.
00:30:55
Speaker
All the time, you know businesses I've worked in previously, in order to be promoted from you know consultant to senior consultant to principal to manager, it's all based on the amount of placements that you make over a certain time period then gets you promoted. And you think, well actually, the best, the best people, the best billers, we we call it, it's the best people making placements. um usually the best managers because they have a different mindset of kind of what they're looking at or what they want to focus on and this kind of stuff so you almost promotes away your best talent and watch their placements kind of drop off a little bit or quite a lot a lot of the time because they're trying to juggle things that they're not necessarily naturally skilled at so yeah you see it all the time across across of all sorts of industries right um yeah it's uh blows my mind when companies companies do that
00:31:47
Speaker
So you briefly touched on it. Yeah, but absolutely. And I think... Sorry, go on.
00:31:57
Speaker
I think there's also, when you think about or look at the types of organizations in this field, also here, especially Web3 is really interesting because in this field there's a lot of innovation and therefore also people try to innovate how organizations work together. this things like okay very flat hierarchies, there things like trying to derive group decisions in and a a clever way. So also it's an experimental field for different organizational structures.
00:32:35
Speaker
um And ah we tried out also in and the journey of the and organizations that worked on Celo, we tried out different methods of organizing teams, we tried out Holacracy, we tried out a bit a middle version between Holacracy and something that is a bit more hierarchical. um And also that for me was really really interesting um because yeah ah it ah justifies in some way all these organizational classes that you had when you were studying economics had to do and then like in the past they were probably a bit annoying and now I find it really interesting to see
00:33:17
Speaker
um Also in that like organizational structure, how you how you derive this or come to decisions in an organization. Also in this field, people try out different things, which which is really, really interesting. yeah Sorry for interrupting. No, no, it's all good. So talking of trying different things and and things you find interesting, ah why did you initially take an interest in Web3 and blockchain? It's a good very good question. And like I think um when I came to blockchain and Web3, I didn't know too much about all of this industry. i As I mentioned, I was coming from an economics background. I looked into monetary theory. I looked into how markets function. I worked in traditional finance in the markets.
00:34:07
Speaker
And therefore, I always had that interest on how a market functions. And actually, when I learned more about that three, that this is in some way at the core, how people do transactions with each other, how people are incentivized to do transactions or to to interact, um also how money works um as ah as a technology or how markets function. All of this is at the core of this Web3 ecosystem, also how ownership is transferred, new forms of ownership in new types of tokens and NFTs, for example. All of these are core economic questions.
00:34:48
Speaker
And then Web3 is bringing basically brilliant developers together with entrepreneurs that look into this, into incentives, into transactions, into money as a technology. And this for me is super, super interesting. And then a good friend of mine, we studied together, started this project Celo. And Celo was about bringing this technology and still is, to end users um all over the world, especially to these countries where it's much harder to ah hundred or be part of the of the economy um because you don't have access to stable currency or because you don't have access to the financial system or you don't have access to a bank.
00:35:33
Speaker
especially there I think this technology provides or adds a lot of value. If I today for example in Berlin want to buy a coffee, I can use my phone to pay, I can use my credit card to pay, it's super easy um but that might be different in and ah Kenya or in Nigeria or in um in the Philippines, maybe because there's no um available stable currency or because there's no bank that I can use or and so on. And for me, I mentioned now also different African countries a lot.
00:36:13
Speaker
This is really interesting to see because in Africa, mobile money um there is already a reality. um Adoption of digital currencies and blockchain-based solutions is growing faster than anywhere else in the world. So what you can see there is that actually people leapfrog in some way all the steps that we went through in in economies like Germany or the US, where we went from paper-based money to checks to like other forms of of payments to the credit cards today and so on.
00:36:56
Speaker
And here people, for example, across Africa, basically directly jump to mobile money, blockchain-based solutions and all of this. And it's super interesting um to see. um So for me, this was like a big part of the reason to to enter this field. And I think a second part I mentioned earlier ah is this opportunity to be innovative, um not take For example, money as a given technology, but actually innovate on that technology, I think is a u huge opportunity. Yeah, for sure. And see people look at ah you being the founder of a Web3 project and it has this
00:37:39
Speaker
People on the outside almost has this like glamorous connotation around it of, you know, Foundry and Web3 and this kind of stuff. But what's it really like working on the ground, trying to get a new project started and up and off the ground and get people aware of it and hiring the right people? Like, what's that? What's that really like? It's a good question and I think i mean we've touched this before a bit that um the role of a founder or the role of a CEO of a company is often like being a manager of ambiguity and add structure and remove uncertainty.
00:38:15
Speaker
Things like this. I think this is true probably for every every founder and every CEO But it feels at least for me that in web 3 This is much more amplified because it is a very young Industry and similar to many other young technologies. This industry is going through a lot of like hype cycles bubbles extreme phases of speculation um I mean Web3 and blockchain is is like the the absolute incarnation of of hype and type cycles. it's A lot of the projects are about that. And I think in that extreme environment, still trying to basically add value, find real users, build a real product is even more difficult.
00:39:07
Speaker
and ah requires, I would say, even more endurance than in many other other industries, where it's maybe easier to to basically stick to a certain um path, I think. This industry similar again to many other young industries also attract then sometimes a lot of um crazy projects where these like boom and bust faces or these bull and bear markets then sometimes also are necessary especially the bear markets to in some way ah
00:39:44
Speaker
Clean and and help the market and help the industry to become healthy again so that some of the pure hype projects then maybe have to leave and have to restart by thinking about what the actual product is and I think this is where it's a bit different in Web3. It's driven by so much hype, driven by so much um ah yeah cycles and volatility that here you have to really even more focus on what is the real product and what how we can can we add real economic value.
00:40:24
Speaker
So do you have any advice for anyone who is stepping into Web3 for the first time, looking to build a successful career for themselves? Obviously, you've mentioned a few things there that ah people probably need to be aware of about Web3 before they come in, but is there any any advice that you could share to help people be successful? Yeah, absolutely. happy Happy to chat a bit about that. um I think if you're like for the first time stepping into Web3 and go, for example, to one of these large conferences and gatherings, you see a lot of funny projects, a lot of like super interesting projects. And actually, you will be bombarded with like opportunities where people say, this is the next next big thing. And I think crucial here is to find, basically,
00:41:11
Speaker
your way in in that crazy industry. um A lot comes back to something that I've mentioned like earlier, I think at least two times, that focus on what users want, how can like economic value be created, and then maybe also question some of these projects, do they really create value? um Am I therefore at the right spot? I think this is probably important and this industry makes it really, really hard. I mean, we are recording this during Berlin Blockchain Week. Berlin Blockchain Week is ah or like one example of these crazy conferences if you go to
00:41:51
Speaker
One of the conferences like Dubcon or many others here, you see a lot of like interesting projects and you need to in some way find ah your way ah to navigate this this space because everyone is building on something new. Therefore, it's a lot of new you ah things, maybe also many more new things than in some traditional industries. so i think um it's It's maybe not advice, it's more like an observation that in this space it's even harder to to stay focused on what you want to do, where you want to add value, um but at the same time it's also super important. So in my case I can speak to, I wanted to work on economic questions and and sometimes it's easy to get
00:42:41
Speaker
basically derailed and and think about many other other things and therefore I try to focus often on this. and If you're for example a young developer that or a new developer that that wants to enter the space, I think here also it is really easy to be sucked into a rabbit hole that that basically lets you build a lot of things that nobody will ever use. um because you you can get, I would say, derailed to to a lot of like things that that don't really add value to this. I think if you enter that space, um always try to find projects you contribute to that that actually in some way generate economic value.
00:43:28
Speaker
For me, and I think for the whole cello ecosystem and the mentor ecosystem, this like providing value is a lot about, in the end, building real world applications, building real world use cases, building something that people um really can use not only for speculation, but actually for real transactions where they want to, for example, do a payment, do a send remittances, send money across border, save, land borrow, all of these things um I think are extremely important. Maybe to add to this something we haven't touched today here is what I also find really interesting is this whole regenerative regenerative finance aspect um of of blockchain and Web3.
00:44:18
Speaker
When this whole space started with Bitcoin, I think at some point many people were looking into the energy efficiency of Bitcoin and how much energy it uses and and so on. and Therefore, it actually um the industry got maybe a bit of a negative stamp in terms of the um impact on the environment. But since web3 is like a big mechanism to distribute incentives and distribute value and distribute ownership, um this is a great mechanism to also set the right incentives to save the environment and to do something good for nature and and and so on. And therefore, this whole like
00:44:58
Speaker
emergence of regenerative finance projects that tokenize value of like for example carbon emissions or trees or clean air, clean water and so on and use this in incentive mechanisms I think for me is a super interesting upcoming space. um And yeah, if people enter that space, um they should look out for, is there real usage? Is there maybe projects that actually do something good for maybe for the environment or having like, can actually provide real value to to end users to navigate to navigate in that space. Yeah, I was told a really interesting piece of advice ah from someone who was on the podcast.
00:45:46
Speaker
ah Quite a few months ago now actually, someone called Anthony Rose, who's the VP of technology from Matterlabs, they make the ZK sync. He was saying that ah because there's so many things being built in Web3, there's so many problems being solved, there's just a lot of noise, new things popping up all the time. He said, ah when he was looking to get into Web3 for the first time, he was doing his research about the actual industry itself and the different problems that had been solved and this kind of thing. And actually went, you know what, I'm really passionate about looking into zero knowledge tech. You know, that's one area that I find the most interesting. the One area I think will have a huge impact on the space moving forward.
00:46:28
Speaker
And then he looked at, right, well, who are the main projects who are solving problems in ZK? And then came across MatterLabs, obviously building ZK Sync, and then spoke to them. And um even though he didn't have any ah necessary experience within Web3 prior to that. because he was so passionate about the problem and said, look, I love this. I really want to get involved. um He ended up obviously getting there the VP role there. That can obviously happen at all levels. you know I guess as a as a CEO and as a founder, if you had someone who is super, super passionate about solving ah the problem that you guys are working on, but they didn't necessarily have too much of the in-depth knowledge industry yet,
00:47:09
Speaker
you So I guess someone who can come to you and say, look, I love what you're doing. This is the only thing I ever want to work on. you know It's an amazing problem, amazing mission. you know You'd probably be a lot more likely to even speak to that person or potentially take them on. So I think being able to do your own research about the industry, look at the problems that you're really passionate about and really interested in, and then seeing what problems projects are solving those problems is probably a really good place to start.
00:47:35
Speaker
Absolutely, and I think this industry ah is, especially when you start to look into it, it just takes some time to do that research because there's so many shiny websites, so many shiny white papers, ah so many shiny ah booths this of projects here at the fairs Berlin Blockchain Week and all of these other events that are happening around the world. I think it just takes some time and you should take that time if you want to enter that space to try to understand what is what is behind, what is actually driving value in in some way. And I think this the same is true actually also for people who invest in that space.
00:48:20
Speaker
so like So many people invested in projects like Terra Luna and others because it looked super shiny, it looked super successful. But if you actually took a bit to really try to understand the economics behind, it would have been clear very quickly that this is not something sustainable that is being built there. and then markets can move really really fast to then actually um yeah correct the this mistake of building a not sustainable protocol. And I think if you want to enter that space and take that time to learn a bit how that space functions and actually what are the economics behind and and
00:49:03
Speaker
is this project that you're looking at actually building something that can be sustainable then yeah this is always I think time well spent if you if you want to enter that space yeah for sure do you have any advice on where someone can go to start that research is it just get on to google and just start with the basics of what everything is or is there certain websites that you would go to to have a look or anything like that yeah and I think um Of course, Google and also the websites of the larger projects, they're always um a good starting point to find easy information. I think it also makes sense to like pick a few ecosystems and look a bit deeper into. Of course, you can start with like the big ecosystems. You could look around a bit what is out there on Ethereum. It's the biggest builder ecosystem um out there, and therefore you find tons of resources on that.
00:50:01
Speaker
And then from Ethereum, you could then look a bit deeper also to the L2s, for example, to Celo and the information that is out there on Celo, if you're interested in like the real world applications in the sustainability aspect of it. um then you can basically dive deeper into and then if like Ethereum is the first layer and then Celo the layer 2, the third layer then is something like Mentor that builds on the Celo blockchain stablecoins, we are basically even
00:50:34
Speaker
one more layer in and then there are hopefully a lot of projects that are actually build on Mentor and build FX platforms or local payment applications using the Mentor stablecoins. So then we are already at a fourth layer um of projects. So basically you can go as deep as you want. there There's a lot of information out um and then I think also podcasts like yours actually um and and and many others are super interesting because in that space you have a lot of like tech people, tech people like to do podcasts and so on so you also find good information there as well.
00:51:18
Speaker
No, that's brilliant advice. Yeah, brilliant advice for anyone who's looking to get into the space and and yeah helping them to understand where they can where they can start. and Marcus, to to finish up then, you shared some amazing, amazing advice today. You know a lot of shared a lot of insight into into your career and and the skills that people can learn. Knowing what you know now about business, technology, leadership, ah if you could go back to the start of your career, any advice that you could share for your younger self?
00:51:55
Speaker
I think for for my yeah younger self it would be a bit specific advice. I think I came in this industry from an economics background and I think if I now could give advice to my younger self, I think I should have looked into the technology aspect, and into coding, into that aspect of the space earlier. i think I'm like a bit um bit older than the average in this industry. And therefore, I think especially I should have like looked into this earlier. This is something where I'm still learning every every day. so But I think this is a bit specific um for for for me. I think everyone in that space
00:52:40
Speaker
should look into these two aspects, um basically the economic side of things and the technical aspect of it at least a bit. Everyone has different but specialties and specializations in this spectrum. But understanding at least the basics of both sides is really important because this field brings both together. Basically, incentive design, economics, stablecoin, money as a technology, markets, all of this is like a big part of the whole web3 space. And then of course the other big part is the whole, like how is this built, um the the coding behind the open source infrastructure and and so on. I think
00:53:23
Speaker
Having a basic understanding of both is very important, but then finding your specialization in that spectrum um is is also important. That's brilliant. Marcus, thank you very much for taking the time to have a conversation today. I've ah really enjoyed it. You shared some brilliant insights. I'm going to have to rewatch this quite a few times to go back and take notes ah to to make sure I take a lot of this in myself. If people listening or watching are really interested to learn more about MentorLabs or about Celo, I guess in you guys across like Twitter, Discord, obviously you have your own website as well is there. Would you direct people towards the website or is it better in in one of the Discord communities or Twitter communities with you guys to to learn more information?
00:54:14
Speaker
yeah I think all of these are good channels as everyone in the space. ah Twitter is an important ah medium ah for us. um so ah For example, if you want to follow ah the mentor a community, you can follow Mentolabs on Twitter. um Of course, you should also look into Celo on Twitter, um which is I think an amazing community of mission-driven projects. Both Mentor dot.org and Celo.org are entry points in terms of websites.
00:54:49
Speaker
And then as every other project in the space, also there is a lot of discussion in the different Discord channels. So for example, for Mentor, there's chat dot.mentor dot.org, or for cello, chat.cello.org ah entry points into the Discord community. So I think if you just want to keep up to date what is happening, then Twitter is good. If you want to get a broad overview, then the web page is good. And if you want to like contribute to the discussion and and chat with folks, then Discord is good. And yeah, always always happy to to chat with people who are interested about the space. Thanks so much for for the opportunity to to be here, to to talk to you. I really had a lot of fun. Yeah, thank you very much for coming on as a guest and i um yeah I'm sure I'll speak to you soon. Absolutely. Thank you.