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Finding your passion will define your career success with Zoltan Fazekas Head of Research at Zilliqa
46 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, I spoke with Zoltan Fazekas, the Head of Research at Zilliqa
We talked through Zoltan's career journey, what a day in the life of a Head of research looks like, and Zoltan's advice for someone looking to start a career in blockchain research. We spoke about Zilliqa, who they are and their plans for the future. Zoltan discussed the difference when building in a bear market compared to a bull market, what it's really like working in a Web3 startup, his advice for building remote teams and being a good leader, why he gave up his senior leadership role to focus on a technical role, why web3, what Zoltan would change about Web3 and way more...
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 own career aspirations.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Behind the Blockchain podcast. Today I'm joined by Zoltan Fisakash, the head of research at Zilliqa. Zoltan, welcome to the show. How are you? Thank you, Jack. Thanks for having me today. I'm fine. I hope you're fine too. Yeah, can't complain. I hope I pronounced your name properly then.
00:00:22
Speaker
It was perfect. Good, good. It's also for people who don't know who you are. Could you give us a bit of an introduction, please? Yeah, sure. So I'm a blockchain research scientist working at Zilliqa, as you mentioned. Besides that, teaching at universities, giving blockchain courses on mentoring startups, supporting startups in this field. So yeah, various activities going on.
00:00:53
Speaker
Great.
Journey into Software Development
00:00:54
Speaker
And so going back to the, I guess the very start of your career, why did you take an interest in technology in the first place?
00:01:04
Speaker
Oh, for that, we need to jump back, I don't know, 30 years or so or even more. Sometimes as a child already, I was kind of talented in maths and fascinated by computers from the first time I saw one. So I remember, I guess I was kind of maybe nine or 10 when I got a Commodore 64, if you know what I'm talking about. And it was... I've heard it was.
00:01:34
Speaker
Yeah. So those machines also used to be computers, home computers. And since then, I've been simply into computers and software development.
00:01:50
Speaker
I was eager to learn everything. So the first thing I learned on that machine was kind of basic. I mean the programming language basic. Later on I replaced this C64 with a PC. This is more of the kind of computers we know today.
00:02:09
Speaker
I learned kind of everything like I use Pascal, C, C++, all this before my first kind of job or working experience, before I later on learned Java, JavaScript, Python, then Solidity Rust and all these kind of newer things.
00:02:28
Speaker
So yeah it was since my childhood simply I'm fascinated by this industry, by computer technology and yeah this is it. Way back then how did you know that you wanted that as a Christmas present?
00:02:48
Speaker
I was asking for that for, I guess, two years or so. Yeah, you know, back then it was kind of not normal to have a computer at home, especially in the country where I come from originally. It was expensive, so not kind of that affordable as today, and it's kind of normal to have one at home. No internet, of course. So it was a completely different age, but I
00:03:15
Speaker
So one, I cannot even exactly remember where I guess we visited some relatives of ours and that guy worked with computers and that was the first time I saw one. And then I was always kind of asking my parents,
00:03:35
Speaker
I think I can get one, and yeah, I guess one or two years later they had no other choice than to buy me one. And yeah, of course, I was playing games and everything, but I was really interested in how these machines work. I even disassembled this C64 and reassembled it again and it still worked.
00:03:58
Speaker
So I didn't damage it completely, but I wanted to understand and learn everything. And yeah, this curiosity is something that I kept the same kind of curiosity as children have until my current age. That's cool.
Transition from Web 2 to Web 3
00:04:21
Speaker
So could you talk us through your career journey then? So you've got your C64.
00:04:26
Speaker
got obsessed with technology, obsessed with computers. And then, yeah, where did your kind of career take off from there? And how did it reach where it is now?
00:04:35
Speaker
Yeah, so it was obvious that I would study computer science, which I did end of the 90s. I got my PhD 17, 18 years ago. At the same time, I started to work. And altogether, I spent two decades in what you call Web 2 today. So kind of web development from end of the 90s.
00:05:03
Speaker
Then .com burst, but still staying in the same industry and working there.
00:05:16
Speaker
I call this sometimes the first chapter of my professional life. We will get to the next chapter. And the peak of it, I would say, of my career was when I worked for a German software company, around 500 employees and renowned clients in Germany, Austria, so kind of in this region.
00:05:43
Speaker
And I was a member of the executive board there. And this is where my kind of change of mindset also began because the larger the company grew, the less time I was able to spend on hands-on work, kind of writing code or everything you would call hands-on work. And at some point I had kind of no other
00:06:12
Speaker
choice than if I wanted to stay there and keep my role than to look for some new area which where I can again get back to hands-on because nobody else can but at the same time same time my company would benefit from so kind of expansion you know new business opportunities and 2016
00:06:38
Speaker
This area was blockchain, mainly Ethereum as kind of the main platform or tech stack where I started to engage myself. I built up a team.
00:06:53
Speaker
within that company. Most of them, my colleagues were students or really young chaps, you know, super curious about how this new thing works. And I did the same handsome job.
00:07:11
Speaker
like them, so kind of Solidity Engineer later on conducted some smart contract audits. We designed ZK protocols and implemented circuits. I will tell you in a minute why. And one, just one of four many, many projects I'm very proud of.
00:07:34
Speaker
was an anonymous voting protocol on ethereum using zk-snarks and it was very useful during the pandemics
00:07:45
Speaker
where companies or organizations like associations with all of their members couldn't meet at some venues to have their annual general meetings or whatever they are called and vote on proposals. So they needed kind of a digital way of voting, of governance, and we thought
00:08:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's maybe something where blockchain can help, smart contracts can help, and zero knowledge can help, and this was just one of four projects in that company. Yeah, sorry.
Blockchain in Large Companies vs Startups
00:08:25
Speaker
At some point, I saw that I will need to decide between
00:08:37
Speaker
between that job and staying with that company and going kind of full-in in web free and in blockchain. So 2020, I left the company and joined a startup called MyPrivacy. It's kind of a cryptographic startup. But the CTO. And 2022, finally, I joined Zilliqa.
00:09:04
Speaker
and we can talk a bit more about Zilliqa if you want to later. Yeah, for sure. Was there a point in that job that was a catalyst for you to say, right, now I want to leave and I want to really, really pursue this Web3 thing? Yeah, I struggled a little bit with...
00:09:29
Speaker
with the attitude of large companies attitude how they wanted to use a blockchain because it was fancy to use a blockchain. It's great for a press release to tell, hey, we are building this and that using a blockchain. But many of them didn't really mean it. So they
00:09:54
Speaker
would have been happy and maybe there was even not even a need for a decentralized or distributed technology for their use case. They just wanted to have one. And I saw several such cases where it was, we called it blockchain posing, you know.
00:10:14
Speaker
But it was not real. And when I worked, and this was a contrast when I worked with web free startups, blockchain startups, at the same time on other topics like, I don't know, one of them had a smart wallet with thousands of users. It was already live.
00:10:35
Speaker
and my job was to review their smart contracts and to work out a migration strategy from Ethereum to Polygon. Super interesting topics. I saw what or how a kind of real use of blockchain can look like. And this was, I guess, also one of the important triggers where I thought, okay, I want to go for the real thing.
00:11:02
Speaker
And then did you just see a job online at Zilliqa and you applied for it? Or did they headhunt you out of that company? How did you kind of land that out?
Joining Zilliqa and Career Skills
00:11:12
Speaker
There are headhunters and recruiters out there, as you might know. I was approached by one.
00:11:23
Speaker
That's cool. And could you talk us through the skills that you needed to learn or that you have learned throughout your career that have really helped you in your current role and helped you to achieve your current role?
00:11:38
Speaker
Yeah, it was a variety of skills, which also changed over time, of course, some kind of basic computer science skills around software architecture and requirements engineering and project management and then the software design and coding principles I went through.
00:11:55
Speaker
or many years ago and kept many of them and they are super useful even today. But it got a bit more specialized when I started to focus on web free. So my kind of focus of interest became distributed systems and algorithms, cryptography, even math.
00:12:19
Speaker
Because as you know, in order to really understand how C.K. Snarks, for example, work under the hood, you have to have a kind of good understanding of polynomials and their properties. So I had to refresh quite a lot of stuff from my studies, but it's fine. I'm really happy to learn. So I enjoy it.
00:12:43
Speaker
So this is kind of the hard skills. Then there are some, you know, everyone has some individual strengths or we can call them skills like mine was. People told me all the time that I was very good at explaining kind of complex concepts on various levels of abstraction, depending on to whom I explain. And this is something I benefited from kind of
00:13:11
Speaker
all the time, I was doing it from the beginning on. The topics changed, these concepts changed, but the skill of being a good explainer is what I maintained over these years. And then in terms of soft skills, people-related skills, there's also a lot to learn from the very first opportunity when I was offered to lead a team.
00:13:41
Speaker
At a very young age, no experience, no training in that. I took that opportunity, but it was more of a role of being like the captain of the football team. I was one of them. I was a teammate, but I became kind of the team lead.
00:13:59
Speaker
Later on, other roles in other companies were very different. It was kind of more of a coach, so I'm not playing with them, but I'm coaching them. After some years as the company grew, my own team became kind of 56, so kind of different dimensions, you know. You do not only have direct reports,
00:14:27
Speaker
Then it was about showing or teaching people how to lead others was also kind of a experience.
00:14:36
Speaker
Yeah, and one thing that I needed to learn over these years is how to deal with various stakeholders. It's not only your teammates, your boss, your colleagues, but there are clients, for example. And clients can be kind of tech-savvy clients. So tech people, it can be business people, it can be C-level, how to deal with investors, with board members.
00:15:02
Speaker
This was also very interesting to learn what kind of roles you need to play and how you can communicate with them.
00:15:14
Speaker
And how did you learn those communication skills? Is that just trial and error over time? Because based off a lot of the things that you were explaining, them all come down to communication, being able to easily explain really complex components of a certain technology, for example, or speaking with investors. And obviously, they're two very, very different things. You obviously speak to both in a very different way.
00:15:44
Speaker
How did you learn to be able to change your communication styles and stuff? It was actually learning by doing, to be honest. And leading my comfort zone all the time, which
00:16:01
Speaker
But sometimes it was hard, but I learned to reframe these situations where you face something challenging because you face a situation for the first time. It's a bit scary and you don't exactly know how to behave.
00:16:17
Speaker
I thought it would be easier if I see them simply as an opportunity to practice, to try out things, to learn if they work for me. So I learned a lot from others.
00:16:31
Speaker
serving others act and think and trying to adapt and try out in doing those opportunities if that works for me. So it was really learning from others, learning from examples, learning by trying and doing this. This was I guess most of the time of course later on you attend some trainings and what so I just do
00:16:56
Speaker
to settle what you already knew. But it's rather this street smartness and not book smartness I obtained over the years.
Role and Responsibilities at Zilliqa
00:17:10
Speaker
Could you talk us through your current role in a little bit more detail then? What's it like being the head of research at Zilliqa? It's fun. No, really. So it's
00:17:26
Speaker
I would say that the mission is to know and follow the state of the art in everything a blockchain protocol needs, to understand how other protocols work, what we can learn from them, to monitor upcoming scientific papers,
00:17:48
Speaker
something really new that maybe has not yet been implemented and know that it exists and to come up with solutions to, I would say, the hard problems which are not just hasted down and coded. Yeah, in terms of concrete activities or daily routines,
00:18:10
Speaker
It's I can tell you on average which kind of activities I'm doing in a month, but it changes. So there are days. There are some periods like days, even weeks where I code maybe all the time or most of the time. There are times where I'm not writing a single line of code, but in general I would say it's.
00:18:33
Speaker
A lot of reading, reading papers, academic scientific papers, reading code on GitHub, listening to podcasts to stay up to date simply what's going on in the industry.
00:18:51
Speaker
I'm preparing or giving seminars, even internally, externally. From time to time, this consumes quite a lot of time. Writing papers, research papers, white papers, RFCs, improvement proposals, or reviewing them if others wrote such.
00:19:11
Speaker
designing features in our kind of new protocol I can talk about later, coding prototypes of those features and simply interacting with others. Also having meetings with the engineering team, with the dev team, with our, we've got a lot with our CEO, CTO and other colleagues. So yeah, it's a great mixture of activities. I really enjoy it as you can hear.
00:19:39
Speaker
They can tell. Yeah, it sounds it sounds fun. I can imagine there'll be a lot of people listening who would love to be at the forefront of innovation like you are. Have you got any advice for someone who wants to reach the position that you're in now? So somebody wants to start in the research space and be able to be at the forefront of innovation and being able to get involved in a lot of the things that you're describing there. Do you have any advice for someone if they're kind of starting out on that journey?
00:20:10
Speaker
Yeah, the question is where they are starting from. But in general, I believe it's in general good advice, regardless of on what level you already are in terms of these technologies or even the theory behind it to keep learning. So never give up learning.
00:20:36
Speaker
there's always either something new or you can dig deeper and you will see. Due to the knowledge you simply gain and your understanding and maybe combined with some ability to convey, to explain as I told you, you will also get opportunities to prove yourself in.
00:21:01
Speaker
in whatever roles you sought after. So yeah, I guess learning is my main thing my entire life. And I can just recommend everyone to do the same. That's really good advice. Really good advice. So I think it's quite nice for people to hear that someone
00:21:25
Speaker
Someone in your position still puts such a big emphasis on still learning. Obviously, you have had a really successful career and obviously now you're right at the forefront of the research and innovation. I suppose it's really nice people to hear that you still put such a big emphasis on trying to learn and still grow and still develop yourself, which is nice to hear.
Zilliqa's Unique Blockchain Features
00:21:51
Speaker
So could you introduce us to Zilliqa in a little bit more detail, please? Yeah, sure. Zilliqa is a layer one blockchain protocol from Singapore, by the way. It started six years ago. It became famous for being the first charted blockchain
00:22:13
Speaker
before ethereum also that kind of this approach it changed them quite a lot so the current tank sharding, protodank sharding is a little bit different so Zilliqa is closer to the original sharding approach ethereum
00:22:36
Speaker
wanted to pursue. And it's about massive scaling, the blockchain tree lemma and scaling. Otherwise, we use proof of work that there are not that many blockchains anymore using proof of work, but not in the same way like Bitcoin does. So in our case, proof of work is only done for very short periods.
00:23:01
Speaker
once per hour, approximately for one or two minutes to select the validators. So we need validator sets for these shards. They need to be selected randomly. And this is where we currently use proof of work. In the future, we will move to proof of stake. Consensus algorithm is PBFT. We are using some kind of, this is the
00:23:26
Speaker
the grandfather, the grandmother of many consensus algorithms out there today. We have our native token called ZIL and we have a separate governance token called GZIL.
00:23:40
Speaker
We have a own kind of smart contract programming language called Zilla, which is meant for more secure smart contracts besides EVM support, which we also have. And currently we are working on Zilliqa 2.0, which is actually a brand new protocol. It will be launched with a new network next year. So this is also most of my work and our team's work.
00:24:10
Speaker
That's cool. Is that common knowledge yet? Or is that a bit of an inside scoop that you've released there? I'm not disclosing any secrets here. There will be something new to come. But details are not known yet, so it's kind of...
00:24:34
Speaker
Yeah, very new. The community knows if they follow our communication, but we haven't really done a lot of communication marketing PR on this. So, yeah. Okay, nice. I won't try and delve any deeper because I don't need to release any secrets that you're not allowed to release.
Challenges in Blockchain Development
00:24:57
Speaker
But what does it take to build or create a new blockchain or a new protocol?
00:25:06
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, in our case, it's even a little bit more complicated than create a new one from scratch, you know, because we already have one. And of course, a new one must be better in every possible way. It needs to be cheaper and faster and more powerful. But it also needs to be backwards compatible.
00:25:29
Speaker
And we need to ensure a smooth migration of all the projects that already live on Anzilica. One, the current version of the chain to the new chain. So this is an additional challenge.
00:25:46
Speaker
Otherwise, it's kind of a lot of pieces you need to design and fit together. So, you know, every blockchain needs a consensus algorithm, you need P2P networking, you need persistence, you know, every node needs to persist some data, mempool, transaction processing, even kind of non-technical or less technical topics like you need a tokenomics, you need a governance. So a lot of pieces that need to be
00:26:15
Speaker
uh designed and then of course also implemented yeah there's a lot to think about lots of think about and yeah sorry sorry i just wanted to give you an example of okay what what's challenging uh what is there anything that has not yet been uh kind of solved by others and you can kind of copy your solutions and and uh
00:26:43
Speaker
One thing I would pick is two properties that we want to optimize for are kind of fast finality and high throughput. So fast finality means that you have short block times, and these blocks are kind of final within a few seconds, less than if the human and other chains. And high throughput means a lot of transactions in every block.
00:27:11
Speaker
And only achieving one of these properties is not that hard. So our current kind of DevNet can produce and finalize eight blocks per second. Eight blocks, not transactions. So it's actually great, but those blocks are actually empty. It's just the block production, they don't contain kind of heavyweight transactions, which require a lot of processing. If you want to fill those blocks with thousands of transactions,
00:27:40
Speaker
then the nodes need to execute the transactions and it takes time. They need to execute them in order to check kind of the validity of the proposed block before they agree that the block is kind of valid and can be committed. And you already see kind of the trade off between the two and why kind of
00:28:03
Speaker
A combination of certain properties makes it harder to achieve them all. And in this case, what we are working on is this kind of concurrency or battle execution of transactions. But there are several such challenges which have not yet been completely solved by no one in this industry.
00:28:26
Speaker
I can imagine that's quite fun, working on challenges that, especially for someone like yourself who, you know, with the research and your PhD background and stuff, like being able to solve challenges that haven't been solved before, I can imagine is something that's really exciting, that keeps you really interested. And yeah, and you probably don't regret leaving the corporate world to come across some work on exciting stuff like that. Not a single day.
00:28:53
Speaker
So what's it been like doing that whilst we're in a bear market then? Yeah, I mean, a few things are different. It's harder to find investors. This is also what I'm hearing from the startups I work with, I mentor. No one throws money at you just because you can spell NFT or whatever.
00:29:24
Speaker
You need to add an AI section. Yeah, of course. But if you already got money because you have a really good idea and you convinced people that it works and then you are the right
00:29:43
Speaker
team to build it then you need to be more thoughtful of how much money you can afford to spend on various things you know in order to deliver the things you promised before you run out of money. You need to prioritize what you want to focus on this kind of
00:30:08
Speaker
having more or less infinite money or in many cases it feels like infinite money at disposal because you know if you're tokens, skyrockets then and I don't believe
00:30:22
Speaker
That phase is a better one. I believe that this more disciplined planning and execution is the right way to do things. Of course, it's bad for especially for new startups. If they don't get funded because then it's over, you know, then you can do.
00:30:43
Speaker
anything, even if you had a really good idea, but still I believe this kind of disciplined way of working is better than just kind of swimming in money. Yeah, I guess it builds a real solid foundation and a solid base to be able to scale moving forward, right? If you're
00:31:06
Speaker
if you're rushing to get stuff built and rushing to get stuff out because you need to catch the next wave and everything. I can imagine maybe there's some corners that sometimes get cut or something like this. But I guess if you can take the time to build something properly with the solid foundations, then it really helps when you come to scale in the future.
Working in Distributed Web3 Teams
00:31:25
Speaker
So what's it really like working in a Web3 startup then? I guess everyone has this
00:31:32
Speaker
idea of how and maybe people who aren't in the Web3 space, maybe have this idea of how kind of glamorous and fun and crazy and cool it might be to work within a startup in the Web3 space. What's it really like when you're on the ground there?
00:31:48
Speaker
Yes, some things are, I mean, Zilliqa, I wouldn't call Zilliqa a startup anymore. It has a lot of startup spirit, like kind of everyone in this industry. But yeah, the company has been around for six years, you know, we have already existing smart chairs. And so a lot of things are simply more professional, like in real startups.
00:32:16
Speaker
But something that was new for me, for example, and maybe new to many people who kind of come from the traditional corporate or web 2 or whatever vault and join the web free space is this fully remote work. So the team is fully distributed. Everyone is sitting more or less at home. No offices are not so
00:32:45
Speaker
extensively used like I used to in the past. It has some downsides for sure, because if you have never met most of your colleagues, then you can have a good relationship, work together, but it's different when you meet someone in person.
00:33:11
Speaker
And it's astonishing how well it works. And fortunately, I had to learn it like all of us during the pandemics, during my previous year, actually. So it was no difficulty for me. But this full distribution of the teams worldwide and working remotely is, I guess, something very typical for the three startups and larger companies.
00:33:39
Speaker
Yeah, it is. I don't think I've spoken to a Web3 company for the last
00:33:46
Speaker
12, 18 months that have said, yeah, we really need someone to come into the office, to be honest. I don't think it happens really anymore. Not in Web 3 anyway. There's a bit of movement in, I'll say, traditional Web 2. It's still not necessarily traditional. But in the Web 2 world where there's a bit of a movement to try and get people back to the office. But in Web 3, I suppose it can't really happen because everyone's based in, you might say, if you say you're a startup with 20 people, you might have people from 10 different
00:34:15
Speaker
countries within that group. So you've got no office really that they can go to. So if someone is stepping into a leadership role for the first time in Web3 then, with a team being distributed and no one meeting and this kind of stuff, have you got any advice that you can share with someone on how to set yourself up for success in that sort of role?
00:34:42
Speaker
Yeah, my advice is the same as it would be for Web2, but this distributed remote work makes it even harder. So first, you need to realize that you're leading people. So whatever your role is, tech lead, et cetera, it's not about tech. It's about leading people. And for that, you need to
00:35:04
Speaker
To do things you may not be used to without being a leader of whatever team, like listening to people, understanding their feelings, their motivations, concerns, desires, without them complaining or kind of telling you, hey,
00:35:24
Speaker
objecting about something, then earning the trust, it's so essential and being careful not to lose it because once it's damaged, it's really hard to restore and earning it with your behavior, not with promises you cannot keep maybe later.
00:35:47
Speaker
Be, be authentic, you know, be, be yourself, be honest, be respectful all the time. There's no, I don't see a difference between Web2 and Web3 in these regards because all of us are humans. And I worked with very young people even in Web2. We had a super young team on average, I don't know, below 30, so 20 something. So I was used to this kind of generation and how they
00:36:15
Speaker
kind of think and work. You need to understand when you shall step in and it's most of the time in uncomfortable situations. When there are tensions, conflicts, I don't know, dissatisfaction with something, then you need to be there because you are the leader.
00:36:39
Speaker
And you should stay in the background when there is sunshine. So let the others shine. This is your job, basically, to encourage them to take ownership initiative and the fruits of it, basically, not to contribute to your own career. Now, that's really good advice. Really good advice.
00:37:05
Speaker
And are there any mistakes that you made throughout your career that were some really key learns for you? Probably focusing more on the learn that came from it than the actual mistake, but are there any points that really stand out to you as a key learn that you could share?
00:37:24
Speaker
Yeah, I had to learn a lot. But I would not call them kind of mistakes. So I had to learn how to delegate. I was not the best at the beginnings. I had to learn to tame my ego in leadership roles and several other things we already touched. There was, I guess, one thing I
00:37:48
Speaker
I regret it a bit at some point and then fixed it fortunately later and it was to trade off my developer carrier for a high management role. And the decision was
00:38:03
Speaker
It was actually easy. I wanted that role. It was kind of my desire. But I didn't know what the consequence is. I didn't know how badly I would miss coding, for example, and the appreciation for my technical skills I was used to in the past. So yeah, maybe, maybe I
00:38:32
Speaker
would change this if there was a time machine, if you can go back in time. But I'm fine with how the things went on. And then, as I mentioned, before it became too late, I fixed it again. And this was also something, as I told you, that led me to Web3 and then my current position.
Technical vs Management Career Path
00:38:55
Speaker
There's probably quite a lot of people listening who
00:38:59
Speaker
maybe at that crossroads or at that fork in the road where they can either kind of stay technical or they can go down the management route and they're really unsure about what to take. Have you got any advice on maybe how you made that decision or any advice for them if they're at that point in the road?
00:39:19
Speaker
You have to realize if you didn't know yet that management positions are not that shiny as they seem to be. So they are quite tough and hard. And if you are used to and if you enjoy kind of the feedback, the technical role. So I will tell you concretely what I missed the most.
00:39:46
Speaker
create a program if you write a program and it works as expected. It's a feedback, it's a good feeling that you cannot replace with anything or there's no kind of one-to-one replacement if you have a kind of pure leadership or management role. Because in that management role, you work mostly with people and people are non-deterministic.
00:40:16
Speaker
So you don't get the feedback you expect or maybe deserve or you think you deserve. And this was simply a struggle for me. I was used to having this kind of direct, mostly positive feedback and being kind of happy with my results and others telling me, hey, good job. And in my management roles,
00:40:40
Speaker
I many times didn't understand why things did not work out as I wanted to. I gave my best and other things suddenly worked out. But I don't want to turn down anything. So being a good leader is so important for
00:41:02
Speaker
even small teams for organizations. So if you feel like you want to become one or be one, go for it. But never forget, it's about people and it's about other people. It's not about yourself. You are actually, you are a servant. You're helping your team, your organization, and then go for it and then make your way, your career there.
00:41:27
Speaker
I suppose it's quite hard to know if you don't like it without giving it a go, right? Because if you hadn't ever gone into a leadership role, you wouldn't have maybe realized that you don't get the feedback for it, like you would do if you were building a system or building a program or something. So I suppose without really getting into it and giving it a go, it's quite hard to judge. It maybe doesn't help anyone. It doesn't really help anyone listening, I suppose.
00:41:54
Speaker
It's also hard to practice like I did as a child with my home computers to get kind of a gut feeling for what these kind of jobs might be about as a software engineer. You cannot really practice this management and leadership roles before you get them. But you can still kind of observe
00:42:22
Speaker
If you already got a job and you work in an organization, then you can be mindful about what's going on and observe how management, how well or less well it works. Talk to people and then make up your mind if you want to face the same challenges as
00:42:46
Speaker
as the leaders do, or if you want to keep building your carry-in in a tech role. Yeah, for sure. I mean, now there's obviously tons and tons of really senior tech roles that you can do that don't require any sort of leadership, right? So you don't have to necessarily go down that route if you don't want to. So yeah, there's all sorts of stuff. So I mean, here are what I see. It's also hard to
00:43:16
Speaker
generalize because the same title, the same role can mean different things depending on the team, on the organizations. There are cases where the challenge is really to work with the team. There are some issues among the teammates or the team inside a large organization does not have the visibility, the acceptance whatsoever issues.
00:43:44
Speaker
there can be. So then this role is kind of less technical, even though it has the same title as the same role in another organization where everything works fine and they really want to have a tech guy who knows things better, has more experience with certain
00:44:03
Speaker
architectural things or even a programming language. They want to have the most senior Rust developer. So these roles can vary depending on the challenges and the organization. So if you apply for such a role, always ask
00:44:25
Speaker
recruiters or in your interviews, what is it actually about? What's the mission? And not just the title and the salary and all these things. And I think every organization, every recruiter is happy to give you some insights. Maybe they won't tell any secrets or so, but kind of give you some insights and they are happy to see that you are interested. You want to know
00:44:52
Speaker
what the job is about and not just get it and earn the salary and get all the duties. Yeah, you're completely right. That's obviously one of the challenges when I'm recruiting for organizations is really working out what type of person do you need. Because an engineering manager at one organization might be completely different to an engineering manager at another one. So really working it out is tricky, actually.
00:45:19
Speaker
And I think that can sometimes change as well throughout the process. If you're applying for roles and you speak to a company, they might speak to a couple of people who are very, very technical and then quickly realize.
00:45:29
Speaker
or sorry, they might speak to people who are very, very management and not as technical as they still are not as hands on as they might want. And then they change their mind halfway through the process and go, actually, you know what, we've talked to a load of people there and we actually think we need someone who is way more technical and way more hands on. So yeah, it changes. Welcome to one of the challenges of being a recruiter, I suppose. So is there a piece of advice that you wish you'd have been told earlier in your career?
00:46:03
Speaker
Yeah, I guess a bunch of them. But it was okay not to know. It was okay to make this experience and this learning without knowing in advance. I mean, this is what life is about, isn't it? But sure.
00:46:24
Speaker
For example, I don't know. And these advices are always very kind of individual. If they apply to you or someone else depends on your personality. So maybe something I'm saying is either obvious or nonsense to you.
00:46:42
Speaker
I would have been thankful if someone told me at a young age that I should develop my strengths and not bother that much about my weaknesses. I wanted to be perfect at everything, fit into some stereotypes and
00:47:01
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not saying I failed, but I could not reach that. No one can reach the same perfection in everything. And I just wasted a lot of energy on that. Or, I don't know, just take more risk and use opportunities more spontaneously. Even if you see there was a risk and you consider everything and you have concerns, sometimes you just have to drive.
00:47:32
Speaker
Really like that. Another thing which is again very individual is don't try to make everyone happy. There are simply people who
00:47:48
Speaker
you can make happy or even worse. They see that you are trying hard and they abuse it and then try to manipulate you. So it cannot be kind of the goal of your life to make others happy and depend on their kind of feedback or whatsoever. So yeah, these kind of learnings, some of them
00:48:11
Speaker
took me long, but it's okay, as I mentioned, and I'm also happy to share them with others. If they apply for their situation, for their circumstances, but I think we are different enough, all of us, to have our own issues and learnings to go through.
00:48:35
Speaker
That's good. I think that's great. Yeah, I think that's really good advice, really useful for people listening, especially the part about not having to be perfect every single thing and really kind of honing in on your strengths and really doubling down on your strengths. I really like that. I really like that advice.
00:48:57
Speaker
So there is a good book. I forget that also I read it many years ago. It's called The Halo Effect, you know, the Halo. And it says that
00:49:10
Speaker
People are many kind of exposed personalities, mainly those were the examples in the book, are kind of judged based on a single either achievement or equality they have. And everyone believes they are kind of perfect in every possible way, just because they were super successful in one thing.
00:49:37
Speaker
And this is not true. Later we learn the full picture.
00:49:45
Speaker
I don't know, we know a bit more about Steve Jobs, for example, today than a few years back. And everyone has kind of strengths and weaknesses and kind of a complex personality. So this effect and the opposite of it, by the way, this is how the book goes, is that
00:50:11
Speaker
if you're such an exposed person and you do not even make a mistake, it just happens. I don't remember the name to be honest, but one of the examples in the book was the former CEO of Cisco.
00:50:29
Speaker
uh who was kind of a god end of the 90s you know cisco uh skyra cutting but after the burst of the of the bubble dotcom bubble like every other company he didn't make any kind of mistake completely crashed and from then on the press uh started to kind of uh
00:50:48
Speaker
just write the opposite. Everything that was believed about him in the past was wrong and then he became suddenly the worst person, the same person. This is one of the fallacies I guess and I just mentioned it because it was somewhat fitting too. That's a good book. It's called The Halo Effect. Yeah, The Halo Effect exactly.
00:51:18
Speaker
Yeah, I'm going to make a note of that and I'll check that out. Sounds good.
Embracing the Web3 Mindset
00:51:24
Speaker
So if someone's coming into the Web 3 space for the first time then, how do they set themselves up for success? Are there certain expectations around the industry and when you join the industry and working within it?
00:51:40
Speaker
One thing you should ask yourself if you really identify with the values. I really believe in these values, even though many times...
00:51:52
Speaker
or others perceive us differently, but I have not joined this industry, you know, to kind of quick money and all these memes like, you know, to the moon and Lambo, et cetera, it's nothing for me. So I truly believe in the values. And I guess if you want to stay in this space, be successful, you need to identify with them.
00:52:20
Speaker
then be prepared for maybe the fastest moving industry you have ever worked in. So it's much faster than IT in general. It's already kind of very fast-paced, but this is crazy, I would say. But the good thing about it is that there is always enough to learn.
00:52:44
Speaker
which is something I love to do all the time and acquiring kind of really deep knowledge in all these non-trivial topics is an advice I would give to everyone.
00:53:01
Speaker
regardless of your position. And what is deep depends on you. But try to always dig a little bit deeper than you were used to and it might differentiate you in your role from competitors, from other people applying for the same role.
00:53:25
Speaker
Yeah, and again, this values mindset. Let me give you an example of what I mean. So one of the very well-known themes in Web3 is trustless and decentralized. We are talking all the time about these, and these drive a lot of development, or I believe are the drivers of this industry. Otherwise, we are not doing better than Web2.
00:53:55
Speaker
designing solutions with these kind of properties in mind is very different than without or in Web 2. You cannot simply rely on things.
00:54:10
Speaker
we're used to in the past because, yeah, in Web2, there is some cloud service. You can kind of push data there or call it. You get a reliable response, et cetera. So this is the wrong way of thinking. And the simplest example to show kind of the difference, the contrast is what all of us know is the double spending problem.
00:54:35
Speaker
And this double spending is not an issue in central systems. It's simply trivial. Send all the transactions to a central entity which you simply trust in because this is the paradigm, basically. You trust in the entities or in certain entities in the system
00:55:02
Speaker
especially the large ones, the powerful ones, they will do the job, they will kind of determine the course of these events or the order of these events and they will filter out if there are attempts to double spend. So this problem does not really exist there, but it's a hard problem as we know in decentralized systems where you cannot rely on such a central entity and this is why we need consensus and all this stuff.
00:55:28
Speaker
So you need to change even a little bit your technical thinking and how you design features and solutions in this space. Yeah, that's a really good insight. Really good insight. I think the mindset shift maybe from coming across from Web 2 into Web 3 is probably the biggest kind of change, right? I guess building technology is
00:55:50
Speaker
building technology to some degree. There may be some problems that you haven't necessarily solved before, but it's still programming or it's still systems or whatever it might be. But I think the mindset around why you might be doing certain things and the ethos that underpins certain companies and things like that, I think is maybe one of the biggest shifts. Excuse me. And I guess with a lot of the projects being so
00:56:19
Speaker
So open source and so out there, you have so many opinions coming in from the community hammering in you all the time as to when's there going to be an update on this and when's this going to be built and when's this going to be released, which you don't necessarily get in Web 2. So maybe there's slightly different pressures from a Web 3 perspective just because of how open and out there it is.
00:56:41
Speaker
So, yeah. Yeah, the types are a little bit more intense, so to say, and it causes distraction, I would agree. Yeah, so there are a few differences. But yeah, I guess everyone who seriously wants to work in this space and is interested in this space, in the technology, in the values,
00:57:08
Speaker
get used to those differences, so it's not like kind of living on a different planet. Yeah, I agree. I think I already know the answer to this question, but what's your favorite part of working in the Web3 space?
00:57:27
Speaker
So what brought me to this space was it was not investing. So yeah, I own a few tokens, various tokens, but it was not kind of earning quick money. It was really the ideology around decentralization and kind of
00:57:50
Speaker
inclusiveness and protecting people, simply protecting the poor, the weak and preventing the abuse of power, which is kind of a natural consequence of growth and in a little bit more general or in a broader sense. So a lot of things in the world
00:58:20
Speaker
can only work efficiently if they scale. They have to grow simply because you need scaling effects, you need network effects. So it's okay to grow and to scale. But if this growth is controlled and the service of them.
00:58:38
Speaker
whatever we are talking about is controlled by either a single entity or a few entities which get super powerful, then we know the dangers, the risks of abusing this power in various ways or they can abuse the power. And the question is, can you grow on this scale globally and provide a service and infrastructure
00:59:05
Speaker
without these downsides, without giving it into the hands of a few entities or even a single entity in monopole. And I guess this is our mission. This is whether it's payment or could be, I don't know, social networks at some point which grow to similar sizes like Web2 social networks today. But these things
00:59:32
Speaker
need growth, they need massive scaling and not only massive scaling in terms of how many transactions per second you can process, but kind of cover the entire population, cover the entire world.
00:59:45
Speaker
And so these were kind of my drivers and the technical challenges I saw there. So in distributed systems, in cryptography, the first time I kind of faced DK proofs and snarks, I was blown. And I wanted to learn exactly how they worked, how the math works, and build such stuff.
01:00:16
Speaker
all of that together. The ideology, the values plus the tech was for me the perfect combination. It sounds like you really love working in Web3 and working on the Web3 technology. I do. Is there anything you change about the Web3 space?
Tackling Scams in Web3
01:00:40
Speaker
Yeah, there is.
01:00:43
Speaker
The first thing is, I don't know how, but if we could just get rid of the scammers, the impostors, the charlatans, there are simply people that harmed this industry.
01:01:00
Speaker
Yeah, if you ask me for one thing, this would be the thing, I guess, because we are being perceived, I believe, by many people outside of EPRI in an unfair way. We kind of, the good ones did not deserve. We have kind of good intentions, I believe, and yeah, the perception is.
01:01:26
Speaker
Yeah, no, I agree. And even the scams aren't just there from a either a scam project perspective or people trying to do hacks and stuff like this. I even see scam CVs and scam profiles get sent to me or people would apply for a role or send me a message saying they're looking for a job.
01:01:47
Speaker
And then I get on a video call with them and it's just completely obvious that they're either reading from a script and they can't divert away from that script, but they're just really trying to get a job within the Web3 space to collect the cash, to just not do any work in the background for two months and just disappear, for example, which is it's really bad. I've been in recruitment, what, 10 years now?
01:02:08
Speaker
And yeah, I didn't have that issue when I was recruiting in Web3 companies. When you come across the Web3, yeah, it seems to be a real issue. So yeah, I'm with you there. If we could get rid of that, it would be great. Great place to be. Sultan, then, to wrap up, as a leader in Web3, then, what advice could you give, if you could summarize, what advice could you give for people looking to follow in your footsteps?
Advice for Success in Web3
01:02:37
Speaker
First of all, I would say do not try to copy anyone just to get in their footsteps. You'll be disappointed simply. It didn't work for me. So figure out what's important to you, what is your thing simply, and find your way. It's fun to learn from others, to adopt things, but you have to stay yourself.
01:03:05
Speaker
And of all of the things we are talking about today, I would say stay curious, never stop learning and success will come.
01:03:19
Speaker
Love that. That's brilliant. Well then, thank you very much for taking the time to have a conversation today. I've really enjoyed it. You shared some brilliant advice. It's great to learn more about your journey and why you got into technology in the first place. If anyone's interested to follow up with you or they're curious, they want to ask you any questions, are they able to reach out to you on Twitter or LinkedIn and stuff, for example?
01:03:47
Speaker
Yeah, LinkedIn. I'm rather old school. So either LinkedIn or you can send me an email on Zoltan. So the first name at Zilliqa.com. And I'm happy to answer whoever reaches out. Great, great. Cue all the job applications that can fly into your inbox now.
01:04:09
Speaker
applications or whatever spam more than enough of it. But anyway, so I'm kind of not hiding. So I'm happy to have conversations with anyone. Cool. That's great. Well, yeah. Thanks again. And I'll speak to you soon. Yeah. Thanks. Take care.