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Can you live without the fancy sushi? with Pepe Blasco, CTO of MELD
36 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, I spoke with Pepe Blasco. Pepe is the CTO of MELD, a revolutionary decentralized non-custodial banking protocol built on Cardano, providing both crypto and fiat borrowing/lending services.
Pepe talked through a huge amount of advice in this conversation. From getting started in your career, what made him successful, what it means to be a manager to a day in the life of a CTO and what it's really like working in a Web3 startup.
He gave us an introduction to MELD and talked through what makes the project unique and exciting, and Pepe talked us through what part luck and sacrifice play when building your 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 own career aspirations.
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Transcript
Introduction to Pepe Blasco, CTO of Meld
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Behind the Blockchain. Today I'm joined by Pepe Blasco, CTO of Meld. Pepe, welcome to the show. How are you? Doing great, Jack. Thank you very much. No, no, no problem. So Pepe, for those people who don't know who you are, could you introduce yourself, please?
00:00:18
Speaker
Sure. So I'm Pepe. I'm a random Spanish dude that got into technology a while ago and managed to evolve in the technology ecosystem and participate in some cool projects, did a lot of work, had some good luck. And now I'm CTO of Melt, one of the biggest projects in the DeFi space in
00:00:41
Speaker
in Cardano, we are expanding to more networks. I'm also advisor to a couple of other projects, which we'll probably touch base in doing the recording of the importance of being aware of other things in the ecosystem, aside from your main kind of project and company. And yeah,
Pepe's Journey in Technology
00:01:03
Speaker
that's me. Someone who likes technology, someone who has been
00:01:08
Speaker
in technology for I would say over 12 years now and specifically in blockchain since 2016 or 2017. I don't really know the exact date because for me it was quite easy on ramping into the ecosystem rather than a hard all in into the blockchain space. So yeah, that's me. That's cool. So why did you take an interest in technology in the first place then?
00:01:39
Speaker
For me, technology has always been relevant in some way or another. I was this kid that basically touched all the buttons on every single device that my parents or my family had.
00:01:54
Speaker
and quickly transitioned to being that guy who knew how everything worked and everything could be resolved on a smartphone or on a laptop. So it was like the designated tech support for family and friends.
00:02:13
Speaker
I think technology since a long time ago has allowed us to do many, many cool things. Specifically computers, because technology is like everything is technology, creating a cherished technology, creating a better way to harvest your farm is technology. But specifically computers automating things, making so that
00:02:40
Speaker
you can program things and they will happen. That's amazing. It's like you tell someone or something, hey, you have to do this, this and this, and then it happens. However, now it becomes that we humans are kind of the weak end and therefore
00:03:00
Speaker
most of the problems or most of the things that break is not usually because of the technologies, because of our own fault. And I think that has also have a big impact on my life and how I see, I perceive careers, like making sure that you work
00:03:19
Speaker
hard and you try and have as many kind of guideline points as you want, but also that try accept mechanic that in programming we have, work for the best, prepare for the worst. So always have that kind of backup and make sure that you are aware of the risks and consequences of the risks and adapt your life around it.
Career Transitions and Team Dynamics
00:03:46
Speaker
That's brilliant advice.
00:03:48
Speaker
So could you talk us through your career journey so far then? Did you have those kind of guidelines and those points that you wanted to go out and achieve? Talk us through it. So for me, kind of my career started when I was like 13, 14 years old. I started doing like random websites, random projects for local things like
00:04:16
Speaker
the organization of friends and family or an English school in my hometown. And so I was that kid who Neoma Technology wanted to do something and many people would allow me to create around them.
00:04:32
Speaker
Then that quickly transitioned into, for instance, in high school, instead of taking computer science lessons, because on those classes I was not learning anything,
00:04:47
Speaker
I created or I co-founded a robotics group. So I was teaching younger people on how to create robots and how to program them. And we participated in competitions across Spain. It was pretty cool. More or less around that time, I was already kind of freelancing and creating websites and creating things. Then got into university.
00:05:16
Speaker
those things kind of took a pause. I was focusing on projects there, doing other things like an ethic hacking group that I co-founded also while at university. But I think the initial step for me, what most people will consider the start of my career was when I got an internship for working in
00:05:43
Speaker
in the blockchain space in one of the biggest consultancy firms in Spain. I was there for two years from like an intern all the way up to almost leading teams and starting to be like the point of contact for a couple of projects in the blockchain space. It was all pretty new. We didn't have all the cool tech and cool standards that we have right now. Then I had
00:06:11
Speaker
the pleasure to be able to jump into a smaller startup in the city I was living. The reason I did that jump was first, it would allow me to get that kind of startup feeling. I had been in corporate world for a while and I didn't really like that, even though we had some agile methodologies and we're pretty cool.
00:06:39
Speaker
I wanted to go to a trenches, so to speak. So I joined Climate Trade, a blockchain-based marketplace for carbon credits, worked there for a year and a half, two years, and joined as the first internal tech person, evolved into the CTO role. But that was kind of a fake CTO role.
00:07:07
Speaker
We can debate more about that later. But CTO role means differently, different things on every place. So back then, CTO was basically like talking out with external partners, coordinating development, coordinating things, but maybe not having that kind of high impact on kind of mid to long term planning of the company that was still most on other stakeholders.
00:07:36
Speaker
COVID happened. I started working remotely for that company, and then I realized I could work remotely for either that company or any other company in the world. So I got contacted by multiple recruiters. I was not interested in any of the offers, but then one kind of highlighted in my LinkedIn inbox.
00:08:06
Speaker
did an interview for them, had like a double my pay kind of situation. So it was a no brainer for me to jump and to work in full internationally.
00:08:17
Speaker
That was the real DeFi. We did blockchain stuff, but we didn't do DeFi back in climate trade. When I joined Composable Finance and Advanced Blockchain, which they had an interesting mix together between them.
00:08:36
Speaker
it was full on DeFi. I joined as a base lead developer. I consider myself to be a developer rather than a manager. It was kind of deviates from it. But quickly transitioned into like doing more leadership on teams and on projects in that company. And transitioned to more of like a tech lead role.
00:09:01
Speaker
blockchain and composable finance, if anyone had interest in it, they had some up and downs. A couple of summers or like last summer, a bunch of people got laid off, I survived.
Daily Responsibilities as CTO
00:09:15
Speaker
But I was repositioned to a different project, which didn't align with my personal interests. So I kind of
00:09:25
Speaker
lived pretty well for the summer, worked on that project, that was not really my passion. And then it was after summer when I got contacted by MELD through our agreement agency. And
00:09:43
Speaker
It just clicked. It just clicked. I met with Ken, the founder. We had multiple calls and we were discussing about how to build a team, how a team should be, what are my preferences and what the project aimed to be.
00:10:02
Speaker
I had a very very good feeling and the part that kind of sealed the deal was that before signing the offer I got to met Ken in person and something that I think is super important in the DeFi space and in the crypto world is
00:10:23
Speaker
and we are all humans and we should treat everyone as humans and getting to know that human person was kind of a key factor for me to say yes because it was no longer working with like a random stranger who used a pseudonym and an avatar as profile picture
00:10:44
Speaker
It was be able to go for dinner with someone and discuss things about professional lives and personal life. And you see that person, you see that that person likes what he's doing, loves the project. And we have this like kind of test, like we are working internationally, potentially we are going to be traveling a lot. Is this the person I will sit next to in a plane for 10 hours?
00:11:12
Speaker
If you don't pass that filter and you will have to get in a plane for 10 hours with someone, then I think that's very important. I'm CTO. My first task was to build a new team in different kind of roles. We hired, I believe,
00:11:36
Speaker
10 to 15 people back in December. And we've been working on creating non-custodial wallets and DeFi solutions since then.
00:11:48
Speaker
with a pretty surprising good result from my perspective. I think the community may be having different opinions, but when you are kind of behind the scenes and you know everything that's going on and all the work that is put into developing and doing these things, for me, it's been a great journey and I really hope that it goes for a prolonged period of time. I'm sure it will.
00:12:17
Speaker
That's a really interesting journey. So you were chucked into blockchain right from the very start of your career then, really. Yes. I say career after university, as opposed to when you were a professional career. Professional career. Rather than freelancing and all of that. Yeah, for sure. What was it different, or how does it differ, working within a consultancy company within the blockchain space and then working directly for a startup? What are the differences that
00:12:49
Speaker
It has positives and negatives. I think everything in life has positive and narratives. The biggest positive that I see on a big company is everything is there for you. There is procedures for traveling. There is procedures for time off. There is procedures for you need a new laptop. There is a procedure for it.
00:13:12
Speaker
So you don't have to think about those extra things. You need to focus on your work. Those procedures can also be a problem. And if, for instance, when you need to purchase a subscription to something, then it takes two months for you to do that. That's not good. I think startups are, you
Meld's Goals and Challenges in DeFi
00:13:39
Speaker
need to have multiple roles at once.
00:13:43
Speaker
depending on the startup, but generally speaking, you need to take care of yourself and take care of the product at the same time. It's more about, okay, so I develop, but maybe I also have to do tech support for the marketing person. And then I also have to like jump on something else. I need to go and buy my desk and
00:14:09
Speaker
assemble it myself. And it's just a different perspective. I think I was pretty lucky on that kind of first jump from a big consultancy to a Spanish startup. In Spain, we have a very, very, very good set of work conditions. We have a lot of vacation, paid time off.
00:14:37
Speaker
Everything is super taken care of. I think it's one of the best countries to do that. And then when I jumped internationally, I didn't have that kind of upside. When I was telling people, I used to have 30 days of pay type off. And they were like, what? That's not going to happen here. And it's like, fair enough. That's OK. You play the game of international.
00:15:07
Speaker
follow the rules of international. Yeah. Well, I guess being international, if you wanted to go and work somewhere else, I'm guessing you could kind of pack up your laptop or something and go and work from a nice location somewhere. Yes, yes, yes. I've done that kind of locally for the last two years.
00:15:28
Speaker
I've had like a week in Italy, a week in London, a week somewhere. I think that flexibility is super cool. I've not gone to the point of like going and live full time in Bali or in the Borta or like in outside of Europe. Simply because for me, and I understand most people do that either for kind of
00:15:57
Speaker
taxes and financial reasons or simply because they really want to live that experience. For me, I have my friends, I have my family nearby. I travel a lot, but I always have that like home to go back to. And I think that's a very good balance for myself. But definitely I know people who are constantly traveling or they are in a faraway place
00:16:27
Speaker
and they are enjoying life because they are discovering new cultures, they are discovering new aspects that they don't have back home. For me, I think that time may come in the future, but as of now, I prefer to stay home and kind of have everything under control because work is always chaotic. I prefer my personal life to not be chaotic.
00:16:56
Speaker
Yeah, it can be chaotic. Coinciding with launching Vail last year, I decided to pack up my flat in London. My girlfriend and I started moving around and working from all sorts of different countries and traveling around and that sort of thing, which is great. And it's really good fun. I'm not complaining about it because I'm really lucky that I get to do it. But getting into a routine when you go to different places can be quite tricky. So if it's
00:17:25
Speaker
chaotic at work and and um obviously working kind of all hours under the sun and this kind of stuff then yeah it can be quite um quite disruptive i suppose to keep traveling around to different places but um but yeah i kind of just learned to you learn to adapt right and and you kind of i've adapted to it quite a bit i guess over the last 12 months and it's been yeah i'm in the flow of it now but to start with it was yeah definitely disruptive i guess for you it also helps that um
00:17:54
Speaker
you've gone with your partner, with someone who you both have that kind of same flow, so to speak. And I think that's something that is maybe a pivotal point for someone who wants to do it. Either you travel alone or you travel with your kind of core pack, so to speak. Yeah. No, no, I agree. I agree. So did you
Building a Career in Web3
00:18:21
Speaker
always know that you wanted to be a CTO then?
00:18:24
Speaker
I didn't know what the fuck was a CTO. And I don't know if Carson is allowed on the podcast, but if you ask a kid, what do you want to be when you grow up? CTO is not something they will tell you. Like maybe now that kind of terminology is a bit more expanded. But the reality is that
00:18:53
Speaker
I will translate it more to like technical director, which is a more traditional way of calling this role. And no, I didn't really always want it to be a technical director. When I was young, I pictured myself in kind of this big servers room, like in Google or Amazon, and managing a lot of computers and servers and doing that.
00:19:22
Speaker
During university, I also started learning more about networking and Fisco and I started certifications and a bunch of these things. But then I quickly realized that I would rather be on the application layer rather than the infrastructure layer. For me, I still consider myself to be a developer. Obviously, my current role has a lot of management positions and a lot of management aspects to it.
00:19:53
Speaker
I don't really code on a day-to-day basis, and that's something I'm sad about. I always tell the people in my team, please call me. I want to help on anything that I can help. I don't want to be in boring corporate meetings. I would rather be with you, fighting with a bug, trying to think about something cool.
00:20:17
Speaker
And however, I think that kind of transition into a CTO role was something I benefited and I hope and I work hard to make sure that it benefits people that work along with me because for me, um,
00:20:37
Speaker
When I think back about the bosses that I had during my career, my best experience was when they were able to coat themselves and they were technical people rather than
00:20:51
Speaker
someone who was always a manager. So I think it's important that having that capacity to discuss with someone who understands what you are talking about, that makes, for me, that makes a lot of difference. So I try to be that kind of person and role for the people working in my teams.
00:21:14
Speaker
to be there for them, to support them, to let them know I'm one of you and just like trying to filter the corporate aspect so that you can focus on developing technology. So have any of them called you recently and got you to jump on any problems and stuff with that?
00:21:36
Speaker
Yeah, I do it almost daily and I enjoy it every single time. For instance, right now we are designing a stake-in system. When this recording goes live, probably it's already outdated and live and people will be able to test it.
00:21:53
Speaker
but right now we are developing a staking system for the MEL Duke and mixing different strategies and aspects that I've never seen before together in other staking systems. And we are always constantly finding, okay, so how do we solve it? How do we solve that? And what they do is they ask me like, hey, can we please go through it together? I don't always have the answers.
00:22:21
Speaker
don't really have the answers to everything. But there is this theory of the rubber duck that when you tell things to someone and explain it how it works, you find the solution yourself automatically kind of thing.
00:22:39
Speaker
So I am that kind of rubberback for them. Someone who listens and understands what they are talking about, I may ask a couple of questions, I may suggest how to start debugging or solving some issues.
00:22:55
Speaker
but they end up being the ones mostly resolving things. So yeah, I think of myself as a support person and people usually have like the CTO on
Building During a Bear Market
00:23:08
Speaker
top of the rest of the team and I consider myself to be kind of below them so that I support them and I give them the tools to do their job.
00:23:18
Speaker
And I think this is, from my perspective, if I were in a developer position, that's what my CTO or ideal CTO would look like. Someone who I can call, have a human to human conversation, support each other, and he takes a lot of the burden from me and gives me time and focus so that I deploy and I do good projects and good code.
00:23:49
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a really nice way of looking at it, to be honest. I can imagine a team are really grateful for that support. And I think the job of a manager is to enable your team to be able to fix problems, right? You don't have to know the answer to everything. I don't think anyone knows the answer to everything, especially in Web3, because you're solving problems that haven't been solved, right? Yeah, it's impossible to know the answer of everything.
00:24:15
Speaker
Yeah. We are all humans. There is only so much things that we can know. You have to make sure that you are surrounded by intelligent and good people, and especially people that know how to resolve problems and find solutions. And that's, I think, the key. The key is not about knowing about everything. The key is
00:24:39
Speaker
knowing about how to treat a problem and face it in the way that will give you a solution. And the moment that you are able to do that, you don't care if you are writing it in Python, JavaScript, Solidity. It's all about the mentality. It's all about the way of facing things. Yeah, I agree. I like that. So
00:25:04
Speaker
Problem solving is obviously something that you've developed over your career and it's helped you achieve your current position. Is there anything else that's really notable to you that you've learned over the last 10-15 years that have really contributed to the position that you're in now?
00:25:24
Speaker
So I think obviously you need a technical baseline, you need to be able to understand what you are doing, the concepts behind specifically in crypto and blockchain, you need to know about the
00:25:41
Speaker
benefits and also disadvantages of bloating. So the technical knowledge is kind of baseline. Problem solving I think is one of the key points for anyone becoming a senior position in any company.
00:26:00
Speaker
And then the third one I will say is be a human. Remember that we are humans, we cannot make mistakes and what we need to focus is on solving those mistakes and making sure that we are aligned. I've been in teams where the culture and the relationship between people were super
00:26:25
Speaker
kind of tense and difficult and like you didn't really know the person. You maybe only knew like the avatar and the name and every single conversation you had with them was purely technical. That's fine. You may have a relationship like that in a professional environment. I think it's also important or it adds an extra value to get to know people at the human level because when
00:26:54
Speaker
you treat everyone as a number or as an avatar, you consider them to be perfect every single day of the week. But then when you start to know them, you know that I may have a bad day because I fought with my partner yesterday or your grandma just died and that will have an effect on your work for the next week.
00:27:22
Speaker
or even, I don't know, like you went partying yesterday and today you don't feel 100% of yourself. And those are things that are important to humanize. Personally, something I really do believe is that we should work in order to live rather than the other way around. If you live to work constantly,
00:27:48
Speaker
you are missing out on a bunch of things. You need to work, you need to make sure that you achieve your goals, because it's going to be a big part of your day-to-day, so you have to be comfortable and you have to be happy with your work. But at the same time, you need to be aware that that work is just giving you the capacity to live a good life.
00:28:09
Speaker
and be able to go to cool restaurants, be able to spend time with your friends and family, be able to do some sports, be able to travel. If you are the richest man on the cemetery, you've not achieved the goals, at least from my perspective.
Balancing Personal Growth and Team Dynamics
00:28:30
Speaker
There may be people who want to be the richest man of the cemetery.
00:28:35
Speaker
No, I like that. So if the team go out partying and they give you a call in the morning and they say, I'm going to be a little bit late today. Is that something you can say? Yeah, sure. Start lunch time. Don't worry about it. I mean, we do have a very, very flexible schedule because we have people working from Europe, from Asia, from America. So everyone is kind of adapted to the fact that
00:29:03
Speaker
you are not going to be able to call someone at nine in the morning every single day because you're nine in the morning, maybe their lunch time. So yeah, some people have called me like on this week, their daughter was ill. It's like, okay, take it easy or a familiar just died or I went partying for the weekend this Monday
00:29:30
Speaker
Not my best day. And those are things that it has happened in the last month and it's fully OK. Obviously, there are limits to it. You cannot be like coming back late every single day of the week or drunk or having a bad mood every single day.
00:29:52
Speaker
But once you understand that everyone is a human and everyone behind the scenes is a person with their hobbies and also with their problems,
00:30:06
Speaker
then it makes communication in a team so much better. In Meld, for instance, I've met almost every single one of my team members in person, and it's a super, super clear impact on the relationship that we have.
00:30:29
Speaker
because, and it makes sense, you join a new team, it's like the CTO or the cool guy, like the intelligent person. And then we met in person, we grew up a couple of years, we comment about life, and then we have that human connection. We know each other. It's not just about Pepe, the CTO telling me to do these things. It's like,
00:30:53
Speaker
If Pepe cares about what I do, if he's telling me to do something, there may be a reason about it. I can ask him about the reason and we can have those kind of more grabbing a coffee kind of conversations that in remote environments are not easy at all.
00:31:13
Speaker
Yeah, because that kind of leads me on to another question, really. Because I think there's a lot of companies in Web3 that are, most companies in Web3, to be honest, and most projects are completely remote. You guys are obviously quite lucky, and you're lucky that you've been able to travel and meet them, or maybe flown them to meet you, whatever it might be. But a lot of people don't get that opportunity. Have you got any thoughts on
00:31:36
Speaker
how you can try and build that connection or help grow the team culture without being able to actually meet people face to face? I think that's one of the hardest things to do when building a remote team. And the reason for it is because if you try to push it from a management perspective, like from the top down,
00:32:00
Speaker
it will never work. It will never work if you force people to be on a 30-minute conversation once a week with a random person in the team. That's never going to work because they are not going to be interested in having that conversation. So something I will say to everyone working in remote teams is
00:32:25
Speaker
Tell your manager you want to be in contact with your partners. Tell your manager that you want that human connection. Because then when you do that, the manager will be able to mostly, or most occasions, create that kind of ecosystem. I think no one will say no to a suggestion from a team saying, we want a 30 minute call.
00:32:54
Speaker
with a random person in the team every week. Or in my previous project, what we had was once a month and the company gave us an allowance of like 10, $15, like nothing to Gracie. We had like lunch time together.
00:33:11
Speaker
It was funny because lunch time for someone, some people was like breakfast from other goes lunch and from was dinner. But we had that possibility of doing an activity together and discuss tonight even more informally about things.
00:33:29
Speaker
And it paid out significantly because you have that connection with the people and it's no longer a random person in the internet, it's someone who,
Advice for New CTOs
00:33:41
Speaker
I mean, you don't have to become friends with him, but having that connection with him or having that understanding on who he is, is a key aspect. And to all managers and company leading remote teams,
00:33:57
Speaker
make sure your people know each other in person. If you have that possibility, spend a budget. It's expensive. It's very expensive. It's a logistical nightmare, flying people from 15 or 20 different countries into a single location. It's expensive and it's a logistical nightmare, but it pays out. Even if you mess up like
00:34:22
Speaker
restaurant reservations for 20 people in a random city in the world. That will also be an experience that the team lives together and they will be able to base their relationship around. I've been lucky that in the different teams I've been working, I've been able to meet people in person.
00:34:47
Speaker
And I can assure you it's been a key aspect on improving the performance on a professional level as well. Yeah, I really like that. Yeah, I'm a big believer that people should get together or you should see people. Obviously, I really like the remote working side of things and I like that you can have work-life balance and you can kind of have that flexibility with life.
00:35:12
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely think it's key to meet people face to face. It doesn't have to be all the time, even if it's, you know, a couple of times a year or once every four or five months or, you know, whatever it might be, or even just once, if that's the only ability. Yeah, always build a better relationship.
00:35:30
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's also important because for me, most of my days spent in meetings and talking to people, that's kind of my job. But for developers, they spend 95% of their time alone. And it's very difficult for them to have that kind of environment where you can message anyone and like grab a coffee. So if you're lucky and you have a personal environment that can support you on that,
00:36:00
Speaker
That's fine. You will survive. Like you can tell your partner, let's grab a coffee. I need like a 15 minute break. But if for whatever reason, you are like living alone in a flat or in apartment and you don't have that capacity, it burns down over time. Um, and you need to have some way like escape vault somehow to disconnect from work, even if it is 10 minutes on the meat of the morning.
00:36:29
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. I think it's important to be able to definitely have that human connection and that personal connection. So I know you briefly touched on it, and there's probably no straight answer to this, but what does a day in the life of the CTO at Meld look like? It's different every single day.
00:36:54
Speaker
And it's different every single month, meaning that different months or different areas of the development stage require different roles from my end. Some
Improvements and Passion in Web3
00:37:11
Speaker
days it's more about discussing with external people, external partners, potential partnerships, integrations,
00:37:21
Speaker
relationship with third party companies, I do that kind of role from a more technical perspective, then a lot of catching up with everyone in the team, making sure that they don't have any blockers, making sure that they have everything that they need to do their work as good as they can.
00:37:44
Speaker
And I will say 50% of the time is just responding to messages and adapting and resolving issues. Things like managing subscriptions, managing access, managing everything, it mostly goes into my end. There is obviously a part of the role that entails on looking into the meet a long-term strategy.
00:38:12
Speaker
of the company and the product both from a product perspective and from a team perspective and we as a team get to that point. What are we requiring? What are we missing? What are our strong points and our weaknesses? And also something that
00:38:38
Speaker
I enjoy from time to time, although it's not always positive. It's also being in contact with the community. At the end, CTO role is a public person's role. It's a politics role of some degree. So making sure that everyone in the community gets their questions answered, supporting people in the community,
00:39:08
Speaker
getting feedback from people, getting feedback, checking if it is reasonable feedback or if it is something that they are struggling with trying to resolve it. So basically I'm like an octopus with like five different things at once. We are trying to, on the last couple of months, get appropriate feedback
00:39:34
Speaker
persons for certain roles. So we now have a product person who has taken
00:39:40
Speaker
a lot of the work that I did on purely product related aspects. We also now have a tech lead who can cover my back for dealing with the team on most things and follow up and test things. And for me, the end goal, and this potentially controversial opinion, but the end goal of a CTO is that the company doesn't need a CTO.
00:40:10
Speaker
Like make sure that you have surrounded by people who are able to sustainably guide the company to where you see the company going.
00:40:24
Speaker
Obviously, I'm pretty, pretty far from it right now. But the goal is making sure that everything runs smoothly so that you can discover new areas of development rather than having to babysitting or taking care of the things that are ongoing right now. That's, I think,
00:40:47
Speaker
the goal for a CTO position as a team grows, becoming the reference person, becoming the politics person, but making sure that everything is able to run without them.
00:41:04
Speaker
This is very kind of idealistic. It's not something that most people or most companies ever achieve. And I think the biggest test to see if you are on the good track of accomplishing it is taking vacations. Take a week out. See what happens. If you have to come back three hours after the start of your vacation, you are doing something wrong.
00:41:34
Speaker
If you've been able to go through the week, barely responding messages or supporting people, then you are on the good track. I mean, I would love to believe in a constant vacation. That's not the case. But I think that's a pretty good kind of reference point. Take one week of vacation, see what breaks, and identify those issues that you are missing.
00:42:00
Speaker
check if that's something that you need to work on or maybe you need to improve the people you work with around to make sure that those things don't break and there is not a single point of failure that is the CTO person. Yeah, I like that. I like that. So yeah, for any managers listening, any CTOs listening,
00:42:22
Speaker
Yeah, take a week out and see what happens. Hopefully, after listening to this, we don't see loads of projects falling apart because everyone's taking vacation and stuff hasn't been done. But we'll see. We'll be reasonable about the vacation. So could you introduce us to Meld in a little bit more detail? You briefly touched on it, but it'd be great to understand a little bit more about the project.
00:42:47
Speaker
So the goal for Melt is bringing together traditional finance and crypto, like melding them together. That's all of the reasons for the name. Therefore, what we do is we develop products all around that kind of interconnection. We have our own blockchain that we built on top of an avalanche subnet. It's currently the biggest subnet in terms of validator count, and we are super happy on it.
00:43:14
Speaker
We keep on expanding and we have a very interesting set of things that we want to introduce to ensure that that runs smoothly. We have our own protocols. We are developing a learning and borrowing system in EVM. We did have one in Cardano. Well, we do have one in Cardano, but it's currently on hold for deployment because we detected that
00:43:40
Speaker
the way currently the Cardano network works doesn't support for a secure deployment of these kind of systems. There is a lot of controversy in the community. Some people don't agree with this. Some people do. We are the most affected ones because that protocol has been developed. It's totally open source. Anyone can go into our GitHub and check it.
00:44:07
Speaker
But we've done our analysis. It's right now not a secure approach to deploy it. And therefore we are now developing an EVM version of it that we will be deploying into our subnet. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we are building a bank, a new bank, challenger bank, whatever you want to call it.
00:44:30
Speaker
lot of asterisks for legal reasons, there is a proper name of calling these things, but it's basically a bank. It's what you can have in Revolut or N26 or like a new bank where you will be able to hold your fiat and it will be rather than what most banks are known of about because they
00:44:50
Speaker
reject crypto. They don't allow you to transfer to Coinbase or to Binance and they put a lot of trouble to you or they ask a lot of questions. We are embracing crypto. We want our customers to be crypto users and therefore we have a non-custodial wallet already live for several months in the web environment.
00:45:15
Speaker
We are bringing our mobile app that will be tightly connected with the bank in services and also in a non-custodial crypto wallet. We don't want to have control of your funds. You should be the one controlling your funds, nor your keys, nor your crypto. And bringing those things together, there is a set of
00:45:38
Speaker
products or tools around there that will allow you to easily own an off-ground crypto. And one of the end goals to see if that first iteration of product is successful is that you will be able to take a fiat loan against your crypto.
00:45:59
Speaker
So the example is pretty easy. I'm pretty sure people in this podcast have come here or you know, of people that have a lot of money in crypto, but then they cannot afford to pay a car or they don't want to pay for beers because they have everything locked in crypto. And with this system, you will be able to, um,
00:46:25
Speaker
do a lending of your crypto, it will generate interest and you will be able to borrow against that crypto directly in fiat with our automatic exchange. All non-custodial so that the end case will be you will have 10 bitcoins in the protocol and you will go to a bar with a credit card or a debit card
00:46:52
Speaker
pay and automatically everything happens behind the scenes. You keep your exposure to Bitcoin. You are not selling anything. You are taking a small loan or a small borrow and potentially automatically repairing it with the interest that your 10 Bitcoins are generating. So it's basically
00:47:13
Speaker
a free beer, not losing exposure to Bitcoin and making sure that everyone in the crypto world has a bank that wants them as users rather than a bank that takes them out or pushes or asks too many questions. If you want to transfer one million dollars in crypto
00:47:34
Speaker
We are going to give you the tools for it. We are not going to be asking any questions. And for the fiat side, there is obviously regulations that need to happen. And this is not something that we like, but it's the fiat world. The banking world has
00:47:51
Speaker
the things, so there is a KYC process and things like that, but you will always be able to use the crypto products independently without any kind of KYC or any other regulatory aspect. Yeah, sounds cool. And what happens then, this might be getting too into it, what happens then if the value of your crypto that you have stored in the platform or staked in the platform
00:48:19
Speaker
drops below the value that you've loaned out? Well that liquidation happens, like a lending and borrowing protocol, same as SAVS, same as Compound, like there are many already in the ecosystem. If you deposit 10 Ethereum and you borrow half of that in USDT and the Ethereum price drops below a certain level called the liquidation threshold,
00:48:44
Speaker
Usually people have like a 50% margin until the real kind of price match happening. And what happens is a liquidator, basically a bot or any user can pay off your debt. So like if you've borrowed, imagine like $5,000.
00:49:05
Speaker
the liquidator pays those $5,000 and gets the position that you brought there, the 10 Ethereums or things like that. So you basically use those 10 Ethereums, you get liquidated, the money that you have
00:49:21
Speaker
is on your control because it's non-custodial. It's impossible for any kind of smart contract system to take your money from you without approval. So you have your $5,000, but then your position is closed. You no longer generate interest on that deposit, and you no longer are able to repay your role and get the initial deposit.
00:49:49
Speaker
Yeah, okay, I understand. Yeah, it sounds like a really cool idea. And I guess it's, yeah, helping people become their own bank, right, with the lending. That's exactly our stack line. Be your own bank. Yeah, I was reading the website, actually. I was looking at the project. So yeah, I did steal that from there, I'll be honest. But no, that's cool, I like it. So what's it really like then working within a Web3 startup?
00:50:18
Speaker
Obviously, there's this whole glamorous view, I guess, of working within this really cool emerging tech industry that's right on the cutting edge and solving all these problems and this kind of stuff. But what's it really like on the ground when you're in it? The reality is... I mean, I will say it's heavily dependent on the project that you work.
00:50:42
Speaker
So I think one of the things that Web3 start-ups and the Web3 world heavily differentiates from traditional jobs is that it allows for a wider range of structures happening in the company.
00:51:00
Speaker
It allows for companies that maybe work fully in an office while others that work with fully remote teams. Others that are more human-friendly, kind of meeting reasonably every week, every month, every couple of months. Others that work completely on pseudonyms and you don't really know who is behind that pseudonyms. So for me, my perspective is
00:51:31
Speaker
It's exactly the same as a new job, but with a higher risk due to the volatility of the market. You still wake up and you have to do your job and you get paid for it.
00:51:46
Speaker
What job you do and how you do it depends on the company. How you get paid and the amount that you get paid depends on the company. But at the end, the only biggest real difference I've seen and noticed is there is much more volatility in this market that gets compensated by having a higher salary structure overall compared to traditional markets.
00:52:15
Speaker
and you can see it on any job offering like crypto projects. It's pretty common to see 50% or even double the salary for working in crypto than compared to working in a random company that is doing video games or something. So something I will recommend and I recommend to everyone I try to apply it myself is
00:52:43
Speaker
Use the money wisely. It may not be forever. Don't get used to earning $1,000 or $1,050 or $200,000 per year. That may not be forever.
00:53:03
Speaker
enjoy the life, take profit of it, buy a house, but don't get yourself into debt, don't get used to the lifestyle of earning six or seven figures, because that may not be forever. And I know a lot of people who earn a lot of money and use it very, very fast, now they cannot
00:53:25
Speaker
Earn that kind of money and they are in a bad position. So make sure that you have a year's worth of savings on your normal life on day-to-day basis so that if you are unlucky that your project is shutting down or there is layoffs or anything, you can survive. But on the other hand,
00:53:51
Speaker
Take profit of that. Make sure that you're enjoying the extra yield for your work that you're getting. Get a fancy sushi, go on a trip, get an iPhone. I don't know. Enjoy life, but be reasonable about it. Don't spend money that you cannot afford to lose. Yeah, I think that's really good advice. And I've actually seen salaries
00:54:21
Speaker
Over the last 12, 18 months, I've seen salaries in the Web3 space fluctuate a lot, to be honest. It's one of those industries where when you're in the height of the bull run or the bull market, projects are paying whatever they would need to to get certain skill sets into the business.
00:54:40
Speaker
And then now we're in the bear market, those projects have committed to paying this much salary, for example, someone say they close down or, you know, they make redundancies. Now that person's expectations is as has increased to what salaries might have been in the bull market, whereas now we're at the bottom of the bear market.
00:54:59
Speaker
their expectations are not being met. Salaries have come down and it's much harder then to be able to find a job right now because, you know, say you were getting paid $200,000 a couple of years ago, now you may be being paid $120,000, for example, which is quite a tricky thing to get your head around, to be honest.
00:55:21
Speaker
You know, if you're in a role and you're thinking, right, you know, now I've reached this point, I'm worth this much money, this is great. My life's set now forever because I've achieved this level. And as you said, I've set my life up that way. To go back and be earning, you know, what's that, 45, 50% less than what you were earning before. It's really hard thing to do. And it's quite a hard thing on your mindset as well, to be honest.
00:55:50
Speaker
I don't have the answers to how to get around that, to be honest. It's a very case-by-case, personal thing. For me, I jokingly say pretty often, some days I will gladly change my position for a normal developer for half the pay.
00:56:13
Speaker
And my life will mostly be the same, but obviously you will have to cut down on a bunch of the extra things. As long as you are not in debt or you are not in a bad position from it, everyone can live without fancy sushi. Yeah, I agree. So what's it been like then building in a bear market compared to building in a bull? You've obviously been in the web three space for a long time, seen a few cycles and stuff. What's the difference? What does it feel like?
00:56:45
Speaker
I think the best, so for me, I've been through like different cycles now. On a bull market, everything goes bananas. Like salaries increase, you suddenly get like double the head count on every company in three months. So there is like a lot of growth because there's a lot of
00:57:16
Speaker
pressure from investors that are giving you a lot of money, but you have to give me this very, very fast, because if you are one week late, you are missing out on a potentially huge opportunity.
00:57:32
Speaker
Personally, I enjoy building on a bear market because you don't have that kind of pressure. However, it needs to be a company that even during the bull market has prepared for a bear market. You cannot have, as you said, like super high salaries because then you will have to fire people. You cannot have
00:57:58
Speaker
triple the amount of people that you really need to build your product, because then you will have to cut those people off. And that will have a super negative impact on the morale of your team and on the way that you set up everything. I also think that some people may benefit from it, but how the team projects on a bull market
00:58:28
Speaker
cost you like five times more than in a bigger market. And obviously, auditors heavily benefit from it. I've seen auditing companies like two years ago or a year and a half ago that they were billing an insane amount of dollars to companies and they had like a year wait period. And it's like
00:58:54
Speaker
How can you achieve that? While now, budgets for auditing are pretty more reasonable. And right now, I'm looking for an auditor on certain smart contracts. I've been able to reach seven to 10 different high-level auditors. None of them had more than a week before we could actually start.
00:59:22
Speaker
Wow, okay. That's a big difference. It's a super big difference. It makes the experience of building much, much better for projects, obviously for people who are financially invested in an auditing firm.
00:59:39
Speaker
They have a different set of criteria. But for builders, it's a way better ecosystem to navigate. You have to manage very, very well the community sentiment. Some people, when your token goes down to a third of the price, it was a couple of months back. No one is happy.
01:00:08
Speaker
Investors are not happy, token holders are not happy, employees are not happy because sometimes I think, for instance, on the Mail Telegram chat or the Discord chat, there are some people complaining about the token price being low and we don't
01:00:28
Speaker
do anything to solve it. And it's like, come on guys, do you really think I'm not interested in the mail token price to be a hundred times what it is right now? Like part of my salary and part of everyone's salary is in tokens. It's on our best interest for that token to be as high as possible because we will make money out of it. Same way as community people make money out of it.
01:00:56
Speaker
So I think handling the communities is something very, very important in the crypto space. I do think that there is a lot of people in a lot of communities that they are not aware of the risks that it entails investing into a company. When I started in the crypto space, it was all about like, you put $10 in Bitcoin and tomorrow we will have $15.
01:01:23
Speaker
And that's not the case. It has never been the case, but for a period of a couple of months back in 2016, 2018, more or less, it was like, yep, tomorrow is 20% higher. It's not the case like that. Don't invest money that you cannot lose. For me personally, every single cent that they have in crypto,
01:01:50
Speaker
is money that if everything shut down tomorrow, my life will still survive. It will be a huge impact, a huge loss for me. But I have not invested any money that will compromise my life. I've not taken a loan against my house, I've not taken
01:02:13
Speaker
and maximizing credit cards. And I think that's super, super important that everyone needs to be aware, don't risk money that you cannot afford to lose. And I think it's pretty common sense, but we still see some cases where it's not the case. Yeah, for sure. I guess when you're building in a bear market, it's actually really hard to keep the community spirit
01:02:40
Speaker
there I guess and kind of keep that real community feeling that. I guess that really great and kind of feel-good environment within the community, which I guess is super tricky. But I suppose then the other side of that is that there's a lot of people in the community who know how
01:03:04
Speaker
how the crypto cycles and crypto markets work, right? There are certain people there are saying, when Lambo, when Moon, all this sort of stuff, that then the people who are complaining about the token price and stuff, at least right now,
01:03:21
Speaker
I mean, you can't exactly call the crypto gods and say, hey, can you just pump the whole markets, please? It just doesn't work like that, right? So but yeah, I can imagine tricky thing to navigate for sure. Yeah. I mean, one of the coolest thing is most communities slow down during these periods. So you are able to get to know your community. And I know the people that are
01:03:48
Speaker
frequently talking in Telegram, in Discord, and I respond to them, we can have conversations. The biggest problem I think right now is even if you have 99% of the community, let's say happy or passive, if you have 1% of the community that is narrative,
01:04:14
Speaker
that's the feeling that gets transmitted. Because negativity travels super, super fast. You can get a lot of comments like, good job, the new update looks amazing, everything works perfectly. Then if someone goes and says, this is crap, you are scamming, or this is a rock pool, everyone feels bad.
01:04:41
Speaker
It's something that we have to deal with, but it's something that sometimes I guess people saying these things don't really understand the impact that it has on the builders, because I'm spending 12 hours a day or more working in this project. I know
01:05:05
Speaker
Everyone in Melt is dedicating a huge part of their day, is their jobs, is they put a lot of effort, they put a lot of energy. If you read comments on the community say, this is a rock pool, these people are scamming or whatever, it takes all of the energy from you. It then becomes a situation where you say, why am I spending this amount of energy?
01:05:33
Speaker
if these people are just thinking I'm doing nothing. So I will say there will always be bad actors in communities, but for the good actors or for the people who are really in that community, make sure that you put your voice out also for the good things, because
01:06:00
Speaker
At the end, I'm coming back to the beginning, we are all humans. Doesn't matter if it is your boss or your employee, or if it is a community member, or if it is someone from a random project, we are all humans. We also like positive feedback, and that gives us more energy, gives us more willingness to work hard to keep on delivering. If the messages on Telegram are, this is a shit show,
01:06:30
Speaker
do you really expect people to wake up and give 100% of the energy to solve it? I think it's not reasonable, so it's on everyone's best interest to of course be
01:06:45
Speaker
Do your own due diligence, make sure that if you really think someone is scamming you, try to investigate and discard that option. But yeah, I think there is a lot of things that need to change community-wise to ensure that projects runs smoothly. Yeah, for sure. That leads me really nicely into the next question I had for you.
01:07:12
Speaker
Have you got any advice for someone who's looking to build a career for themselves in Web3? I guess being able to take the heat from the community is one of them, or at least be prepared for the heat from the community. Be prepared, but also I would say that something that will happen anywhere, I can imagine people working in Tesla or working in Google or working in Amazon. Also don't lie when someone calls their product
01:07:40
Speaker
a bad product. But I will say focus on yourself and focus on making sure that you have a path to follow and then don't use that path at all. Like have a mental guideline. I want to go in this direction.
01:08:05
Speaker
I will assure you, life will never take you in that direction. Life will throw things at you that will be for better, like a random recruiter messaging you on LinkedIn, like, hey, I have this great opportunity, maybe a good thing, or it may be for worse.
01:08:25
Speaker
professionally or personally you may have something that prevents you from working for a while. So have an idea, try to follow it, then don't care about it and flow with the life. Work hard because good things come by luck but come by luck to those
01:08:51
Speaker
who work for them. If you are somebody with a piña colada, you aren't going to get an offer from a big company. But working very hard doesn't assure you that you get an offer from a big company either. So make sure that you are there, but sometimes you just have to be lucky and you just have to be
01:09:22
Speaker
kind of buying as many lottery tickets as possible, it doesn't ensure that you will win the lottery. So make sure that you like what you are doing. If you feel like you don't enjoy what you are doing on your day-to-day life, maybe you should consider changing careers.
01:09:45
Speaker
And it doesn't really matter if it pays you triple what your friends does. It's important that you enjoy your day to day because you are likely spending eight, 10, 12 hours on it. Money gives you a fancy sushi, but doesn't give you happiness. So make sure that you enjoy what you are doing and you also take some rest and differentiate your personal life from work.
01:10:16
Speaker
Yeah, that's great advice. And what about if someone is stepping into Web3 for the first time so they don't have any experience in the Web3 space or with blockchain so far? They really want to get in and they really want to build a career for themselves in the space.
01:10:31
Speaker
Anything you advise they do, any courses, any skills they should learn, what do you think? There is literally hundreds or thousands of very, very good content for free in the internet. You don't really need to pay like thousands of dollars for a master's degree in Web3. Doesn't work like that. That will give you other aspects like networking with people like you or knowing
01:11:02
Speaker
relevant people in the space. But in order to learn, I've always learned by doing. So I recommend, for instance, that you are getting into Solidity. You take some courses, like I started with Crypto Thumbies. Last time I checked, it changed a lot from what it was when I started. But there are tutorials in YouTube. There are written posts everywhere. Make sure that you understand how
01:11:31
Speaker
things work from a conceptual standpoint. I mean, it may seem trivial or maybe see like common sense, but make sure you understand what the blockchain is, what the transaction is and what gas is. Make sure you understand the different kinds of blockchains there are. Ethereum is the most kind of smart contract evolved or assumed network.
01:11:59
Speaker
but there is also a polka lot and cosmos and you may want to get into Cardano. There are a lot of ecosystems. Make sure that you understand one in depth and have some notions and some concepts about others.
01:12:16
Speaker
And then if you want to get kind of some easy freelancing jobs, create a couple of personal projects, like learn how to create a token, an empty collection, learn how to use GitHub and 14 existing projects, try to modify them, learn how to deploy them.
01:12:37
Speaker
create a small portfolio website. And with that, you will go into multiple freelancing websites. You go there, you put your offer in, and it's very, very likely that someone will start contacting you. And from those early projects that may not be making you a millionaire,
01:12:58
Speaker
but they will definitely give you the real world experience and the real world contacts that then will lead you to either continue your career as a developer and joining projects and companies and being useful or creating your own projects by knowing people in the ecosystem and people in the space. So I think that
01:13:23
Speaker
That's generally speaking what I will do if I were to start over. Learning the basics, making sure I know the most common standards and what they really do. For instance, a common mistake or a common thing that I see everywhere is
01:13:43
Speaker
Tokens are not transferred anywhere. You don't transfer USDC from my wallet to your wallet. The smart contract below skips like a record of balances for the different wallets. There is no real transfer anywhere. It's just a variable being added or subtracted.
01:14:04
Speaker
understand that and it's going to give you such an advantage over people who are just there for the show or for the money. Because clients will be able to detect if you are simply laughing or if you understand what's going on underneath. Yeah, I think that's really good advice. So I think a lot of people
01:14:26
Speaker
look at the web3 space and think, where do I even begin? Where do I start? Where do I even go? But I think, yeah, I really like that walkthrough. And yeah, I really like your advice there on how people can get into the space. So just going back to something we were talking about before. What part does luck play when you're building a successful career?
01:14:51
Speaker
You briefly touched on it, but... I think it plays out a huge part. I consider myself to be pretty lucky, but also I consider myself to have worked pretty hard to be lucky. As I said before, if you are with a piña colada,
01:15:11
Speaker
I mean, you will have to be very, very lucky to get certain things. But if while you're a study or your early career, you do some site projects, you learn more things, you try to get interest in the community. Something I've not done a lot, but when I do, it has benefited significantly is going to events.
01:15:37
Speaker
95% of the people listening to this will likely have a crypto event in their city in the next six months. Go there. Maybe 10 people, maybe 100 people.
01:15:49
Speaker
But if you go there, you will be able to talk and discuss with other people who may have a similar or a different approach. And you are opening up for opportunities to happen. I think without preparation, you can have as much luck as you want. It's not going to happen. But for me, it was about putting myself out to the world and then
01:16:18
Speaker
making sure that you respond to those instincts. Like I get maybe 20, 30 messages from recruiters every single week. Most of them I discard, but there will always be this possibility of CTO of Amazon.
01:16:43
Speaker
Yeah, why not? Not going to happen anyway, but put yourself out there, learn, make sure you have the technical capacity and the technical knowledge, and also be able to sell yourself. You can be the most amazing programmer in the world that if you are going to get in an interview process,
01:17:12
Speaker
and you cannot talk about yourself or you cannot have that kind of human interaction, you are likely not going to, you are not a good fit for a startup, most likely. Or maybe yes, depending on what they are looking for. But it's going to be harder for you to get a position if you are not able to talk about yourself realistically.
01:17:36
Speaker
Don't call me on saying lie about anything or like oversell yourself. No, be realistic. But I see now I'm not doing so many interviews, but at the start of the year, I was easily doing 15 to 20 interviews per week. You will be amazed at the amount of people that had the skills and they knew what they were doing, but they didn't have the capacity to communicate around it.
01:18:06
Speaker
and especially in a remote environment, communication is key. If you don't have communication, you will never be able to successfully be part of a team. Therefore, learn, put yourself out there, and get some basic capacity to talk about you. Don't be afraid of talking about you, because there will be people who know way less than you do,
01:18:34
Speaker
that will be talking about them very, very good, and they will get your job. Even though they are less capacitated or less prepared to do that, they will get your job because you were not able to defend your knowledge. Yeah, that's really good advice as well. Yeah, communication is key. Obviously, as a recruiter, I speak to
01:18:57
Speaker
as you can imagine, hundreds and hundreds of people every week, to be honest, about their job searches or about companies that are looking and that sort of thing. And yeah, good communication skills is at the top of every employer's list. But I do think sometimes it's quite tricky as an engineer, as a developer, to develop those communication skills, especially as you go about something you mentioned at the start around a lot of developers might be on their own a lot of the time.
01:19:23
Speaker
It's quite difficult to be able to build and develop those skills right if you buy yourself. I guess you have to be almost seeking seeking the opportunity to be able to engage with people and seeking the opportunity to do it, which sometimes is against.
01:19:41
Speaker
a lot of what people would like to be doing so you do have to take yourself out of your comfort zone I guess to be able to then improve those skills and something I would suggest is if you don't want to do that or if for whatever reason you don't know how to do it there will always be a place for you but it may not be the one that you want it may be on that and don't get me wrong some people really enjoy being
01:20:08
Speaker
kind of in the shadows, just coding building and you like someone telling them exactly what to do. They do it and that's it. And that's totally fair. But when then the bad types come or when there is a layoffs or when the performance review comes, you will be just another guy. You will not be showcasing your work to your manager or to
01:20:36
Speaker
the people who may be able to give you a raise. So I really hate people that just kind of say, I never do, but the people that do, you need to make sure that you also say about it a little bit. Live in the shadows, be happy in the shadows. I've been in the shadows and it has been super great.
01:21:04
Speaker
But make sure that what you do in the shadows gets visibility. Great advice. So that's the part that luck plays in your development and then other skills that you can use or need to develop. On the other side of that, you have to work hard to be lucky, as you said. And obviously, there's a lot of sacrifice that comes with that.
01:21:30
Speaker
What part does the sacrifice play in building a really successful career for yourself? I will say it's it's heavily dependent on
01:21:42
Speaker
on the individual position. For me, I've been sacrificing. There is sacrifice and then there is liking what you do so that you dedicate a little bit more time. So for instance, when I was at the start of my career, I was working, I sacrificed part of my personal time because I wanted to learn further on what I was doing.
01:22:10
Speaker
I got into a master's degree that took Fridays and Saturdays and then all the extra work that it entailed. So I was in a point where personal life was very, very small or non-existent. It had an effect on friends and family. So sacrifice, I will say, gives you an advantage.
01:22:38
Speaker
But you also should not compare to others because there will always be someone who sacrifices more than you. There will always be this guy in university or in work that stays the full day working because they don't have anything else to do.
01:22:57
Speaker
So don't compare you against them. Compare you against yourself. Are you doing everything you can and everything you are willing to do to improve on your professional career? Is it really your professional career, the part of your life that you want to develop at this point? Maybe you want to, you are fine on how you are professionally right now and you will rather develop it, you develop yourself personally. Will you sacrifice then
01:23:27
Speaker
having a higher salary or having a cooler job so that you can dedicate more time to your personal life. I think we have 24 hours in a day. Hopefully everyone gets eight hours of sleep. So that gives you a set of hours that you have to work with and dedicate to whatever you prefer.
01:23:53
Speaker
We will benefit from having 40 hours a day and we will have more time to do everything. The reality is you will always have to sacrifice something until you find a good balance. If you are in a good position professionally and personally, congratulations, keep it up, but you may want to develop further professionally and you will have to sacrifice some of the personal aspect.
01:24:21
Speaker
I will say for me, it was worth it. I sacrificed a lot or I dedicated a lot of time for my kind of growth and career development early. And it has paid out. If you tell me 10 years ago that I will be in the position I am right now, it's like, no, you're crazy. That may happen when you are 45 or something.
01:24:49
Speaker
I think it has significantly speed up my capacity to grow. But as I mentioned before, it was also partially luck. Taking the risk of six, seven years ago going to blockchain, not knowing what could happen. What if in 2020 blockchain disappeared?
01:25:17
Speaker
All the sacrifices I had made until that point will be for nothing. It will have an impact, it will have a benefit somehow, somewhere, but it will be not as impactful as it has been for me. So I will say sacrifice only what you are willing to sacrifice. Don't put yourself in the position where
01:25:41
Speaker
you discard all your personal life because you want to grow significantly on your career. I will recommend you rather do kind of a little bit more consistently during a prolonged period of time, rather than doing a lot of like, OK, so these six months, I'm fully career focused.
01:26:09
Speaker
those things play out for a longer time frame. As I was explaining at the start of the recording, I started going the extra mile when I was like 12 and 13. So it's like 15, 20 years of timeline wise that it has been a consistency on dedicating time and effort to my professional career.
01:26:38
Speaker
But again, it's very, very different for every single person. We are all humans and we are different. And our surroundings, our context is different. I was lucky that I was able to take more time to that because
01:26:58
Speaker
I have a supportive environment around me. Some people may not have the financial or the personal capacity to do this. And yeah, I think it's heavily environment dependent. And even if you sacrifice a lot, luck is also a part of the reasoning. So don't kind of hit yourself
01:27:27
Speaker
if you are having bad luck, eventually you will have good luck. And the same for me. I've been having a very good luck streak. I'm worried about the next week, or sorry, the next year. Maybe something bad happens. Well, I hope not. I hope not.
01:27:46
Speaker
No, I think that's really good to understand. There is sacrifice involved with everything, but it's, I guess, choosing the level of sacrifice that you're willing to make.
01:28:00
Speaker
I guess then taking accountability and taking responsibility for that decision. Don't say you're not getting anywhere in your career, for example, if you're not putting the work in to be able to achieve certain things, or don't necessarily blame everything on luck, because there is an element of, well, a huge element of the harder you work, the luckier you get in quite a lot of industries. Obviously, there's still a massive luck element, as you said, around blockchain, and Web3 could have, crypto could have,
01:28:29
Speaker
completely disappeared and then then then then obviously you'd be you'd be trying to find a career in in something else so there's definitely an element of luck involved um but yeah you still have to take responsibility for uh for the things that you can control that's that's exactly i will i will say like 60 to 70 percent of of success rate is work and the rest is luck and so make sure that
01:28:58
Speaker
you put everything you can into that. And again, making sure that you prioritize what is important for you. If for you it's important to have a nine to five job and then shooting on the computer and not being involved and going with friends, that's also an legitimate option to take. Don't tell
01:29:21
Speaker
And I know this may be kind of like throwing stones our own proof, but don't let people tell you what success looks like. Success is not being a CTO. Success is not being an entrepreneur. Success is not being a millionaire. Success is different for every single person. And for you, success may be having a family.
01:29:50
Speaker
having enough money to support it, go on a trip once a year and eat mac and cheese every single day. That's fine. If success for you is that, work towards that. Don't work towards something that someone else is telling you to work towards. Find your own thing.
01:30:12
Speaker
live with it. And if people complain and tell you you are doing the wrong thing, listen to their feedback, but it's your life and you have to do whatever you like. Yeah, I agree. That's some really good words. And also, I think as well, your version of success can change. What I thought was successful when I was 20 is completely different to what I think successful is now.
01:30:38
Speaker
And then in another 10 years when I'm 41, 42, then it'll be completely different again, probably. So yeah, don't necessarily feel like you have to think, right, this is what I think success is. And then that's that final decision made forever because it's really not.
01:30:53
Speaker
Also, because when you think success is something and then you accomplish it, I can assure you it will evolve. If I tell myself 10 years ago, do you think it would be successful if you're a CTO of a company and you get interviewed in podcasts for things?
01:31:14
Speaker
Yes, of course. But then I'm here. I think I'm further successful, but there is still a long way to go to like, achieve final success. Because final success is never going to be achieved. You're always going to be wanting something more, something more, something more. Yeah, I agree. I agree. If I again, similar to you, if I look back, you know, five, six years ago,
01:31:41
Speaker
And I think back then, if you'd have said to me, right, in five years, you're going to have founded your recruitment company. You're going to be traveling the world and working from remote locations daily and monthly. You're going to be going to different countries and traveling and doing it at the same time. I think that looks great.
01:31:58
Speaker
sounds brilliant, I've nailed it. And then you get here in the moment and you're actually thinking, I could do with making a few more placements every month, or I could do with growing to a bigger team, for example, or there's always that next thing, right? So no, I completely agree with what you're saying. So if someone is stepping into a similar role to you then for the first time,
01:32:29
Speaker
Is there any particular advice that you'd love to share with them? I will say two or three key points. First, it's been kind of the topic of the interview, but be a human and make sure that people know that you're a human and acknowledge that other people are human. Second, I will say be the boss that you want to have as a boss.
01:32:58
Speaker
Be the kind of person and the kind of contact that you will like your boss to be like. Maybe not in that new position, but if you take yourself like three years back, what is my ideal boss look like? Try to be that person. Make sure that you care about the people that you work with.
01:33:22
Speaker
and make sure that you create an environment for everyone to be successful, not only yourself. Because when the rest of the people feel great and are successful, then it directly correlates to your thing. The third one is accept that there is going to be challenges during the journey. Accept that you will make bad decisions. Accept that there will be things that don't play out as expected.
01:33:52
Speaker
learn to navigate those things, learn to understand that when someone complains or when someone shares a different point of view of yours, there is likely something behind that that you can benefit and learn and improve from. And I think that's pretty much it, like be
01:34:20
Speaker
Be the person you want to be. Put yourself in a film or like imagine yourself, you are in a series and you are the boss of an office. Would you think that guy is a cool guy or would you think that guy is an idiot? Be the cool guy, don't be the idiot. I like that way of looking at it. Yeah, think of yourself in a TV series and then yeah, think of what you'd view of the character.
01:34:49
Speaker
I like that. That's a good way of looking at it. And if you could go back then to the start of your career and give yourself a piece of advice. Anything you'd say to your younger self? Buy more Bitcoin. No, I think realistically,
01:35:17
Speaker
If I were to start again, I will potentially...
01:35:23
Speaker
like what we were discussing earlier about like pushing hard on the accelerator so that you get successful fast. Maybe you don't need to put that hard, like live your life, have personal life, make sure that you take care of friends, family, partners, making sure that you prioritize yourself. But life is not always
01:35:49
Speaker
being on a computer. Success, as we mentioned, is always going to be a moving target. So don't obsess with achieving things at 25 or at 30. Things can come at 35 or 40.
01:36:08
Speaker
And that has actually been a conversation I've had with multiple friends. So you are now a CTO. What's your next step? How does your career move from here on the other 20 years that you have to work? Or 30 or 40 years I have to work? It's like, no idea. Just go with the flow. So maybe it's also a wise decision to not force things to happen early. Take your time.
01:36:41
Speaker
Use the opportunities that may appear in your life and understand that they may be once in a lifetime kind of opportunity. But take care about yourself. Take care about yourself. Enjoy what you do.
01:37:00
Speaker
make sure that you are working and you are spending time in an environment that it fulfills you and both kind of in the work side but also on the personal side. Are you enjoying spending time with this person? Are you enjoying going for beers with this friend? If you are not, what are you doing? Like, come on, no one is forcing you to be friends with anyone. You cannot be friends with everyone.
01:37:31
Speaker
dedicate time to what you enjoy personally and professionally. I think that's really good advice. Really good advice. So going back to something that you said at the start of the podcast, you mentioned that you got into blockchain. As soon as you came out of university, you went straight into blockchain. That was what you wanted to do. Why Web3? Why blockchain? Why was that the direction you wanted to go?
01:38:02
Speaker
So I've been kind of like different faces on that question. The very, very first one is it attracted me a lot the direct implication that a piece of code could have with money.
01:38:20
Speaker
that one Bitcoin, one Ethereum, it was directly trading, totally decentralized and people will buy it from you and you will be able to do so many things just on programming. I was very amazed by it because it was kind of a next generation kind of programming world when I started. I do think it's still like that.
01:38:47
Speaker
that extra level of relationship that code and technology can have with financial and money, super, super cool. Decentralization, I also think is super important. It doesn't make sense to have everything centralized in a single entity. And we have too many things centralized. And don't be wrong, they probably work fine, like Gmail.
01:39:17
Speaker
how many Google accounts have a Gmail service? It's fully centralized. If Google goes down, the world will collapse because everything is based around Google, the search, the emails, the Google Maps. Everything will collapse. And the risk is not that Google collapses. The risk is that Google stops liking you and blocks you.
01:39:45
Speaker
as an individual. And the reality is Google and many other companies have the capacity to do so. In a decentralized environment, those risks can be avoided. There is always a risk. There is always a point of failure. There's things that can go wrong. But if you have a decentralized mailing system or messaging system,
01:40:12
Speaker
there needs to be a lot of things going wrong for that to disappear. So that was kind of the main point that got me into the blockchain space. Then I had this kind of area or timeline where I started seeing the reality of building in the Web3 space and how the limitations play out. And honestly speaking, there were
01:40:42
Speaker
and sometimes where I didn't really care about the blockchain things I was doing because they were not real blockchain things. We are just putting blockchain on these for marketing purposes or for having a higher
01:40:59
Speaker
capacity to get investment. They didn't make sense from a blockchain perspective so on those period of times I was here just for the money and that's fair. If you do a great job, you provide value to the company, the company pays you for it, you don't really have to enjoy
01:41:20
Speaker
everything, every single day of your life and you are enjoying maybe money rather than the product itself. It's a high end sushi. Yeah, high end sushi is very good. But then I came back once I got more into DeFi and decentralized finance. Blockchain right now gives
01:41:44
Speaker
a lot of opportunities for so many, so many people. People in, let's say, in development countries can easily get access to internet and a computer and suddenly they compete with people who studied in
01:42:02
Speaker
Cambridge or MIT or places like that. So it opens up for a lot of opportunities from many, many different people. It also opens up for a lot of cool projects to happen. And it allows you to participate in an industry that
01:42:24
Speaker
It's relatively early stage still. Most projects are still kind of research projects or proof of concept or like, let's see how it goes. It's an ecosystem that is still in development and being part of that kind of evolving system makes you learn things way faster because you learn about things at work and you learn a lot about things that don't work. Nice. I think that's good.
01:42:55
Speaker
Everyone I've spoken to so far for the podcast has been really bought into the mission of blockchain and the ethos and the decentralization side of it and being able to give equal opportunities to people from anywhere in the world really. There's a real kind of common theme that runs through everyone that I've spoken to and I think that's really important. It's a really important thing to
01:43:21
Speaker
understand if you want to get a career in the space or build a career in the space as well, is you have to be interested in it. I think you said before that people will be able to quickly work out if you're faking it and if you're actually truly interested in it or not. So I think if you're not interested, fair enough. But if you are really, really interested in it, again, make sure that that comes across when you're speaking to companies and this kind of stuff.
01:43:48
Speaker
Is there anything that you would like to change about the Web3 space? Many things. Many, many things. I think all of this, like anonymity is super cool and it's great and it allows for a lot of things. But the fact that a lot of projects are totally anonymous, I think is a risk or is a problem.
01:44:17
Speaker
And when you do it kind of external facing, I get it. You may be a crypto millionaire. You don't want your face to show up so that you get mocked in the streets. But when you work with those kinds of people that even internally, you don't know their real name and you have to call them like Stormtrooper.
01:44:41
Speaker
1, 1, 2, whatever. That's not an environment I enjoy working in. And it's an environment that, sadly, from my perspective, is very, very spread in the ecosystem. I'd rather enjoy this. And some people may think, like, this guy is called Pepe, like the frog. Like, no, sorry, I was called Pepe before the frog. So the nicknames in the space is something
01:45:12
Speaker
I would rather change because it gives the perspective of, I don't know, like maybe not being so serious or so professional or so, and this may be like an old guy kind of thing. Like you don't care if your name is Jack or if your name is Stormtrooper, if the word that you do is the same.
01:45:38
Speaker
But it allows for that personal connection to happen in a loss for the general public to understand what you're doing. When I tell my friends, no, I work with a stormtrooper. It's like, who the fuck is that guy? But if I tell my friends, no, I'm working with Christian from Colorado. It's like, cool. I don't know the guy, but he's a person.
01:46:03
Speaker
I think being persons will help a lot on driving the industry further. However, I do recognize the benefits of anonymity and the capacity that it gives for certain things to happen. And privacy is something that should always be respected. What else I will change from the industry?
01:46:36
Speaker
this like get rich quick mentality or or like this pump and dump mentality um i think there is a lot of people that are participating in buying shit coins buying um coins or things that they think they are going to make money out of it while in reality it's just like a group of 10-15 people that are really making money out of it
01:47:04
Speaker
and you are just giving them money. I think if crypto is so full of scams and problems and things going wrong, it difficulties significantly the capacity that we have to go mainstream. Don't get me wrong, it's still happening on more traditional technologies like emails.
01:47:32
Speaker
I am the prince of whatever, please claim this million dollars when clicking on this link. That can happen on emails, that can happen on websites, but in crypto, right now it's such a big part of it. You need to be super, super careful which link you click, which person you talk to, everything around crypto, you need to be super careful.
01:47:59
Speaker
And I think that's a problem that is significantly impacting our capacity to go to market or go to big markets. And the biggest problem is a lot of people participate in these things and not being aware that they are kind of benefiting someone else. They
Emotions Towards Crypto's Evolution
01:48:19
Speaker
are not benefiting themselves. And yes, that's pretty much it, I think.
01:48:29
Speaker
depending on the week, I hate crypto or I love crypto. And I think that's something that everyone who really knows and really is in the ecosystem goes through. Because there are so many good things. At the same time, there are so many things that is like,
01:48:47
Speaker
Really, are we still doing this? So I think it's just a maturing industry, a maturing ecosystem, and hopefully it improves significantly on the next months and years.
Optimism for Crypto's Future
01:49:03
Speaker
Yeah, I think it will. I think it will. There's a lot of people building in the space now, and obviously that's only going to increase, right? So as more people come into the space and as more projects start to really
01:49:14
Speaker
kind of kick off and launch or whatever it might be, then I guess those issues and those problems there that you've talked about, hopefully we kind of iron them out and it's kind of smooth sailing afterwards. But who knows when that's going to, I mean, it might happen six months, it might happen in three years. We don't really know. Cool.
Advice for Future Web3 Leaders
01:49:36
Speaker
So Pepe, if you could summarize then all the advice that you've
01:49:41
Speaker
spoken about today, which is a lot of it, to be honest. There's some really, really great stuff that you've talked us through. As a leader in Web3, if someone is looking to follow in your footsteps to become the CTO of a really successful Web3 project, any particular advice that you could summarise for them
01:50:02
Speaker
I think it's been very clear through the almost two hours that we've been talking that I consider very, very important for people to be humans and people to treat people as humans. Be the person you would like your boss to be. Be the person. And the other way around, also, if you are an employee and you want to keep being an employee, be the employee that, as a boss, you would like to have.
01:50:33
Speaker
Make sure that you sacrifice things according to your priorities. Make sure that if you want to prioritize your career, you are putting that extra effort. But if you would rather prioritize your personal life, that's totally fine. Just be aware of and transmit that information to the people surrounding you.
Enjoying Life and Remote Work Benefits
01:50:56
Speaker
And enjoy life.
01:51:00
Speaker
You don't have to be working hard 24 hours, seven days a week. Enjoy life and take profit of the benefits that remote working or high salaries may give you. Get fancy sushi and be happy.
01:51:23
Speaker
That's great.
Closing Gratitude and Reflections
01:51:24
Speaker
Well, Pepe, thank you very much for taking the time to have a conversation today. It's been brilliant. You shared some great advice. Yeah, a lot of the advice I'm going to take on board for myself as well. Yeah, I really, really do appreciate your time. And yeah, I'll speak to you soon. Thank you so much, Jack, for the invitation. It's been a pleasure. Yeah, no problem. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye.