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Don't underestimate the value of chance opportunity, Randy Harrison, VP of Engineering, BlockDaemon
51 Plays1 year ago
I spoke with Randy Harrison, the VP of Engineering at Blockdaemon - one of the largest blockchain infrastructure providers that manages nodes and payment rails for blockchain networks.
We talked about Randy's career journey, his top tips for building a successful career for yourself, stepping into leadership, the state of Web3, what the future holds, how humans underestimate the power of a chance opportunity and so much more...
Behind the blockchain is a series of conversations with technology 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 Randy Harrison
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Behind the Blockchain. Today I'm joined by Randy Harrison, VP of engineering at Blockdemon. Randy, welcome to the show. How are you? I'm doing great. How are you? Yeah, not too bad. Thank you. Not too bad. Thanks for being here.
Journey into Blockchain
00:00:14
Speaker
So, Randy, for people who don't know who you are, could you introduce yourself, please? Yeah, I'm Randy Harrison, Vice President of Engineering at Blockdemon.
00:00:25
Speaker
I have been in technology my whole life and have been in blockchain since about 2016, 2015, late 2015. And yeah, I'm a true believer in kind of the overall mission of our industry and what we're trying to do with Web3. It's good to hear. So why did you initially take an interest in technology?
Tech Trends: Past vs Present
00:00:53
Speaker
Yeah, I've been interested in technology since I was a child, to be quite honest. I was one of those kind of geeky children that built electronic circuits and such. I'm of the age where computers were really starting to take off as I was going through college. I had the opportunity to be on some of the really early internet, both through college and into my early career, which I started off in technology consulting as a way to
00:01:20
Speaker
really try to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I knew I didn't want to do kind of say like accounting lawyer or that kind of stuff. I really wanted to go much more into a kind of an engineering and technology discipline. And the thing that has really drawn me to it is I like to solve very, very difficult problems. And as such to
00:01:42
Speaker
solve those problems and create tools or platforms for dealing with those sorts of problems in the future. And of course, those problems have changed as technology has evolved over the years. Yeah, I can imagine. What, from someone who, as you said, has gone through the, when computers were kind of all the rage and then going through the internet period and then now going through the Web3 period as well, what sort of similarities have you seen between what's happening now compared with the .com
00:02:12
Speaker
era bubble. Yeah, there are definitely some similarities, although it is not an exact parallel. People like to say history repeats itself. I like to think it more sort of rhymes vaguely. But the parts that are similar are the over exuberant sort of hype cycle that comes along with it, generally with a very large and consolidated push of investment. And then shortly thereafter followed by some kind of fallout where the
00:02:43
Speaker
The strong companies survive and the weaker companies get gobbled up or sort of fade away. I've seen that very similar with didn't happen so much with web 2.0 because those tended to be really large companies, mostly in Silicon Valley. And while there was some of that same kind of cycle there it.
00:03:01
Speaker
it seemed much smaller to me. What's happening with a blockchain Web3 seems to have gone through a pretty similar cycle to .com in that regard. And the main thing I see now is similar back then is the companies that focus on tangible specific goals and delivering value and they kind of ignore all the FUD that's going on and really focus on building. Those tended to be the companies that won. And I saw that in the .com and I believe that that's what's happening now as well.
00:03:31
Speaker
Okay, wow. So anyone listening who's a founder of a company, just focus on that. Yeah, I would just focus very, very specifically on building the solutions and getting those solutions in the hands of those that you're trying to solve the problems for so that they see that value. At the end of the day, customers and partners will go to value more than they'll go to.
00:03:55
Speaker
marketing or hype or the perception of value. Really, people look for true value. What problem are you solving for me? How valuable is that to me? And what things can I do with your platform or with your tools? Nice. Yeah, great advice.
Career Path Insights
00:04:17
Speaker
So could you talk us through your career journey so far, what's led you to this point?
00:04:24
Speaker
Yeah, I've had a kind of circuitous career path, you could say. I kind of started off pretty early as a founder and CTO of technology companies. That was in the telecom space where I really designed, architected, and led the development of some pretty complex network element management systems in telecom used by a lot of the large telecoms. And that was pretty interesting.
00:04:52
Speaker
Reflecting back on it, I was a bit young and naive in certain aspects, though I did learn a lot of what it takes to be a successful technology leader going through that. Kind of mid-career, I deviated and spent about seven years in a very large corporate environment. I, like many, saw the grass was greener on the other side at the time.
00:05:15
Speaker
and had a young family at the time. So it was looking for more predictability and stability. First, I'll say, I think that's a bit of a myth that people think they get predictability and stability in a large corporation. But yeah, I went to Autodesk where I led the digital transformation, which at the time Autodesk was still really a pre-web one company, box software, perpetual licenses, shipped to customers on physical media kind of thing.
00:05:44
Speaker
And we just leapfrog straight into a cloud environment. So I was really focused on web to enablement at the time, a lot of building cloud infrastructure. And what led me at the end of that, as I was ending that tenure in my career, was right around when Bitcoin was really starting to become more popular. So 2013, 2014, more people were learning about it. I started doing my own mining. What is this? It's interesting.
00:06:11
Speaker
you know, kind of got involved, bought a few Ace USB A6 just kind of toy around. And I became a big believer in blockchain and decentralized networks, and was really encouraging Autodesk as we were building out our cloud ecosystem, which included a cloud credit kind of model.
00:06:29
Speaker
to explore and be a pioneer in adopting some of that, at least internally within our own content network. It was really too bleeding edge for Autodesk at the time, but since we were done with the digital transformation and I had learned what I
00:06:47
Speaker
didn't know before going into a corporate role, which is it's just as hard and just as volatile as a startup in many ways. I decided to move back into the world of startups and dove headfirst into blockchain. Worked with a number of little companies, kind of doing pre-seed and kind of seed round sort of technology ideation and building out proof of concepts and such.
00:07:16
Speaker
And yeah, that's when I ran into some old colleagues who'd ended up at Coinbase and got pulled into Coinbase, had a great tenure there, and one thing led to another there. And as Coinbase acquired Bison Trails, which they turned into Coinbase Cloud, my involvement with that is what ultimately led me to meet Konstantin, the CEO of Blockthemon. And that's how I ended up in my current role.
00:07:46
Speaker
That's cool. That's cool.
Role of Enterprise Architecture
00:07:48
Speaker
So you spent quite a long time as an enterprise architect or head of enterprise architecture, obviously at Coinbase. A lot of web three companies probably aren't big enough yet or aren't quite mature enough yet to need enterprise architecture. But for those listening, can you just explain a little bit more about what enterprise architecture is and what you do as an enterprise architect?
00:08:11
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. It is interesting because you'll get different answers from different people as to what enterprise architecture is. Same reason you'll get different answers from different people if you just ask in general what IT is. If you think in a web 2.0 or kind of older school sense, people think of IT as more of a support function and kind of enabling function. And I think classic enterprise architecture was really focused on IT internal systems and kind of business enablement, business productivity type of systems.
00:08:41
Speaker
You can think of CRM systems like Salesforce, CRP systems like SAP, that kind of thing. But what has happened over the last, say, 15-ish years is IT itself has really morphed. There's still a support function, but a lot of what we used to call IT is now indistinguishable from the engineering platforms that host the products and kind of the whole enablement of the services being provided by whatever the company may be.
00:09:09
Speaker
And as such enterprise architecture, I tend to think of it more as strategic architecture. It has morphed into not just focusing on internal business enablement and productivity, but on kind of the harmony of the integration across all of the systems and solutions. A lot of what we do these days, as far as providing services to customers,
00:09:34
Speaker
creates a ton of data. There's a lot of transactional concerns to manage as well. And those, there's not as clear of a boundary between
00:09:42
Speaker
what data is really internal say business information data versus what data is the product data itself. And I see the enterprise architect or strategic architect as having the function of making sure that those things are being built deliberately so that you don't build like a messy service spaghetti mesh ends up with a kind of non deliberate service architecture. Many folks have gone through sort of the life cycle of
00:10:09
Speaker
moving to microservices, database per service sorts of architectures, and then gotten to a point where every service practically has to know about this internal state of every other service in order to realize a transactional outcome. And what the architects function is in that regard is to look at the future and figure out how do we keep evolving
00:10:33
Speaker
our design and architecture in a very deliberate manner, say like with a saga pattern for services, such that we can still keep a reasonable encapsulation and modularization of the functions. We don't want to have to know about the internal state of each service just in order to accomplish a transaction. We'd really like every service to be atomic as much as possible.
00:10:59
Speaker
And so that's really what I see the architect's role as being. A lot of it is focused on data. We generate a lot of data and that's increasing non-linearly as technology progresses. And so approaches to dealing with that data are becoming ever more critical to the success of potential future products and services.
00:11:26
Speaker
For sure. And are you still heavily involved in service architecture and enterprise architecture at Blockdemon now? Yeah, I am for sure. One of the things I did do at Blockdemon was establish a strategic architecture function. We intentionally did not call it enterprise architecture because we were trying to move past kind of the old school labels. But yeah, I'm still very heavily involved in that. Myself, we have a brilliant head of that group who she came from Lending Club, B. Clark.
00:11:56
Speaker
Yeah, she really is responsible for the overall architecture at
Strategic Architecture at Blockdemon
00:12:00
Speaker
Block Demon. And it's something that we try to get everyone to think architecturally.
00:12:06
Speaker
Architecture doesn't work when it's just people in an ivory tower drawing diagrams. Architecture does work when you're shoulder to shoulder with the engineers, figuring out what their problems are and then figuring out patterns and kind of creating libraries and reference designs for those engineers so that they can more readily access the kind of existing code base and design that's already there. Okay. And did you always know that you wanted to do that?
00:12:37
Speaker
Oh boy. Yeah. Uh, probably not, but, um, I like to solve difficult problems, puzzles, if you will. And, um,
00:12:52
Speaker
I am a technology geek. And so those two things together really inevitably lead you to some aspect of design and architecture, whether you are professionally calling yourself an architect or a designer. I've found that all good developers or engineers have a big part of their brain that is thinking about architectural concerns as they're doing. So it might be really down to the units and the modules that they're working on, or it might be more broadly into the kind of end to end system.
00:13:21
Speaker
But yeah, I think inevitably everybody gets an aspect of that. I couldn't tell you whether I was really deliberate in moving my career into that space. I think that just sort of happened naturally. Okay. And did you start your career with some kind of goals in mind where you wanted to end up or where you wanted to be working and what position and that sort of stuff?
00:13:48
Speaker
The answer is yes and no, kind of broader goals. I wasn't one of those folks that said, oh, in 10 years I want to be a director with ex-responsibility or a founder with a company of 500 people or whatever, something like that. I really wanted to be successful in whatever it was I did.
00:14:10
Speaker
I also very much value independence and the ability as much as possible to balance risk with progress. Uh, I avoid actively avoided situations where there's very low risk tolerance. That's not the sort of career for me, you know, where you have to get everything exactly right and never have to redo anything. I'm much more of an agile kind of a nativist, if you will. And I think iteratively and solve problems iteratively. Um,
00:14:40
Speaker
Yeah. Nice. And are there any notable things that you've learned throughout your career that have really helped you achieve the position that you're in now? Obviously problem solving being a huge one, but that's maybe a broad thing to say, you know, I learned problem solving in this area. That's just something that kind of comes either over time or naturally you'll get thrown into enough situations and you start to work out how to get out of them. But is there anything really noticeable in your career that
Engineering Principles
00:15:06
Speaker
you say, right, these are the main things that have really helped me excel.
00:15:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think that one of the main things is developing a healthy self-awareness, being able to be critical of yourself in a positive manner. I think most engineers are self-critical just by their nature, but that can
00:15:27
Speaker
turn into a negative sort of feedback, being positive, being self-aware, and being flexible. It's often the case in engineering that you will see an optimal solution to a problem, but that's not feasible for reasons that frustrate you from an engineering perspective. There are business reasons. There are people-related reasons. There are a whole host of reasons that you may have to pursue
00:15:56
Speaker
a less optimal route to solving the problem, developing the service, the product, the solution, or whatever it is you're working on.
00:16:03
Speaker
And so I've found that being flexible is super important and that comes with a big part of empathy, understanding the perspective of others who have very different roles and functions, understanding why the finance people think the way they do, why the marketing people need what they need, and why the sales people are concerned about the things they're concerned about. It's very important to project yourself as much as possible into understanding their reality and what they're working with. The world doesn't revolve around engineering.
00:16:33
Speaker
Although most of us as engineers like to think that way. And so, you know, being a flexible part of a bigger solution and knowing that you optimizing the whole often means that no specific individual part is going to be optimized. It's sort of that complex system problem. Okay. And this might be quite a tricky question to answer. How does someone start on that self-awareness journey in your opinion? Yeah, I think.
00:17:02
Speaker
I think that's where flexibility comes in and is very important. I think as human beings, we tend to underestimate the value of opportunities as they come up. You may have an opportunity because you've met someone at a conference and they end up putting you in touch with their boss or someone at their company. And there's a very short window opportunity where maybe you've got a great opportunity to partner or go work with that team.
00:17:31
Speaker
work on that stuff. But we'll tend to think as humans, well, I got that opportunity many more will pop up. Or we tend to think, oh, I got into this job because or into this role or this situation because, you know, I did A, B, and C. And there's a great book that changed my thinking on all this, Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb. And we as humans tend to not really value the chance part of things.
00:17:57
Speaker
And we can't control it. Chance is just chance. But what we can control is our flexibility and how we deal with that. And so what I would say to folks is if you're looking to really move your career in a kind of particular direction towards a goal, is to have the courage to seize the opportunities when they come up. And to understand that those opportunities themselves are generated largely by chance, being in the right place, the right time, hearing the right thing from the right person, talking to the right person, whatever.
00:18:26
Speaker
And once that happens, really evaluating it as a valuable option that you have for the moment. And like all options, there's an expiration period. And once it's gone, it's gone. That's that's good advice. What was the name of that book again? Food by Randomness by Nassim Taleb. Food by Randomness. Yeah, I like all of those. Anti-fragility is probably the one most people are familiar with that he's written most recently.
00:18:51
Speaker
If you were around during the dot com era, the black swan, you know, black swan events, he's, he's sort of the origin of that type of thinking. Okay. Nice. Yeah. I'm gonna, I'm going to check that out. I'll let you know what I, what I think to it after I, after I read it. So when, so could you talk me through a day in the life of the vice president of engineering at block Damon? What does, what does a day look like? Yeah.
Daily Responsibilities at Blockdemon
00:19:17
Speaker
Well, each day can be definitely different. But in general, a day in the life will be focused, we'll say about a third or so on the internal organization, the health of all of the different gears of the machine, if you will. So as Bryce present engineering, you're not just responsible for the coders that are writing the code. That's a big part of it.
00:19:43
Speaker
But you have the quality folks who need to ensure the quality of what you're producing. You have, of course, architects. You have a very tight interface with a product group and you need to work very fluidly with the product group.
00:19:57
Speaker
For a larger company like ours, there's often a group that helps to manage projects, so sort of a team of project managers. And understanding how that whole organization is working, things that could be improved, things that are at risk, and just generally all the people stuff that comes along with that.
00:20:16
Speaker
That's a big part of the job. And I think it is important for folks that want to move into engineering leadership to understand that excelling at the technical aspects is sort of table stakes. You really need to understand the technologies to have credibility and to provide guidance just from your wisdom and your knowledge set. But as you sort of move more and more into management,
00:20:40
Speaker
You just as a real realistic outcome of that you have less time to really be hands on with all the code yourself you can't do that. If you try you will, you will fail after you get past dozen or so engineers. So understanding how to
00:20:56
Speaker
raise up your own leaders and to coach and mentor, that's a big part of the job as well. And then the more technical aspects, looking at the sorts of metrics that we're gathering, making sure those metrics are on track with what you're targeting. Those are the obvious things and then some non-obvious things as well. So the obvious things are
00:21:19
Speaker
you know, like, say, scrum metrics, how well is your team's doing throughput, cycle time, stuff like that. The less obvious ones are employee engagement. What's the morale of your team? How many external recruiters are seeing an opportunity to start pulling people out of your company? The more successful you are, the more attention you're going to get, and the more your team's morale is going to really matter as far as their own internal
00:21:44
Speaker
effectiveness with one another, but also the stability of the team. It is very expensive to find good talent, bring it in, acclimate it and have them adapt to the culture of your team. And then obviously all the onboarding knowledge-wise, them understanding your stack, your code base, your SDLC, all of those things.
00:22:12
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. There's a lot of recruiters out there that are probably trying to tap up people who work at Block Demon, I can imagine. It's a daily struggle to fight them off, probably. Yes. It will come in waves, but yeah, right now we are definitely in a wave. Did the team let you know? Did they tell you if they're being messaged and everything?
00:22:38
Speaker
Yeah, it depends upon every individual's different and even each team, especially teams that aren't ephemeral, that tend to sort of work on the same thing for some period of time, they'll develop some cohesion and each one has its own personality. Some teams will tell you quite openly what's going on and others will be a little more guarded about it. And yeah, you really have to be super adaptable also as an engineering leader so that you can understand
00:23:08
Speaker
the internal culture of your API Golang development team may be very, very different than your data team's internal culture.
00:23:21
Speaker
That's fair enough. And I guess you get the odd person knocking on the door saying, Randy, I've just been offered this much money. You need to match this now because I'm being hit up all the time by all these recruiters. Yeah, you do. And that's a difficult challenge when you're hiring and firing sort of a manager that has that responsibility because you have to consider it in the context of your whole team.
00:23:45
Speaker
Again, if you just allow every employee to essentially hold you hostage because they've gotten competitive offers, that can be bad. But if you don't face it, that could be bad as well. So it's really a kind of, it depends case by case in it. It's very, very context, context heavy as to, um, what your kind of response should be to each one. Yeah. Tricky. I, uh, I can imagine. Yeah, for sure.
00:24:15
Speaker
Out of everything that you've just listed there, obviously, there's a huge amount that it sounds like you get involved in. What's your favorite part of the job? Oh, boy. I think my favorite part is when we are ideating new products or services.
Innovating Products and Services
00:24:33
Speaker
And it's a space that's not well explored, or even if it is well explored, there's no consensus on the solution space for that particular problem.
00:24:45
Speaker
So a lot of the stuff going on right now with layer zeros, for example, with dealing with the fact we are moving to a multi-chain future, that's going to be the reality, which I think is a positive. I know some folks would rather see much more standardization and kind of simple clarity, but I like the kind of marketplace of different ideas and competing approaches.
00:25:13
Speaker
But solving for the problems in how to do that, how to create solutions on top of a multi-chain architecture that still work for your target customers and users. That's the kind of thing that I find super interesting and is the favorite part of my job, is just being able to trial and error and explore and find out what other smart people are thinking and doing, all of that stuff.
00:25:42
Speaker
Um, you know, contrasting to the least favorite part, which is probably most engineering leaders. Least favorite part is cost optimization. Sort of like, how do you squeeze the optimization of your cloud infrastructure or another 2% sort of stuff? You have to do it again, sort of state table stakes, but, um, it's not quite as rewarding to, you know, you're looking at spreadsheets in that case. It's not, it's not the fun stuff. No, definitely not fun stuff.
Blockdemon's Evolution
00:26:10
Speaker
So, um, could you introduce us to block demon and a little bit more detail, please? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So block demon's been around for, um, five ish, maybe six years now. Um, and, uh, we were one of the first in the space of, uh, blockchain infrastructure provider, uh, started off by, uh, hosting, uh, nodes and really just, uh, helping customers to set up, uh, primarily at the time, Ethereum nodes, um, cosmos validators pretty early on those sorts of things. Um, and.
00:26:40
Speaker
We quickly evolved into partnering with a number of projects, whether that's scale or stellar, those sorts of teams. And we also developed an abstraction layer called Ubiquity on top of the nodes, which greatly simplifies in managing those nodes, whether those are validators, history nodes, relayers,
00:27:05
Speaker
even oracles, all the different sort of node types. And we are still very much a nodes business, but as we'll say like 2021, 22 came around, we began to develop a lot of APIs on top of that staking APIs, most notably.
00:27:22
Speaker
And again, providing a common architecture and interface for customers to be able to accomplish staking goals and to do that with a simple API. We're still in the process of adding more and more protocols to those APIs. And most recently, we've moved into the MPC wallet space. And we acquired a company called CPR from Denmark.
00:27:50
Speaker
That company had a great MPC wallet that lots of banks and other kind of super secure customers used. And what we've basically done is blockchain enabled that and we're rapidly in the process of selling that to institutional customers and even enterprise customers that are starting to show interest in that.
00:28:13
Speaker
So Blockdemon is really building on top of our competency and expertise, which is nodes at the end of the day, knowing protocols, having close relationships with those project teams, and then abstracting and normalizing the services that our customers really want to leverage off of those. Cool. And how does working at a business like Blockdemon and where you're at Coinbase before, how does that differ to
00:28:43
Speaker
more of the traditional, I'll say Web2 businesses that you worked with previously. Yeah, yeah. And I'll also say that it's very different between Blockdemon and Coinbase as well. Obviously, there's aspects of Coinbase's business that are similar to Blockdemon's, Coinbase Cloud in particular. But in all of those businesses, we are working with a set of customers who
00:29:06
Speaker
Our forward-thinking early adopters, whether that's a lot of the retail customers, obviously for Coinbase, but Coinbase also has a very large institutional business. That's actually a lot of where I spent most of my time with Coinbase was more work more on the institutional side, helping to cobble together solutions in that space.
00:29:26
Speaker
And those customers tend to be early adopters forward thinking. They tend to think that they understand a lot about blockchain and Web3, but a lot of our role is also helping to educate them in a manner that's appropriate because obviously we live and breathe this day in and day out as new entrants are starting to, the early adopters are starting to adopt things that, you know, that we're offering.
00:29:56
Speaker
helping them to understand what they're really looking for and helping to educate those customers. I would say in a web two space, it is much more about kind of a more traditional sales approach, which is you have a problem, you can't reach X number of customers, the CRM system will enable you to more distill your customer data and target different customer cohorts and track all your pipeline and your opportunities and that kind of thing.
00:30:26
Speaker
So it tends to be much more systematic and process-driven at a Web2 company. Whereas I see in our space, it's much more idea-driven. So there are ideas that we are trying to implement and translate into valuable solutions. In the Web2 space, those solutions tend to already exist. They've been built 10, 15 years ago.
00:30:52
Speaker
And so it's more about convincing customers that this solution is going to solve your problem versus this very similar other solution that would also probably solve your problem. Yeah, sure. So I guess there's more innovation in the Web3 space. A ton more innovation. And that by its very nature changes the sort of customers and partners that you will work with.
00:31:17
Speaker
You'll tend to get a very risk averse customers in web to space, especially these days, since it's so, um, mature at this point. Sure. How can most people in web3 at the moment, uh, probably quite the opposite. They've probably got, uh, they're probably willing to take quite a lot of risks. I would have thought, um, yeah, they are. And what's interesting about it is.
00:31:40
Speaker
Some of those customers are by their own nature, risk averse businesses. You can think of banks, for example. A lot of those banks, because their overall business is one of stability, they have to closely manage their risk. But what I've found is, especially with institutional sorts of financial institutional customers, they understand risk well. So they're able to take calculated risks in specific spaces. And that's a lot of our customers. That's the kind of teams that we're dealing with.
00:32:08
Speaker
they know they're in a risky space, they've isolated and contained the risk, and they're trying to innovate together with us in that space. I think other custom again, comparing to web to risk tends to not be thought of as compartmentalized like that tends to be just overall our company culture is one of being risk averse. So we don't want to make a big decision without lots of committees and input in, you know, months and months of process.
00:32:38
Speaker
Yeah, okay. And if someone was stepping into the Web3 space for the first time, or say someone might already be here and they're looking to build a successful career for themselves, any advice that you could pass on to someone who might be coming from Web2 into Web3?
Advice for Developers
00:32:57
Speaker
Uh, yeah, now it would be dependent upon what kind of role they're looking for, but assuming they're a developer, um, a coder and they're looking to move into the web three space, my advice would be to find a project you're really, really excited and interesting in, and you're excited about. Uh, for me, some of the early gateway drugs were a library. I was very interested in that protocol early on.
00:33:19
Speaker
More lately our weave Solana I really like I'm a rust guy so I really like you know sort of that ecosystem But the reason I say that is dive in Really start to spend time on discord telegram within those communities see if you can contribute to those projects even if all you're doing is helping to document things at first and
00:33:42
Speaker
or helping to write tests around things to others. And as you learn more about that space, about that particular stack, you also start to get an idea of who's who. You'll meet people. And while every protocol is somewhat different and some are wildly different from one another, that type of thinking that you'll develop and that type of working style, which are different than a lot of other industries, we're not the only industry,
00:34:11
Speaker
There are very few industries that are so open source and so global in nature just from inception. And learning to work well in that sort of environment. And the reason I say to start with a project is because I really think people who have practical knowledge are then able to more easily build upon that as you kind of abstract up to, I don't know, like leadership roles or design roles, architecture roles, things like that. It's much harder
00:34:36
Speaker
Uh, to be credible, if you're just sort of coming in top down and saying, Oh, well, you know, I'm just going to kind of look across all the protocols and sort of, you know, have, have, uh, you know, a tentative sort of understanding of, um, but technology is technology. It's, it's not the case in web three. It's, I would say it's almost more of a, uh, mindset and a philosophy difference than it is just a technology difference.
00:35:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting you say that about joining a project and really getting stuck in and trying to help out where you can. I've spoken to so many people over the last 6, 12, 18 months that
00:35:14
Speaker
actually started off by just helping a project doing the odd kind of bit here and there and then actually the project turn around and say you know what you're really helpful uh let's have a chat and end up offering them a full-time job and then now they're working in the project as a you know lead engineer or could be ahead of community or whatever it might be so that's actually such a powerful way to actually break into the space.
Growth in Web3
00:35:37
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And there's a lot of opportunity for rapid growth in the space. And that's true in any cycle like this, where there's a kind of a new paradigm shift, a new wave of technology that's coming through. If you're good at what you do, you're passionate, and you focus, and you constantly are learning, you have to learn something new every day, you'll find just naturally, a matter of fact, you might find yourself being pulled along faster than you want to be. And I almost say that that's as much of a problem as
00:36:06
Speaker
knowing how to progress. In corporate or kind of older school industries, you know, it's very hard to progress forward. And we have sort of the opposite problem where if you become known for being able to write really good smart contracts in a particular protocol, you're going to have people starting to try to pull you maybe faster than you're ready for. And so, you know, again, that's where that self-awareness comes in. Because if you, the best way to
00:36:33
Speaker
ruin a really great engineer is to move them into management. You really need to be deliberate and know what you're sort of getting into. But the good news is there's a lot of room to try different things also in our industry. Again, because we have this very iterative sort of philosophy and mindset in this industry. And so nothing's as permanent, whereas you can make career limiting moves much more easily in kind of a rigid web two corporate environment.
00:37:03
Speaker
for sure. It's interesting that you bring up what you said there about ruining a good engineer and moving them into management. That's something that's come up quite a lot in the conversations that I've had so far and on the podcast is
00:37:18
Speaker
moving engineers into management or people kind of stepping into those management roles or being forced into it, missing coding, not really wanting to go down the management route, just kind of taking that opportunity and then leaving businesses and going doing an individual contributor role somewhere else. Yeah, that's been quite a common theme and quite a common thing that I see engineers make and mistakes I see projects make, sorry, all the time really.
00:37:49
Speaker
So if someone is... Sorry, go ahead. No, no, after... Yeah, I was going to say, I think that that's just by the nature of the fact that we are starved for talent in Web3. Well, it seems like there's all kinds of people doing Web3 in our universe. It's a very small little universe compared to the overall tech industry at large.
00:38:17
Speaker
And so it's just a product or a consequence of that kind of scarcity as to why engineers, the better they are, will tend to get pulled in different directions. And the good news is that
00:38:35
Speaker
This industry will mature. It'll continue to grow. It'll continue to mature. And that volatility will die down over time. And so it depends upon your kind of horizon. Are you early, mid or late career? And depending where you're at, the earlier you are in your career, the less you really need to worry about it so much. There will be plenty of
Value of Individual Contributors in Web3
00:38:53
Speaker
opportunity for you as a leader, you know, a couple of years forward. You know, even say like five years forward, which seems like, you know, a geological time in blockchain.
00:39:05
Speaker
You know, five years from now, it'll be a very, very different world than it is today. And so if you're early in your career, you're going to have tons of opportunities for leadership or for individual contributor. I also think we're going to see a rise, a continued rise of
00:39:19
Speaker
the parity of valuing individual contributors versus managers. The kind of old school way of thinking is you've got to move into management to move up. And I think that in Web3 we are going to shift a lot of that thinking because it is super important to have very high value individual contributors because they act as thought leaders.
00:39:41
Speaker
And you don't need to burden them with people management or management kind of stuff. They should be able to progress their career and be just as successful as vice president engineering because they're just as important, arguably more important in many cases. Yeah, I agree. I think that that mindset shift.
00:39:58
Speaker
has definitely probably already happened to some degree. I see tons of principal engineering roles or technical architect positions where there's no line management involved at all. It's really solving technical problems and then working between different teams to kind of jump in on tons of different problems and really trying to enable the teams to kind of solve those challenges really. So yeah, I see those types of roles a lot. Going back to something that you said,
00:40:26
Speaker
uh said before about sometimes people can be pulled along too quickly so if you're really good at smart contract engineering on a on a certain protocol and get loads of people kind of knocking on your door and putting you along do you think that's a good thing because it forces you to level up your skills that much faster than maybe you would do if you were just kind of left to your own devices like what what's your view on on that
00:40:51
Speaker
Yeah, I think in general, it's a good thing. I think the only time it can be, I shouldn't say only time, but I think the main reason it may become a bad thing.
00:40:59
Speaker
is if you're not taking deliberate moves. And so you're always balancing trying new things and seeing if that works for you, if you're good at it, if you want to keep moving that direction, like moving into management, for example, versus getting pushed there and then feeling like you're trapped. And the big risk is you lose your
00:41:24
Speaker
kind of your specific tech, you lose the edge on your specific technical knowledge. Basically, if you're not coding and staying up, I mean, in our ecosystems, if you're not staying up to date, day by day, you fall behind pretty quickly because the technologies are moving so quickly. And so that's what you're balancing is, none of us are, you know, can create more hours in the day. So you have a limited amount of time and focus to
00:41:51
Speaker
to pay attention to, and you have to ration that somewhat deliberately. And yeah, you're going to divest from one area to invest in another. For sure. I think going into the management side of things maybe too quickly, especially in the Web3 space right now, I think that also does limit the job opportunities that you can get, to be honest. There are obviously a lot of small startups who need
00:42:22
Speaker
need their engineering teams to still code and they need their managers to really still be lead engineers essentially as opposed to managers, right? So moving into that pure management type stuff too early can have a bit of a negative effect and really reduce the amount of opportunity that you have. That's what I've seen anyway.
00:42:40
Speaker
It definitely can in our space. And this is true, I think, of all newer industries. You'll tend to have the pragmatically, you'll have a lot of player coaches, a lot of leads and engineers or leads and managers who are also still doing individual contributor work. And I think that what we're starting to see is some companies are becoming like blocking block demon are becoming more successful and growing is it becomes less and less
00:43:08
Speaker
effective to have that sort of player coach sort of mentality. So you get folks having getting pushed more to peer management. And that's really where you start losing your edge. If you if you really think you want to stay as an individual contributor, you sort of have
00:43:23
Speaker
a bit of an inflection point there, a decision to make. The good news is a lot of startups, earlier stage startups, you still can kind of do both in a lot of situations. But you just have to be realistic about knowing that that doesn't scale well. And so as companies get larger, inevitably you will get put into more pure sort of management functions. For sure. Do you miss coding or do you still code yourself?
00:43:51
Speaker
I miss coding as a daily activity. I still do code. I burn a lot of my evening hours. Again, because I'm a bit of a rust nut, I'm a rust station. So trying to stay up with the latest. Right now I'm trying to really dive deep into kind of like atomics and locks and threading and that kind of stuff, concurrency programming.
00:44:15
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely miss it for sure. I'll tell you, it's a lot easier to deal with code and coders when there's gnarly problems than people in organizations when there's gnarly problems. Really? People problems are wildly more difficult to solve. Yeah, I suppose there's different personalities involved and emotions and that kind of stuff, right? Whereas an engineering problem,
00:44:41
Speaker
There's a way to solve that problem. There may be many possible solutions to most engineering problems, but you can really objectively determine the correctness of whatever solution is there. With people, not so much. I suppose your code doesn't argue back if there's something that they don't quite agree with or something happens that they don't like.
00:45:07
Speaker
Yeah, your code won't argue back and your test will tell you passed or failed. It's not going to go, oh, well, depends on the day. Simple as that. So if someone's stepping into a leadership role for the first time, any advice that you could give them? Probably tons. Yeah. So the two pieces of advice I tend to give are, first, be authentic. People hate inauthentic leaders.
00:45:36
Speaker
And that means being appropriately genuine, transparent, and direct with folks. I think especially if you're coming from a more corporate environment, you'll tend to get wrapped up in this sort of correctness sort of approach to how you deal with people, and it becomes very impersonal.
00:45:57
Speaker
Even when I was in a corporate role, I took a very different approach to that and tried to just be super genuine with folks. And I would also say, be careful of all the systems and books and methods that people come up with for management. The 10, 12 behaviors of successful managers kind of stuff. It's not that there's no value in all that stuff. You can definitely derive value from it.
00:46:23
Speaker
None of those are going to be like flow charts or prescriptive sorts of recipes for how to be good manager because being a good manager is, is a hundred percent contextually sensitive. It depends upon the people, the situation, the circumstances, the history of the culture of the company, all those things. Yeah. That's, that's good advice. And what are some of the biggest challenges that you faced when you first moved into leadership and how did you overcome those? Any, anything that springs to mind?
00:46:54
Speaker
Yeah, well, I first moved into direct leadership really early in my career when I founded, as I'd mentioned, when I found a company building a software and telecom space. And the thing that was toughest for me to learn, and I was sort of forced to learn and make some mistakes along the way, was essentially the combination of finding and hiring good talent, but also being willing to be appropriately
00:47:23
Speaker
critical in feedback and basically get rid of folks that aren't going to work. And sometimes that can be a really negative situation and something you really just don't want to deal with. Sometimes it can be positive. It took me time to really figure out how to do that in a respectful manner and do it in a way that
00:47:44
Speaker
You know, we'll help that person as much as possible to continue in their career seldom have I run into a situation where someone was just totally rotten and needed to go. And, and I didn't care what happened to them. I can't even really think of any specific case where that was. Um, it's usually just the case that it's not the right fit. It's sort of like dating, you know, it doesn't mean that either person's bad. It just means you're not the right match for one another, but you really have to think of your whole goal, the company, the team, the, uh,
00:48:12
Speaker
the effectivity of your group or your team or your department or your company you're managing. And you have to have the right people for that. And, you know, there's some people that are going to work well and some people that aren't going to work well in that situation. And you do not do yourself a service by trying to keep along
00:48:29
Speaker
keep on folks that aren't really a fit. It demoralizes the team. It brings down your overall productivity. That person's going to end up leaving anyway. So that was probably the toughest single thing to learn. And if you are in a higher fire, sort of manage
00:48:44
Speaker
management role, you really have to take that very seriously. And it can weigh heavily on one's conscious. I think that's the part of management that most people don't really realize. I shouldn't say most, but many people don't realize when they jump into it is they see all the leadership parts, but there's also a management part. And that's often the tougher part where you just, you have to make tough decisions. And sometimes there's terrible situations where
00:49:08
Speaker
When I was at Autodesk, we went through a couple of reductions in force and I had to make really critical decisions about who we keep and who we don't keep. And so knowing that you have to be fair, but be logical and rational in making those decisions. Yeah, I remember.
00:49:28
Speaker
making that decision for the first time and having the first kind of conversation in order to kind of have one of those chats with someone. I remember being really nervous at the time, really nervous to go in and have that conversation because it's just something that you can't really prepare for, you can't really train for, you can kind of just run it past, so I run it past my director at the time and we kind of played out what I would say and all this sort of stuff and you really, yeah, I was nervous going into it.
00:49:57
Speaker
But then actually, when you mention there about, you know, it's not necessarily anything about the person, it's just not the right fit. And actually I found that when I had that conversation with someone and I said, look, how do you think this is going?
00:50:09
Speaker
and they said actually you know what I'm not really having that much of a good time and then I kind of said well I can kind of tell and then actually it was quite mutual it wasn't necessarily a really kind of butting heads conversation it was well they know they're not of the right fit I know they're not the right fit so actually it wasn't quite as bad as what I thought it was going to be obviously there are some bad conversations that you're going to have but
00:50:33
Speaker
Yeah, quite often people will know if there is something up, right? Not every time, obviously, but quite often you kind of know, I guess. Any other mistakes maybe that you've made that were some of your biggest learns throughout your career? Maybe focusing more on the learn than the mistake, obviously. Yeah, any other big learns for you?
00:51:03
Speaker
Probably the other big lesson that I learned, which involved some mistakes, a couple successes.
00:51:12
Speaker
both of them kind of in the same sphere is understanding the importance of the culture of your teams. And in particular, avoiding what a lot of people refer to as kind of office politics kind of stuff. And I'm not talking about politics and grand, but sort of the internal dynamic sort of politics, people trying to get ahead of one another. You'll tend to see that more in corporate situations. Startups tend to sort of be a little immune to that, but not completely.
00:51:41
Speaker
And so what I learned is you can't ignore it because it is an interpersonal dynamic of just people trying to work together that just happens naturally. But you also should not embrace it because it tends to be a net negative. It just adds friction and it's a drag on productivity and tends to not be people happy.
00:52:03
Speaker
and makes people distrustful of one another. So not being naive about it. It's going to exist, trying to deal with it in a manner where you keep it contained and you give people plenty of other incentives and reasons to focus on the good things, the things that we're trying to accomplish together as a team, celebrating those wins, that type of stuff. You have to constantly be inoculating yourself. It's like it's a...
00:52:28
Speaker
I don't know how to put it. It's like it's this base infection that's just in the environment that if left to its own devices will sort of grow in. And so if people are in a vacuum of information or of cause or of goals, they'll come up with things. And that's where the politics-y sort of stuff will start to come in, kind of start to creep in.
00:52:50
Speaker
So yeah, don't don't don't be naive about that. I learned that um There were a couple times where I just thought the best answer is just ignore it not acknowledge it Yeah, and I learned that well, it'll just kind of fester and grow then without you. Yeah, I get worse probably Yeah, that's yeah, it's very hard to solve once it really starts to take root for sure nuts, that's really good advice and If you could go back
00:53:17
Speaker
to the start of your career, let's say start of your career, any advice that you'd really love to share with your younger self?
Career Specialization Advice
00:53:27
Speaker
Don't be afraid, I would tell my younger self, don't pick a specific like industry focus too early.
00:53:37
Speaker
While I had a great run in telecom and really liked it, I kind of quickly grabbed onto telecom, thought telecom's the place to be. That's where all the innovation's happening. It was kind of the digital bandwidth sort of revolution.
00:53:53
Speaker
I would have, uh, benefited more if I'd taken more advantage of, uh, I started off with KPMG consulting. Um, and. You know, I had the opportunity to work across lots of different things and I, I got a little bit of that at first, but quickly just grabbed onto telecom to try to make that my specialty. So I guess in a more broad sense, don't specialize too early, especially when you're younger in your career, you you've just gotten more capacity and sort of drive and hunger to just learn everything. And.
00:54:23
Speaker
Don't limit yourself. That will happen naturally over time. Yeah, I like that. I think that's really good advice.
00:54:31
Speaker
I think a lot of people are quite quick to try and specialise in a certain area. For now, that makes sense. Obviously, then you learn tons of different problems from tons of different industries. And then especially now when you're working on problems that don't have a solution yet, they haven't been solved before, being able to pull experience from all of those different areas is probably really helpful and really useful. So yeah, that makes sense.
00:54:58
Speaker
Yeah, I'm definitely more successful today from the time I've spent in functions very far from working with functions or helping in some early consulting to provide solutions for, you know, like financial, corporate finance stuff, accounting sort of stuff. Like I said, marketing information type of things.
00:55:19
Speaker
I'm not an expert in any of those things, but I am better for knowing what it is they do, why they do it, the value it adds, and being able to think kind of from their perspective. Yeah, I like that. That's really good advice. So at the start of our conversation, you briefly touched on it, but why did you take an interest in Web3 and blockchain specifically?
Interest in Decentralized Networks
00:55:46
Speaker
Yeah, the reason I specifically took interest in it, and it happened very quickly for me, is what I believed was developing as the internet grew and the kind of web one became a reality was a kind of naturally diversified and decentralized
00:56:10
Speaker
network system of solutions. You build your solutions on those. And it was a very fair playing field with lots of competition of different ideas and ways of solving problems. And when Web2 really took that and consolidated it and established gatekeepers and much more centrality. And we now have a web and an internet that is controlled by gatekeepers primarily.
00:56:40
Speaker
And what I see with web three is returning that back to more of an open market of ideas with the decentralization, removing those intermediaries. And it's not the intermediaries are always bad. We tend to think that disintermediating middleman, if you will, is always good. And it's often good. It's, it's usually good, but.
00:56:59
Speaker
Sometimes they're there and they're adding value for a reason. That's usually why they got into the mix in the first place. But once it gets to a point where there's gatekeepers and so certain ideas can't get through and certain information can get through or certain transactions are not possible.
00:57:15
Speaker
Web 3 is letting us to level that playing field again and to make it so any entrant. Someone with a great idea in Africa, in Central America, South America, it doesn't matter. You can be successful in Web 3. That is not the case today with Web 2. With Web 2, you've got to go through the corporate gatekeepers to be successful. You can't get
00:57:39
Speaker
an app onto people's phones unless you go through effectively one of two companies for provisioning of those apps to the apps app stores. If they decide that you're competing with something they don't want you competing with, you're not going to get it. Or if they don't like a certain feature or yeah, they can tell you what to change basically. They have control of your entire app, even anything you do. Yeah, no, that makes sense. Yeah, they do. And they're extracting a lot of value
00:58:05
Speaker
Um, out of that without adding value into the total kind of economics of it, in my opinion. Yeah, I know for sure. And this might be quite a tricky question to answer, but is there anything that you would change about the web three space? If you could.
00:58:24
Speaker
Well, yeah, the SEC. Not to be good. I would look for, yeah, it was a bit of a joke, but I only have so. Regulatory clarity is what I would change. I think the same thing's happening in AI right now, to be honest. It's sort of a sister industry that's going through a similar explosion and adoption curve.
00:58:49
Speaker
Regulators always lag. They lag in their understanding. They lag in their action. And we are in a period in our space in Web 3 where the lack of regulatory clarity and the regulation through enforcement approach that primarily the US and our largest trade allies have been following suit in is really detrimental to what we're going through.
00:59:13
Speaker
If there's one thing I could change about our industry, it would be that. I tend to like fewer regulations, just my own philosophy on it. But as long as we have clear regulations, everyone can work with those and move forward. Yeah, you know what you're building, you know the standards that you're building to, you know how to follow it. It's easier, I suppose. Do you think? Yeah, just knowing where you can't cross the line. Right now, we don't really know for sure.
00:59:41
Speaker
where the line is. You're probably, well you will be much closer to this than I am, but do you think regulations are close? Do you think they'll be coming in soon? Do you think it will still be another year, two years, three years, six months? What do you think?
Regulatory Challenges in Web3
01:00:00
Speaker
I think it's really hard to predict the timing in the US. The way we tend to
01:00:06
Speaker
handle things like this in the US is through about the messiest political process you could imagine. So it will probably continue to get worse until something happens that forces Congress to take action and pass some kind of legislation. I saw that in the early web one, you know, as we went through the dot com. There was really no
01:00:26
Speaker
really not a lot of clarity regulations. And then once it just became untenable and was almost pure chaos, finally, then Congress took some action and clarified a lot of that. Okay. Well, hopefully, but whether that happened in six months or three years, I couldn't tell you because that gets into the world of real politics and you might as well roll it out. Yeah, for sure. Well, hopefully, uh, hopefully the industry doesn't go into complete chaos, uh, before that happens. Hopefully we can get some kind of, of, uh, kind of standards in place, I guess.
01:00:56
Speaker
In your opinion, are there any other challenges in Web3 right now that you think we need to overcome before the utilization of blockchain becomes more mainstream?
Accessing Web3 Solutions
01:01:10
Speaker
Well, I do think that the simplification of access to the features, the
01:01:17
Speaker
of things that one wants to do on Web3. It is still relatively difficult. It doesn't feel like it to us. Difficult to access those solutions, like conducting DeFi transactions. If you do that all the time, you know, you grab your ledger or your, I use actually grid or whatever, you know, you grab your wallet and you know your bridges that you're going to use and you know how to get your stable coins and facilitate transactions and all that.
01:01:47
Speaker
But that is innovators only and super early adopters. If we want that curve to move beyond that, it has to become accessible and understandable to folks who are not going to invest in that like detailed level of kind of arcane self control and management of the things that they're trying to do. The transactions are very hands-on. You've got to really be involved in these transactions and know what you're doing or you can get in trouble really quickly.
01:02:17
Speaker
as many of us have learned the hard way. That's how most of us learned is, oops, well, there went that money kind of thing. But yeah, that's... That's right. We have to get past that. There's one that springs to mind for me. Yeah, sorry, I cut you off. Yeah, there's one that springs to mind for me. So I...
01:02:37
Speaker
I was looking into this project called Telcoin a long time ago. It was the first crypto that I actually took interest in back in 2020, or started 2020, I think. I was actually building remittance payments over an SMS network to bring banking to unbanked and this kind of stuff. But you could only buy it on the Qcoin exchange. But at the time, you couldn't buy fiat currency on Qcoin.
01:03:07
Speaker
because it was the first one I ever bought, so I had to buy, downloaded Coinbase, I bought Bitcoin on Coinbase, transferred it across to Qcoin, then bought Telcoin, and then Telcoin bought out their own app, essentially their own exchange now. So in order to transfer it then from Qcoin across to Tel, I then had to make sure it was on the right network. Yeah, the right network, because if it was not on, if I didn't transfer it across on Polygon, I'd have completely lost all of the money that I'd put in. And I think
01:03:38
Speaker
If things are still happening like that, I think of my parents, for example, trying to do that. I mean, you might as well just chuck the money off a bridge. There's just no, you just won't be able to. So yeah, that makes complete sense. Yeah, it just reminded me of that. I mean, it made me learn a lot, to be honest. And now I can probably handle most things in terms of trying to do transactions and stuff. But yeah, it was a learning curve for sure.
01:04:06
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I think a lot about this actually in business school actually what I mostly focused on was economics and specifically like consumer behavioral economics that kind of stuff because I find it super interesting and it's why a company like Google was so successful because in the early web
01:04:26
Speaker
Once there were browsers, it was easy to access, but hard to find anything. And what they did is they optimized that economic search utility kind of thing, which is how much time I have to invest to get to an answer I want. And we face a very similar problem right now, which is even having better dApps that are easier to use with better interfaces is only part of the problem.
01:04:48
Speaker
It's people being able to find the solution to whatever it is they're trying to do and to find that without investing more time and energy than is worth the value of what they're trying to do. And that sort of. I guess people are so used to people are so used to things happening.
01:05:05
Speaker
so quickly and so easily in web 2 and what they're buying and what they're doing now. So then try and get them to go back to something that's more complicated and takes them a little bit longer, just stops people from using it, I suppose. Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. So, Randy, to wrap up, as a leader in web 3, what advice would you give people who are looking to follow in your footsteps, if you could sum it up?
01:05:34
Speaker
Yeah, if I could sum it up, I would say be confident and be willing to take risks and continue to learn. It is impossible to know everything across this industry. It's impossible to know probably 10% of everything across this industry. So just constantly keep learning and be humble, but also have courage kind of at the same time.
01:06:01
Speaker
I know those sound like generalities, but if you live that every day and apply it to how you approach your work and approach dealing with your colleagues and solving the problems you're solving, I think it leads to successful opportunities becoming available, like I was talking about earlier, and then you can seize those opportunities.
01:06:20
Speaker
continue to move forward. And that's kind of natural organic growth as opposed to like deliberate prescriptive sort of growth. I would not try that. That's my advice is don't try to take that approach. Don't sit down and draw a flow chart of exactly how you're going to get from here to here because there's no way that's going to happen. No, I like that. No, thank you. That's a, that's brilliant advice.
01:06:41
Speaker
Well, Randy, thank you very much for joining me today. I really enjoyed the conversation. You know, you said some brilliant insights, some brilliant advice that I think anyone listening will be able to learn a huge amount from. So yeah, thank you. Thank you again.
01:06:56
Speaker
And yeah, obviously, we'll keep in touch. And yeah, in a few months' time or six months, 12 months, we'll have to get you back on and see if, yeah, see if you've learned anything else and the landscape of Web3 will probably be completely different by then. So yeah, we'll see. But yeah, thanks again. Yeah, thanks for having me. Happy to come back anytime. It's been great. Brilliant. Take care. Yeah, thanks. Bye now.