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Leon Dolinar, Energi's VP of Engineering, and I might have discovered the best way to progress in your career in Web3
55 Plays1 year ago
Behind the blockchain is a series of conversations with technology leaders who have built successful products, teams and careers in Web3. You will have the opportunity to understand how they were able to achieve their career goals, what skills they have learned, what mistakes and frustrations they might have and what advice they can share with you to help you achieve your own career goals.
In this episode, I speak with Leon Dolinar. Leon is the current VP of Engineering at Energi Core, a blockchain which is able to solve some very interesting challenges and has been able to eliminate 95% of all crime on the chain. Leon talked through some of the skills he learned which helped him to achieve his career goals and he talked through some brilliant advice for people looking to build a successful career for themselves in Web3.
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Transcript
The Role of Values in Leadership
00:00:00
Speaker
values are the most important thing by far. There's nothing else that comes even close. One thing I always advise when I'm coaching people and coaching companies on how to interfere is always sit down. Then it's something that I mentioned already and it's something that I had to learn in a very hard way which is
00:00:20
Speaker
Any advice? Sure. I don't want to give up all my secrets. I want to give away stuff. But yeah, I think for anybody who aspires to become a leader, I think one of the biggest things you will need to learn is how not to code anymore. Hello and welcome to the Behind the Blockchain podcast.
Leon Dalinar's Career Journey
00:00:44
Speaker
Today I'm joined by Leon Dalinar.
00:00:46
Speaker
Director of Technology at Energy Core. Leon, welcome to the podcast. How are you? I'm great, thank you, Jack. How have you been? Yeah, I'm great, thank you. I'm great. So, Leon, for people who don't know who you are, could you introduce yourself?
00:01:03
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So my name is Leon. I am director of technology at Energy. Energy is a blockchain organization that started in 2017. And yeah, so basically, if you look at my profile, you'll notice that actually my title is VP of engineering, but it doesn't matter. It's all the same. You know, titles are not really important.
00:01:30
Speaker
Um, but yeah, um, you know, I started the interesting part about this is that I started as a community manager and I, I went all the way from, you know, community management to actually, you know, leading a team of talented engineers. So there you go. Yeah. It's a bit of an interesting route. So how did you talk us through that? How did you kind of get to that point going from community through to engineering?
00:01:59
Speaker
Yeah, I think one of the things that was very interesting for me is what energy was building at the time. And before that, I was actually mining Monero and Ethereum. So, you know, I was already familiar with how things function in terms of blockchain, but I was super interested in, you know, what they were building. And so I just joined their Discord and, you know,
00:02:27
Speaker
chatted with a bunch of people there. And it was actually a great community already. They had built already a great community.
00:02:36
Speaker
And one day I get a call from Tommy, who is our CEO, and he's like, hey, would you like to join our team? And it was just around their first anniversary. So what really happened, what kind of propelled my rise, let's say, in kind of funny way to the position I'm in today is that this was supposed to happen on Monday. And on Saturday, when I got a call from Tommy,
00:03:06
Speaker
I'm asking all of those people who are in charge, hey, where's the plan for the anniversary? Is there any plan? And they're like, no, we're just going to hang around in Discord for 24 hours. I'm like, OK, well, that's great, but don't we have anything prepared? And then I get no answer. And on Sunday, I just start writing a document and I pretty much come up with games and what sort of things we could play.
00:03:37
Speaker
And for some reason, everybody was on board. Like everybody just looked at documents and they were like, okay, let's go. And that's what happened. We had a 24 hour straight, you know, with no sleep of games, fun. And yeah, that's, that's how I started. And, you know, then afterwards, obviously they realized I, you know, I was a programmer.
00:03:59
Speaker
I took on some challenges that they had and after their previous director of technology left, I just assumed the role.
00:04:17
Speaker
I didn't want it, by the way, I really didn't, I didn't, I didn't feel I was ready. Um, but they sort of like, they did the, you know, the, the old style, they just pushed you in and I had to learn how to swim. So, and now I feel way more comfortable and it became my kind of second nature in this. So, so yeah, that's, that's kind of my, my path, uh, into this.
00:04:40
Speaker
Wow. Did you always know that you wanted to go into engineering management or was it just something you kind of fell into? I think I fell into it more than I...
00:04:54
Speaker
I never really aspired to lead a bunch of people. It wasn't something that I ever thought of. But once you're in a position where you have to, when you wake up and there's like 25 people waiting for you to say something, you got to say something. You have to do something. So in that kind of moment, you
00:05:19
Speaker
You know, at first it's probably like riding a bicycle, right? At first you're just sort of trying to stay in balance and, you know, not break your knees. And then eventually you learn how to pedal properly, you know, and then it becomes your second nature and it's just, you know, day to day becomes normal, just like anything else. And then eventually you come to a point where I'm at, where you're comfortable with this, where you understand,
00:05:45
Speaker
you know, when you should intervene, for example, with software where you shouldn't and so on.
Transition from Coding to Leadership
00:05:51
Speaker
So, yeah. Sure. So how did your mindset have to change then from being an engineer one day to then being kind of pushed into leading the team the next? How did your mindset have to change to be able to then make sure that you were comfortable in that position?
00:06:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think for anybody who aspires to become a leader, I think one of the biggest things you will need to learn is how not to code anymore. It's so hard because sometimes you'll see a solution to a problem that you know you could code in 15 minutes.
00:06:32
Speaker
but you will have to delegate it. And the real reason behind it is because there are bigger problems that you're dealing with. So you'll be dealing with much, not only more important, but larger issues that will need your brain power. And so all of these small things that you could actually solve in 15 minutes, you're just going to have to delegate to somebody else.
00:06:57
Speaker
and let them do that. So, and I think that restraint, you know, that when you see it and you're like, just let it go, let it go, give it to somebody else. No, I think that's good. I think it's, it can be difficult to give up ownership of the different tasks that you do and yeah, being able to delegate to someone. I guess that means you then have to
00:07:23
Speaker
really trust the team around you to be able to delegate that to them. Was that something that you had to kind of build or did you already have people around you that you trusted that you could pass work over to? Yeah, I think.
00:07:42
Speaker
I think we can expand this a little bit, but I would say it goes all the way from hiring, right? Because what you really want is to hire people whose values are aligned with the organization's values. And so if that is the case, then you will not have a problem with trust because you will already assume that if they're working according to your company's
00:08:12
Speaker
value structure, then you don't have to worry about that.
00:08:16
Speaker
Um, but then if you, if you make wrong decisions when hiring, then that obviously can, you know, surface as an issue later on. Um, so I think at first it's very hard, right? Because, because you don't know if people will be able to execute in, in the same manner as you can, um, or in the same or same, uh, level of quality, right? I think that that is something you worry as a leader, but then.
00:08:45
Speaker
You just gotta let it go at one point. And I think it's also a correcting process because at first, you know, for example, your style, the way you build products may not be the same as somebody else's, right?
00:09:05
Speaker
And then there's also another thing, oftentimes you will hire people who are smarter than you. And so you have to learn how to trust that because they are smarter than you in that specific field, you just have to trust them that what they're doing is the correct thing. And then
00:09:25
Speaker
Because at the end of the day, the only really output you get is some sort of analytics feedback and stuff like that from customers, from users, from the community. So yeah, that's sort of your feedback loop, but in general, yeah, it's also something you got to learn. The trusting people is something you got to learn. It doesn't come naturally.
00:09:49
Speaker
I mean, it can go the other way where you trust them too much and then you get burned. So you need to find the right balance. I agree. So what else did you have to learn then through your career to reach the point where you are now, both on the technical side and the softer side?
Skills and Communication in Leadership
00:10:06
Speaker
Are there any other skills that you really needed to develop that have really helped you along the way?
00:10:12
Speaker
Yeah, so on the technical side, I don't think there's more to say than what already exists in the tech sector.
00:10:25
Speaker
I mean, if you're a Golang programmer, learn Golang inside out. If you're a TypeScript backend developer, learn it inside out. If you're working on databases with SQL, learn it inside out. So in technical, there's really no magic sauce, nothing to share. It's all the same as it has been for, I don't know, the last 50 years.
00:10:55
Speaker
Well, maybe one thing that has changed over the years is that, you know, when I started out, you could literally take just one language. Let's say when I started out, PHP was very popular in terms of developing some kind of backend for websites. And, you know, you learned PHP and you will have a job for the next 10 years easily, like no problem at all.
00:11:23
Speaker
Um, today it could be a little bit difficult, right? So you need to, you need to stack your knowledge a little bit more. So you can just have PHP and nothing else. You, you need maybe PHP and JavaScript or you need, I don't know, salinity, a smart contracts and some front end, you know, knowledge of react. So you, you, you can walk into, let's say a hiring procedure with zero knowledge of front end, but know everything about backend. Like it's, it's going to.
00:11:53
Speaker
it may backfire, not necessarily, but it may backfire today. So if there's one thing that I can say is like, if you are in this industry, you may already notice that employers will ask for some kind of stack. So it's not just one single thing. On the soft side, this one is very difficult. And the reason I say this is
00:12:22
Speaker
There is no real way to...
00:12:27
Speaker
to learn how to be a leader. There's no manual. There's no manual where you open, oh, how to be a leader book. And then you open it up, you read through all the chapters, and you close the book and say like, yes, I'm a leader now, let's go. I don't think it exists, because if it did exist, then we would have way more leaders in the world. We would have a much more beautiful and undivided world today.
00:12:54
Speaker
So I would say in terms of soft skills, just learn how to communicate clearly. I think that's important. One thing that helped me a lot is taking very complex subjects, breaking them down into simple analogies that are way more approachable for people who aren't as technical as I am, for example.
00:13:19
Speaker
And that certainly helped with, at least in my case. One other thing is, you know, learn how to appreciate people's input, so be open-minded.
00:13:34
Speaker
and then take their ideas from the concept all the way to the actual production. So let's say that you're in an all hands meeting, you have, I don't know, 20 devs, even though that's maybe not a good idea to have such big meetings, but let's say you do. And then somebody comes up with a fantastic idea and everybody's like, yeah, let's do this.
00:14:00
Speaker
Even if it deviates a little bit from what you yourself thought initially as a leader, don't shy from it. Just take it on board and run with it because when people naturally get motivation from their own ideas, they will do it in a way more happier way. They'll be way more excited than if you kind of ram it down that way, hey, you have to do this.
00:14:24
Speaker
Yeah, so I find it's more like that. Listen and try to learn what everybody's saying and then make those decisions in such a way with an open mind. Based on what you said previously about being able to take really complex problems and then learn how to then shorten them down into smaller analogies,
00:14:49
Speaker
How did you go about teaching yourself how to do that? Is there somewhere you went to learn it? Did you learn tons and tons about the problem and then shortened it, learned how to shorten it down? How did you develop that skill?
00:15:01
Speaker
I think it involves a lot of reading. And by reading, I don't mean books. So one of the things you'll notice in today's world is that people will give you these suggestions or read this book, that book on Twitter and stuff like that. It works if you're selectively reading. And so what I mean by this is that you find chapters that apply to you.
00:15:29
Speaker
If you read the whole book, sometimes you'll feel a little bit overwhelmed because you will get so much information. You'll not know what to do with it. But if you selectively read something and then even reread some chapters, you'll be able to better figure out what the author really meant with that or what the subject is really about. And for me,
00:15:57
Speaker
What I often do is I read a lot of technical stuff. They're usually short articles or short, I don't know, some sort of technical breakdowns.
00:16:07
Speaker
And, you know, somebody asked me like, how many pages have you read in last month? And I tell them two pages and they're like, oh, you don't read at all. I'm like, well, try reading those two pages and tell me if you understand the math and all of that stuff behind it. Because it's super difficult. Like for every paragraph you spend like, I don't know, next two hours just Googling around and figuring out what it really means.
00:16:29
Speaker
So and then what happens to me, at least in my head, is like, OK, I understand the abstraction of this. But how does this apply to our world? Like, how can we apply it? It's the same as, for example, cryptography. So you have cryptography. Everybody knows how it works in principle. But how do you apply it? And here we go. Now we have blockchains. So there is a practical application of cryptography.
00:16:58
Speaker
And same is with very complex situations. If you read, let's say, many articles or many chapters, you will find some resemblance of that. And so what you'll be able to alter maybe some of those examples that you read in the book and apply them to that specific problem.
00:17:24
Speaker
maybe it will crystallize. Sometimes you miss. Sometimes you also miss. You try to make an analogy and you're completely missing. Maybe that wasn't the best example. But oftentimes, what I'm the most fascinated by is the solutions themselves. I tend to go for what's the most brilliant solution. This reminds me,
00:17:53
Speaker
So I'm going to give you now live example of this. Like, let's say we were solving some difficult problem and people, you know, didn't understand like how we came to solution, but now people don't understand what the solution means. And so I would tell them, OK, think about it this way. Let's say we need to write on a on a on a piece of paper in space. Right. So but you want to do it with with a pen. Right. So
00:18:23
Speaker
You could spend, I don't know how many millions of dollars, taxpayers dollars to invent a pen that is going to do that in space, or you could just take a pencil, you know, and you solve a problem, you know. So what are you going to do? By the way, this is an example. I mean, this is an online rumor. I'm not sure if it's true or not, but actually the NASA spent like
00:18:47
Speaker
I don't know how many, I think over in excess of $100 million to create like space pen, but then Russians just use pencil, you know, it's something stupid like that. But in any case, you know, it exemplifies this way of thinking, right? So another thing that I once said is, you know, we were discussing like, what if we get cyber-attacked, like very hard on
00:19:13
Speaker
one of the machines that doesn't necessarily have to be up online all the time. We were talking about some firewalls and how we should set up the infrastructure behind it. I said, no, just plug it off. It's a simple solution. It's the best. Just plug it off. If it doesn't have to be online, what's the problem? The beauty of these solutions is that
00:19:39
Speaker
Let's say if you have a system set up in the way they're automated, what I mean by this is that you have it set up in a way that they're going to automatically spawn somewhere else. In such situations, what's the problem? Just turn it off and you spawn it somewhere else on a different IP and boom, you're back in a few seconds. That's the beauty of such solutions.
00:20:05
Speaker
reading, let's say, technically difficult stuff, but then translating them into something very simple, very easy to understand. Yeah, that's good. I like that. I like that. So why did you initially take an interest in Web3 and blockchain then? How did that come around? Yeah.
Interest in Blockchain Technology
00:20:29
Speaker
You know, since I was a little kid, and I'm not joking when I say that, when I was about like 11, I think.
00:20:38
Speaker
maybe 11 or 12 years old, I've discovered cryptography. There were some challenges online about cracking cryptographic ciphers and stuff like that. Then I also discovered something called steganography, which is very similar, but instead of
00:21:00
Speaker
uh you know concealing because in cryptography you're concealing some sort of text right or some sort of information but in steganography you're using like you know audio video you know other other um other media and so okay and since yeah so since cryptography is used to secure blockchain data you know it was sort of a natural fit for me and
00:21:26
Speaker
Then, on the other hand, I really loved following the financial world. Maybe since I was 17 years old, I started to gain interest into stocks, derivatives, options, and other financial instruments. When I saw this combination of two, I was like, oh, that makes a lot of sense. We're finally getting somewhere. That's what got me in.
00:21:56
Speaker
Cool, cool, and you have a look back ever since. Yeah, I don't think, you know, it's a beautiful space. I don't see a reason why to go out of it because, you know, I've worked in what I call a traditional legacy tech, let's say sector, and it's not exciting at all.
00:22:22
Speaker
You just go to a cubicle, you do your thing, you hit the keyboard, you clock in, you clock out. Nobody ever notices you if you're in a bigger company. It's a weird thing. But here, you're sort of surrounded with people, with community. You're there all the time. You have your Discord, you have your Telegram, you're connected. And it's a completely different feeling. And that excitement never goes away. And I think it's way, way better than just
00:22:52
Speaker
I don't know. That legacy idea of just, you know, do your job and keep your head down. I think that is slowly dying and we're in general becoming more and more decentralized. In the same way, you know.
00:23:07
Speaker
Like you're doing podcasts, right? It's a decentralized thing. So yeah, I don't think this is, unless something really more exciting comes along, which I don't know what that could be at the moment. Yeah, I don't think we're leaving this space for a really long time.
00:23:26
Speaker
No, that's cool. That's cool. So could you talk us through your current role then and what that looks like? Talk you through a little bit more detail. What's the day in the life of you working out energy in Web3? What does that look like? I'd say it varies a lot from day to day. And it really depends on what are we solving.
00:23:51
Speaker
I would say that due to the nature of the organization, which I would say the majority of Web3 organizations are startups, I obviously wear many hats. Generally speaking, you always want to tackle the hardest problem first and then go to those that need a little less attention.
00:24:18
Speaker
But on a day-to-day basis
00:24:24
Speaker
Yeah, I would say maybe I can describe like a day. And that's kind of clarify this better. Yeah, so, so basically, you wake up, you know, and the first the first thing you know, is that, you know, you're happy that, you know, your organization is still alive. You didn't get hacked overnight. So you're still there.
00:24:49
Speaker
Uh, and then, you know, you, you log into your Slack and there's like, at least in my position, there's like a hundred messages waiting for you. No more depending. Yeah. Yeah.
00:25:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's every single day. Now, I do this different, so a lot of people will tell you they'll do exercise first, but what I do first is I check my messages because I want them to linger in my head, so I will just kind of go through what I think is the most important and save others for later.
00:25:28
Speaker
Then I'll do my exercise, my running, my lifting, whatever I'm doing for my body. So health, everybody. That should be your priority, number one. So take care of yourself. And then after that, so what I do is I always check my to-do list. I identify which of the items are the most important.
00:25:53
Speaker
And then I go and just do that. And I let everybody else wait. And I don't care if they have to, even if they're not happy about waiting, if something is very important and needs to be solved, that's what I'm doing.
00:26:12
Speaker
And then you work on that and you move down the list. The list is endless. So you're never going to go. You're never going to burn through everything. So, you know, at one point you got to call it quits and, you know, make, you know, revisit your to-do list, add new items or, or delegate some items away. And that's it. And then the day repeats and that's how it is. And it's full of everything. Like obviously I'm skipping a lot of things here, but
00:26:43
Speaker
You know, there's a lot of interventions in the day as well, like when something breaks, you know, and you got to jump in, you got to fix it, or I don't know, let's say that, you know, one of your DevOps guys is not available at the moment, you know, you just got to know how to log it into servers and, you know, restart something or, you know, so yeah, there's a lot of such things. But yeah, in a nutshell, that's my day.
00:27:11
Speaker
Sounds good. Sounds good. And could you introduce us to energy in a little bit more detail, please?
Energy Core's Governance and Protocols
00:27:18
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So I already mentioned before that energy started in 2017. And the idea was to build a governance into the protocol layer.
00:27:37
Speaker
So I think a lot of people in web free space are familiar with governance, but the way they're familiar with the governance is through the ERC20 tokens. So for example, you have, let's say you have a, I don't know, sushi swap or something, and then they have their own token. And then through that token, you can, I don't know, vote on some things or, you know,
00:27:59
Speaker
So, however, energy is different in a sense that this entire mechanism is built into the protocol. So, it's a part of the blockchain itself. And instead of having layer 2 as, let's say, some kind of ZK roll-up or something like that, our layer 2 are masternodes. So, it's a little bit different system.
00:28:25
Speaker
Now, the history goes something like this. So energy was first a fork of Dash and Dash was the first one to introduce the governance in the UTXO model. So, you know, on top of blockchain, on top of Bitcoin. And then
00:28:48
Speaker
As Ethereum was gaining more and more traction, the idea was to migrate this entire system from UTXO model to account-based model and EVM compatibility. What we did is we forked Ethereum and
00:29:07
Speaker
and wrote all of those functions in Solidity, so smart contracts, and all of that is connected on a layer one. Obviously, the question is, what's the real difference between, let's say, energy and Ethereum? The difference is this.
00:29:28
Speaker
On Ethereum, because you don't have any governance, you have no control over anything. So if I send some funds in error to somebody else, there's no way for me to retrieve them back. It's impossible.
00:29:45
Speaker
On energy that actually exists because you have governance So what you do is you you issue a proposal and you say like okay I send from this to this address in an error and I would like I would like participants in the network for masternode so if you have a masternode you can you can vote so you're voting with your feet and
00:30:06
Speaker
you can actually help pass this proposal. And if the proposal passes, the funds are frozen and drained from that address and moved back to the original address. So that is the process. Yeah. So
00:30:26
Speaker
Now, obviously, I know that some hardcore people are going to say like, oh, yeah, but this isn't really, you know, that's not the ethos of blockchain. Maybe ask, maybe no. I do believe that, you know, governance has its purpose. So if you have participants who want to, let's say, secure their funds in a way that they're not
00:30:47
Speaker
That they're safe so they can go to sleep and not think about it because they know that you know if anything happens Nobody can really take away your funds then yeah, I think that's a that's a great feature to have so So yeah, that's that's a that I would say is a general generally energy in a nutshell
00:31:08
Speaker
That sounds cool. I wonder how many people have lost funds by sending them to the wrong addresses that would have loved the ability to be able to recall those. It would be interesting to find out. I'll up the ante on this one. How many bridges have been hacked on Ethereum for hundreds of millions of dollars that could have easily just, on energy, they would just issue a proposal
00:31:39
Speaker
And for less than $10 in value, they would get the proposal through and they would get their millions back. That's crazy. Save a lot of money.
00:31:54
Speaker
Yeah, it still kind of baffles my mind why people are not using energy. I don't know. It's a little bit strange, but okay. If you people like losing money so much, go ahead. So anyone listening, use energy.
00:32:14
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, look, so one of the things that we've done is, and I personally contributed to this, so I know how this looks like. We eliminated virtually 99% of all crime on energy. There used to be scammers just like they're on Ethereum, just like they're on any blockchain, but now they're none. There's just nobody there. Everybody just gave up because they couldn't get anything out, so they just gave up. That's good.
00:32:46
Speaker
I like that. So what does it take to work at business like energy then? Well, you got to have technical skills. Well, if we're talking about technology, obviously you need technical skills, you need a little bit of soft skills, and that's mostly in communication.
00:33:09
Speaker
if you have other interests, obviously, different other skills, I don't know. I would say energy, one department where we really lacked a lot, I would say, over the years is marketing, because a lot of people have never heard of energy, even though that at one point we were
00:33:27
Speaker
I think top 40 on CoinMarketCap. And it's interesting to me that nobody, even when I talked to some other web tree projects, they've never heard of us. So it seems that we haven't really done a great job at marketing. So I think that is something that would, if you have a marketing
00:33:53
Speaker
in you and you have a project that has a product that's working and you want to help build it, then this is your biggest opportunity ever because energy has fallen to, I think it's only like $5 million of market cap.
00:34:15
Speaker
You're at the bottom. So if you want your spaceship to go up, here you go. Here's your chance. Take it. Not financial advice. Yeah, not financial advice. Just put that in there. Yep. Your own research, not financial advice.
00:34:35
Speaker
So what about the mindset and the values of someone to come and work with you? Because I know we've spoken before about making sure that people have the same values or same beliefs or putting them in the right direction. What about the values of someone to come and work with you at Energycore? Yeah, one thing that we
00:34:58
Speaker
I think in general, we pride ourselves the most is that people are very transparent, honest, direct, that they provide value. And often this thing is thrown around. You'll hear it a lot, right? Like we want people to provide value and then it's so abstract that it's sort of like when somebody asks, so what do you mean by that?
00:35:28
Speaker
And at least to me, what this represents is that if you're given a task and
00:35:40
Speaker
and you were supposed to do it, then do it. And if you didn't do it, then say why you didn't do it and why you need more time. Be proactive in your endeavor. Don't sit on it. Don't wait until somebody has to slap you on your back and say, hey, how's it going? You're quiet here in your cubicle. Say something. I think that's very important. And I think this is something that people need to learn. So I would say,
00:36:09
Speaker
Uh, if there's one thing that's very important is autonomy, right? So, and that, that actually fuses all of these things, which is, um, you, you'll work on things. Um, don't.
00:36:25
Speaker
don't clock things you don't work for ever, because people will quickly find out. And I've seen this happen a lot, where people clock a lot of hours, but they don't actually work them. And then it becomes a problem. And then you're in a position where it's not fun for anybody.
00:36:49
Speaker
So yeah, and then be responsible for things, right? So what does that mean? It means that if you say you're going to do something, then do it. And if you, again, I'm just repeating myself. If you don't do it, just be proactive in communicating what blocked you. Or if something is blocking, you say it by the way so that people can unblock you.
00:37:11
Speaker
So yeah, I would say those are the core values that exist and that have to be there. So yeah. Cool. Cool.
Interview Insights and Values Alignment
00:37:24
Speaker
And what are some of the common mistakes that you see people make when they come to interview with you?
00:37:29
Speaker
Just any advice that you can pass on to anyone listening who's looking for either a role in Web3 or looking to kind of further their career. Any common mistakes that you'd love to see people change or eradicate from their interviewing style? Common mistakes. Well, I'll put it more generally because it all boils down to some basics. Okay.
00:38:00
Speaker
So,
00:38:05
Speaker
I need to, I need to talk more from my experience than, you know, how, how things should be, because I think that there's a, there's a big difference here between theory and practice. Because in theory, we all want everything to be perfect. And sometimes it is, most time it's a little bit messy. But, but the mistakes people make is that one, they come, they come unprepared.
00:38:31
Speaker
Number two, they get into things a little bit nonchalant.
00:38:38
Speaker
as if like, hey, bro, how's it going? Like, eh, I don't know. Like, yeah, it's okay, I guess, in a way, but it's a little bit weird, you know, because you're trying to leave your best impression, right? And if this is your best impression that you're coming into an interview, you're unprepared, you're scrambling, you know, like, that's not, like, you should be better than that.
00:39:08
Speaker
And then one thing that I started terminating interviews
00:39:20
Speaker
when people wouldn't turn on their camera or they wouldn't share their screen. I'd be like, it's over. You don't want to share your screen. You're a programmer. How are we going to do this then? I'm just about to blindly trust you on your... You're saying here that you're coding. I can hear your keyboard. You're hitting your keyboard, but I can't see anything. So what do I know? Maybe you're just asking chat GPT to write the code for you.
00:39:44
Speaker
So I don't know. And I don't want to blindly trust these things. I want to see some proof. So like Bitcoiners say, right? So don't trust, verify, right? So it's something like that.
00:40:03
Speaker
So yeah, it's a lot of basic stuff for me. And you know, if those basic stuff are not covered, I feel like that's a big red flag. And I tend to shy away from from then, you know, going into anything more.
00:40:23
Speaker
Okay, cool. Do you think working in Web3 has changed how you interview or has maybe changed your perspective on how companies should hire or how you should hire? Sort of. I've had some ideas as to what would be the best way to organize a company.
00:40:49
Speaker
Like if it was my own company, but it turns out that the core principles actually are still there, like the core principles of organization, finances, process and stuff. What's different in Web3 or remote work is that roles are very specific and require a different type of approach.
00:41:18
Speaker
So there's also different things in hiring, right? I would say that some things remain the same in terms of the way things are proctored in a technical interview. Like I said before, in a traditional way, you're going to have people watching over you, right?
00:41:45
Speaker
Now we have cameras, right? So you're going to share your screen, you're going to turn on your webcam. But then there are some other things that are different, which is I think there's less...
00:42:04
Speaker
less formality and it's more to the point. I feel like if I go to an interview for, you know, brick and mortar, it's always a suit and a tie. It's always everything's kind of formal. It feels a little bit. It's kind of like a script, right? Yeah, but but here but here we you know, it's like, OK, I'm I'm I'm in a T shirt. You're in a T shirt.
00:42:29
Speaker
Okay. You want a job. I'm hiring. Okay. Here are my requirements. Show me what you got, you know, and it's, that's it. Let's go. Um, and we talk just like you and I talk right now. And you know, if we click, if you connect and you show me some skill, well, here's your 99% chance. I'm going to pass you through to the next round, you know? Um, so I would say that that's a little bit different.
00:42:56
Speaker
For sure, for sure. So could you talk me through, I know you briefly touched on it, but talk me through how you evaluate someone through an interview process. So for anyone who's maybe going into engineering leadership for the first time and they're building a team, how do they go about evaluating someone? And I know that's quite a big question, by the way.
00:43:16
Speaker
Any advice for people? Sure. I don't want to give up all my secrets. I want to give away some. But no, just kidding. Just kidding. There are no secrets, to be honest. I think so. I want to break it down in a simple way and then maybe expand on some. So the short listing is, you know, as the usual, you have resumes, you have your recruiters, you know, they shortened the list. They put a few in front of you.
00:43:46
Speaker
You look at their achievements. You look at, you know, what did they do? You kind of try to get an idea whether they fit, you know, what they're applying for. And if they do, you know, you start them. And once that period is over, you know, you look at your list and you go like, okay, let's go. Let's interview these people.
00:44:09
Speaker
Um, so in the interview itself, because it's not a lot, it's not alive in person. So I think that the, what you're looking for is a little bit of a nonverbal cues. Um, you know, how they react to some of your questions, uh, the way, the way they think about certain problems, uh, you know, their creativity. Uh, and then one, one of the things that a lot of people forget is that, you know, how.
00:44:38
Speaker
they forget to be genuinely curious about the position and enthusiastic. It's a little bit weird thing because generally I think tech people aren't like super upbeat and all happy unicorns, rainbows and all that stuff. But at the same time, give me a smile. If I'm interviewing you for one hour and you were just like there with a,
00:45:09
Speaker
Wall, nothing, no emotion. It's a little bit weird, you know, because I'm always thinking, okay, am I going to... Because my general rule of thumb is that, you know, if I can't work with you in... You're giving me your best through the interview, right? You're giving me your best because this is your best behavior you're ever going to exert.
00:45:32
Speaker
If you're giving me the best now and I can't connect with you, I don't see myself working with you for the next five years. I don't even want to continue here. There's no point. And so I think these are the sort of, I would say, differences between traditional and what we have now in a remote setting.
00:46:01
Speaker
um so
00:46:05
Speaker
Yeah, other things like I mentioned before, it's thinking about thinking creatively because we are working remotely, right? So the solutions are going to be different, right? Because when you're in a physical space, you're limited by the physics. But when you're in a remote, you're only limited by virtual. And virtual is way, way wider.
00:46:31
Speaker
how do you express your creativity in that sort of space is also very important so if i see somebody who is actually. Again we're going back to that enthusiastic has ideas. You know and this actually connects to the product that we're building.
00:46:51
Speaker
Well, there you go. That's a perfect combination. I think that sort of rounded up. I wouldn't go more on that because I would already be giving you cheat codes a little bit too much for the candidates. If someone watches this and then comes to interview with you, they'll know exactly what to say and what to do because they know I appreciate that.
00:47:19
Speaker
And so where we've spoken before, I know you're big in making sure that people have the right values. And obviously, I know that you look for certain values and people and things like this, you don't have to go into what those values are. Because I know you don't want to give away the codes for them to be able to pass your interviews. One thing I always advise when I'm coaching people and coaching companies on how to interview
00:47:42
Speaker
is always sit down prior to when they start interviewing game, right? What type of person do we want in the business? What type of key skills are going to be the key skills? As you said before, go learn JavaScript, Solidity, whatever it is, but actually the values and what the person needs to show and this kind of things. I always say to people, get that ironed out before you start the interview process. At least then you can create questions around those different values and ask people to show you
00:48:12
Speaker
give you examples and things you can actually interview based on behavior and past experience as opposed to just kind of guessing themes through process. What part do you feel that values play in that team building and kind of management process?
00:48:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think you already touched on it and in your own words, I'm just going to emphasize this a little bit more, which is I think values are the most important thing by far. There's nothing else that comes even close. If your values as an employee are not aligned, you'll quickly get caught.
00:48:55
Speaker
It's just you won't be able to do fake it till you make it thing At least not in web 3. Maybe you'll you'll you'll do that in I don't know real estate and you know as a car salesman You'll not make it here is gonna quickly show And I've seen it happen, you know time and time again so people sometimes fake it and
00:49:20
Speaker
It's a sad state of affairs when you do that. Be honest with yourself.
00:49:29
Speaker
ask yourself, what are your values when you're applying? And if those values are aligned with the organization you're applying for, then you have actually a very high level, high chance of success. And the reason is because you may be surprised that people will hire you
00:49:52
Speaker
maybe you lack skills, but they'll be like, okay, this guy is exactly, he's speaking just like us. He's saying stuff that makes sense. And if he's really enthusiastic about it, he's gonna fill that technical gap real quick.
00:50:08
Speaker
So people will hire you, even if you're less technical than somebody else who is just 100% technical but doesn't care about how the company does. That's a turnoff. So yeah, I would say also be honest about it to yourself.
00:50:31
Speaker
I know this is hard for people to understand, but let's say you were offered, I don't know, half a million dollars salary to work for Coinbase, but you didn't like Brian Armstrong. You hated the guy and his values, but he's offering you half a mil per year. And then there's another company who is offering you maybe 200,000 a year.
00:51:00
Speaker
You know, but you love those people, like those are your people. Now obviously the money here is awesome, but you know, how long will you torture yourself?
00:51:11
Speaker
You know, and how much stress will you get from this? You know, before one day you wake up and you're all stressed out, you're just faking it every single day. It's not good for your health. It's not good for your psyche. It's not good. Maybe even for the organization itself is not good because you're not, you know, you're not playing along. And eventually they say like, hey, look, you're an awesome engineer, but you know, your act is like, this is not good, man. And then they let you go.
00:51:41
Speaker
But and they let you go and what and what happens is the worst thing that that that other role is now filled by somebody else, you know, who is who is maybe in the same it's it's that person is enthusiastic in the same way you were, you know, and you won't be able to get that role anymore. You know, and so not there's a last opportunity there, you know, because maybe just maybe you could have taken that other role
00:52:09
Speaker
And, you know, maybe you could have raised your salary in like a couple years to a 300,000 or something. I don't know. Maybe the company did well. And then now, you know, you're happy and you got a good gig. So I think it's important to recognize this value thing and just be honest to yourself, you know, what you want to do. Now, if you're after money, I don't blame you. I really don't. Like, go for it. But I would just say it's really not a good idea.
00:52:40
Speaker
Okay. I also think from a, from a manager's perspective, you know, building a team remotely and being able to build a culture of remotely is tough.
00:52:51
Speaker
So if you're not hiring people based on values and things, then it's going to be very difficult to keep that team together, keep everyone on track, keep everyone kind of pointed at the right things. If everyone's got different values, then no one's really getting along. It's just a job. No one's really that involved. Whereas if you hire people based on their values and make sure that everyone has the same kind of mindset,
00:53:13
Speaker
There might be differences of opinion and things, which is obviously really healthy and you want that in a team, but it's obviously the actual core values of someone. It helps really nurture that team culture and that corporate culture, which then kind of keeps people in the business and in their roles. I think when people were in the office,
00:53:31
Speaker
The culture was more based on the values as well, but you'd see your friends every day. You'd go and speak to people at work, you'd grab a coffee with them, you might grab a lunch with them, whatever that might be, and that will keep the team together and kind of keep people in the business. Whereas now, with everyone being remotely, unless the actual job itself is amazing, people can kind of just switch off and they can go find another job and this kind of stuff.
00:53:55
Speaker
I believe if you hire people based on their actual values, you'll get a lot more longevity in the team and the culture that you build remotely. I'm not sure your thoughts on that if you've seen similar or not. Yeah, I think it also...
00:54:14
Speaker
I think it plays into the leadership as well. So I'm going to give you an example from what I did to relax the whole grind thing. I will reply with memes, like in our Slack communication.
00:54:33
Speaker
And that made people a little bit more relaxed and got some feedback. Hey, that's cool. We are now communicating in memes. We're joking around. Because you can't always be tense and stuff. You need to also show your human side because we're not robots, at least not yet.
00:54:54
Speaker
So so I think so. So I think, yeah, and it's hard. It's hard to get that emotion across. Right. When you're when you're working remotely, like you said, like it's super hard. So the memes are a great way to do that. So if you are in a leadership position and sometimes, you know, there is a chance to do a meme for everybody. And, you know, I think people are going to appreciate it. So, you know, obviously, like every every leader finds their their own way.
00:55:23
Speaker
This is what I started doing and it was actually fun. And then I got memes back as well. You haven't sent me any memes yet. I'll be expecting all our conversations from now on to have memes in them. Yeah, I promise we'll do it. So is there someone stepping into a leadership role for the first time then?
00:55:48
Speaker
What piece of advice would you like to give them or what piece of advice do you wish someone would have given you when you made that first step?
00:56:00
Speaker
Here's a meme, this is the oof meme because this is such a difficult question that the oof goes all the way to the, it breaks the meter. No, it really does. I'm not even exaggerating because this is such a difficult question. So let me counter question you. Just entertain you for a second. Let's say you are about to start your own company.
00:56:31
Speaker
What advice should you be given about starting your own company? I would say dive straight in. Just give everything a go. Get stuck in. Don't be worried if you make mistakes. Don't be worried if things don't go as well as to plan, as perhaps you thought they would.
00:56:59
Speaker
be open to being adaptable and then just getting stuck in. And I think it'll always work out. Okay, so focus and roll with the punches. Yeah. Okay, so I... If there's one thing maybe that would help,
00:57:28
Speaker
then it's something that I mentioned already, and it's something that I had to learn in a very hard way, which is when you hire people, you have people who are smarter than you, and you have people who maybe aren't as smart as you. And so you already know this in advance. And so what you need to do is you need to decide what you're gonna do and what other people are gonna do. And so play to your strengths,
00:57:58
Speaker
and delegate your weaknesses. Maybe that will be the best advice in that sort of way. I like that. I like that. I'm going to take on board that piece of advice myself, actually, moving forward. I like that. Yeah. Cool. So moving on to, I guess, questions about Web3.
00:58:25
Speaker
If you could change something about Web3 in the industry, what would it be?
Enhancing Blockchain UI/UX
00:58:33
Speaker
Well, this is such an easy question but has a complex answer. But in order to simplify, which I like to do, I like simplifying things, here's what I would do. So make UI UX designers.
00:58:56
Speaker
understand exactly how blockchain functions. Because generally speaking, our user experience right now is terrible. It's just, I mean, have any of you tried like using MetaMask for let's say 45 minutes continuously and not lose your mind? It's just terrible.
00:59:18
Speaker
Like if somebody like if somebody who didn't know blockchain came to this and Started playing with this they would just say like this is garbage. Like well, what is this? Like this have like this you guys have millions in this like You guys are crazy So so I think I think that we as as as industry as web3 industry we have to fix this like this is
00:59:46
Speaker
This is the thing that I would change, like just teach those UI UX designers understand, you know, just understand how blockchain works so they will be able to do a better design. Okay, cool. And why do you think that needs to be changed? Why would you change that purely from a mass adoption perspective and an ease of use or anything else?
01:00:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's more from, yes, mass adoption, but more specifically easier onboarding. So what you really want to do is you want to reduce the friction as much as possible.
01:00:26
Speaker
Um, so, uh, let's, let's take, for example, um, you know, how, how it was when you, when you first, when you first open your social media account, let's say 10 years ago, you know, they would ask you like, Oh, what's your name? What's your last name? What's your dog's name? What's your mom's name? What's your mom's maiden name? And you know,
01:00:45
Speaker
You know, whatever. There's like thousands of questions, right? That you had to fill out. Now, all you do is like you just connect your Google account to it. Like it's like click, click, click, click, click, over. You're onboarded. So you see that they reduced the friction from somebody requiring, I don't know, five minutes to sign in.
01:01:03
Speaker
to 10 seconds. That's a rate of improvement. That is insane improvement. It's wow improvement. So I think something similar, in a similar way, I think we have to fix the web pre. So the people who come today is that they don't, you know, what
01:01:28
Speaker
what concerns me is, and I've seen this with my mom, for example, you know, she sees like some numbers and some letters and she's like, what's this? And I'm like, yeah.
01:01:45
Speaker
This is not going to be easy to explain. How do you explain that? It just doesn't make any sense. If there was a way to do it simpler, where it's like, okay, here's your thing that you're using, you just click on this button and you're in, and now you can do whatever you want.
01:02:03
Speaker
If it's like that, now you have a 10X improvement in terms of usability and you're on board way more people. And that's the change. That's the order of magnitude change. From 1% of the world, we go to like 10% of the whole world using blockchain.
01:02:30
Speaker
And obviously with social media, and as you mentioned earlier, the onboarding process has changed over time. Social media now has been around for a long time, let's say a long time. It's been around for a large number of years.
01:02:48
Speaker
Do you think that the Web3 and blockchain space just isn't mature enough yet to develop the good process and the good thing around the UI? Or do you think we should learn from past mistakes and sort it as quickly as possible? Do you think it comes with time or should we sort it now?
01:03:08
Speaker
I think it will come. I think it's a little bit of, I think it's an issue of
01:03:27
Speaker
when a lot of web3 projects are open source. So what does that mean? That means that whatever they create, they don't claim the intellectual property necessarily.
01:03:38
Speaker
So you can just copy that thing and you're right there. So you can make these carbon copies easily. And I think the biggest fear, I guess, from a perspective of capital is if I invest, let's say, $10 million into R&D on how to fix this UI, UX thing,
01:03:59
Speaker
And now I fix it. Now, what is everybody going to do? They're just going to copy it and, you know, and I just sunk my entire money into something that now everybody has, you know. So I think there's a fear of that a little bit because such things are easy to copy, you know, anything that's, you know, front.
01:04:19
Speaker
front-end facing, it's very easy to copy. I think there's that fear. Maybe that's the reason why we haven't seen an improvement in that area. Interesting.
01:04:37
Speaker
But yeah, I think so. I already mentioned less friction, but there is also the user experience of some of the things. There are blockchains that have certain functionalities that are not even represented in any UI. So there's a lot of work to be done there. So I think if we really put our mind to it, it can be done, and it can be simplified, and it can be easy.
01:05:07
Speaker
I think that actually, surprisingly, the centralized exchanges have done a way better job at this.
01:05:16
Speaker
And I would say because most of their software is obviously closed source, so they never publish their source for obvious reasons. And so sometimes they do a better job. So if you have any like Binance application or something, you will have a much better user interface in terms of how you navigate than what you'll get from, I don't know, Uniswap or something.
01:05:47
Speaker
And by the way, so here's a good example, right? When Uniswap first published their, I think, version two, everybody copied that, right? And it was a really badly written code in TypeScript. Like, it was a really bad code. Like, I have to say, like, I've never seen, like, it's almost as, I don't know,
01:06:08
Speaker
They just hired a bunch of juniors and they just hit the keyboard and something came out. It's a weird thing. Now, obviously, it's much better now. They've improved it a lot. Even on a smart contract level, it's way more robust. You could see that the grownups took over and fixed it.
01:06:34
Speaker
That is a little bit of something that I worry about. I'm hoping we speed up this UI UX improvements. But honestly, I don't know where it comes from. Does somebody do it and then everybody copies? Does one of the big web three companies do it? I don't know. We'll see.
01:06:56
Speaker
Interesting. So in your opinion then, what are some of the other challenges which we need to overcome before blockchain becomes mainstream? I honestly don't think there's
01:07:20
Speaker
Anything else to fix? But UIOX, and the reason I say this is because a lot of things are tied to UIOX. I would say that let's say you're trying to do a trade, you're trying to swap something, and then your transaction is not going through. Now, it would be very nice
01:07:43
Speaker
if the feedback from the software is something that human can understand, not some weird error from solidity. But this is, like I said, this is all tied to UI and user experience, which is if you make it so that it's easy to understand what's happening, like let's say I'm doing that swap. Now,
01:08:06
Speaker
You know, it should go somewhere and say like, hey, your your transaction is in the mempool right now and it's going to be processed in about, I don't know, 12 seconds. And it's like, you know, kind of a.
01:08:21
Speaker
some kind of timer or something, I don't know. But those are the sort of solutions that I'm thinking about which people are used to, right, in other areas. And so they would say, oh, this makes sense, okay, there's no more ambiguity, there's no more mystery behind this, it's all just very nicely done and you understand exactly what's happening with your transaction.
01:08:45
Speaker
and so on. And then, for example, let's say that your transaction fails. One of the craziest things to me still is that it actually says your transaction failed. You know how much fear that puts in a person who doesn't understand what that means? I can totally imagine somebody, oh, I just sent $2,000 to somebody else and it failed. Oh, wow. Oh, no. I just lost $2,000. No, you didn't. It should be like,
01:09:10
Speaker
you know, something else, use a different word, you know, say, like, your transaction was not successful, please try again. Now, how about something like that, which all humans in the world can understand, instead of, you know, your transaction failed, because that's very, like, scary. So I think, you know, these are small improvements, but improve them, and you get a way more, way better experience, you can easily onboard people. So yeah,
01:09:37
Speaker
I'm kind of repeating myself, but that's really what I see. That makes sense. And this might be quite a difficult question to answer because it's quite a big question. But say you weren't at energy.
01:09:54
Speaker
You wanted to stay within the Web3 space. You're given an unlimited pot of money, unlimited resources. You had a huge amount of time. Any particular challenge or any particular project you'd love to have a go at getting stuck into.
Future Vision for Blockchain Technology
01:10:08
Speaker
Yeah, I have a joke about that.
01:10:12
Speaker
I would move a bunch of population over to Mars and start there. But jokes aside, here's what I would do. I would improve security and simplify it.
01:10:30
Speaker
And so I think there's a way to do it. And actually, this is not my idea. It's one of my teammates' ideas. I just expanded on it a little bit. And the idea is this. So you would have two types of accounts.
01:10:51
Speaker
Just like, for example, now any type of organization has hot and cold wallet, right? You know, cold wallets usually, you know, you kind of have your keys, you throw them away and, you know, nobody touches this and then you have hot wallet where it's, you know,
01:11:07
Speaker
Kind of exposed and you know, even if you get hacked like you, you know Kind of fine funds are safe when all that stuff, you know Now what I would do is I would do this on a protocol level so When you're when you're opening when you're creating new account on a blockchain you would ask you hey what kind of account you want to have do you want to have account which is You know you open to anything. So if you if you send something to a wrong guy interest you're done and
01:11:36
Speaker
Or...
01:11:37
Speaker
you want to have an account that is secure account, meaning that, you know, if you send a transaction, it's not going to be immediate. It's going to take some time before it propagates over, or it's going to take some time before it's added to the mempool or it's going to, you know, or however the design would be. So I think, I think that that is a way. And also I think there will be a way to revert that. Right. So if, if you, for example, if you made a mistake,
01:12:07
Speaker
You made a mistake, you sent something to a wrong account, and you noticed that. You're like, oh, I made a mistake. I got scammed or something. Then you will be able to revert that with this security type of account. You'll be like, okay, I want to revert this. You pay some fee, and boom, your funds are back. How will that work in practicality?
01:12:27
Speaker
Let's say I'm sending you one million dollars in Ether and my account is secure. And I send it to you. I think I'm sending it to you. But then you realize, hey, man, I don't see it pop up on my side. I'm not seeing anything. And then I check, oh, I made a mistake. I trimmed one character or something or got replaced or something. And boom, now what I can do is I can say, OK, cancel this one. I'm going to pay some
01:12:52
Speaker
fee, obviously, because it should be some kind of penalty for, you know, for making a mistake, the blockchain boom, you pay that fee, you get that those funds back to your protected wallet, and, you know, do it again. So I think it would require a lot of
01:13:11
Speaker
cryptographic R&D to get this done. So since you said like unlimited amount of money, I would just hire a bunch of, you know, brains. You know, I have a few in mind that would definitely
01:13:27
Speaker
I'll hire Vitalik as well. Say like, stop working Ethereum. Come, let's do this. This is going to be an improvement. It's going to catapult Ethereum to wherever. So let's do it. So yeah, but that's generally what I would do. Just something on the security side. And to be honest, I haven't really thought this through.
01:13:55
Speaker
if this concept actually makes sense or not. Maybe it doesn't. But just my gut feeling tells me it actually is a good idea and a good concept for the future. Because usually when you
01:14:10
Speaker
when you're working on security, you're giving up something else. So I'm just wondering here, what am I giving up in exchange for this security feature? So maybe there's some other thing that technically would have to give up in order to get this.
01:14:29
Speaker
It's just like, for example, with anonymity. If you want to have something anonymous, you have to give up something else. That's just the way it is. It's the same here. Like I said, I haven't really thought this through completely, but it's something that I really love to do. Interesting.
01:14:52
Speaker
Cool, so to wrap up then, as a leader in Web3, what advice would you give to someone looking to follow in your footsteps? Someone wants to become a VP of engineering. I know we've spoken about lots of different bits of advice there. Overall, any kind of closing statement, any piece of advice you'd love to give? Yeah, have courage. Don't be afraid of rejections. Keep working hard.
01:15:21
Speaker
There are a lot of opportunities in the space and this space will never run out of opportunities. It'll never get boring. So, yeah, just keep at it. Great. Good advice. But yeah, Leon, thank you very much for your time today. It's been great to speak to you. You shared some brilliant advice there. Hopefully people listening will find it useful. If anyone wants to reach out to you, you know, ask you any questions, things like that, are they okay to drop you a note on LinkedIn or something?
01:15:51
Speaker
just reach out and start having a chat. Is that something that's possible? Yeah. One of the good things about me is I have one of those names that nobody else has in the world. So if you go to any platform and just type in my first name and last name together, you're going to get me. So if you go to Twitter, it's Leon Donner. If you go to
01:16:13
Speaker
I also have a sub stack, so maybe we can add that as well. You know, it's very simple. It's just the first two letters of my name and the first two letters of my last name. So L E D O dot sub stack dot com. So if you go there, I started writing just two weeks ago. So it's pretty fresh for me. It's one endeavor because I want to continue, you know, giving advice, helping people in the space. So it's kind of my goal on leadership and software and stuff like that.
01:16:42
Speaker
So yeah, that's how people can reach me as well at LinkedIn, like you said. Well, one thing that I do want to say, you know, I want to thank you for giving me this opportunity because, you know, this is my first podcast ever. So, you know, and we all remember our first, as the saying goes. So yeah, I want to really thank you, Jack. It's been a great honor to, you know, to do this.
01:17:11
Speaker
Thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate you taking the time to do it. I've shared some brilliant advice. You should podcast more often. Maybe set up your own and then I'll come on. I'm yours.
01:17:26
Speaker
Yeah, I have to do something, you know, I kind of thinking about it a lot recently, you know, to kind of go expose myself a little bit more publicly. Because right now I'm a little bit rusty in terms of this, like, like anything else, you know, you don't have much experience. Yeah, I'd love to. I'd love to start something like that.
01:17:48
Speaker
No, you should. I was chatting a guest of mine last week, was talking through how he puts himself out there.
01:17:58
Speaker
And he actually has a YouTube channel where he talks about various different topics. He posts regularly on LinkedIn and kind of gets his face out there. And he's a big advocate of building a personal brand. And actually how he got his role is a chap called Michael. He's the VP of engineering at Dat Radar.
01:18:19
Speaker
And how Michael got his role was actually that radar approached him from his YouTube channel because he was explaining technical things or he'd record himself talking about various different topics. And they then approached him and said, look, we've got a really interesting role with you. You'd be great. Come and join us. So that's the power of putting yourself out there and stuff. I guess it's quite daunting, I suppose, to record yourself and
01:18:40
Speaker
and get stuff out there. It's kind of people who really like it and also people who really don't. So I guess you just have to be okay with that and something to get used to. But yeah, once that episode is released, you know, I'll send it across to you or I'm sure Michael will be okay with you reaching out to him as well and have a chat with him about how he did it and what he does and that sort of stuff. But I can put you guys in touch.
01:19:02
Speaker
Yeah, sure, that would be great. Yeah, I think, you know, what Michael's saying here makes a lot of sense to me because, you know, if you compare to how, are you familiar with Alex Hormozi? Have you ever seen some of his videos?
01:19:22
Speaker
So Alex is a guy who who raised a lot of money and, you know, he has his own fund and stuff like that. So, yeah, check him out on YouTube. But but basically he he talks about businesses, you know, how to start a business, you know, how to how to play all that game, that startup game and all that stuff. And one of the things he said and he put it perfectly is like, you don't want to you don't want to start 10 things. You want to start one thing, do it well, you know, iterate, repeat.
01:19:52
Speaker
And then when you feel your master of that, then scale it. And then when you scale it, if you really, really feel that you have enough energy to start a new thing, then start a new thing. So I think you could apply this same thing for putting yourself out there like Michael says.
01:20:17
Speaker
do it, repeat it, then you get comfortable, you know, and eventually you can, you can scale, you know, different, different media, different, you know, whatever you're doing. And yeah, so I think that's a great advice. Yeah, that's great. I'm going to check out, check out Alex. You say Alex. What's his, Alex. I'm going to check him out. Yeah. Yeah.
01:20:44
Speaker
Cool. Cool. Now I'll look into that. Let's be a Leon. Thank you very much. Yeah. I'll catch you at DC. Thanks very much for your time. Take care. Thank you. Take care. Bye bye.