@SuperRareJohn and I have known eachother since @Consensys days. We collaborated on a bounty in 2019 with @ethBounties and Pixura as a way of showcasing what our respective projects did and we have been in eachother's orbit ever since... medium.com/bounties-network/… As with every episode of @_humanprotocol, I want to know who is behind the success, what creating a landmark crypto application gives and takes on a personal level, what still inspires them and how they have evolved as humans all these years down the line - through the highest of highs and the lows. I hope you listen and enjoy piped.video/C04m_9zqtF8

Episode 13 is live - "Riding Out" with @SuperRareJohn, co-founder of @SuperRare 🌊 A nod to his passion for surfing, the title speaks to the ups and downs of creating one of the best known and most successful platforms for digital art and a core crypto application. We chat about BC (before crypto) times: architecture, civil engineering, a New York ad job and finding his people in the early @ethereum crowd. Pitching SuperRare to 120 VCs. All 120 passed so they built it anyway: "You have to be a little bit crazy..." SuperRare is a family business - John, his brother @SuperRareChar and his cousin @rareperkins...because they already knew how to disagree without it getting personal. Especially when debating about maybe giving up on SuperRare entirely and maybe pivoting into DeFi back in 2019... On the personal side of staying in it through the lows: "This may be pretty horrible, but I know where I'd like to go, and I think it's still worth it to get there. So I'll suck it up and deal with it. Every day isn't a good day, otherwise you wouldn't have good days..." Then October 2020: the first $1M month, the moment it started to feel like this is definitely something. And the honesty of going from the crest of that wave to having to lay off 30% of the team in 2023 - all in public, full ownership of mistakes made while growing. "I think the best learning experiences are always the most difficult." This is the yin and yang of building here. Full episode - piped.video/C04m_9zqtF8 open.spotify.com/episode/0Mw…

The real bottleneck is never the tech. It’s that powerful tools are in the control of people who've never sat with their own nervous system and looked at where their behaviour actually stems from. "heal the mindset and traumas of humanity" is the actual arms race. Self work at all levels, starting now.

Episode 12 is live - "Growing Up" with @evabeylin She joined crypto because she realised management consulting was just duct taping a broken system and checking crypto Twitter in the bathroom felt more alive than her stable job. Then it was the people, putting her energy into building alongside them felt so much more aligned. But that initial idealism slowly turned into realism - both personally and industry wise. Crypto has had a 10-year experimentation phase and stress test on human behavior: the culture "grew up" because people got more evidence. But experimentation wasn’t a detour, it was the education. She also makes a point we don’t hear enough about: technical fluency matters less than people think. What matters is understanding the framework, learning fast, and knowing how to sell what you build - if nobody sees the product, it doesn’t matter how elegant the code is... As we journey through the past nine years, we also go through her exit from @graphprotocol - five and a half years in, she was burnt out. Not because the mission stopped mattering but because she knew she wasn’t the right person for the next phase anymore. That level of self-awareness and knowing when it's time to end a chapter tends to be rare. So is her answer to burnout: removing Discord and Slack from her phone and a vision of crypto slowly becoming more “9-to-5” socially, even if the rails are on 24/7. Because humans need to set and practice boundaries... Full episode - piped.video/bKrjn7RxaC0

More wholesomeness for you via @ricmoo on @_humanprotocol ep 11: Being kind to AI isn't really about the AI... it's about the kind of person you are when nobody's watching. A lot of people think of "be nice to AI" like it's future insurance. If and when the bots take over, maybe they'll remember you said please and thanks. Ric builds live fruit fly traps and then securely disposes of them outside. It's a tiny thing. But tiny things are the whole game. You are creating and practicing habits and habits spread out and reverberate into everything you do and build... Full convo piped.video/gGM9WoTNnHc?si=cbSC…

timely qt

Posting seems to work (while re-posting is broken for me). Lez see if this works. :) I haven’t watched it yet, but already two key insights for next time: do not sit in a Poäng rocking chair and don’t have the laptop on my lap.

"Be Less Worse" - episode 11 with @ricmoo is live! One of the most honest and heartfelt conversations about building, open source, crypto and what it means to be human while the world gets weirder... Ric's story starts far from “founder legend” energy: University of Waterloo, Blackberry graphics engine, Kindle work at Amazon. Then a Kickstarter experiment that failed and taught him more than its success probably would have. The early days of crypto - a small, strange community: meetups, random developers, @VitalikButerin, drinks with people who all seemed "normal" until you realised they were all building the future together. Then ethers.js - at first just a tool to scratch his own itch, then millions of people depending on it. The edge and beauty of open source: you build for yourself, then the world shows up and the responsibility kicks in. Throughout the conversation, there's a self awareness and honesty that makes it all incredibly relatable: from admitting he loves being on stage to going off on tangents, to taking a good few minutes talking about potentially killing a frog. This episode is part technical history, part philosophy, part cautionary tale and part frog-related existential crisis. “Be Less Worse” is brilliant - not fake perfection, no moral posturing, just a more realistic goal: make things less harmful, less captured, less broken, one step at a time... Full episode piped.video/gGM9WoTNnHcBe

Good humans only on @_humanprotocol

Knowing @kartiktalwar and the core @ETHGlobal team since 2018 and judging most of the hackathons they’ve run since then has enabled me to closely watch their invaluable contribution to this space throughout the years. Onboarding newcomers around the world, creating the spaces for core projects to emerge and relentlessly fostering developer access and immediate feedback loops has been a trademark - I wanted to know what drives that mission. What the personal side of creating the spaces enabling others to create looks like and where that drive comes from. Over 150k developers onboarded and $200 million raised by companies who started as @ETHGlobal hackathon projects…this is the personal side of building this big thing.

Ep 10 is out - High Stadards Build Resilient Ecosystems @kartiktalwar @ETHGlobal Kartik's first ever podcast interview dives into in his background in astrophysics, exploring complex systems and big questions blending into @svangel and the 8,000 pitches that shaped his high standards when it comes to...everything. Recognizing real value, real conviction and the difference between something that sounds good and something that proves it can actually become huge. Hackathons became the perfect environment for fast feedback, low friction and the chance to turn ideas into something concrete - @CryptoKitties was born at ETHWaterloo, @Uniswap and @1inch also sparked during @ETHGlobal hackathons. The thread connecting it all is that ecosystems get stronger when builders and projects share openly, learn quickly and hold themselves to a higher bar: "If you want things to get better, the only way they will get better is everybody is in the same room. And the second you go internal or solo or on your own track, you're bound to just be behind because ideas don't spread that way..." Full episode - piped.video/49ZmG59hBm0

stay true to values and principles on repeat cc @diogomonica

“If you want your product to get better, the only way things will get better is if everybody is in the same room.” - @kartiktalwar interviewed by @Sim_Pop The final conversation for Pragma Lisbon turned into a live recording for @_humanprotocol. 10/10 way to close out the day.

Decentralized does not mean dehumanized.

Pragma Lisbon 🇵🇹 | 5:20pm The Invisible Labor of Creating Community with @Sim_Pop of @_humanprotocol July 25 ∙ Pavilhão Carlos Lopes ethglob.al/HKRXP56HKA

“At the end of the day, decentralization is probably one of the most important things we need to be thinking about right now.” @jbrukh on @_humanprotocol with @Sim_Pop discussing everything from growing up in Russia to starting @coinfund in a Slack channel in 2015 and what it takes to be a great founder. Listen to the full pod here: piped.video/watch?v=Qi3AWRFN…

Such a great episode with @jbrukh where we chat about skepticism and rebellion as shared insticts coming from our Eastern European heritage, the hard lessons from bear markets, the need for resilience in entrepreneurs, the true importance of human qualities and creativity in tech success and everything in between. As one of the longest standing crypto VCs, our conversation blends takes on the future of crypto, AI and decentralization together with personal boundaries, mental health and the emotional rollercoaster of our space and the power of entrepreneurship as a creative form. Really enjoyed this one - in full piped.video/Qi3AWRFNvYE?si=Nn7x…

Ep 09 is out - The Decentralization Revolution: Tech Needs Human Resilience with @jbrukh @coinfund The most disruptive tech isn’t just about the innovation, it’s about human resilience, creativity and purpose. Growing up in the USSR, Jake learned early to distrust authority...that cynicism became a superpower in crypto. When most saw Bitcoin as a speculative gamble, he saw a chance to challenge tradition - an act of rebellion rooted in deep skepticism that made him question everything: Why can’t money be self-sovereign? What’s actually stopping blockchain from changing the world? The emotional core of it all? Rebellion, curiosity, creativity and purpose - crypto's not done, it’s just evolving. We’re finally at the intersection of technology and mainstream acceptance and now more than ever humans need patience, even though it is a tough space to navigate. It's our creativity that fuels innovation and tech-driven pursuits need that human touch. More than anything, Jake emphasizes: don’t wait for perfect conditions. Build, iterate, learn. The market always rewards resilience. For all the ups and downs, the key message is stay true to your purpose, keep learning and trust your gut. The best is yet to come... Full conversation: piped.video/Qi3AWRFNvYE

btw, while we were in algo jail I launched a podcast. (yeah, I know but you know…?) It’s an absolute passion project, I’m learning as I go (as a host, AI wrangling editor etc), I want it to be good and enjoyable *plus* I get to talk to the friends who have put their hearts and minds into this wild endeavour of ours. Where it will take us who knows but I want to record their stories because they matter in a very deep way. There are so many I still have to interview and I will continue my ethstory vlogging regardless of what happens. Anyway, this is it @_humanprotocol Give it a whirl if you like humans 🫡

I saw @worthalter at @EthCC in April - a month after the first announcement that @poapxyz was going into maintenence mode - he was not wearing his trademark orange jacket...but a full black suit. I asked him how he was and if he wanted to talk about it. He told me he wasn't quite ready...I said, take your time, I will be here when you are. Four hours later we sat down and recorded this. With so many key projects sunsetting, this is an emotional, vulnerable journey through burnout, discovering @ethereum, building a beloved collective graph of all our memories and how they connect us and what it's like to let go of something you have put time, effort and passion into. Thank you Patricio for sharing the human side of building the big things.