Ep. 001 - Ollie Chapman

Ollie Chapman is a Product Manager working at a traditional Startup in Sydney, Australia. Ollie is also increasingly involved with several Near Ecosystem projects. In this episode we discuss how traditional Product Managers and entrepreneurs can find their way into crypto, stages of development and adoption of technology and opportunities for creatives and much more.

Intro song credit to - joystock.org

What is Wild User Interviews Podcast (Wuipod)?

People, Product and Crypto.

Wild User Interviews is about open-sourcing open-ended conversations with the creative forces shaping up the decentralised world. In the wild, our guests range from Product Designers to Blockchain Architects, and include topics such as Philosophy and Proof-of-Stake. The common thread being our focus on the human side as he try to deconstruct the frameworks and processes to enable listeners to become the better version of themselves while venturing into the Metaverse.

Podcast
Alejandro: [00:00:00] and we are alive ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the first episode of the Silicon craftsmen UXisNear. While I was interviewing.
I was like, I'm forgetting something. Yes. The name of the podcast. So this is a wild user interviews podcast. Also known as WUI podcast, I deliberately played around with the initials to make sure that we have something memorable. And today we've got Ollie Chapman also known as chapllie not known as Japer

Ollie: could be my new identity.

Alejandro: I could not have thought of a better guest for the first podcast, because a longtime friend, we have coles basically every day to test ideas from each other or give career advice. Everything from cracking into products to [00:01:00] cracking into the NEAR ecosystem and building projects in between. Definitely, a great first guest to see me through the embarrassing process of setting up podcasting gear.

Ollie: It's been like two or three years now. I've been telling you, you should do a podcast. So

Alejandro: We've definitely had a few calls where like towards the end, like halfway through, I think about it and towards the end I say this would have been a great podcast. Like we should have recorded this goal. We have some insights, some problem solving. I went out for a walk, drinking coffee and eating almond croissants. You should have definitely been a podcast. Yeah. If I understand it. So thank you for your encouragement. We're here now.

Ollie: That's biggie. Thanks for that

Alejandro: You are welcome. Before you are too drunk to be functional, I should start by saying that I will be heavily editing the podcast, using a software called Descript. It's actually quite [00:02:00] nice. You're able to edit like a document, so you get a full transcript and then you're just like copy paste and take things out and it takes out the corresponding video so we can talk loosely freely.

And then we'll just chop things out if not appropriate also. You're so grainy, basically your entire face is one pixel.

Ollie: It's probably your internet
Alejandro: Okay. hundred percent my internet, but this software that we're using shout-out to Zencaster. It's meant to be recording the video locally on your computer, and then somehow it's going to transmit it to me. So it should be high quality on both sides.

Fantastic. So we should probably start by introducing what the Wild User Interview Podcast is, how it came to be, and what it is aiming to grow into. Yep.

Ollie: So [00:03:00] what is the structure? What are we going to do today?

Alejandro: That is a fantastic question. In many ways, you said you and many others. Including myself, I have been saying for a while that I should probably get a podcast.

I think it plays to my strengths of being a natural extrovert. I genuinely like talking to people and it's like half fun, half insightful. So the idea for the podcast is. To try to create an asset or some content that is approachable. So we want to create avenues for more people to join crypto. And I guess in specific the near ecosystem.

And when we think of the product and design space, I think there's a lot of people that are very smart. They're creative problem solvers. They may be attracted to crypto, but it may seem a bit. Yeah, a bit foreign or it's a bit harder to crack because up until now it's been mostly technical. So what we have for the podcast is to have open-ended conversations with members [00:04:00] of the ecosystem and existing product people that may be interested

The user interviews aspect is basically open source or I guess, make available these conversations. Because I think that all of these people would be users of the NEAR ecosystem in one way or another. So I guess we can learn someone's pathway as a product manager, how they operate, what they're interested in, what difficulties they're having.

People running guilds people, running projects, developers. So I think it could be really interesting. The wild aspect is just to like lower, I guess everyone 's expectations could really go sideways or downhill. What we're learning as we go. And I think that's part of it.

Ollie: I have spoken about this before, but something a bit more casual and conversational rather than the very, very technical podcasts that typically come out of the blockchain space

Alejandro: They can be very technical.
They can also be a bit Challenge, people trying [00:05:00] to sell something. I watch a bunch of videos because I try to stay on top of everything that is going on to make sure that we amplify it and test everything that comes out. And it is certainly the case that once you say you're a founder and you're given platforms, it tends to be more of a copy paste. What'd you just repeat, your pitch and your sale. You assume that people are hearing from you for the first time. And if you only get 15, 20, 30 minutes of their time, you want them to know what your business is. We want to go the other way around. We want to get to know the person as opposed to, and from that, their worldviews or experience, what motivates them, et cetera, from that we will deconstruct to what it is that they are building now.

Ollie: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. That's the style of podcasts. I enjoy listening to the Joe Rogan's of the world.

Alejandro: It may have been me, but I'm going to claim it was you. This is basically Joe Rogan for appropriation.

Ollie: I [00:06:00] heard this podcast is about to take over Joe Rogan. So

Alejandro: We are well on our way with episode 001.

Ollie: Did you say Spotify deal?

Alejandro: Exclusive,

It may be in the roadmap that I'll be relocating to Austin because NEAR is opening a few city nodes in Austin and I'll be doing some standup comedy there. It's my insurance policy not to get canceled and I'll be inviting Joe Rogan to these parties. If they would have thought that I was going to Austin, I want it to be on his podcast.

Eh, Jamie is already reaching out to me. Oh,

Ollie: I can see it. I believe it,

Alejandro: Matt. But now on a serious note, I think that we both draw inspiration on that kind of podcast. Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, Shane Parrish, Alex Friedman open-ended conversations between two people. [00:07:00] And I think people enjoy that.

Even if they're just passively listening, it feels like a group of friends having a chat and you may learn something or you may be entertained, but it's like a nice way to pass time. Yeah, definitely. Sorry.

Ollie: I was just going to say, I listen to Joe Rogan, like literally in the gym or on the way to work.
I think it's a perfect medium just to enjoy yourself and

Alejandro: learn something along the way. Don't go to the gym.
No, I sometimes will pass people in the street, like driving a forklift or something and we are both listening to Joe Rogan.
Ollie: If you're driving a forklift, you probably shouldn't be listening to anything.

Alejandro: This is Australia mag. Getting back to the theme of the podcast, it would probably be a good time to start to deconstruct.

Who he's chopper.[00:08:00]
So what we can do is maybe I'll give you a really brief intro of what I know of you and your immediate present and future. This sounds like a tower reading.
I'll share what I think I know of you. And then we can start to unpack and you can take us further back or we can, like dive deeper. How does that. Yeah, for sure.

When you were six, so all you and I met in Sydney in 2018 those were the dark days when I spent literally six months. It was actually a good time, but I only lasted six months at a law firm working as a lawyer.

And I was actually really lucky because my team was amazing and I was working in corporate law. Working mostly with startups. So during the day I was miserable, cause I just didn't [00:09:00] enjoy the work, even though the team was great and the clients were great, but at night there were heaps of networking events. So this is where Ollie comes into the picture.

Ollie: Yup. I was working at a tech accelerator and they were all focused on blockchain stuff. I think this is when I was doing my little side project or was this before?

Alejandro: Then I was hoping that you would continue the storytelling to a networking event. All the takes over a Friday afternoon.

I was standing in a corner.
You guys, we're not going to do this. Okay. Yes. You were working on your side project.

Ollie: Yeah. So this was after I maybe we'll go back a little bit. What do you reckon

Alejandro: Go as far back as you want?

Ollie: Okay I guess maybe fresh out of uni.

Alejandro: Oh,wow.

Ollie: That's go even further back,
Alejandro: boy. [00:10:00] No, as far as you need up until the point when you hit puberty, but that would seal the, it wouldn't take us to fall back, like maybe one or two months ago.

So basically. Yeah,

Ollie: no. So I was just working at a tech accelerator. I think I was doing marketing initially. It didn't last long though.

I found Mark. Not boring, but a bit generic. I like to bounce all over the joint. You know what I mean?

Then I got an opportunity to kickstart a crypto project. That was really my first door into crypto. But that was back in 2017, the hay days. The hype was at its peak. Everyone was making money. So I thought, why not?

AVB: But Nobody was working?

Ollie: No one was working

Alejandro: I remember sitting and the first time I became poor came about 18 months later.

Ollie: No. I remember sitting at my desk one day and watching the price of Bitcoin go from, I think it was 19,000 Australian to 25,000 in one day. And I was just like, holy shit, this is something I've [00:11:00] never seen before.That's pretty much from that day

Alejandro: I have screenshots between going from 700 to 3000. And you can see the blips in the order books, which are just getting obliterated, like the actual order book for the strand exchange, the whole order book. It was just orders to be taken. And it was more exciting because of the time I was working at the coworking space here in Melbourne, dedicated to blockchain stuff.
And the exchange offices were within the coworking space. So people were literally running around screaming wild, I've been hacked, is there a big terrorist attack? What happened to the price of Bitcoin and nobody knew, and we just kept buying.

Ollie: Yeah, no, I got into it in 2017, I think, January or February, but you were much earlier than me. I was 700 bucks.
When was that? 14

Alejandro: 2015, 2016. Maybe it wasn't really that much earlier. And I felt we were peaking at 1200, so things happened very fast.

But you've touched on [00:12:00] a really interesting topic, which I think we both have in common. So I think it could be like a good, nice starting point. As much as people would like to know what happened to puberty and why before naturally go check it out.

We both have undergraduate degrees in something completely unrelated. You studied marketing back in the day. I did arts law and Yeah, law with politics, international history.

And then we have a bit of a windy path towards product and product management, which is what we're both doing now. So it has, it'd been interesting to know your uni experience. Did you have any friends?

Ollie: None whatsoever. It was horrible.
No, but I did a bachelor of business in management and marketing and really, I had no idea what the hell I wanted to do off to school. So that kind of just sent something generic that I [00:13:00] could use with whatever picks a marketing and management. Because it was relatively easy at the time.

Alejandro: It sounds like something people get jobs in Right?

Ollie: Yeah, I didn't particularly like uni. Fortunately, it led me to the product files. I'm grateful for that, but I just went into uni, did the work and left there. Wasn't really a social thing for me. I think if you lived on campus, it would be completely different, but I think we really have that culture here in Australia.

What do you think?

Alejandro: It's interesting because I think both things are true. The first one is you know who hosted experience in Australia is completely different. And assuming that there's people listening to these overseas, I don't know how to do it in every part of the world. But if you look at the United States, it is fairly common for people to move into state or at least spend the first year on campus.

And that really creates a different university experience in Australia. Most people go to the local universities in the cities that are great universities, but there's something about getting out of [00:14:00] home with parents to spend three hours at a class, and then coming back, it's much harder to connect with people.
And personally, I had a blast at uni, but then again, I think I had that mixed experience where technically I was away from home. Because I came from Venezuela to study here. So I was hyper social. I joined every club in society. I volunteered for everything that I could, I guess I didn't study much actually, but I did have a great time and did meet a lot of people.

Ollie: Yeah, no. For me it was more of a lifestyle thing than literally a few hours of uni a week. And then spend the rest of the day at the beach with my mates. It was good fun, but it made it seem like a waste at the end of the day. There's so many digital courses like micro things that you could do.

Like I know you're doing the design sprint at the moment and if I have to do uni again. I would just do like a handful of them and I reckon you'd have so much more experience, more knowledge, of real world things [00:15:00] yeah

Alejandro: There's a couple of things there. The first one is and other migrants have also shared these with me. Like this are the things that we know. Australians seem to be quite unique in that they are very strong, like high school friends, or even like primary school friends. And they keep those groups throughout. So they go to uni and it's actually hard to meet people because everyone already has their friends.
And you meet someone in class, you're having a great time. You're having a coffee on the lawn and they go, what are you doing on the weekend? Hanging out with my mates. What am I like the stranger around the corner that you met on the bus? I get it. How do you play? Because once again, I look at everything from a product lens.

Now, what is the worldview of your users? What are some assumptions that you're making about them? How do they like to connect with others? It obviously depends on the nature of the product, but even, how do you sell to them? And if you do have a culture that [00:16:00] is much more like Australians are pretty wild, pretty open.
We don't hold back, but there are like tiers of friendship groups and professional groups and off it goes,

Ollie: I definitely agree. My closest friends are probably the ones that I made at school. Same with my brother and sister. I don't dunno. It's a difficult problem to have, although I'm going to say the crypto community is very open. It's not necessarily like face-to-face friends that you would make, but you can make some very strong connections online. Some Super weird

Alejandro: Community is the best. So I'm a natural extrovert. And I think we don't have that in common. So what I find interesting, you said, when I had for instance last week after I had the near ecosystem hangout.
It went for two hours. It was actually a great turnout. We had, at some point we had 20 people listening. I hung up and I have [00:17:00] so much energy. I literally went for a run in Australia and I just went not running like Phoebe, and I was just like, this is what I need. I need to be in contact with people.

And the crypto community is amazing. It's a community like, like in, in a proper sense you may be on a telegram channel, would you to be calorie or discord, which is a bunch of pseudonyms, but people recognize you and people acknowledge your input and your work. And it is a hundred percent possible tool, I guess like golf, the rock sounds a bit corporate, but you do start to connect with people and we've both had it, you start on the general channel, you DM, you exchange ideas.
And next thing you've got a partner for a project you've got funding from someone else you're studying a part of the user experience Guild. Yes it’s amazing

Ollie: Yeah, not definitely. I think news is particularly good at that through all the games that they've built. I've been more involved with the human guild session for that. They're just open arms. [00:18:00] If you want to chat and chat. If you want to run an idea past, then they're always happy to listen and give feedback.
I think that's similar to what you're building here. And a lot of other guilds in NEAR it's perfect for kick-starting projects.
Alejandro: I think the strength, if we had to deconstruct what makes the community special, I think that it is a self-selecting community. If we go back to the Australian case of your best mates are the ones from high school most kids in high school have things in common
Know, they're leaving the same area their parents have roughly the same income or for whatever reason, you have things in common with people, no money in high school steps out of comfort time. They want to do the ones that don't fit in high school. Because they were weird, they weren't really fitting anywhere around them.

Because they're weird. These are the people who go to crypto. So you have to self-select no one who is born into crypto. No one goes to high school. [00:19:00] Yes. You have to dive into the match of those and choose a weird stage name and get a funky display picture and engage. And I think that crypto up until now has been like these magnets where all these weird people, they have ideas that really don't fit anywhere within existing frameworks, loosely in tech.
But some of it is ideological within society or business models or whatever it may be. And I think that's why this podcast is so interesting because we're trying to deconstruct, okay, what is it that these misfits have, what drives and what did the view of the world? Hopefully that will be an introduction for new commerce. What is it that got cryptic going? Why, like the underdog movement, it's gained so much momentum. Why do people keep showing up when it's a better market? Why do people keep, it takes a very special kind of [00:20:00] person and conviction to buy into a project or to continue to buy a project.
And it can be in any way financially or effort, you putting your time before it succeeds, because these are pretty dire before something has momentum and it's growing 10X.

Ollie: Yeah, for sure. Do you reckon? Cause I've seen that kind of, yeah. The misfits bonding together on a lot of these tech industries, but particularly ones that have financial incentives, look at wall street, bets that read it.
It's just like everybody working together on one thing, which is obviously to make money. I think a lot of crypto projects have that same aspect.

Alejandro: Wall street bits are interesting. I guess they overlap in the category of a sub community online. And, let's add a third one to those groups of third sub communities online and then try to tease out what they have in common.

And [00:21:00] what's different to say we've got crypto world, we've got wall street beds. And the third one we have just traditional gamers. You're on a discord server, you're playing a game. It could be anything call of duty or something. And you tell it to play video games. So when the three people have in common E.
They choose to leave the physical world, the real world where everything is being very politicized. Like there are expectations and people there's right. And there's wrong often determined by someone else who doesn't know you and doesn't care about you. So do you think it's interesting that once you're able to be one layer removed in the internet, you can be anything, you can choose any pseudonym, you can have multiple accounts, it gives you a lot of freedom.
And I think a lot of people are naturally frightened, if they think what is the worst thing that would happen? But there's also a lot of opportunity and [00:22:00] potential, at least from a sociological experiment. I find it interesting how people connect when they have an interesting common and that freedom to show up or not sure.
Wall street bets, I think, were very strictly financial and I didn't participate, but I'm assuming that people would show up repeatedly and maybe prove that they knew what they were talking about and be recognized by others et cetera. These group servers, I'm inclined to think it's more younger audiences or at least less stakes in the game.
So you still have a really strong community, but the interest may be is kept within the world of the game. And I think crypto blends, both crypto enables you to have, some sort of like financial alignment, but you also creating, these strongly gamified products in little ecosystems. And what I find most interesting about crypto is that no one is forced to show up, even now with like [00:23:00] DAOs and stuff, there's DAOs that have a ton of money in them, but, you still have to entirely put your hand up, take up the work, keep showing up, keep engaging it's very different from a traditional model where you have a contract and you were luckily show up, even if you hate it. And it's interesting.
Ollie: Do you think there's, I don't know how to really work this, but say like more people just trying to abuse that system because generally it is easier to get away with a lot of things.
Just take it down, giving out. I know, whatever it is, a few hundred dollars a month to publicize a bunch of things, tweet and comment like that. Do you reckon there would be abuse. To me, I think the obvious answer is yes. There's people trying to abuse that system. We're more unlike a traditional centralized model.
You have a job it's a bit harder to get away with things like that
Alejandro: A hundred percent. And this comes [00:24:00] down to a core distinction between the keyboard in crypto, because it would be wrong to say that everyone in crypto is at high end. There's two very distinct caps. There's an idealistic camp and a fatalistic camp.
And in fact, I think two of the three L two solutions are actually opposite ends. You've got the opposite optimistic one and whatever the other one is called, realistic camp. There's people that think that if you could just restructure society, if you could just, start a protocol from scratch and build it, how would you think would be best, everything would be perfect.
I would be very skeptical of that group because once again, it comes down to watering the assumptions that you're making about the users that are going to use your system, if you are assuming that the users that are going to use your system are all going to be honest, that hypothesis is going to get tested and the system getting abused is you getting feedback.
So in some ways, not that I am encouraging people to go out and commit fraud and [00:25:00] scam, but I do think that we just have to reconcile with the fact that it is in the human core to be corrupted, and that's why we have laws and that's why we have police. And that's why we have smaller social circles and social trust, which is actually quite bigger than crypto.
So I do think that we are very early, these experiments and some of them are prone to abuse if we don't take appropriate measures. Going back to your specific DAOs example at the moment or this on the data that we are involved in, you can only really put forward a proposal requesting funds, it gets approved or denied.
So it's very early days. It's a very straightforward process. And I guess we are limited in what we can do or know going forward. I think it's going to get more, more sophisticated, but definitely it’s something that we should be mindful of.

Ollie: Yeah, definitely. You touched on a good point that we are just experimenting with a lot of these ideas.
You obviously have the [00:26:00] two ends of centralized and decentralized. It's right answer is probably somewhere in the middle, but you do have those diehard crypto fanatics who want to decentralize absolutely everything as much as possible and I say, go for it. If it's an experiment, if it keeps on working, then why not?
But you do have to realize when something isn't working and maybe there is some application for some centralization.

Alejandro: A hundred percent. When people talk about decentralization, I think it's easier to identify the problem and what you want to move away from. It is much harder to identify the solution and what it is you want to build.
So I think that the consensus is, especially recently it's becoming a more topical, big tech or big government having too much influence and users, not even knowing what is going on or how to opt out. That would be a trend that I think is going to gain momentum. [00:27:00] But when you think about what is the alternative?
You have a problem because of what I realized, especially recently with the DAOs and I can dive a bit deeper in my experience with the ref finance community DAO. There is a very big difference between decentralized and ownership. So you basically limit the power on the influences and the status of the owners of a platform to censor people, to exercise their influence on others.
There's a difference between decentralizing that layer say you tokenize it. And the token goes out to the community, whatever that is very different from decentralizing the team or decentralizing the product in ways that will probably make it unusable. If we deconstruct that decentralizing the team is very hard because at least now there seems to be too much money in this space.
You can make a passive income, chill, do gen trading, [00:28:00] farming and freelancing every once in a while when you feel like it. It's very hard to get someone to show up full time and grind their brain, trying to work out how to make the code work and really push things forward. So I think that centralized teams are not the worst that we can see.Maybe there'll be synonymous online. There can be a blend, but I do think that these projects need to have a team. We need to know who's the leader. And something that came up recently was well, who in this team has a founder mindset, who has a vision? Where is this going? Like I lose respect in projects very quickly if they raised a lot of money and then they say, we're going to allow the community to decide what to do. What communities should be giving you feedback on someone whose job it is full time to decide what to do. Once again, it comes back down to an information assessment. [00:29:00] How much time can a reasonable community member have to be across all the aspects of the business, how much knowledge in depth industry specific knowledge can an average user have across all the years of the business.
Like it's just not reasonable to me and, caveat, I'm not taking a goal. So the code aspect, I do trust, big brands to figure out. And I do have a legal background. Like I was trained for years seeing the absolute worst that goes wrong in every possible scenario. And yeah, I guess it, I'm always trying to, it's a risk management role. Really lawyers are told to always look out for the worst and avoid that. Yeah.

Ollie: Yeah. And again, like, I'm not super technical either. I'm more product management, which is, there is definitely that tech aspect, but it also has that UX aspect. I do think there is a place for more of a mix between centralized and decentralized management style like Jocko [00:30:00] Willink derives from the seals.

It's like a decentralized line of command. So you still have key decision makers for certain aspects of the product or the army or whatever it is. But then you do allow that certain level of freedom between each of those people. If you give someone a task, you say, do this, do it, how you instead of micro-managing, which I think curve it's pushed a lot of businesses to that structure, even just forcing people to go remote, whether it's short-term or long-term, it's it makes it very difficult to micromanage these days. I think

Alejandro: It's great that you bring that up because the thing that I really like drug code, because he has literally battled-tested his ideas and his framework, his way of viewing the world and I think that's why we are now in a very affluent society.

Everything's very cushioned. We've got safeguards everywhere and [00:31:00] there's a lot of people coming up with ideas and things start to get pretty interesting and pretty wild when you go from idea to execution. And I guess that as a part of the new user experience Guild, this is where we jump in because there's two really important elements when you go from idea to execution, the first one is; have you refined the idea on the hypothesis and what it is that you're trying to do in a way that you're maximizing your chances of success your idea, you should go out and talk to people and you should do some research and you should really distill what it is about that idea.
You know what you're infusing into that idea from your personal perspective, from your walk of life that might make it work or not. This will be really useful before you spend money on it. But then, let's be honest most likely the idea is going to fail because let's be honest ideas evolve over time.

We can think of ideas like a baby. Babies [00:32:00] are cute, but babies don't have much in their head. They grow over time and in the same way that baby learns over time and they can become Lex Friedman when they grow up, we need to do the sign with an idea. So once again, from a part of the new UX experience yeah.

Asking questions along the way, everyone can go to an office or to Twitter and be like, we fucked up. The important thing is to ask the questions like where did we go wrong? What can we learn from this? Like from 1 to 10, how bad is this problem? Is this a killed project kind of thing, a reframe try again, like there's so much in the day to day that product covers and UX covers.
And I think it is to some extent missing in crypto because the thing is that people tend to confuse ideas with ideology. And [00:33:00] that's why I like drove, he said ideas have to be battle tested ideologies and crypto needs to be battle tested on that. I guess that's where we come in to do all the user tests.

Ollie: Yeah, for sure. It's probably way too simplistic. But obviously product management is like three tiers. The UX, the technology and the business, and once all are balanced, that's when you can make good products. Generally, I find the crypto markets way too focused on pure technology NEAR not so much.
A lot of the functionality is very UX. But I think you do need that balance to balance those three things.

Alejandro: Yes. You're a hundred percent correct. Those are definitely the three ingredients of a successful business, but I think that what we have to acknowledge as well is that the needs required are different depending on the stage of the [00:34:00] business. It's like driving a car, I don't know if people still drive manual, call it steam, when you're going, you go in first gear and it's like more reps, but slower.
And then you vooom!!, you change gears. And can you do that? I grew up driving on the other side of the road, changing gears with my right hand. I was a great driver by the way, before I wrote off two cars and never drove

Ollie: we're coming back to that.

Alejandro: And it's funny because I tell people I grew up driving in Venezuela. I can drive anywhere in the world. You people don't know how to drive because I see some homeless people and anyway, kudos to Elon Musk and self-driving cars looking forward to that. But yeah. Look, when we look at crypto, I think that this is where. This is a really good example of something that is super simple every day, steaks, bread, and butter for product managers, but that it may be novel or like a really interesting framework for crypto people to look at.

You look at the technology adoption curve, [00:35:00] you've got innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. I think that's the case. You can look it up and there's a framework of it where you have what's called the chasm, the chasm is like a valley of death between early adopters and early majority. Because you know, things get tough there and usually funding dress up. So I think that when you look at the crypto as a whole, it can be misleading. I can understand where people could be misled. If you've been in crypto like I have since ethereum was $4, 16, 24, and there was nothing online.

And then you look at a sushi swap or a uniswap or an Abbey. We’ve made it, the vision that we had, we've made it, Abby has 20 billion in the back. Like it is easy to see how as an underdog with vision and very patchy technology, there is something there, it exists. But when you pull one step [00:36:00] back and especially once again from a product and user experience perspective from a market and business perspective, you realize the crypto market is tiny.
No one is using my crypto. The Commonwealth bank of Australia makes on average the entire market cap in a quarter in profit, like I've told people they've got 50, a hundred thousand dollars in savings in dollars waiting to buy a house here in Australia. I was like, oh, you know what, if you like, actually, I shouldn't be going around giving financial advice.
But again, I've had it before. What if you put down the money in Bitcoin? You have all the upside and then you borrow money against it and you still have money for your apartment. No one's touching default for whatever reason. And volatility would be a big aspect of it. Maybe don't gamble your first property on TFI. There's a big gap to bridge and there's a huge market to tap.
So I guess, when you look at that crypto adoption curve, my theory has always been that crypto is unique because at the moment, or at least [00:37:00] up until very recently, we were definitely in the innovators stage. The innovators were the same people as the users and the same people as the investors.
And when you have that combination, it's really weird because as a user, you're willing to put up with friction because all the assumptions that you would make of a user, never having new script or go away, you built this thing from scratch from CLI you know how to navigate all the corners to make it work.
And it gets worse because when you bring in investors as outside money, they bring in expectations and they bring expertise. When you build this and all these guys are crypto reach and they don't have to worry about money. I was again like I would like ambition, I don't know. Maybe once again, it's a self-selective circle, but I see the people on Twitter, talking about trading tens of thousands dollars worth of crypto punks and I was like, is this the biggest challenge we have in crypto right now? We’ve [00:38:00] reached the point where there is very expensive digital art, easy at Peter, me of what we do that kind of be POS that kind of be true. There has to be more to taking this product and service and potential to the masses. I think that's what takes us to NEAR it must still work.

Ollie: There is a shift from technology focused to more of a balanced tech and UX. But yeah, I think you first introduced me to NEAR that was probably almost a year ago

Alejandro: Price credit for your big brains joining the ecosystem.

Ollie: The price was about what it is at the moment.
Unfortunately like a steel

Alejandro: that, which means that it is doubly as seal

Ollie: Now. Yup. So belongings. Yeah, it was by far the easiest like a wallet to understand. I literally set my dad up on one and he pretty much got it straight away as well.

Alejandro: I've got a couple of Ethereum miners, back home and my mum looks after them. She's learning how to use metamask and she knows how to check, [00:39:00] like the mining rate and how much is coming in. She gives me a lot of trouble because I often use the Ethereum to pay for Ethereum fees when I do stuff on the Ethereum side of things, and for a while, it was extremely expensive. I don't know exactly how it works, but all the money that I was making as a miner, I was burning in fees plus more so I'm like these unit economics are out of whack because users that are getting ripped off with really expensive gas things that were making all the money, but we're not like, where is the money going?

The point is that my mom knows how to use Metamask basic stuff. And I set her up with NEAR and she's easy. This is amazing. It feels like a normal product work to put art. I think that is why, and this is something that I want to make really clear because I think that there's a lot of people like that.

If you've been around crypto for a long time, you [00:40:00] choose where you want to be. Who you want to work for, where you want to develop your product. There's no shortage of options out there. There's a ton of them. And there's a big distinction. Like I choose where I invest and I put some money where I think the fundamentals may be there.

Disclosure, I'm staking some Solana and I'm staking some other projects that may be seen as competition. But where I choose to spend my time, when I see the potential, where I feel that the fundamentals win or will win long term and I feel like I'm talking like Mark Cuban only then I'm in the negative net worth.

And the fundamentals, the win is it mirrors, vision, and hypothesis is super simple. We already figured out the technical layer. People have been misled. Because Ethereum hasn't been able to scale, people think that blockchain can't scale, that's not true. Blockchains have scale. There's a [00:41:00] ton of them that can do what Ethereum can only dream of doing. The problem is that these blockchains innovated looking backwards, they were looking at Ethereum and they thought what can Ethereum not do?

We'll do it. They weren't looking forward. See these blockchains failed to ask themselves if we had a blockchain that is fast and scalable, what would have to be true for everyday people on the street? I'm looking here at the window, there's a middle-aged lady with a dog. What would have to be true for her to be able to use the blockchain in the same way that she uses Facebook or Instagram or whatever, her online banking applications. And I don't know how deliberate the NEAR team was, although increasingly I am going through some of their old content from 2018. And I'm actually quite surprised at how user experience has been top of mindsets since 2018, but it is amazing they've got these ginormous brains that worked out the technical layer and we could go into detail with that.
Although I feel that when it

Although I feel that when it [00:42:00] comes to content around the new year, that has been covered really well, you've got sharding and night shading and bridges, but they also have the user experience component. And I feel like they've done some amazing work. I’d going let's start with user journeys, user experience.
When you think of user experience, the customer journey is at the core of it. You lay out from beginning to end all the touch points that the user has with your product. And then at the very end, you have to define what it is that they are trying to achieve and have they achieved it, are they happy?

Your delight, you exceed expectations. And then they've done a great job. It starts with an account model, each having an account that size with zeros and has a ton of digits and a private seat phrase stored in a computer, which is probably going to die. And it's hard to keep secure. Is that an experience that we can expect anyone to have on any service where they put reasonable value in? Probably not.

Look, I know people who've been in [00:43:00] crypto for years and they still lose access to wallets or they still get hacked. Like it's a very big hurdle when you decentralize the experience to remove managing of people's data securely. A secure centralized service can definitely be, that's just one example of how they've managed to build a really nice stack that enables.

Ollie: Yeah. It almost feels like you sign up to Instagram or something. When you make an error account, you do have the one hurdle of funding that account to actually get your name. But if you can sort that out, it's. It's cool. Like you can pick your own username. And I think there's also something tangible there.

Like you try to claim some good names. Like I somehow managed to get all eight.net and I was stoked.

Alejandro: Which other name did you manage to claim?

[00:44:00] We've got him on our

Ollie: He'll be coming to us soon.

Alejandro: These were ones again, credit where credit is due. Then your team has done an amazing job at building basic infrastructure that allows anyone to come in and build a great application that feels at web 2.0 on top. But once again, this is where we come in.
We're product people.

How many applications, built on top of NEAR? Can we say has an excellent user experience? Including a decent looking UI(User Interface), Pretty design, somebody thought deliberately about the colors on the front.

Ollie: Surprisingly it takes a lot of research and thought behind

Alejandro: It takes a lot of research.
This is where we get people with funky haircuts and fashion. Yeah, it's fine.
Let the [00:45:00] hips just have a place.

You need to have the creatives in the room and that's what we need. And that's why most crypto people acknowledge this and now we have flipped to people, acknowledging, look, we can build a backend, that's fine.

And we've got enough money to pay for anything. How can we get these creative problem solvers to improve our products? That's why we have a parking experience Guild. That's why we have a deliberate effort to expand the ecosystem to 12 hours for more people. And that's why we're having this podcast.

Ollie: But yeah, there are a lot of cool projects starting to pop up on there to put it bluntly. A lot of them could do with a good UX review or a design sprint to really nail down like what you actually want to accomplish with your project and how can you get there in a beautiful sinful mouth?

Alejandro: Yeah, I agree.
And I think that it's a good problem to have [00:46:00] because it is the layer of the cake. It is the layer of the stack that it takes people with skilled, with experience, with dedication, it is an art and a science people shouldn't be underpricing and underpaying and underestimating designers or product people just because maybe they operate in a different way than, hard coded technical people.

But it is easier to make a website look really nice and too smooth. And the experience that the user has, you go from two pages to only one. Maybe you add an extra button, you add an extra label. That side is easier. Then whatever it is they're doing on the backend and trying to make the blockchains structure each other and what not

And look, obviously we're biased because I can barely talk with Siri on my computer. Like maybe the technology side seems [00:47:00] disproportionately hard to me, but this is where the conversation has to be. I think it would be really encouraging for product people and design people to know that there is technical talent dealing with these buckets of problems.
If we focus on these buckets and the feedback that we provide is going to be well-received and there's going to be a healthy relationship. I think it's extremely powerful. Let's be honest. Any product design has a broad bucket of creative problem solvers. I think it is very likely that they could find a more fulfilling, more fun and better remunerated professional that came over to the crypto side. Pretty bold statement. Like you're still on the traditional side and you're dipping the toes. You're just very conservative.

Ollie: It's definitely more exciting. I'll give you that. There's a lot of things that can move to the crypto world and it will happen. It's just [00:48:00] going to take time and a bit more focus on UX, a bit more focused on mass adoption and we will get there

Alejandro: Once again, focus by whom? Because that's where I see my role. I guess to provide a bit more context, we should have probably talked about it earlier. The way in which NEAR is growing, it's actually really interesting. A fascinating case study, decentralization as you scale is an experiment of itself. So the NEAR foundation, I'd say it’s at the very top, they've got a big community treasury. And as the ecosystem is growing, there’s being more layers added, which is later becoming like a self sustaining autonomous unit.

So one of the many layers removed would be the Guild. So the guilds at NEAR are community run [00:49:00] projects or initiatives. So we have total discretion and autonomy of what we do and how we do it. But the foundation does fund initiatives. There's a couple of different structures there. Some guilds have a bit of a fixed budget to allow them to have more long-term planning like the part of the New York Guild.
This one is deemed to be core to the ecosystem and able to provide that well, the volume pressures on it and there's other guilds that can be project-based. There's a bunch of them, you can go check them out on the website. So I guess that when we talk about, the focus should be on X, the question is whose focus because we know that the foundation which operates at a very deep technical level, the focus right now is in making the blockchain work and making sure that the things that we identify as nice to haves, or even like fundamental might be like, we need this to work for us to be able to build a product.

That's what they're [00:50:00] doing. I feel like the focus in many ways is on us. And I'm going to say us loosely as product and user experience Guild and community more broadly, the focus is on us to take the message to the broader public. Do you have a business idea that could potentially live on the blockchain, but maybe you've heard that ethereum is extremely slow or expensive, because let's be honest when faced with the restrictions when faced with the constraints that Ethereum has most serious businesses and startups just go the traditional way, they go centralized.

How many projects applying to YC are crypto? Not many. How many people raising series A, B, C, D F G, whatever the, they go all the way now. So I think that's where the conversation needs to start. And once again, like it's not just illustrating that now we've got a really user-friendly stack, which allows you to build, [00:51:00] I'm not going to say anything, but it allows you to build a lot of things.
Yeah, definitely getting there, but also it is a matter of market share and positioning. So I've always said that some of my non-techie friends have failed to understand why venture capitalists were willing to subsidize Uber for years. Like why would an investor be okay with a company losing billions of dollars a year for you to have a cheap ride back from the bar after your shit faced?

And I explained to them, you have to understand we're only going to leave this moment of rapid take adoption once you know, this is the digital equivalent of a landlord. Think back in the 15 hundreds or whenever it was, all the ships going out there looking for land. Once all the land [00:52:00] in the world has been discovered and once someone puts a flag on it, that’s the reason to own your land. You can start a new country from now. I guess that the new frontier is Mars and who knows how that's going to work out, but also the new frontier and the crazy thing is that one that is accessible to everyone is a metaverse, Uber doesn't care about losing money for 2, 3, 4, or five years, because we want to say all the dominant player, they're going to be the dominant player for a very long time.
So I think that kind of positioning in crypto is really powerful. Not only can you be a dominant player within the blockchain and decentralized world as a whole but even within the NEAR ecosystem, like right now, launching is insane because you have an entire community or very active, very dedicated people
supporting you like the recent token sales as being Skyward in ref they're raising an insane amount of money. And this is all very community [00:53:00] wanting to see projects succeed. We want to attract people to build on NEAR, and we want to make sure that they succeed and we'll give them the capital.

We'll give them feedback. We're trying to recruit talent for them. It's a good time to be an entrepreneur.

Ollie: Yeah, definitely carve out your pace of MediVis.

Alejandro: Exactly. Have you parked flag, put your stake in it?

Ollie: Yeah, no, but you're not wrong.

Alejandro: I'm using my standing desk

Ollie: stretch those legs

Alejandro: stretch those Lennox, mostly my back.

Ollie: It is interesting though, to look at it from the centralized point of view too. I know Facebook is such a heavy focus on VR and reckon they'll build some very big metaverse in the future. You also have a lot of games these days building their own small meterverse look at fortnight.
They have like [00:54:00] virtual concerts in real time that sell millions of dollars worth of just skins which literally means nothing, but it works so we can translate that into decentralized where instead of just owning a piece of skin that does nothing that you can actually sell off and change and upload your own versions that would be just next level.
Alejandro: You're into the money because there's two big trends here. The first one that I see is the technology. So I feel like all these games are pioneering in the creation and the testing of the technology. It reminds me, I don't want to date myself, but back when I was in high school, maybe in primary school a friend brought a phone with a camera, this was like the latest Nokia with the camera.
And we were like, whoa, like the future is here. This is before the iPhone, just to make things clear, the photos [00:55:00] were potatoes. The photos were the worst quality you can imagine and the screen was tiny and there was basically no way to transfer it to a computer. Basically, that's why I have a career now because there's no footage of me.
I would have had to, I would have counseled myself, honestly.
But now, the interesting thing is that somebody's looking at that phone in the photo, they would say, look, this makes no sense. Clearly it's not better than anything that exists right now, but he hinted at a trend and you're going to extrapolate that as far as you want, because then you've got phones with proper cameras and then you've got the Instagrams and the filters and streaming and creator economy.
It just keeps, it never stops. It keeps going. So I see games pioneering merging with the second trend that I was going to mention, which is technology [00:56:00] and businesses colliding and converging. The blockchain space is fascinating because it does allow you to think in different ways when it comes to business models.
The fact that you can have non fungible tokens and a bunch of incentive design mechanism design, like that could be an entire podcast. We probably will have an entire podcast. We're certainly working on having design sprints around this, because it's just fascinating where you can do it. In fact, as we hit the one hour mark.

You wanted to bring up some points about a design sprint in general. We are both doing a bit of a design sprint workshop training now, which we're really excited about. And it's exciting because it's one of those instances where you come across a well-established practice and framework in the product world that when you [00:57:00] combine that nice neatly laid out structured with our experience dealing with real projects and the real world, and there's bullshit cycles of never ending discussions and lack of certainty and lack of anything.

You bring the two together and you're like, okay, if I could be empowered as a product person to approach a team and say, look, I've got this framework, let's run through it. You have a very high level of certainty that the team could benefit greatly from the clarity that it brings. And in crypto, I think that the problem or the potential is even more acute, because once again, we've got mostly tech people which are really good at building the technology.
But as you build the product on top of the technology, or you could look at it as a commercialization of that technology, that's when some people could come in and help shape things up a little bit. Yep.
I don't know if you had anything in mind when you mentioned that you wanted to run like a [00:58:00] design sprint with me for the Guild.

Ollie: This is stemmed from that book that I can see in your background, sprint by

Alejandro: the book in my background, but you didn't mention anything about the dirty plates.
Yeah. That's the one to take a nap, Jonathan.

Ollie: And the other guy. Yeah. I'm not completely,

Alejandro: You are the other guy on my Jake net.

Ollie: I would be happy. Happy to be the Jamie.
Yeah. But I've just started that book and I'm super enjoying it so far. And I think first of all, a design sprint is just like a week or even four days now session to really flesh out what you're actually trying to solve a problem that you're trying to solve and a few potential solutions and then really [00:59:00] prototyping and testing those solutions to validate your ideas before you actually commit to them. And I always thought it was just product specific, but it sounds like it's more general than that. You can do it from a they did it with the book, title and cover. So yeah, I thought it might be a good idea to test out what you're doing with Silicon craftsmen through a design sprint.

Alejandro: Yeah very well said. I think you've very accurately summarized without any help. The subtitle of the book is “how to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days”. Definitely done your reading. Now, before we start, I also bought the book for $35, but I also paid for the online workshop for $2,000.
And I must say. The book would have been enough.

I [01:00:00] love learning and I feel like I'm a hundred percent good. I'm going to get my money back either way. But, I guess this is not a criticism of the workshop. I guess this is more encouragement that it's amazing how a $35 book can provide somewhat value and push you forward in your career. And this is just one example, all you know both like to read a lot when we can.

I think my last book I read was last year. I was going to say, we should definitely run design sprints, bringing propositions for the ecosystem, not a bad idea to start maybe with the guild to clarify some things. If I could just add a couple of things to your description of what the design sprint is or what, where the value comes from.
The problem that I've come across more often and where I think a lot of the value is, its when you get a group of people together to discuss something. Everyone has very valid [01:01:00] grievances and very valid ideas and half-baked solutions, but it's very hard to come to an agreement on any of those. It's very hard to come to an agreement on what the problem is or what the solution may be or how to merge them. Because at any one point in time, everyone is focusing on something different.
I'm a be focusing on the nature of the problem. Somebody else is focusing on the nature of the solution. Somebody else is focusing on an interaction they had with a customer and a specific feedback for a specific use case. So once again, I'm a very visual person and I guess that through my legal training, sorry, I'll stop showing off now.

I'm also very analytical. Like I like to see, in at least 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, a one, a nine 17, you can pin things down specifically. When you get a letter of demand, you respond to each claim and it one claim, one paragraph like things need to get addressed. Probably, what I like about the design sprint is that it's very, [01:02:00] open-ended, you have heaps of sticky notes and then have little things to vote and people draw and you really allow everyone to bring everything out.
And you place it on a timeline and you vote and you remix. So it's a really nice way to get everyone on the same page. Get everyone motivated that they had an opportunity to express themselves, that they had an opportunity to learn. Because you know, there's a period where you may bring in some experts to answer questions or present on a topic to make sure everyone's in the same level of understanding.

So design sprints are amazing. We shall be reporting some design sprints with some NEAR projects in the near future. What I wanted to run by you while I have you, because we don't want to keep this one too long.
I have an idea for this podcast and this is going to be a major Alfa leak through the tour. Three people that we listened to the first episode, but it's great because we're going to capture it raw as it is. [01:03:00] And I guess we will see in the real world in due time, what actually

Ollie: I'm excited.

Alejandro: Yeah. So one of the things that I love about blockchain, and this is something that if you're a product designer or creative outside of the crypto space at the moment, you really need to get your head around.

Crypto allows you to create like self-contained ecosystems, where you can really go to town with this incentive design and behavioral design. So if you've done any work or readings, if you were attracted to gamification, crypto takes it to the next level, it really taps into a bunch of human trends from wanting to feel special and recognized, giving people status to giving people money to there's a few things in there that you can tap into.

So I'm going to give you a very specific example with [01:04:00] this podcast. We know that the battle for attention is Savage at the moment, every man and the dog and the tax as well, probably has a podcast now.

And even though ours is quite niche and I'm interested in capturing content, even if people only listen to it in six months time or whatever, I do think that there's some interesting experimentation that we can do.
Are you ready?

I am.

So when thinking about this podcast, I applied some of the thinking hats that you may apply more broadly to every project. So some of the hot trends right now are decentralized governance and decentralized ownership, incentive design. So you're giving people some sort of reward or participating in NFTs as digital art and potentially more.

We're starting to see NFTs as digital [01:05:00] ticketing, et cetera. Those, I guess like technical trends, start to really think through real world questions pertaining to your view. So in my case, I start to think of, okay, a new podcast. How can we make it more attractive to attract high quality speakers? Or how can we make it to create a different business model where we early community members or the podcasts are able to benefit from it, or, how can you start to play around to get some sort of a niche.

Are you ready?

I was going to say I would use the whiteboard behind me, but had a full [01:06:00] session the other day with Jordan. And afterwards I realize I can't see anything on it

Ollie: Do you have anything on there that you need a cover of

Alejandro: My private key is on it? Just fun Easter egg hunt for it

Ollie: That’s actually a good idea we should do it
next episode I guarantee at least .1million

Alejandro: I'll drop some Sheba. Sorry. I was thinking first from the perspective of creating a special experience for guests, especially, we're going to have some guests like you, but more that are going to be on the product side of things that may not have experienced crypto yet.

So I was thinking of a way to introduce them to the NEAR rivers and experience a crypto transaction, et cetera, [01:07:00] for the first time, in a way that was exciting and memorable. So the first thing that I come up with was we'll be talking with people all over the world and was gonna say, internet alcohol is a social lubricant, and coffee is delicious.
And what are some nibbles? Because the call may be longer. So I thought of giving people some kind of allowance. That sounds horrible. Encouraging people to buy themselves some sort of snacks or official appetizers for the podcast and to put through a proposal for payout on the UX is near, which is the guild doubt.
So it will be really suitable way. I'm expecting requests to be anywhere between five and $20 if they go to town. I'm thinking it'd be really cool because it's obviously not about the money. Nobody is gonna invoice you for a dream come true. It's just a really nice use case of experimenting with the DAO
So that was the first [01:08:00] one. Yeah,

Ollie: That's a really good idea. Actually, that’s a good use case as well. Would you do it live? get them to make an account and you fund it? And then they make a request on the DAO.

Alejandro: We could a hundred percent do it live taking into account that most of the podcast is going to be audio only.

The video will be available on YouTube, but the video, as far as I'm concerned, I hope so. It's only the camera it’s not recording the screen on my screen.

Ollie: You're setting up the account. We've been talking about.

Alejandro: yeah, so that was one option as far as creating that user experience for guests. And another one that I thought would be really good would be to give people numbered NFTs [01:09:00] So you were episode number one, you get a really nice NFT. We source from the community.

Once again, you can see how here we start to double. So we want to create a special experience for guests. We want them to have a good time, not you, but some of them were quite busy. And then we talked to people for a lot of money for an hour. So we want them to have a good time. And, we're genuinely grateful for them coming on board that will be layer one. Layer two is we want to engage the community as much as possible. So you can see how, if we run ongoing.

What'd you call it? I don't know why. I guess I'm tired. The word is coming to me in Spanish. Ongoing competitions for the community to submit NFTs and then we'd pay for it. And when you say I'm in the community DAO or someone, there should be magic money coming into the UXisNEAR DAO that will be paying for this art.

And once again, my [01:10:00] ideal would be, even if we have to set up some KPIs, this is free marketing from us. If you were to think of, okay, they will only ever going to be 100 people listening to the podcast most likely they're going to be community members. So how can we be present in the community members mind?

How can we draw their attention to these? How can we make them feel like this podcast is theirs or full of them.

Ollie: That's a great idea, too. So basically at the end of this podcast, the community would come up with a few cool art pieces about something relevant that we've been speaking about. You pick one of them, turn that into an NFT and give it to the host, not the host, the guest.

Alejandro: Oh my God. See the power of a brainstorming and bouncing ideas at a tolerance. You just leave me an amazing idea as well. People would create the NFT. [01:11:00] After listening to the interview. So the NFT could be themed about anything that came up or anything specific about the speaker.
It is such a good idea.

Ollie: As long as it's not me on a kangaroo saying it chapter room,

Alejandro: I'll pay out of my own funds for chapter.

Ollie: Oh

Alejandro: that's where the playfulness scene. And we do have to have some guidelines, obviously the problem with gray too but you said it has no

boundaries. So you know, some about some guidelines for submission as would be necessary. We can't really stop people from putting you inside a kangaroo.

Ollie: Don't get paid. Okay. I'm glad you clarified in the pouch.

Alejandro: Okay. Awesome. That's another great idea. Obviously just laying them out loosely. Not necessarily in order, because if I have [01:12:00] set them in order then similar initiative, but I guess a more early stage would be the creation of the artwork for the podcast.

You know how when you open Google podcasts or apple podcasts, whatever application you use, there's a square artwork, which is always the same it’s consistent and Joe Rogan has his horrific face too close to the camera with red and black pattern I don't know why it's such a bad image.

Ollie: Oh, it's classic.

Alejandro: Yeah. Some podcasts have really good ones. So I've come across it to do a little research, I've got a good page with really good guidelines. I have to keep it simple, the measurements, et cetera. So I think that's another really good task that I'm going to allocate to OWS. I've already messaged Sophie to understand that the better the collaboration between the two guilds namely, who's going to pay for this is magic money on both sides, money shouldn't be an issue.

And once again, I think it'd be a really good way to engage the community. Come up, [01:13:00] hopefully with a way better artwork than I would've made myself.

And obviously I really like finding ways for the community to be able to earn money, especially in the early stages. So if we were going to spend money in a logo, I'm more than happy that it is going to OWS participants

Ollie: Yeah, no, I really like both of those ideas. It's a good way to involve the community, get more listeners and also incentivize the guests.

Alejandro: It's that. And I was going to mention this at the beginning of the podcast to take the edge off a little bit of what I chose not to, because there is a very real chance that no one is going to understand this podcast, right?

Oh, I struggle to understand your Australian accent. In my mind, he's much between an American Australian and a South American. And I think people are just going to tune [01:14:00] out.

Ollie: That's where the power of editing and subtitles come into play.

Alejandro: On YouTube. Yeah. I'll add that disclaimer on apple podcasts if you cannnot understand it?

I realized my accent is so bad when I started editing videos and the bloody transcription thing, it get it wrong all the time.

It's not that bad.

And I was like maybe the software is bad. No. I will replay and upon listening to me and seeing the transcription

I'm starting to pick up and I’m saying things incorrectly but that’s how people talk here. So anyway, that is a side note. Hopefully, we will get more listeners, but once again, like when we look at our customer segment, our audience NEAR is very international and NEAR has actually been remarkable at getting a lot of users and a lot of interest, a lot of builders in non-Western [01:15:00] countries.
They've got heaps inside the station in South America. There's a NEAR city node opening up in Africa. I think that my theory for that is that these are communities with a very high pain point. They've got real problems in the society where they see the value and the use of decentralized technologies and they were priced out of Ethereum. If it was just too expensive, they didn't bother engaging for the last two years. Yeah, that's just a side note. Do you be mindful of, I should be speaking a little bit slower.

We will be adding captions to the video. Now we've been warming up and I know that we have already gone way over time.
I know that you have your bedtime
7:44 PM for the record. Now we've been warming up. So far we have that's going on to this time, the artwork for the podcast competition NFTs based on the content of the episode, [01:16:00] competition will pay out more because it's going to be an hour of the time. Plus during our work and the guests requesting a reimbursement for some stacks

Ollie: really

Alejandro: is where things get really hot.
And this is where the pre I'm going to say the prenup prenups tonight, the preamble that I had before we jumped into the next exercise now where things are interesting is I'm thinking of some sort of a token Nomics model. So say we create a DAO for the podcast so this will be the first podcast, which would be a decentralized autonomous organization.

And just to draw the parallel here, podcasts can actually grow to be large media companies. It's amazing how much power they can bring in brand recognition and [01:17:00] sponsorship and money in just a cloud. There's a lot of money in being able to deliver a message to people. So hypothetically, when we take over Joe Rogan, the podcast, as a thing, as an entity would have traditionally been whatever, like an LLC in Delaware, which accumulates the value of the company and invoices for advertising.

I'm thinking of having a DAO and ideally a Delaware LLC registered in Miami. I'm talking with the legal field to learn more about the setup. And what I'm thinking is if the podcast starts taking sponsors, they pay the DAO for the sponsorship and then down members decide how the money is dispersed, which should obviously be a hundred percent to me.[01:18:00]

No DAO member is getting admitted, all the money goes to me because if you think about it, and this is a question that we haven't quite solved, where at least I haven't seen all the doubts in the ecosystem because it's so early if the DAO controls the funds coming into it.
And let's assume that there's ongoing revenue, you've sold out an ads for the next six months and the number of listeners is only going up, then what is the process for people becoming part of the DAO? Like naturally I think people would have to buy in. The value of being a member to the DAO will be proportional to the assets the DAO controls. Okay. Am I correct?

Ollie: So some kind of governance token

Alejandro: That's where things get murky, like it is governance in the sense that you have a [01:19:00] say on how the money gets dispersed.

But if the money coming in it's an income stream, then technically it is the same as ownership. You govern the protocol because you own it. We've obstructed the ownership layer in some of this crypto talk. Let's be honest, mostly for legal reasons. We like to say that a governance token doesn't have any inherent value in it, but if there is money in that treasury then it must have a value.

So anyway the Silicon token, so it can tell you things and possibility once again, like I'd find a way where

Ollie: There are a lot of cool things you could do. I'm just completely spitballing. But with your episode, what if you had two per episode, one will go to the guest. Second one would be auctioned off and then used as a token for the DAO.[01:20:00]

Alejandro: Whoa, whoa,

Ollie: stay centralized podcast

Alejandro: It just blew my mind. Could these be away.
I'm thinking of a way of potentially expanding the number of submissions that wins so say we pay out one. The one that we gave to the guest, but maybe we auction off three more so that all three have voting power or something like that because it could be interesting to have actually like an NFTs team for each podcast.

Ollie: That'd be very cool.[01:21:00]
There's some really interesting stuff you could do with this.

Alejandro: Because the other option, I guess the more straightforward one would have been. You have the Silicon token. Once again, you always try to find fair ways to distribute among the community. So guests would receive some tokens, hypothetically not making any promises.

If we could find a way to airdrop them to listeners, that'd be sick as well. Obviously community participants, if they create NFTs we will try to distribute as many as possible. Most of them would be for me, but also at some point they are sold off, because what I find weird in that cycle is that it becomes like a catch 22 people are buying a token to control the treasury.
But when you, when they buy the token, their money goes into the treasury anyway [01:22:00] So
it's not an incorrect model, just to be clear, that is actually the model at Skyward finance house. So when you buy the Skyward token, you get a proportional claim to their treasury and the treasury gross. Would you each subsequent sale? So I guess I would just have to do more research on how it works.

What I'm trying to get to is, I need to understand how I get paid because I've been living in a shared house for way too long. And I don't know if you go ask in here, but some of the product demos that I've done, there's roaring laughter in the background. You know why? Because we're in lockdown and while I'm working hard here in front of you, my housemates are getting up

taking place through the duration of this.
Got to cut it off early because at 8:00 PM, the meth comes out.[01:23:00]

Ollie: Yeah I If you look at that structure before Tony died on the first episode
is gone, I'm the new host

Alejandro: apologies. I'll call that one out.

Ollie: Maybe it's great for the audio.

Alejandro: Yeah,

Ollie: You can just lay it out before you start making these cells. So just say every option of the NFT, the episode NFT, you just take a cut. But if that was written into the code I'm completely sure that the community would be fine.

It's a really good point. So I think a big component of the design sprint that we want to run is, we'll do it with some existing near projects to help them improve. I'm really interested in running design [01:24:00] sprints. Let's call them with the community more broadly. The focus for those assigned sprints is bringing in ideas like the ones that we're discussing now. we've the technical capabilities of NEAR.

So, the specific example now would be, we're talking about auctioning and NFT and trying to decide how different stakeholders would make money from the NEAR side. I immediately saw the opportunity. Great idea, by the way Ollie. I immediately saw the opportunity because mintbase allows you to add a ridiculous amount of people as the recipients of the money.
You can add them. I don't know if it's a once off or they can be multiple ongoing for the royalties. So there could be a split, 20% for the artists, 20% for me or people involved in the production of the podcast, because we expect the team to grow. You'll be my Jamie [01:25:00] and then 60% can go to the community treasury so that I can submit more proposals to keep paying myself.

Ollie: Yeah. I think you should roll with it some good.

Alejandro: I'm going to spin out and a mint based store.

Ollie: Yeah, it could be cool. It's a great promotion I don't know, have a quick Google after this, but type in “decentralized podcast” I bet you nothing will shows up

Alejandro: the deep

Ollie: the way they put,

Alejandro: dude, we are on fire. This is why we charge you big bucks. You like what you seeing
You like want you listening. We have the sign sprints as a service and only fantasy
soon did. Tom's tough, if you find a way to make money, go [01:26:00] for it. I'm not judging anyone.

Ollie: Man I'll tell you something crazy. There was a Twitch streamer. No, leave it rolling. That's a Twitch streamer and she's like one of the most popular ones. So she would have been making hundreds of thousand dollars a year easily, and she made an onlyfans account.

She said, what Twitch would pay her in two months, it would have taken her 10 years to make what she made on only fans in one month. So it's one month of work for five years of what she was making before, purely just so people could see her naked.

Alejandro: The way you laid it out. That's my non mathematician.

Ollie: I laid it, laid it out like that. Because that's how she did, but basically what she was making. Yeah. That's why she hasn't only fence account what she was making on Twitter.
Alejandro: She made one month
Ollie: what she would've made on Twitch in [01:27:00] five years she made it on only fans in one month.

Alejandro: That's

Ollie: fun would have been millions of dollars in one month.

Alejandro: So I sit into a really good podcast. I think it was indie hackers. I love indie hackers podcasts. I love the range of interviewees they have. In fact, we talk about. This part has been inspired and are working, but I think it's more of the format of Joe Rogan being open-ended no cap in time.

Yeah. You can like jokes and navigate your way in and out of serious topics depending on the guest. But I think that the Indie hackers podcast definitely would be a bigger inspiration, at least a closer one to one inspiration, Cortland is doing an amazing job. They have a really wide range of guests, all in their journey, trying to tap into running their own businesses.
And I like to see that transition, their worldview and how they tackle challenges. The recently had two of [01:28:00] the top grossing performers on the fence and the went into a lot of detail of how it works and a problem that they talked about, which I thought was fascinating was there's a lot of people that are able to build an audience elsewhere, say on tik tok or even like traditional whatever media people. And then they announced and onlyfans account. So a lot of people pay before any content is being posted. And then they post like really, vanilla content, let's just say that they didn't manage the users expectations very well. So people pay for who knows what was in their head, but we can tell and then they upload it, whatever, like auto show and elbow, that was a problem for them because now there's being a lot of like credit card, like payment reversal, and the platform is getting very strict and changing the rules.
So I guess that, what I'm trying to say [01:29:00] is that you can definitely make a little money on onlyfans but you need to bring your own audience. I think that seems to be the formula. Yeah, especially if she had a Twitch audience, you could probably charge the same audience by head count a multiple of what each was paying on Twitch, because Twitch would have been what sponsors pay directly

Ollie: it's like you can subscribe to them for $2, 50 oh $5 a month.

And they get 2 52, which gets two 50 and then sponsors and then donations. So there's quite a few revenue streams. And then plus if they sell merchant stuff like that

Alejandro: Interesting different world, I know nothing about. Anyway, there is conveniently a new NFT Guild.
Which joints several hands of createzbase and other sort of like strong community led digital art projects. So I think that once again, leveraging all these [01:30:00] ecosystem pieces against each other, with each other is definitely a winning formula. We've got the part of New York Guild.

We're very small, we're recruiting. We're trying to get the word out there of what it is that we do. And we've got this podcast very small, very new, we're trying to get anyone to tune in and listen. So I think that finding these avenues with the existing community would be great. And if you think about it in a viral way, it takes 10 listeners to enjoy it and recommend it to one more person and it slows the build up over time, or it has the potential to.

Ollie: Yeah, I think you're onto something, man. Some exciting times for NEAR, exciting time for both of us. I know we both have faith in a number of different projects.
Alejandro: D
Ollie: pod T
Alejandro: pod
Ollie: first day pod.

Alejandro: Anyway it's been a great chat. I think we have touched on [01:31:00] some very interesting topics.
Ollie: Wait until you right play it.

Wow. There's some

Ollie: So profound.

Alejandro: This is so roomy. Go back to it. Delete it

Ollie: whatever it is. Two hours that we've been talking, it'd be like five minutes.

Alejandro: It's going to be just like me Schilling the podcast.

Ollie: Thanks guys. Thanks for listening.

Alejandro: I know that most people don't mind, clearly there's a market for super long podcasts, but maybe we're not there yet. Tell you what if you're listening to this bit of the podcast, which means that you've stuck with us for a very long time. You get an NFT and you get an NFT and you [01:32:00] everyone gets an NFT.
Do you use it for everyone? It's going to be Ollie in a tiger.

Ollie: We're not doing that.
What have I done
Alejandro: The powers of the underworld have been unleashed. Look, you'll be fine because people can understand it.

Ollie: Yeah, very true.

Alejandro: Yeah. That's good. It's been great chatting as usual. I'll just stop the recording, but I think we can still have a couple of closing comments when I stop.