Building Optimism: A conversation with Optimism founder Jing Wang

Transcript

[Music] uh I think I know all of you here but uh I'm of course Eddie Lin the CTO for a6c crypto team and joining us today is uh Jing Wang who is the who founded optimism and she was the CEO at op labs for a while before moving over to the optimism Foundation where she's the executive director and of course she's deeply involved in optimism world and has been there since day one so I hope you guys start thinking about questions to ask you know she's very experienced in crypto world so join me in thank in welcoming Jing please yo hi so we we can go anywhere this is very

open-ended I hope you guys will participate in the conversation uh maybe a natural place to start is uh is optimism yeah what's the story for optimism how did it begin how did you meet the team uh just where did it all begin um I actually used to be a bitcoiner I was Bitcoin Maxi but in 2016 the Bitcoin environment was not super friendly especially to women I remember at the very first uh scaling Bitcoin conference in Montreal um there's 300 people and three women so I remember complaining about this to a few friends and uh this dude named vitalic butan

just so happened to be in the room it was a really small community at the time and he was like come over to ethereum come come contribute here we have so many women the executive director of the EF is a woman um I was like yeah but I don't know anything about ethereum goes well it just so happens that uh ethereum researcher Carl Flur is currently mentoring someone else and he could Mentor you too he could teach you everything you need to know and I had just I I used to say dropped out but the reality is that I failed out of college and I wanted to find something that felt meaningful to Asian parents as a thing to spend my time on and so when Carl offered two separate projects He said there's we

could do a coding project or we could do a writing project I picked the textbook project so he said to me one of his mentees he was like great you will write cryptoeconomics textbook um there's a few chapters in there you'll focus on plasma and uh his other mentee had just been laid off from his mechanical engineering job and wanted to learn how to code so to his other mentee he said great Hayden you will learn solidity and you will make Unis swap that L literally bro that's pretty [ __ ] crazy but that's how it started and as I was writing the and what do your parents think about it now you have to go back to college this not real

education it's a bitco corn money um wow okay yeah I know good yeah even now my mom's like when are you going to find a husband is so what's your salary what's equity yeah that's good that's a question it's fine okay um right yeah so how did the team come together how the team came together is over the course of writing the plasma section plasma is a scaling design that predates optimistic rollups it prioritized High transaction throughput because back then it was super early what the [ __ ] is you know product research or user research no one

was thinking about that it was predominantly an academic exercise and when people thought about scaling blockchains uh people thought about transactions not about computation so um we focused on scaling transactions with plasma I had to rewrite the chapter multiple times there was no information available on the internet I had to just fly to where the researchers were and ask them things and write it down and Plasma Research was moving so rapidly that each time I finished the chapter I would have to rewrite the chapter because a new design would come out that increased throughput 10x yet again I finally finished the chapter on an iteration of plasma called

plasma cach and it was the culmination of work from Kelvin Victor and Carl and after I finished writing the chapter I moved on to the next one and a couple weeks past and I was like why is we solved it we solved the whole ethereum scaling thing why is no one building this that's amazing um so I took all the people that I had learned the things from and I said let's build this and that's how we started plasma group and uh after a year of having our plasma test net up and an average of about 10 transactions per day I thought hm why if if scaling ethereum is is like

the foremost problem in this industry and everyone's talking about it and if it was even in fact the first ever response to the Bitcoin white paper when it was sent out on the mailing list this doesn't scale the required size and we've solved scaling why is no one using this and so I hit up our friends at Ido they set up some interviews for us crazy you should talk to your [ __ ] users if you want to know if you're solving the problem and people were like this [ __ ] we don't need this [ __ ] this [ __ ] is way too complicated we had developed this like plasma predicate system a new whole new language for you to code things like Unis Swap and it it just like a horrible developer experience what we realized people wanted was to scale compute not

transactions people didn't care about doing 100,000 trans transactions per second people wanted to pay less fees and they wanted fast transactions so we went back to the drawing board and um a month later we pooped out the first ever optimistic rollup scaling design and we partnered with unisoft to do a demo of it and it was the first time people had seen this ux of instant transactions our Target was sub 200 millisecond confirmations because that's the level at which it feels yeah like real timeing like instant yeah and now it's the this this instant transaction sequence or model is

now like the standard across all um optimistic rollups but at the time it was really novel and really new and we came to a6z and you turned us down not me personally yeah anyways that's how that's how it started great great great [Applause] so of course the the company uh and the foundation right and the ecosystem has evolved significantly since then right and we're in the middle of tons of evolution in crypto everybody's thinking differently about how to cultivate really rich ecosystems how to cultivate projects that own the infrastructure

that they're building on in a way that's truly decentralized right mhm how has that vision unfolded and I know it's still of course it's still happening now can you you think of a few times that were sort of pivotal moments as this is all being figured out that changed the direction for how optimism decentralizes um well I don't think our Direction has ever changed our understanding of the difficulty yeah yeah has evolved significantly and continues to evolve I think um the vision and the end point has always been clear what hasn't been as clear is how to get from point A to point B and I think when you put a bunch

of really smart people in a room who don't have their prefrontal cortexes developed yet the exercise is more about showing off how intelligent you are and how you designed the solution rather than picking the straightest line from point a point p i chucklin I feel your chain so that the big learnings that we've encountered along the way have been more about um learning how to execute because we certainly did didn't need any help in being ambitious yeah so what are some examples of things that you've learned as things have grown regarding execution in particular um when you want to go faster squeeze

the plan not the people because people burn out and the plan probably has a lot of fluff so that's a big thing that we learned very and um how to make decisions I think especially when you're really smart um you can create narratives to justify your choices that feel like logic like emotionally there's like not a huge differentiator between logic and rationale and emotion and like if you've ever gotten even like in a relationship or a friendship like you both have your version of events and your conclusions that you draw from it and no amount of sharing your logic with the other person

changes their stated logic both of you think that you're being purely rational when you know that the other person is being an egotistical [ __ ] same thing with yourself like you cannot convince yourself that you are behaving irrationally even when you are making emotional decisions and those have a cost and when you don't have a framework for how you want to make decisions you change your mind you make decisions inconsistently you make it difficult for your team to model how you want them to operate and how you want them to think which results in your teammates doing things that you don't agree with or that feel asinine to you which results in you trusting their output less delegating

less and then micromanaging it just a whole bunch of things Cascade from that yeah I I definitely sympathize with reasons and logic sometimes come from emotions right like they come not the other way around right like sometimes if you feel a certain way it's very easy to construct especially if you're a capable very like you know clear thing especially especially if you're very capable at reasoning you're probably capable at using reasoning for your own emotional purposes preach yeah so are there ways that you have realized are methods that are good at mitigating this oh I mean

I'm still making a bunch of mistakes each time I make one of these mistakes I realize a new thing about how to make the decision I think um writing your decisions down is a big one and then I think being clear with those around you when you are soliciting feedback versus proposing an idea versus making a decision because there's nothing in the variation of your tone or words that would indicate to some one what category those words fall under it's not like obvious to others but it is obvious to you so just categorizing those inputs there's a huge amount of um

confusion that you mitigate from that writing it down asking others to repeat back what they believe it is another huge one sometimes you know I say protocol and I'm not including Bridge front ends rpcs you say protocol and you are including all of those things and then like things can happen as a result of us thinking that we've agreed but not really understanding what we've agreed to totally yeah makes sense regarding uh optimism and cultivating developer interests and developer activity earlier you mentioned talking to the users to figure out what they need that was a critical lesson for plasma right in the in the earlier days now I think we see a lot of interest and

developer activity on optimism more than ever what do you think is underneath that why is that like and are there things that optimism has done to cultivate the organic interest of the community I don't know if I agree I think we need more yeah yeah yeah yeah like um Carol was showing me this tic-tac-toe game yesterday this like super fun game theory um made by this dude named winter and it's just like a bunch of like coordination incentive design mechanism design it's just a fun experiment and where are all those people do you remember fomo 3D and I do those were so fun just completely unhinged use cases

of the blockchain that you don't normally see and so I wonder if Def and defi summer just created such a huge honey pot on a very specific type of product and nothing else because there was no Financial incentive to do so if you could get rid quick overnight and so where are the developers that are putting genuine effort into creating something actually useful to the end user well I I have a theory for this I'm curious your view that since there's still of course although things have cooled down a little bit on L1 uh gas fees are still very very high compared to that period right that

period like FMA 3D period like 2018 is period it still cost about a penny to send a transaction just because ethereum was so much less empty or less full it's a little bit hard to experiment with totally goofy funny stuff if you know it's going to cost like 15 grand just to like you see we need to scale so my my genuine belief is that if there's enough block space to waste to do the goofy things then people will do those things which is why I think a scaling is a prerequisite of that period it's not that there's less people experimenting it's that they're kind of being crowded out by you know all the you know all the Traders on defi all the applications all the nfts

bouncing around those things are still very much happening like we can all see the metrics like does that does that resonate for you guys at all like is that how you think about it how do you yeah I think um we tend to prefer um the Technical Solutions to the problems rather than the business development or go to market or whatever other Solutions so yeah we thought that reducing fees by um tend to 100x would be the unlocker for this like wealth of new innovation to happen but I think the reality is like there's a threshold of cost which is sub penny at which the cost of a transaction feels negligible to the user or to the developer and other applications can exist so right now

transactions around 10 cents which we thought would be groundbreaking Earth shatteringly amazing to people but it's still predominantly for uh people using structured Finance products defi trading things where there's a a profit that you can model and therefore justification for the cost and I've played a few like fully onchain games like go like that funny category and there there're so cool but I've noticed even with those as constrained as they deliberately are in terms to compute you still emit like thousands of transactions per day to play a game like that mhm even at 10 cents that's prohibitively expensive yeah right so

it's although 10 cents sounds low and it is low for certain types of things it's incredibly low for a lot of really important types of economic activity that's still in a way incredibly high for goofing off so that resonates to me uh I'm curious what what do you think uh are there other types of things that you think developers should be experimenting with like are there things they aren't aware of or they don't think about enough when it comes to messing around with like op stack and optimism ecosystem in general like what are the other things that you want to see more of I want to see some crazy unhinged [ __ ] you know like yeah um I'm going to butcher this and if anyone actually

knows the history let me know but there was a scientist who loved clouds and he really wanted to study clouds and he created this machine to make clouds and after you know a long time trying to get this machine to make clouds he eventually abandoned This research and someone else who worked in that lab was like actually that might kind of be a cool machine and started taking over the research um and that's how the atom bomb was invented no not I don't know the story that's uh I guess my point is that there's like that's an amazing things that feel like toys that are passion projects that people work on and it's

that like passion that brings you to utilize the blockchain in net new ways counterintuitive ways like um you know the founders of Lis talk about utilizing like the physics of the blockchain to create new game Dynamics generate Randomness things like that yeah like that is the kind of creativity that I would like to see net new use cases that weren't possible before and I think they all look dumb useless stupid unhinged dangerous to begin with um but ultimately that that EXP fermentation is like what outputs the killer app it's like that book I Wasing there's a book over there called Kraken creation highly recommend you guys pick it up Jennifer Duda the researcher who

discovered crisper T just Chronicles all of the toy things that looked dangerous and dumb that failed throughout history that pooped out Gene editing so like yeah yeah hopefully we can do it in less than a century definitely now that I mean that that anecdote is basically exactly what Chris always talks about with uh you know what people play with on the weekends ends up being what people work with on the weekdays uh later right the things that the next big production incredibly important economic system starts looking as a toy right that's like that's how it begins I radically I radically agree with with that what what do you think

these Founders like these projects everyone in this room these are early stage projects they're just getting started thinking about what they're going to do and you know the the Visions are definitely taking shape but they're at the earliest stages of executing and building it what do you think they should be asking you is this like a seed preed what is seed situation what should they be asking me yeah oh [Laughter] [ __ ] or maybe what are things you wish you knew you know yeah um the people you recruit are really

[ __ ] important and like that everyone says this and it's in all the books and everything and somehow like I didn't truly understand this until I went through it like literally every founder you talk to every [ __ ] book every VC says the people are the most important thing who you hire is the most important thing a bad hire can set you back a good hire can make or bre it that genuinely is the case and and uh there there's like wisdom that people passed me that I didn't understand until I made those mistakes such as how to fire um how to implement culture I would say that um it's possible that you guys won't

really understand those either until you have to you're faced with it yourself but one thing that you can do without experiencing it yourself is hire someone super experienced um in specifically your areas of weakness I think it especially for smart nerds um it might be not saying that you guys are like this but threatening to hire people that you consider smarter than yourself and more experienced than yourself or to admit your areas of weakness but if you think about it like finding a mentor to supplement your areas of

weakness um you will be doing yourself your own personal growth and your entire team a huge service because at this stage the biggest thing getting in your way is your own goddamn self that is your biggest obstacle by far and product Market fit that's a big one cool well I think we'll open it up for questions um one thing that I saw that you did in your life is you found yourself with like the right people kind of like you know I imagine I don't know dark basement like kind I don't know like like you know where people usually don't hate I don't start New York apartment Windows yeah all right so like

in hindsight like you know you were in the with the right people and I feel like something that my team is trying to do is exactly kind of like someone like gets you know older more experienced maybe not older but just like getting those typ of situations where those type of situations happen so like how did you find yourself there like openness or like kind of like how could you replicate that per se yeah um actually a16z introduced us to our um ninth hire Josh Stein and he um had he's been second in command of a military interrogation unit he was a federal prosecutor Prosecuting cartels he was also um General Council of zenefits and

had been the the CEO of a Securities token company himself um don't skimp on cost like enrich that [ __ ] because they will they will multiply the value of your company do not be [ __ ] stingy with the people that you rely on most so that's like first thing just be open to that and then when someone like a a16z makes an introduction to you take it extremely extremely ser seriously and even if it's not the right candidate for you show respect to the people who made the intro and tried to put their reputation on the line with that candidate to help you and that's how you get more and more referrals more and

more introductions uh yeah so investors are a great place to start um I did a lot of cold reach outs um I would hit up my friends at other companies and like big tech companies ask them to introduce me to their managers um and ask the managers for advice you know um and then follow up that with an offer so that's awesome um second question real quick just like self-awareness I feel like you're a very self-aware person um emotionally like very intelligent how but co-founders may beg to differ but I feel like you're aware you may not be aware of some things but a lot you kind you not sense that how how

can you again like continue to get better at that saying like like make sure that's you're being the best of yourself um I think first you have to want it um that's where you start and I struggled with being defensive early on and one thing that happens when you become the CEO that you don't notice happening is that uh you will trigger other people's fight or flight more frequently than you did before you go from some wimpy nerd in the corner to someone who now has like influence you don't realize it because you're still the same person but new people enter the company or the people around you know this your co-founders may not feel this way because they've been with you since

the very beginning but new people entering see this and so every single time you encounter feedback or the possibility of feedback that [ __ ] is a privilege receiving feedback is a privilege and you have to show people that you deserve it just as much as uh anything else just it's risky to give you feedback and so are you creating an environment for it are you actively seeking it out and then are you proving to people that you've earned their right to continue receiving feedback awesome thank you very much yeah hi uh thank you for you know all the great advice I'm Nikita from chain

Patrol um I had two two questions the first one like back to the hiring um and kind of bringing all these really talented people like outside of like you know the monetary kind of compensation like how do you convince somebody that you consider even like better than yourself or to basically join your company like how do you get them excited and what do you say to them yeah I think um am I say older what whatever start what uh one benefit of finding a more tenured individual is that um a lot of people who've already had a storied career in the next leg of their career

they're not trying to burn themselves out to put the cherry on top of their career they are looking to assist somebody who is burning themselves out to put the cherry on top of their career it's like a mentorship uh relationship so it's really about your relationship with your mentor and I I I think mentors are powerful because mentors are people who can use a language that you currently understand to make you like realize or understand New Concepts without upskilling yourself or learning a whole new category of things they're able to take your current level of understanding and expand it

with the tools that you have right now and those like epiphanies are extremely valuable but it is contingent on having good communication Pathways like when your Mentor speaks to you do you instantly just get it do you have a good time talking to them do you have good rapport um and this is the reason that they would also want to join your startup is that they're getting a gratifying feeling of growing you not just uh making deliverables I see they're not just doing work they feel like the impact is really important you are their work yeah yeah I see okay and so find someone who wants to invest in you AES yeah um just one more question this is maybe a little less like founder

related but I was interested around like the op stack and kind of like how you know what was the decision making around making it like building that because like a lot of these chains are trying to you know kind of aggregate everybody into their community and what was like the decision-making process around you know building this infrastructure that you know now like coinbase a16z and all these others are like building on top of for the first part of your question are you saying what are you really like do you mean like what was the decision around open sourcing it when everyone is trying to build silos yeah yeah yeah um I think it's just a different model of thinking and it's really hard to get out of the web two rut into the web web

3 mode of thinking like instinctively you think that the way to capture value is to extract or create silos and it it takes like active effort to get out of that the reason we open- Source it is because I think it's really powerful to become the standard and um don't get me wrong I was extremely salty when the first Three Forks of optimism appeared but in the series B fundraising deck that we used to get more money from a16z we said this this was an advantage of being the most copied code base it meant other teams were testing our code in production it meant that we were the easiest to Fork

it meant that we was the cleanest code um and it meant that we were more likely to become the standard and being the standards body is also a position of value acral not just extraction uh so that's the first part of that and the second does that make sense yeah yeah no that that makesense and the second part of the coinbase a16z thing are you asking about like the tech stack modularity or are you asking about the super chain yeah no I I guess yeah I was just seeing like how do you view just like them building that in relation to optimism and um are you concerned either about

potentially like liquidity moving or anything else like like how do you see them in relation like similar like there there's like obviously like smaller like I guess smaller like uh you know Forks but these are like potentially got it got it yeah so I would say there's a difference between those who are forking the op stack and then those who are building on the op stack as part of optimism so those who Fork OPC Boba metas Etc we don't um acrew any Direct Value from those people um with coinbase we do so uh the coinbase chain is one chain in what will be a network of chains which we're calling the super chain what we realized is a single block

blockchain no matter what you do to it is not enough to to meet the needs of global computation no matter what so right now chains are more akin to religious ecosystems you've got like you know tokens memes a church it's extremely religious and in your metamask drop down you have to like connect to all these different providers and like whatever it's not a great user experience but a change isn't that different from a smart contract in a lot of ways it is simply a container for compute on a different scale of complexity and feature sets but we think

of chains as contracts so instead of thinking so chainy in the future when the internet is built on optimism no one is going to know what a [ __ ] blockchain is who who the [ __ ] cares like do people know what a root zone is for DNS like no one [ __ ] knows that [ __ ] you you just access the internet no matter what ISP you're connecting from you just access the internet and you get to use your applications so we're just trying to pull out of this like thinking to chain mindset just thinking about this as a container for compute and then the work that we have to do is figuring out how to create a unified wallet experience across all of these chains because right now wallets are uh optimized for the chain as religious ecosystems

experience um coinbase is taking a big bet on us and uh their chain is managed by optimism governance and a portion of their revenues go into the optimism treasury so what they're paying for is the um feature set of decentralization the chain can't be shut down you're your your upgrades are managed by governance and our next few months is getting more These Chains spun up and then building out sort of the Cross chain message passing protocols uh and then one day you won't even know what a chain is thank you yeah that's really it's got like Docker

containers or something you don't really care about containers yeah yeah containers thank you hi J uh Jay from ether ID uh thank you very much for your talk for uh so so my question concerns this idea of of narratives and it appears that you're very gifted with uh with explaining very abstract Concepts in a relatable way and see how narratives can be very use for persuasion explaining Concepts but you also brought up U that desire to scale back narratives when you're working with co-founders for uh in in that space I'm curious if there's a a bright line of what defines a good narrative versus a bad one oh interesting I would say that the it's one skill set and it's

um the there's two sides of the persuasion there's persuading people to give you money and then there's persuading people that you're right when you're really not and how how you know are you asking like how to differentiate between the two yes that one is hard I think you have to develop a process for building conviction and so there's a lot of good decision FR Frameworks out there one way is um categorizing a decision as reversible versus irreversible and then in decisions you believe are reversible then you look at how difficult it is to reverse and some of those decisions will actually practically be irreversible so take all the irreversible ones set them

to the side don't make them impulsively take time don't let your anxiety dictate the pace at which you provide an answer to the people around you it's okay people can wait the email can wait the investor can wait um eager beavers it's their job to ping you incessantly take the time open it up to feedback to people you trust and then write down your justifications for why you're making that decision and if you change your mind go back to the written justifications and ask yourself if you have any new data that would result in the decision changing if you don't have any new data you're being emotional if you do have new data go back through the

like write the justification again get the feedback so on and so forth I see uh and uh one more question uh so considering hiring um for you what is that stage that makes when you're evaluating candidate that means you go from yes to [ __ ] yes like this is the person that you absolutely want I think this is a skill that you develop and not one that I have developed um I have made just as many bad calls on hiring as I've made incredible calls I think the best call I made was the founding team but those guys I had worked with or known for a really long time and one thing that I found helpful was like interview

training and it sounds very like the office and corny but there's a skill set to extract information uh in a short period of time from someone you don't know well and there's resources out there and you should go take a class on it sorry not a great answer but you'll find out over time what you are what you specifically are susceptible to in interviews I am susceptible to The Gift of Gab If someone knows how to answer a question concisely and eloquently I make judgments about their intellect and the two are not as closely related as I thought thank you J yeah thank you for

the talk um uh David from discov um there's been a couple of projects that have been moving to uh to non-blockchain based sort of decentralized Technologies for social um and some projects that are trying to do social blockchains or or put social data on blockchains um I'm curious what you think is going to happen and like I guess you were mentioning these sort of super chains and like all this decentralized compute do do you think there's going to be a lot of like social apps that um they're interacting heavily with blockchains or you think maybe U social is a place where blockchains might not

be the right technology I think social is really broad it's like just as broad as nft or gaming um something like axi Infinity might be categorized as an nft or game project but it's a lot closer to how people interact with dii So based on that like um I don't know what will happen to the broad category of social I can say that um disco. XYZ right diso not uh not the data backpack no not the day backpack the identity startup yeah no not that one oh sorry to disappoint they're they're great though I I have a call

with them pretty soon it's a my my app is a is a farasa client right now um but yeah I me social as in like I guess trying to go towards like Mass consumer social like tw Twitter scale uh social apps that are primarily like use generated posts and and content yeah I think um there's like two categories of innovation I'm really interested to see one is like fundamentally can only exist on a blockchain like the unhinged Moon 3 kind of thing I was saying earlier and then there's another category of applications

that could exist without a blockchain it's simply that existing on a blockchain in a state space with other applications utilizing the same communication standards that creates a new format of innovation by which I mean imagine if Twitter were open- sourced and it was a web 3 application and the Twitter back end were also open- sourced so imagine how much easier it would be to create new Social Network projects if huge swads of code or functionality like that were already open- sourced and in a composable state space um there's

currently no Financial incentive for companies to open- Source the Special Sauce like that so at optimism we have this mechanism called retro pgf retroactive public Goods funding where we try to look at how much impact a piece of code has created and pay them fat saacks of tokens commender it with the value that they've provided so in the last round of retr pgf we distributed like $20 million with the tokens and um every single dependency in the optimism mono repo even though it wasn't a blockchain project got a payout so for social clients for like any kind of application if we are in an ecosystem that has easy incentive

Loops where open sourcing key functionality that is otherwise really difficult for a startup to build like what kind of innovation would we see from that thank you really appreciate your founder wisdom my name is morat uh I'm the founder of Prim pev is a block Builder communication Network for ethereum L1 um I'm curious about your take on me or Mev on uh you know optimism and I have two parts to that one as you know Searchers and others like interacting with the chain to background or front run transactions and two as the sequencer and reordering transactions possibly for whatever Fair ordering or or benefit and as that

translates into you know decentralized sequencing over time yeah you know um I think like the whole like ecosystem around me has evoled really dramatically I don't know that my opinions have um adapted as quickly I think that I'm very curious to see how systems like espresso flash Bots adapt to these like L2 State spaces also with the the SE like shared sequencing of the super chain I I don't know like I I couldn't tell you what actual impact on user experience that would have I think the sort of fallback answer internally is

that um just as there's these markets for Bitcoin mining I think in the future distant future the way that shared sequencing works is that there are these disperate entities that all run um the same ordering function over a set of transactions to be provably fair or what have you not and the compute powering the sequencers is a pool of compute um incentivized similarly to the way that markets around Bitcoin mining are incentivized so it might be like AWS type entities now pulling their compute and and and that pool of compute is what's drawn on rather than individual

companies like F2 pool running a very specific targeted extraction algorithm over a set of transactions and then bidding up in an auction to see who gets to be the sequencer and then who's [ __ ] the users too much gets kicked out by the decentralized governance which was our original design for how we extracted profit from the system and I don't think that's going to work I like that thank you hey Jing Michael from blockas we make uh infrastructure for web three gaming um so earlier you mentioned a framework for decision- making um what aspects have you found work really well or aspects or pieces of it that uh help to solidify you know your decision-making process to everybody else tell me about a decision that's currently on your

mind um so what one of them is um one of them is is chain support so we try to be relatively chain agnostic and be able to support games in the best way um so um kind of figuring out what the next um piece to add on should be so how to prioritize the next which chain you next integrate yeah framework for that would be optimism is the next right don't make decisions emotionally use logic um well what are you trying to enable for your user um so so right now how we approach a decision like that is um like what the what the studio is looking for um are

they looking for distribution are they having performance issues like what what are they what challenges are they facing um but then you know there's there's kind of the um investment versus reward on on our side as well so kind of trying to balance the two I see investment versus reward in a chain or a game Studio what like are you are your customers game studios yeah yep got it and each game Studio wants to deploy a game and different ones will want different chains right right okay so what is your role in this are you doing the deployment for them and building the game for them we are we're basically taking care of everything on the web 3 side so the wallets um

managing the wallets all the unchain transactions uh so that they can focus on the game at itself uh and a lot of times it's decisions around what chain to use and uh you know what wallet to use how to how to build that right so I'm guessing that you're trying to get the characteristics of what they're looking for in a game sort of the cost constraints and then picking a chain based on that what what confounding factor is making the decision difficult um usually for the for the studio or like making the decision for the studio is is easier uh for for us it's okay um kind of is how big is this game going to be uh how many studios are looking down the same path at the same chains um and

what is the development cost for us like are there things that we can integrate and pull off the shelf um and it's a quick build or things we have to built from scratch I see I think we're grappling with something similar right now because um we could deploy a bunch of op chains for people who do we prioritize do we prioritize the coin bases of the world or do we PRI prioritize these seed stage folks where it's like really difficult to evaluate whether or not it would be worth the investment because we are bandwidth constraint I would ask yourself what you're optimizing for and make a a a targeted hypothesis and you you want to construct the next sort of you know quarter of your product road map so at the end of the quarter you have a definitive answer of yes or no whether

or not that was a good strategy and to have a clear way to debug what went wrong um we initially were like we're generalized we do everything and then at the end of the quarter you look at this smattering of different directions that you've gone in and you cannot answer what went wrong you cannot you're not able to debug so ask yourself at the end of this quarter which area of road map ambiguity do you want to clarify and then match everything match everything to that prioritization function yeah and have a hypo hypthesis and try to chase after that HP yeah for example your hypothesis could be um multiplayer games it's probably not

the real game terminology firstperson Shooters are going to be the next wave of blockchain games so we are going to uh focus on a bunch of different kinds of firstperson Shooters our hypothesis for why they will be the next wave of onchain games is because reason and then like show everyone the reason does everyone Vibe with this reason modify if not and then you have your hypothesis and then all your experiments should be testable this partnership is going to answer this question this other partnership is going to answer this other question and frame it in a way that's falsifiable makes sense thanks hey uh thanks so much for talking lots of

really great information you shared um I'm Ellie I'm the CTO of bellow and one of the things I really liked that you talked about was like um squeezing the plan and not the people and I think for myself when I'm faced with a challenge like I'm the kind of person that just like wants to spend 12 hours coding and figuring it out and just solve it right away and that definitely leads to inevitable burnout for employees if it's you know if it's not your passion so I guess what are like tips that you have for trying to like optimize the plan better versus like just trying to like Brute Force more hours in the day because there's only ever going to be so many hours um Josh Stein this like you know ex prosecutor like gry beard type person I

was telling you guys about that we hired um I was having a really hard time turning down calendar requests at first because I felt uncomfortable saying no to things and I'd rather just work more hours and I was telling him about this and I was like you know I'm trying to be respectful and he's like no you're not kid you're being [ __ ] selfish and I was like what how can you say that I'm being selfish I'm being I'm being a a great leader I'm putting in all this time I'm killing myself for the mission he's like no you're not you're being [ __ ] selfish you are taking a company resource your time energy and bandwidth and you're spending it on alleviating your own anxiety because you're too big of a wimp to set that [ __ ] anxiety aside upset some people deal with them

not liking you and put it on the actual thing the company needs which is the [ __ ] plan that is almost Verbatim what he said to me and I say that to you so why why are you having trouble allocating the hours towards the strategy is it because you don't know what to do and there's ambiguity and it's easier to go take care of fires because what you have to do is very clear is it because you feel anxiety around delegating like what like just like ask yourself why and then deal with the reason MH and then Focus your your energy on the plan yeah I love that

thank you hi J uh thanks for the talk I'm Loa uh from fuel we building an affiliate marketing protocol and I wanted to ask you about um the early days of building the ecosystem like in terms of like convincing or onboarding the first Builders to come and build on top of optimism how was that um and then if you could also touch a little bit on the public goods retroactive uh program and how that also so uh helps Fu that I would say that we're still in the early days of building the ecosystem at least it feels like that to me and yeah um I mean like the first few like two three projects that decided to

build yeah I think we had I think we had the advantage of being really early um there weren't that many people working on crypto scaling at the time that we started so we had built up a bit of a reputation over time already um there were maybe like five ethereum researchers working on scaling and Carl was one of them um there were like you know um two people thinking about Bitcoin scaling so it was just a really small community at the time and so there was the the gift of that early reputation um so I don't know that my answer there is that helpful like people just knew who we were because we had published articles we had set a lot of the standards for how um scaling systems

should be designed um the term optimistic rollup comes from us the ux of instant transactions come from us um the first ever plasma production plasma design comes from us so like that had already been established and by the time we raised people already knew who we were were looking forward to the product and it was um pretty easy getting the first set of Builders what wasn't easy was disappointing the first set of builders that was [ __ ] rough uh since then we've had to do things that aren't in our DNA BD Deval marketing we had no idea how to do any of these things and it was just like

about hiring the right people our first ever BD person was hire number 40 yeah so I don't know what problems you guys face right now though Al so we're trying to make we we're trying to allow crypto projects to partner with creators or Publishers in a trustless way so we allow them to you know create campaigns stake budgets on our smart contract and then we handle all the attribution and the payouts to these referers or creators on chain do you have customers currently or are you still in the we haven't luned yet and we're now trying to break that zero and yeah I would I would give similar advice I gave earlier which is like make a hypothesis on who you think you provide the most value to

like who are you solving a problem for and then go and find that person where are you going to find that person are you going to find it with in Dow communities where people are already familiar with nfts if so go to the Dow forums ask a16z for introductions to the Persona that you believe to be your first user then pitch them make a deck just as you would pitch a VC show them your product outline your Valley prop ask them about their problems and you you will learn a ton after the first few conversations and you're not going to get it right the first few times but you keep on having these conversations and then eventually you'll solve a problem for someone and you'll solve it really well and they're going to [ __ ] love

you and they're going to tell their friends and slowly onward and upward awesome thank you um so quick question is um what's the mode um for autism um are they on like the around say stage are you all in person distributed do have on learning from that um that's first question um or sorry what's the mode uh like the working mode like is it in person or distributed any sharing between the commy cultures in general so we um raised our seed round a couple months before the pandemic hit and um I rented one big apartment in New York City and

six of us the entire founding team lived in that apartment um one guy lived on the roof in a tent and he came in during the winter cuz it got cold in New York but we all lived and worked in one apartment that was chaos but amazing like an incredible experience we learned how to communicate um the failure of that model was that when we started hiring more we hadn't developed any of the good habits that of good remote culture requires like documentation writing things down like clear uh clear communication and slack it was really hard to have the

hybrid model um but I will say pandemic was a whole another Beast I remember six of us our fridge broke and uh Amazon Prime was not like the delivery was not functioning and grocery stores were closed um but Forward Thinking me I had ordered 260 cans of Chef Boyd gravioli right as the news of the pandemic hit and so that for a couple days you know cool uh thanks for sharing a story um the followup question you mentioned about uh um getting introduction to the big

comp's uh Eng manager uh when would you start to pull them out of the big company um how would you convince them to join the like Fast Paces startup compared to the sweet like yeah safe environment for the big company yeah what were you doing before a startup Airbnb why did you come out of the big company I got bored great do you know anyone at Airbnb who's bored um I do a lot of them bored but because of current recession most people feel like they just want to rest and West um at the safer investment environment perfect if they're resting investing then they're not doing any fu work give them a little advisory Grant and ask them to do something for your startup the

contributions that they make as an adviser contribute to the likelihood of you shipping your product raising money and then reaching a point of stability where you can pluck them out of Airbnb and for the people who are genuinely resting investing how much Equity do they need are they really that good is everybody who's bored looking for stability or is it precisely the people who are bored that are trying to take a risk and if you're finding high ranking ranking whatever whatever title engineering people at a company like Airbnb they can definitely find another job if your startup doesn't work out

so if they're willing to take that risk that's a solid ass homie and so you can either do the advisory structure with somebody and you really get a good view into whether or not you would work well with them and otherwise go find the people who are down to take a risk and give them an equity comp package that makes it worth it and I would always rather pay really handsomely and expect really high performance because the worst is when you've asked someone to make a big change or they're an expensive hire and they're doing okay and you've been kind of nitpicky about

the kind of Stingy about the comp so you don't really know if it's worth firing them or not pay really handsomely and keep your expectations there and if someone is delivering a mediocre job it is very obvious that it is far too expensive to keep them on the team go thank you great well I learned a lot thank you so much sh I thought that was fantastic all right [Music] n [Music]