Fostering Wildly Successful Web3 Teams / Lizette Kuld, Kresimir Vuksan

Transcript

foreign [Music] hello everyone we good to go yeah thanks hello everybody Welcome to coming here today and my name is Kesh shimmy I'm an account manager at Morales and

with me I have Lizette yeah hello I'm Lizette I'm head of people at Morales being part of Morales since day one so I've seen a lot on how you can build really great teams absolutely and today we're going to talk about fostering wildly successful web 3 teams who is an individual developer but has really big dreams you may have your own project that you're dreaming on building then this information is really good for you or you are a non-technical founder and are also going in there these thoughts of building a team in the future or basically anyone who is interested in going full time into web 3.

so we will talk a little about what we do at Morales why you even should listen to us why you should pay attention to us why you will fail alone because the team spirit is where you can actually succeed how you can build an operating system which is the values of a team or a company how you can hire how you can think about hiring the best team members and also fostering the high performance culture that you are hopefully wanted to build and why you should listen to us well we have built one of the highest performing teams in web 3 within one year we got started last year and we started with an idea and we found out that the best way to go is to find the best team members

fast and start producing fast so we grew from zero to one thousand developers in our community or in our platform using us and believe me when I say we have made many mistakes during this time and we want to share that because this is like a life hack for you to learn from our mistakes as so that's why we want to share that so you can have in this 20 minutes talk a lot of value for for your future team hopefully e so what we do at Morales is we provide the single complete workflow for building bet 3 applications the scalable and high performance applications that you can build today that you can build within days instead of months

and by using Morales and now today to this day over 100 000 developers actively use Morales and build projects of many use cases and we typically seen them save on average of 90 of development time which puts them to Market quickly which helps them launch quickly and consequently it saves a hefty amount of development costs because as a Dev or as a project owner I don't want to be building a project for many many months just to figure out that when I launch it it's gonna nobody's going to be using it I want to go to markets quickly I want to launch an iteration quickly and I want to get the users feedback

quickly the Morales workflow consists of providing a method for logging in your user capturing a user's identity getting your user profile stored in your database with the fully managed backend and tracking all of your users online activities getting them synced in real time straight to a database as well as syncing your smart contract events every time smart contract events events you will get them synced straight to your database as well based on which you can send messages web hooks and update UI and much more examples also the reliable and robust sdks built for platforms web mobile game engines

and other and the apis to fetch any form of on-chain data about your users and their balances their transactions their nfts their own prices metadata and much much more so back to the team why we really really highlight that you will not make it alone because first of all you have limited time in your day 24 hours and there's a certain amount that you can achieve during that time and you cannot be an expert at everything and you really want to achieve to have the best talent in your team the best expert within every field that you need to provide your project so we think the best way to start what is that first you start with the who who is going to build that what you want to build and then you start with what then

you can start iterating okay what is the way to go and so on and how to get started with that is of course to hire the best talent and this may seem very obvious but believe me that not enough companies or not many companies put a lot of effort into it they take shortcuts and that's where things can can get back and as I said we have learned a lot during our one year when we grew from zero to 80 team members so we've done a lot of hirings during that go and the key is to not settle for mediocre you need to be very very picky you rather should look for the culture of it and the skills in that person rather than years of experience because believe me there may be these rock star

developers or anyone who has the best resumes but if you don't have the right mindset if you don't have the same mindset as you or the culture aspect it will not work in the long term so that's extremely important to to think about and then also say no to brilliant jerks and what is a brilliant jerk well it's someone who has all the competences needed is Rockstar on the resume but they just cannot collaborate has anyone worked with with any of that yeah we all have so we know like okay they have the experience and and they're great but they just drag down the other team they take down the morale and you don't want to have that because then long term you don't have a high

performing team so we want to measure by Talent density that's more important you rather have fewer team members who are really high performing rather than have more and mediocre team members so then you should start with building your operating system and what is the operating system well that's the values of the company and believe me this is also very important to get started early with because this is the guide to your uh to your team this sets the expectations on how do we communicate how do we work on things it's also easier to get onboard new team members because they already know the expectations they know what they can can do from that and that's also something that you need to have already in your hiring process that you set the

expectations clearly and you can start matching your potential candidates to that decentralized decision making can be part of that I think it's a really great because you don't need to spend time on on managing your team they should be self-operating and this is also very connected to Talent density if you have talented team members they will be self-operated you don't need to look after them and so choose the values that are actionable and reflect back on how you actually act because it's not just a bunch of words that many companies have you actually need to live up to them and lead by example when it comes to your values so the Morales values are for example collaboration results efficiency diversity iteration and transparency which you can quickly short it up to

credit without taking inspiration from gitlab when it comes to this who is a a big inspiration to us but we really do live by these values we we start with this in the onboarding we check these in the Recruitment and it has helped us a lot then it is about fostering that high performing culture when you find a great team you also need to make sure that this day and that they are happy and usually talented people of course want to work with other talented people that's how they motivate each other that's how they push each other to do even better because remember that your team will not be better than the weakest link you have in your team and

this is really true we have seen this where mediocre performers have drag down or high performers and it's a mistake I don't want anyone to do because it's it is time consuming and it is frustrating for a team because you may lose good talent um so when it comes to how to Foster that feedback is important it's probably something everyone knows but I cannot highlight more how important it is and how to do that well is probably to more focus on the actions that someone does it's so much easier to to focus on the actions and for the person to actually take on that and do something with that feedback rather than focusing on personal traits and yeah and I said once again like leaving your values is

key and setting the example uh for your team and a bit of snipping into the moralist team one of our big objectives is to build the best remote first culture so we are a team of 80 plus team members and we are from 39 different countries we work fully remote As I said and we have our communication tools our slack and notion and so on and you can make it work but you need to Foster that with Always setting the example for your team and we have created something that is the Morales DNA that is something that we never take back on it is that you need to be selfless you need to be ready to work in a team if you're not that you don't have a chance to succeed

at Morales you need to be Fearless in the sense that you cannot be afraid of taking on new challenges because everything we do is is Cutting Edge Technologies new things you can't learn all of that in advance so a lot is of getting outside of your comfort zone yeah and I couldn't agree more with Lizette than what she said because I myself has always have also worked with many sorts of people and it's really important who you bring into the team and the DNA that they have which is going to make the team efficient and successful essentially how we can help you today we have been helping projects build and launch successfully since 2017.

so we make web 3 projects become successful by providing them everything that they need the development development platform the tools and the support the on point contacts and everything else that makes us successful successful that we've made many great successes just recently some of them would be the nft trade super Farm Delta and the World Wide Web some of the great names that have helped build and launch quickly in months instead of years and if I could extract three ingredients to success I would say that you should always be listening to your user and paying attention to your user because

essentially what we do what we build we build for the users we don't build it for ourselves we build for the users and we always let we always want to follow the user and their feedback and their expectations to build successfully also we should always be hungry for opportunities look around every corner we should be booking calls taking meetings shaking hands with people meeting people because you never know where the next opportunity around the corner is and third ingredient to success is that you should build good and fast not one over the other as there's absolutely no reason why you should choose building what using building good versus Fast you

need to do both and please don't hesitate to reach us out at the Morales Booth here at the venue you can find us there our team is there and you may also very welcome to send me an email at cashmerelease.io with anything I may help you with build your project if you need help with your idea if you need help to launch your project if you need help promoting your project on socials if you need help accessing the VCS and getting the funding of your project and generally of course if you have any feedback about Morales and our product I'm very happy to hear it and lastly you should definitely follow us on socials Twitter Youtube and many

more on Twitter WE Post daily we have many great tutorials also via YouTube testimonials weekly challenges where our instructors go live every Saturday and build a real-life world use case such as a webp version of Airbnb a web 3 version of Angry Birds a web free Twitter and many more examples that you'll find there and thank you very much thank you for today's time any questions you might have anything you have in mind you want to reach us out just to say hello or anything else you're well welcome to do so at the hello at morales.to thank you very much

I believe we do have a little bit time for questions yeah go ahead yes please thank you so much and I'm wondering you mentioned 39 countries and being remote only how do you do that like do you work asynchronously how do you span the time zones and how do you work with maybe events or conferences like this perfect question uh yeah this is something that many Wonder like how do we make it actually work we do work asynchronously which means that we record a lot of our meetings so the ones who are in different time zones they can always catch up so that's something that we have already set in our in our

culture we communicate on slack we we communicate with our team so we know when we're online and when we're not but when it comes to these meetings we try to have as few of them as possible when it comes to synchronously yes and that really we have taken on so we have minimized as much as we can there and if there is any important ones we always record them so anyone can follow up with the latest the other part is notion notion is a great handbook for us where we put all of our well all the information you need to to be successful in in your specific role but also in the company as a general so I believe a good onboarding setting the expectations and talking about our values and living by them right away is important because the

remote first is a big part of our culture as well and it's also why many seek to us because they want to be fully remote and be able to work from anywhere and we really see that that is the way I mean web3 is global we don't want to restrict our talent pool to one specific area in the world so that's how we also can work with the best talent in the world which paintings on it so which meetings state which ones did you keep yeah so so we do have the team meetings uh your sub team meetings that are with your closest team members so you can still have that social interactions with your team member but that's more about like brainstorming ideas and and all of that yeah

I would only add to that that having team members active 24 7 in 38 different countries makes us able to support projects support developers support clients All Around the Clock Morales never sleeps yeah hello um hi thanks for talk it was great I would like to ask you you talk a lot about team and hiring so how did you recognize during interview that they have these values and the quality how do they recognize how do you recognize with the potential candidates yeah so so to be honest it did take time to get a solid process for that because there's people who usually what they say is like

the one who gets the job is the one who is best at interviewing but probably not the best at the actual work so when it comes to Engineers specifically we have implemented more like design thinking types of interviews so we can see really how do they approach the problem lie we can see the way we think and for us very important is that you're self-propelled you want to seek for answers yourself rather than asking for instructions all the time so we try to set up the interview sessions like that so we can really see okay do they do that and sometimes even challenge them with things that they don't know and see how they approach that because that will way we can see if they're fearless or not so it did take time honestly in the beginning you think oh this is this is easy but but it's not it requires

iteration all the time to to see and and get the best process um yeah we got a question in the back yes sir you mentioned that you have a team in 39 different countries how you unify all the people from around the world especially in this decentralized approach and virtual and everything yeah let's uh also an excellent question so we we still do a lot of social activities what you do normally but we do them virtually and for example weekly fecals where we play games together or we get to know about each other's

cultures it's actually really really interesting and we find also common interest points so we can have guilds within our team for example we have the ones who are interested in front-end photo photo photography or music and they also get together we do off-sites as well twice per year where our team gets together and actually meets in real life we did one last week in Sweden and that is also really really great so we still emphasize on meeting in real life because that helps the communication still but to summarize and answer your question is we still do a lot of social activities but they're just online and we we still want to meet every now and then and one more question where I in the decentralization game uh how your

team structure looks like how it works so we are still a quite new company so it's quite flat when it when it comes to that but we expect everyone to be a manager of one we call it and and that means that you you know what your scope of your work is but you are the one managing yourself you're the one that is responsible for your work and of course to that helps setting goals having like the big North Star to to reach too so you always know what what am I contributing to what impact do I have towards reaching that so I think communicating the the vision and all that clearly gives the team a purpose they know what they are fulfilling and that makes it also easier to for the team to be together and work towards the

same the same goal yeah I think it's one last question from here yeah I'm afraid um but for any questions you might have please visit us at the booth on the venue you're very welcome to accept any questions and increase you might have come say hi come take a photo with us anything you wish thank you everyone thank you very much guys thank you thank you yep