How blockchain clubs are on-ramping the next generation - Felix Rihacek

Transcript

The floor is yours. >> Yeah, first of all, again, thank you for being here. I know that the telec is speaking right now and it's great that quite a few people made it here today. Um I wanted to start with one thing is I want you to think back to when you first got into Web3. Think back to the first wallet that you've ever installed. Think back to the first chain that you've ever deployed to. Think back to the first conference you ever went to or maybe the first Discord community you ever joined.

And I want to have a quick show of hands. Who still uses at least one of those products? See? That's one of the core messages that I want to convey today. Because maybe your toolbox has grown over time, but the wallet that you set up first is probably the one that you still default to today. The chain that you first used is probably the one that you build on top of. And the community that you joined first is still probably the Discord that you get notifications from every now and then.

And this isn't a coincidence. Preferences form very early and first touch points tend to stick. It's the single most important idea that I wanted I want you to take home today after this talk. And this generation that forms those first impressions are in lecture halls today. They haven't installed their first wallet yet. They have not picked their first chain yet. And they also have not joined their first Discord. So, the question that you should all ask yourselves is how do you get to be the first?

Quick history about me. So, currently I am Felix. I'm the current president of TUM Blockchain Club from the Technical University of Munich. And with that, I'm leading one of Europe Europe's most active and uh largest university blockchain organizations. We do everything from research to hosting our own conference with 1,200 attendees every year. But today, I'm not here to talk about my club specifically, but I'm here to talk about the category of blockchain clubs, which I think is one of the most underutilized pieces of infrastructure in Web3 today.

And I want to make a very specific argument. This isn't just a recruiting story. This is a user story. This is a builder story. And it's a hiring story. I want you to meet three students. They're all composites, but to me, they're real. I see people like this in Munich and all around the world all the time. First one is Alice. Alice is 22. She is a computer science student at TUM, and she's top of her class.

She got her first recruitment email from Google when she was already in her second semester. And she is by any measure exactly the caliber of engineer that Web3 would need. But she's never installed a wallet to this day, and Web3 has never come up to her in any of their classes, in any of her internships, or in any of her career conversations. Alice is the future hire that you will never meet. The second one is Bob. Bob studies economics with a CS minor.

He's already shipped quite a few products. He's currently vibe coding um his next um student matching um program that matches students with flatmates. Um one of his products already has 8,000 users. And he doesn't know it yet, but in 4 years, he's going to start his own company. And the question is, what stack will he build build his first first company on? And whether you in this room know him before he founds his company.

Bob is the founder that you will never see at a demo day. And the third one is Sarah. Sarah is a design student. She's deeply curious. She attends every tech conference that she can possibly go to, and she will spend the next 30 years making decisions about which tools her team uses, which products to use, and which which chains her clients deploy on. Right now, she doesn't know anything of that. But Sarah is the future user that you will not reach with a normal ad.

So, we have Alice, we have Bob, we have Sarah, and you will never reach them with any normal touch point. They're going to make those choices that influence their later lives early. And they're going to make them based on what's familiar. Behavior research is quite consistent on this. The tools, the brands, the communities people encounter first are the ones that are going to stick. It's true for cars, it's true for for banks, and it's especially true for crypto. I mean, switching costs are quite high here. You have keys, you have history, you have a high learning curve to get where you are right now.

And I actually came up with this idea leading up to another conference, where our current vice president Karim told me that he's actually still using the first decks that he's ever used in his life. Years later, he's still using the same. And it's not new. I mean, Vitalik was a student when he wrote the Ethereum white paper, and his first touchpoint with crypto was writing a Bitcoin magazine as a teenager. And I mean, that obviously stuck with him, right? So, getting in front of students isn't just about recruiting them. It's about being the first version of Web3 that they will ever encounter.

The protocol that runs the first workshop that they ever attend. The wallet that's pre-installed at the hackathon that they first ever attend. The L2 who whose docs they read first. Those are the first touchpoints that will stick. And 5 years from now, those students are the next generation of founders, engineers, fund managers, even regulators. And the tools they use, the tools that they advocate for in their own company, the protocols they integrate with, are those preferences are forming right now.

And you don't need to hire all of them. You just need to be there when they're choosing. Now, here's the catch. Most students never become Web3 users. Let alone builders or hires, because they never get this first touchpoint at all. And I'll give you three reasons for that. Universities, honestly, are very hard to access from the outside. You have career fairs, you have industry partnerships, but they're all favor incumbents.

And Web3 just hasn't built those pipelines yet. Secondly, students just don't know that Web3 is a viable career path or even an interesting place that to spend a Saturday like we do here right now. They've maybe heard of Bitcoin, but they don't know that this is a real industry with real problems and real jobs that exist. And even if a student is curious, honestly, the ecosystem is extremely overwhelming. Which chain do I use?

Which wallet? Which framework? Solidity? Where do I even start? And that's why Alice, Bob, and Sarah will not find Web3 on their own. Alice will probably take the Google offer because Google reached out to her first. Bob builds his next side project on Firebase because his roommate told him that this is really cool. And Sarah will build her next startup because that's what the career fair recommended. And this is exactly the gap that blockchain clubs fill.

Our members show up because they're curious. Because they want to build. They're not paid. They don't get academic credit for it. There's no curriculum forcing them to learn. And honestly, this selection effect is enormous. You don't get this kind of filter inside of a company. Inside a club, by definition, you only have the self-selected curious people. And club members don't just hang out with other blockchain club members. They sit in their AI seminar with 20 other students. They're on the robotics team.

They share a flat with a biotech and a philosophy student. And when those students get excited about Web3, they bring the others with them. So when Bob ultimately joins TBC, he will bring Alice to a workshop. And when Alice goes, maybe Sarah comes as well. And this reach goes far beyond our membership numbers that we have. And our clubs aren't just a meetup with pizza once a month. We run a structured pipeline. Starting with a selective recruitment of people.

We educate those people. We teach Solidity, cryptography, what an L2 actually is. And then we put our members to actual real things. We attend conferences, we organize our own conference, we attend hackathons, we do research, we build tools that actually ship. And I want you to I want to show this with the club that I run, which is TUM Blockchain Club. First of all, we have our own conference. Last year, 1,200 attendees, entirely organized only by students.

You have sponsors, you have speakers from major protocols, you have founders as well as academia, all under one roof together. And for you, this is three threads in one event. You have the talent, you meet the students that are worth keeping in touch with, um that are actually building on top of your stack while hacking. You have builders, um you see what the next generation is currently on and what they're currently building. And you have the users. For 2 days, people have your protocol sticker on their laptop, they have your SDK open in their terminal, they have your wallet on their phone.

And that's brand and product distribution at scale that's nearly impossible through any other channel for exactly this type of audience of students. And we did all of that for you in two condensed days while still being students. Second thing I want to introduce you to are our industry collaborations, which we call block sprints. But in general, they're 3-month intern-style ship uh internship-style programs where companies bring real problems, and we match them with the right students to work on.

And the students do the work, the companies get the output. And some of those students get hired afterwards. And that's honestly always the coolest um stories that I can tell. But what I want to highlight is even if none of those students get hired afterwards, every of those block sprint teams becomes a power user of your company's product. They learn the SDK inside out, they find bugs, they suggest features, they become advocates for your product. Your company gains a small group of experts who will recommend this product over years, and will also bring it into what they will build next.

I mean, imagine Alice spending 3 months inside your code base. By the end, she will know your stack way better than any engineer that you will hire on LinkedIn over the next quarter. And whether or not she joins in the long run, she carries that knowledge with her. Third is our Web3 Talents program that we run. Web3 Talents is an education platform that we built that reaches students at your universities far beyond TUM, including cities without any meaningful local Web3 communities.

So, people can plug into a structured education from anywhere in the world. And this is a touchpoint at scale. Every student who goes through this program is a future user of whatever tool that we teach them. And the good thing is that we can choose what tools we teach them. And the last one that I want to go into specifically are hackathons. I wanted to call this out separately because I think it's one of the highest leverage formats, and honestly it's chronically under invested by sponsors who treat it just like a logo placement.

At a hackathon, students don't just hear about your stack, they actually build with it. For two or three days, they debug it at 3:00 a.m. in the morning, and they ship something with it. And that experience is often the first touch point for people to get in contact with you. It's much denser and stickier than any workshop, any pitch, or any ad outside will ever be. And the students who win on your stack are becoming the students who will recommend it.

Some become the students who have found a startup with it. And ETHGlobal does this internationally, but clubs do this locally. With the same dynamics, but often with an audience that someone like ETHGlobal might not reach. So, if you want students to build on your products 5 years from now, get them building right now when you can find them. One really cool thing about universities is university is a uniquely safe is uniquely safe for risk-taking.

Students have the time, students have peer support, they have quite low overheads, and the cost of failure is not high when you don't have a job, you don't have a family, you don't have a mortgage to pay back right now. So, they're more willing to start a project, to try something out, to ship something that's, you know, just half-finished right now, to found a company. And the volume of projects that get started in any given university here are honestly enormous.

Of course, most of them will fail, but the ones that are not failing are the ones that investing in right now in this ecosystem and catching them early is incredibly important. I mean, if we look, Vitalik dropped out of Waterloo to build Ethereum. I'm not recommending anybody to drop out of university, but I'm just saying that the next Vitalik is probably sitting in a lecture hall right now getting bored by a database lecture. And clubs amplify this. We provide the mentorship. We provide a peer feedback and an alumni network of people who are already navigating in Web3 right now.

We host demo nights where the first version of someone's project is getting shown to maybe 50 people that actually know what they're talking about. And this is often the place where Bob finally hears, "Hey, you should build a company out of that." So, if you're a fund, this is the earliest possibility of deal flow. If you're a protocol, these are the integrations and tools that get built on top of you. And if you're a foundation, this is the grand funnel that keeps producing experiments.

The students are not waiting for your permission. They're already building. And as I already said, I want to broaden this, right? This is not a Munich story. Of course, I'm from TUM Blockchain Club. I can tell you all the cool things that we do. But every major university city has exactly those kinds of people that Web3 needs. And many of them, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, don't have a real Web3 community in their city yet. But the local university clubs are often the first note here, the place that hosts the meetup, that trains the locals, that becomes the answer to "Where do I learn about Web3 in my city?"

So, if you want presence here in Prague, presence in Lausanne, in Paris, in Singapore, in Turkey, in the US, anywhere that you don't want to open maybe an office, um but you just want to get the visibility. And you get the seed of a community that grows on its own by partnering with those local communities. I kind of made a list for the end of what my wish list is of what you walk out here with. And it's kind of from top to bottom ranked by what I think is has the highest leverage.

First of all, go and sponsor a hackathon. Honestly, I think it's the highest leverage of anything. Students build with your stack for one weekend and that's the touch point that sticks. If you only do one of the things here on the list, I think you should do it. Second is host technical workshops. No pitch decks, real useful hands-on sessions. Take two hours and students will remember what you teach them.

Because, you know, they remember which SDK you told them, but they will not remember the fifth pitch they will hear in this day. Third is give um give access to your infrastructure. If it's API credits, if it's testnet tokens, if it's access to your premium tiers, the things you would normally give to maybe an indie hacker, give those to the club. Your ROI compounds across hundreds of students. Fourth is open a project pipeline.

Pick a problem, give a club a three-month window and a budget kind of how we do it with block sprints. You get the output and you identify maybe two, three students that are really worth keeping in touch with. And you also get a team of expert users that will stick with your product. And five, recruit early. Don't wait for the students to graduate. The most valuable students are actually the sophomores and the juniors because they're forming their preferences right now.

And the cost of being the protocol that introduces them to Web3 is much lower than competing for salary at the offer stage. So, 5 years from now, Alice will be, hopefully, a senior agent engineer in a major protocol. Bob is the founder that you have seated. And Sarah leads the design at a Series B startup, choosing exactly the wallet integration for the next product. The next generation of Web3 builders, users, and founders are in lecture halls right now.

They have not installed their first wallet yet. They have not picked their first chain yet. And they have not decided what community is theirs. So remember first touchpoints stick. The question is just who will be that first touchpoint? And blockchain clubs are how you get that first touchpoint to be yours, at scale, in nearly every city that you operate in or that you want to go in. So, show up before it's too late. And with that, thank you.

>> Thank you so much. >> And I hope we have some time for some questions. I don't know. >> Absolutely do. But before that, let me just say that was fantastic. It was a very rousing speech. And I am so sick and tired of companies using students as like a cheap workforce and like a cheap recruiting force. Like, the students are the future. That's where everything happens. So, treat them as such, right? So, I I absolutely loved it. It's fantastic, and well done for the club that you're building. It's great. Um, any questions, ladies and gentlemen? How about some of your friends in purple? Have you got any questions? I mean, you know this guy, fair enough, but do you have any questions to kind of keep the chat going?

Oh, no. All right, forget forget you guys. There's a gentleman in the back with a white t-shirt and one more in the front. Thank you. >> Hello. Thank you for your presentation. Have you thought of about including also professionals as mentors in your clubs? So, people who already have experience can give advice. >> Yeah. I mean, for us obviously, one of the you need to be a student to join the club. But what we host are like are also meet-ups, etc. where everybody, for example, in Munich can come. And where people can share knowledge.

We have a big alumni network where we have exchange sessions. You can host a workshop, etc. But yes, the blockchain student clubs is only open for students to join. But we partner with many many of industry professionals. >> Thank you very much. By By the way, actually with DaVinci, we currently have bursaries for student clubs to join us and create communities where you can fundraise, so we can chat afterwards as well. We'd be very very happy to help and support you. Yes, thank you.

There was one more question, but that person left now, probably angry that we didn't get to him first. Just joking. Anyone else? I've got a question. So, we have absolutely no idea about what the future holds, right? I'm I'm an archaeologist, so my job is always going to be here digging up people's gardens. But um for you, we don't know what the job market will look like in 20 years. How do you prepare for the future with everything that's moving so quickly forward? What What's your take? >> Honestly, preparing for the future is mostly just being and learning right now in the present. So, learn what's hot right now. We try to teach everything that's new.

And then, I don't know what the job market will hold. I think honestly AI right now is not too scary. It just you know doubles, triples, quadruples the output that one person can give and uh yeah, we'll see. But just be on the edge. Um build ship constantly improve yourself. And then I don't think anybody has a problem. >> I love it. Like a cloud hunter-gatherer. I love it. Um by the way, are you guys in the hackathon as well? Yes, nodding enthusiastically. How's it going?

Yeah, good. Thank you so much for joining us all the way from Munich. We're very, very happy and lucky to have you. And any company is lucky and happy to have such I think dynamic young people. Round of applause for Felix. Well done. Congratulations.