Proof of Work: Building Your Career Through Open Source in the Age of AI

Transcript

[music] So for the next uh panel, we're going to talk about [music] um the career opportunities in the day and age of AI in the open source industry. And for that, I'd like to welcome three guests um who will be talking about this today. First, we have Mario Bailing. >> [applause] >> We'll have Rush Mafa with us [applause] and Thomas Stanchchuk.

If you'd like to ask a question, you can use the microphone in the middle or please raise your hand and we can come to you as well. Thank you. >> Oh yes. Hello everyone. Um, thank you very much for joining this session and thank you very much to our um, panelists here. Um, I may introduce um, Rup. Rush, you're the CEO of um, FRAPE. Um, it to me it originally sounded like an Italian word, an Italian company. Maybe you will share a story about this in a moment.

Um, but it's actually um, a famous Indian company here from Mumbai. we learned and uh we are very happy to have the local presence and hear about your story um at the event. You're the CEO of Frappe. So, welcome very much. Then, >> thank you. Thank you. And then we have have Thomas here. Thomas Stanjak Stansj like I'm always have my challenges with Polish even though um Thomas is from um the neighboring country because I'm from Germany, Thomas is from Poland. Um thank you very much for joining us here. You have been involved in the blockchain Ethereum community through um yeah many activities um with Nethermine for

example but recently you focus a lot on robotics and you have quite a bit to share here in this direction. Um personally I'm Mario I'm like the co-founder of force Asia. started it in 2009 like originally like we thought like um we all of our companies in Asia um I was in Vietnam at that time and um we thought we're very disconnected from the community um but um how can we uh then reconnect that was our idea we thought we're in Asia we like free and open source solutions how we call it because it's not just software it's hardware it's knowledge it's everything um and um started the event force Asia that was 2009 and people meet have ideas have exchanges and um then u start

projects so um we can have questions later here from the audience here there's a microphone happy to take those but um I would like to uh hear a bit more from our panelists first and your stories we would like uh we want to talk about um opportunities in AI proof of work what uh can people everyone but especially also young people do um in this new age Um for example at force Asia we see um there are contributors now contributing to our projects um and some think it's very easy just like give the prompt from the issue to the AI and copy the code over these uh PRs are not good enough to be merged for us and um it's uh it's difficult so just going the

easy way is not enough um but the difficult way writing all our code as well is also challenging um there are a lot of questions in this age of AI I I'm not sure if anyone has all the answers but we can share a bit from our perspective. So um I would like uh to start with you rush can you uh share a bit about your uh story and your background here with the audience please. [clears throat] >> Uh yeah thanks thanks Mario u uh thanks for inviting me. So I can give a brief background. Um so I'm a hobbyist programmer. I I learned uh to code in the year 1990 uh when I was in uh when I

was probably 11 or 12 years old and uh I could read code just like English like uh nobody needed to explain me what code is and like I could I had the ability to read and write code very easily. So uh software was my hobby then it became my profession later I uh we had a family business in manufacturing of furniture and they were struggling from an ERP system. So I thought like you know I'm a it's programming you know I can do it and I built this uh ERP system for my family business uh in Python and uh uh then later I open sourced it and started a company around it. So this was uh 20 years ago and we have been building uh ERP next which is now the world's most popular opensource ERP system and uh

yeah I think we have more than 50,000 companies using at least 50,000 companies using it worldwide and We run a decently successful small business around it also. Frappe which is the company which uh we are around 80 people and we u yeah we've been building uh so we not only build the ERP but we also build a web framework underneath it's a metadata based uh web framework and several other products now like CRM help desk like everything a business needs. uh the way we build a product is if we like want it ourselves, we'll build it and if it's good enough, you know, we open it up for other people to use it. So that's like the brief journey.

>> Um that is um it's very difficult to do a sum up with everything you do. It's also the business perspective. But uh what I found interesting um when I read about Frappe and look at your um repositories on GitHub um you're actually one of the largest organization in India in terms of uh contributions and contribution contributions uh uh broads like many different people uh contributed they are plugins and so on um but um you also have the idea of a collective it's not just a top- down company you have the idea of a collective you come from a family and community background with a project I know you received um um like a large investment also but you still uh want to maintain this idea of a collective um

can you tell us more about the idea of collective and going forward um um talking about the age of AI um what can be the advantage of this approach here also in the age of AI >> uh thanks this is a very long discussion but I'll try and uh make it as short as possible so uh so when We so my my partner and I we have two kids and when we were looking to uh put them into a school we started searching about schools and then we had friends who are homeschooling and then you know we realized okay what is homeschooling and then we then we discovered like why uh the regular school fails you know it's you can call it industrial schooling that you know you put kids in a prison

essentially and you know you have the UN charter of human rights which the children don't have uh basic human rights right like they they can't spend in the time they they they want to and like once we realized that we uh we we realized like there's no way we can put our kids into a prison. So we started a school and we found like-minded parents uh we started this organization called learners collective which is now 8 years old and uh and then we discovered this whole community of democratic schooling which uh is an international community. We we went to some of their conferences and probably there are uh maybe 50 to 100 schools like that across the world that run democratically and then just the the idea is that the kids are smart they are not stupid uh you know you don't have to control them you don't

have to tell what them what to do like they have to discover their own agency and uh learn things at their own pace when I just uh saw why can't we do this at work like why do like why do companies like the world company itself is a military term you know why why does have to be a top- down kind of an organization. So we organize FRAP as a democratic organization. We vote on several things. We have a constitution. It's there on our website. Uh it's a very fascinating experiment. We have fundamental rights which includes people can pick their own work like they can contribute the way they want to. Like they could be in any department but they could do any work they want. And then we have something called pick your own pay as well which is all our books are open.

So people essentially pick their own pay. So it's a very uh long and crazy experiment uh that we are doing and just in the context of change uh I think it allows us to adapt much faster as an organization because people are self uh self-driven self motivated and uh you're seeing uh or civilizational change at the moment and I think the kind of structure uh allows us to be more adaptive. Um yeah, it's it's a big topic. You're doing it for many years. Uh in 2008 already. Um um you started the founders, how do you call it?

>> Founders collective. >> Founders. Yeah. Collective. [sighs] Um okay. I think we will dig a bit deeper in there. But um I heard something that might be uh or that is relevant for both of us, Thomas. Um so I am originally from East Germany, right? So the fall of the wall had a huge impact for me. I was like um um in my teens and um [snorts] like that was just amazing right like that's a whole new time everything is uh open now like not just the borders but right our mind was open and everything should be different now open source like open networks open hardware everything we we should change it and u um the original like change like why people

want to change because it's of human rights yeah human rights we I'm not sure but I often feel like in Asia people see this like there's the west and there's Asia and there like different blocks but um it's not that homogeneous and especially at that time um 1989 um there was the question of human rights yeah um can we go even like do we have the freedom of movement things like that um and u I think that's a bit of a similar story how do you see this times of change when we were young, right? We are now again at a big times of change.

Can you share a little bit about your path of like that is coming from this time and a little bit like how this impacts here u um like the society today. I think it's a very interesting parallel especially as defining the mission and vision for Nethermind as we were building it. Uh we talked about um no no borders while ensuring safety and cultures to be able to protect themselves. And that no borders comes from the story from East Germany from me uh in the early 90s. I think we were going with my parents to Berlin and we

had to cross the border between like between Poland and East Germany then East Germany entering Berlin and then Berlin you had to cross the border from East Berlin to West Berlin and we were returned at the last border because my parents didn't have some paperwork that was crucial. Uh and that memory of borders and then the collapse of borders as first obviously there was unification of Germany. So our trips to Germany became easier but also then Poland entering European Union removed the border between Poland and Germany. So the removal of borders was like this extremely important part of me witnessing the history of Europe and kind of looking at the entire world as how this can happen on the broader

scale. And now looking at what happens with AI, I feel that there is a significant difference between the generations because maybe my generation was dreaming of how to go global, how to have an impact on the global scales against the borders. While I feel that the and and at the same time our nostalgia, our like thinking of the past was I wish the world was simpler, not so global and I could just go back to maybe the family lifestyle, just not thinking that I have to have this global impact. [snorts] And a new generation kind of starts in this

global participation with the social media with constantly being connected with like five minutes to fame and sometimes I imagine for many many young people that ability to have a global impact already happened. Sometimes maybe they had their five minutes and they were for a moment recognized in the entire world. They became a a meme or posted a story that became viral for a few minutes. So that expectation of having global impact might be even less exciting. I could imagine that's like okay that that happens. So you don't dream of it that intensely but they have a unique chance of living in the AI times when when they can totally turn away from global and be able to borrow

all the intelligence all the knowledge and have a local impact because previously if you didn't leave your hometown if you didn't go to a university in the large city if you didn't connect globally you couldn't borrow the information to well design a medicine for your parents or to improve the agriculture setup and coordination in your local uh environment. Now you can do it. Now you can uh just bring a single GPU open weights models uh install it and you can practically the change entirety of the environment around you. You can start probably designing mRNA vaccines that are specialized for for your friends and

family. I think this is something that is unexplored yet and this is great opportunity for the young to realize that it's just that they were pushed into the dreams of previous generation but they're yet about to explore the dreams of their own that will be so impressive and I'll be like so enchanted by that uh ability to to have a local influence. Honestly, it this sounds amazing, but it also sounds slightly too easy. >> It always is what I said.

>> So, uh it is from your perspective maybe because like you have done many things in your life. um you're building robots now and not everyone has always access to all the tools and even like um if we have access now maybe to some of one of the large companies uh we don't know will it u be the same access that everyone gets still in two years or will it have a different price point and um there are opportunities um but also new challenges um what would you advise a person like uh um who's young today um like how should they approach u um a career? Yeah. How should

they start? What do they need to consider? And maybe you can um share a bit also about your um robots work your work in the robots area. Um I I know you started um this uh with completely open source um and uh um we don't only want to give advice like you know um go to a large company one of the big tech firms and and and and work there. We want uh people to um improve the world and um I think like uh um having access to um open knowledge gives people a chance um um to to you know build their own career right rather than just following

like you you you have the chance maybe not everyone is able to do it or but like there is a possibility that you have a chance through this open approach I don't know what what what are your thoughts and uh also in regards to uh robotics where are the opportunities? >> I think the message will be very different depending on which country you're coming from. So the message for the youth in India probably is different than the message for the youth in China and the message for the youth in Europe. Right? You have different access to to education to global markets to financing. uh you have different situations in the family of how wealthy likely your parent generation is because you know the when you think about the

Chinese youth then maybe they struggle because their parents benefited immensely from the wealth accumulation but they cannot recreate it uh in India I think this it seems like it's coming with the current generation that there is a massive massive opportunity for the transformation so those paths are very different and and everyone has to look really inside and in a closest environment of what is what is the path and there are so many different paths and you maybe jokingly dismiss the large company but very often like you have to get finance from somewhere. It can be parents, it can be large company, it can be global financial markets, might be blockchain. Uh but you have to start

somewhere or simply through your work locally, you start contributing thinking that whatever requires capital is not as relevant as your own work and impact and you can always activate the capital of others around you. Um I can imagine some parts of India might be like extremely devoid of capital locally. So you you go there and you try to help locally. you can have an impact but the capital will not be even there around to activate uh and some other places you know there's massive concentration so I guess you try to look how you can activate the 12 of Mumbai to flow to other places now you mentioned robotics it's interesting now people in San Francisco say they cannot have access to the parts at the

same level as if you go to Shenzhen to uh to China in Shenzhen you talk with people that say I have 100 suppliers and all of them within 2 hours from me because there's 200 million people living within 2 hours of connectivity and thousands or more of factories that manufacture all the different parts and it's almost like food delivery in China you have ability to get all the parts within half an hour um so that's what US is trying to rebuild and now we hear also India starts thinking of how to build the the semiconductor industry in India how to start activating And there's a a great history, great culture of being in in uh manufacturing and hardware engineering and civil

infrastructure and so on. So how to start? I think what whatever works to satisfy the needs for the ideas that you have contributing to the software I think it changes as you said they it's it's more that the verification of commits of others and deep understanding of the project for a longer time may matter more because then then you can really help to make changes without the deep understanding of the software and the idea behind it nowadays you cannot accept the changes to the software uh but even that might be just a moment in time when we observe it but maybe in six months nobody will be even thinking of the contributions to open software

because everything will be passed to agents and only the idea and the and the impact will matter and that that global impact might be distant but you have to start locally. So again I I believe that that path seems most convincing for me. I started just thinking of it recently and the more I think about it, the more convincing it made that it is for me that it's actually it is as easy as I say. So robotics is just connecting to probably like Alibaba or something and buying parts from China and gradually building local manufacturing like re-industrializing in the US reactivating Midwest and so on.

Um Rushab um you here we're speculating about India what are the opportunities for for India um I think that is one of the big differences that the that India is a much younger country than um most places nowadays around the world. So you have a lot of young people and they're wondering [snorts] what do we do in the age of AI as Thomas said there's so many unknowns is it in 6 months like that or is it like that or is it like that right like whatever topic you look at there's so many unknowns Rashad >> yeah I think Thomas made some very interesting points about geopolitics and even that is how you started right and

there's this idea of the civilizational narrative that is going on right like if you're sitting in China maybe you're thinking of how do we defeat the Americans right like because that's the entire civilization is designed for that uh I think in India we are we are a lost civilization and I know I'm saying here but uh I think we are more like France you know we are more the culture and food civilization we are not I mean even though you are in a tech tech kind of an ecosystem and there is a if you go to Bangalore like you may see some tech tech ecosystem but the vast majority of India never came out of farming and you Thankfully they may not have to go back to farming because you know they never came out of farming in the first place right um I think India will probably

bypass all of this uh because I mean I mean yes we have an IT sector in Bangalore but it's just mostly outsourcing of labor it is not really intellectual uh there is no intellectual stimulus there are very few companies that create intellectual capital we don't have the culture we don't like young people here don't see other founders you know do stuff like that So um I think we we missed cloud, we missed uh software products, we missed SAS and we will also miss AI. So we might just be we might leap frog into the future where everybody goes to farming and like we are like oh we were already there. So it's pessimistic but that's the most likely scenario.

>> Um okay. Um um India is a big country. there are so many different people and um I have to say for example um in the frappe um on frappe on github there are a lot of of contributors they they made the effort there always people who who go abroad there many people also nowadays who come back and so I think it's fair to say every country every region um there are always different segments of the population but like here we have people at the event who are really eager uh to achieve something to make a real contribution like what you did >> but they have no clue I I don't think they have a clue uh so if you look at

the the state of capital it is locked by crony capitalists and you know I mean the access to capital is limited like the big companies control most of the tech you know we are sitting in the geo financial you know the geo convention center which belongs to the richest one of the richest families in India right and uh so you are locked into a system where young people maybe they see dreams but they have no path to go forward and yeah I mean there is a small bubble in Bangalore that probably you know has some access to capital and stuff but that is just a very very small piece of India like if you go and travel across India it's a very different scenario I think I think most people have no clue what is going to hit them and uh you know yeah [snorts]

>> yeah but like still um nobody has a clue but what Thomas just said we don't have a clue we don't know in 6 months yeah do we need uh developers or will it be like this? So I am actually um coming from another side and um we know that a lot of people who are now in the um like tech community they they they watch Star Trek. Yeah. Uh when they were young and I always see this like how they imagine they they don't write the code all the time they say oh no match this data set with that data set like extrapolate this and like you know always this kind of thing. So this is how I grew up and this is what I thinking like uh we were promised this uh uh technology in the year 2000. Yeah.

And it wasn't there but now suddenly it is there. Yeah. In force Asia we developed like a kind of AI chatbot with LLMs um in 2015 but we thought um it's it's never getting to close to 100%. You always get a lot of wrong answers. So we thought maybe 30 40 years. Okay. Suddenly it's here like nobody would we always thought like who would spend 500 million into cloud infrastructure to train an AI yeah I mean like this is kind of the cost we are talking about like right um but like they did so we we have it now and the difference is like there we have our story we have our life we we

have some progress um uh and um we have a path. Young people don't have a path. So what can we what how can we help them? What can we maybe share from our path um in a time of unknowns? So I I think that very often now in in the last days when talking to to people in India you you feel it that we lack understanding of the of the amount of challenges that they must be fa facing because even here like if you listen to someone who understands the India challenges very well we

immediately start behaving like like almost like like he doesn't believe in it and we can convince you that he's but most likely we don't understand the the number of challenges here and and it means that what we can do is really to organize events like this and I was very disappointed with the voices of people that decided not to come to India uh from the especially from the Ethereum ecosystem where I think that this is part of the vision and responsibility of Ethereum to build bridges connect and you hear so often that people want to change the world but well I changed the world but I'm not come to India because to come and understand all of those challenges deeply means that maybe you

realize that with a small amount of capital you can activate some people that have tremendous potential here. not activate maybe for them to have global impact, but to start and actually have that local impact and that matters and you can start multiplying it and and that might be an answer to many people that have here the will to change but at the same they really feel overwhelmed and you know being a founder in any format is overwhelming. Being a founder when you feel that there is no access to to capital or there is more bureaucracy and so on and so on might be even more difficult. and what if on top of it you have to continuously think about how to support your family uh and and go over all the other obstacles. I think hearing

listening very deeply to what the challenges are and thinking of how we can how we can activate that will just really make a tremendous difference. But uh both of you also you run companies. So um um let's get hands- on like uh what skills uh what kind of person are you looking for? Uh nowadays like >> well I I started with a big company right like so I started my career by spending 10 years with the global corporation. It was actually my dream at the university to join large corporations like Microsoft and so on. I never planned to be an open source contributor. I imagine that I absolutely don't want to be a founder and it took

me years and opportunity that I very very accidentally bought some Eve got money and suddenly realized okay with capital I can take some more risk and that allowed me to start a business. Now who I was looking for for a long time when building Netamine I thought well I can have some differentiator I'll start hiring people from slightly lower costbased uh places but who had experience building very complex uh large systems like enterprise systems because I thought that was missing in the open source community because open source very often is a lot of 18 19 year olds jumping in starting coding and never learning the kind of

complexity of a very very large systems and approaches like process of building very very large scale systems. So that's what I was looking for a very long time how to bring people with that experience to open source and through that get advantage. Um now nowadays for complete I'm looking for people that have experience with physical infrastructure solutions. So I thank anybody who uh goes to university to do the biotech labs, power engineering solutions, civil engineering construction architecture uh solutions around mechanics, mechanical engineers, robotics and so on and so on. So everything physical. I

think that this this is the anchor for understanding the direction for which you build software for free. Someone who would say I just built software for me is you no longer need it. This you replace with AI but to understand what you use software for. It's so easy to build a software now that you don't know what you will use it for. It's still very hard to understand what you build software for. Uh and everyone has actually their local challenges and problems that they understand that they say I know where to redirect that free software to. Um um it reminds me a bit of my my my my father when my father was young. Um the big thing was become an electrician. That's like technology like

so many things. Yeah. Um and u but nowadays it's just like um yeah a normal thing where plug this plug this like check this check this multimeter and so on right but when he was young this was the top. Yeah. And uh I was thought like how can that happen with software? You need to know so much. Yeah. And but now it's happening in some form it seems. Yeah. I spent the last three months learning like how to be an electrician, right? Like I I wanted to learn how everything in electrical systems works because actually for open software when you look now at projects like Linux foundation energy uh open compute project those are open-source project

that talk about standardization of the physical deployment of the compute data centers uh power engineering transmission lines power plants and so on. So if we open source all of that then I imagine the world now where you can contribute to the physical world the same way as to the cloud in the past. So the world becomes one more cloud where you can automate deployments into and you start understanding how everything works and you combine it from modules to modules to modules. So it's almost like a melting world of financing opensourcing modularizing templating the world and digital into a single mechanism. I think it's the most exciting time ever.

>> Okay. So um uh Rusev from your your perspective um so let's say we have um let's simplify we have two groups of people uh one people who are maybe more local based like more like they have very strong roots they they don't say I want to go like from to the US and make a startup but there are also other people who say um oh yeah I I want to I want an impact yeah US India anywhere but I really want to drive things. Yeah. Um so these two groups of people um how would you what would you say what skills are needed? What skills are you looking for um in your company? Um or do

you like maybe you have another vision? Maybe you say like in 3 years everything is robotized in your company. I I don't know like nevertheless still then >> people need skills. >> Yeah. You need the generic skills of curiosity intelligence communication right? Like you need all of that. But I think when the world is changing so fast, you also need resilience. You need uh the ability to take uh like you know the ability to start all over again. uh you need the ability to let go of your deeprooted uh beliefs uh and have this kind of emotional resilience to be uninvested in your project and you know reinvest in something else because whatever you built now an AI can just build it you know in a minute so uh so I

think emotional resilience is important there will be problems to solve I'm uh I think there will be lots of problems to solve anyways with better tools maybe we can create better quality software we can create better quality hardware uh that people can use you know more long-lasting uh cheaper high quality stuff. So there are a lot of problems to be solved. Sure. But uh people who are more emotionally resilient and open along with having the other skills of intelligence, curiosity will probably do better. >> Um I'm I'm just thinking which of these skills are taught in school uh nowadays because what what would have people answered uh 20 30 years ago? um math or something I don't know what would they

have said they would have probably answered that question in many ways okay curiosity is always important but maybe would they have focused on biology math or something else would like so so any your answer is very different maybe to the past or >> yeah I think schools kill your curiosity like schools don't want they give you a curriculum that you have to study and you know you have to pass an exam like they want you to become producers and not thinkers um and you know they they basically kill your curiosity like um like if you go through a standardized schooling process. So yeah, I mean schools today are not designed for creating emotional resilience. I think emotional resilience comes more from uh doing hard projects and then uh you know yeah so you know emotional intelligence

where you know restarting starting from scratch you know those will be more important. >> Okay. So actually um um I I see we also have an online system and we have a lot of questions from the audience that uh Norbert is actually collecting for us. Norbert uh please grab the mic and uh uh share the questions from the audience. Um we can go through this. So we also have a lot of viewers online. Um there right behind you right behind you. Yes. Yes.

>> Okay. Um the top question is should a company or organization starting hiring tech people in India via their contribution in their or >> make make a contribution in the or what >> should the company organizations start hiring tech people in India via their contribution. So I I I don't know I didn't post the question. I assume it's like first people contribute to the organization and then people start hiring them after their contribution.

>> Okay. So that's probably specific also for open source organizations. Yeah. You can't really contribute to a closed source uh uh codebase. Um okay. So we have it in in front. So so yeah would that be an advantage? >> Uh I think uh contributions are now very cheap. So you know that is not really the thing. I mean the way to really get hired is to build a relationship with somebody in the organization and you know uh show them your skills and convince them so that they vouch for you. I think the vouching system is going to be so much more important like at least on our projects we have stopped uh accepting contributions from anybody like you have to uh we have a list of vouch contributors and only those can contribute and I'm sure most people are going to do it because now a

contribution is just a single prompt away and uh yeah you may want to reach out to people uh inside the organization and show them their skills convince them so that they can refer you inside the organization >> and contri the definition of no sorry like the [gasps] the core of what contribution has changed in the past you attract people that show that they're interested so they start contributing and think even if it's not perfect at least they show that they're really interested I think you can still do that but the contribution has to be or 10x the quality as in the past and this is first of all the talent now has much better access to something that explains the

existing codebase. So you can talk to AI for a longer time to understand the codebase deeply and also when you deliver solution you can spend more time sculpting it into something of super high quality. So just someone who expects that they will do a contribution at the level of someone from 5 years ago and it will be enough is wrong. You always compete with other talented people. It's the organization still will maybe select the top 1% of those who want to join or top 0.1%.

I just what you need to do to be in the 01% the output the effect is 10x of what it was 5 years ago and this is probably now that kind of disappointment people think why I I did this in the past it would be enough. No, it's just it's 10 times more that you could do in the same time. So to be really outstanding you have to do something massive like deploy the entire fully functional module that already works and operational and when people start looking at it or even they push the AI against it the AI says yeah it's perfect we can ship it. So that's that's what you should uh aspire for now.

>> That's a very good point because this is what we saw. So we have 200 repositories with force Asia and we um we get like more and more contribution. we say oh that's really nice suddenly we get 50 contributions per day yeah I mean it's a huge manpower required we implemented some um uh strategies some requirements actually as you said like two three years ago it was a crazy zero people would have contributed with these requirements but now we have AI and it's a big topic here also at the event we actually have workshops out there and we have later by the way a talk by um our um contributor Rashid about like AI can make the patch but can you get it merged? Yeah, there is more to it. You

need to understand uh processes and so on. Okay, let's go uh to the next question. Yes, please go ahead. The next the next one is aimed at you Rab. Um it says, I agree with your points about India, but I'd love to know what we as a next generation from the audience can do to bring a meaningful shift in India's tech ecosystem and what makes you optimistic about our future? Um I mean see my optimism and pessimism is not momentary right it's been I I've been uh uh doing um I've been running a business for 20 years and if you understand how power works in India it is really that um I

mean so there is so much nepotism um if you look at any field in India whether you look at sports or cinema or politics you know there is extreme amount of nepotism from uh the children of like the top industrialists or the politicians you know they always uh you know uh power is inherited uh and like yes you can make a difference so you should always try like in spite of having these kind of uh I mean I'm trying right in spite of being in an environment that does not encourage people like me I still try so I think all you can do is try and maybe one of us succeeds and we change the civilization though it's seems like a very tall I mean we are against a very very difficult target to change the psychology of how power is structured in

India. I uh I mean it it's a miracle if this can happen. See, thank you. Um James, I have another question actually which is not on the list but um something that popped up. We're at a gathering um hosted by Frost Asia and I'd like to zoom in a little bit on the F in this case of that um because the talks we've had here was also about what what choices do you make to contribute uh what options are there as a career in this day and age to contribute to projects but what if you

look at founders uh these days given the um I would say global changes as well and what you mentioned Thomas as the output is required is way higher these days individually as well. [sighs] Uh what would your advice be as all having contributed and founded open projects for um new founders these days that want to initiate FOS projects so specifically aimed at contributions with uh not directly a goal of recuperation? Is that still an opportunity in this day and age to to for new founders?

I'm looking for optimism here as well of course. Again, I think it doesn't change. Being a founder means that you're ready to uh to cry, to be at the edge of mental breakdown, to feel like it never works, to feel absolutely overwhelmed by the difficulty, still believe that somehow you want to do something. Uh if you're ready for that road, you're the founder. It's just the thing that was making people cry and collapse 5 years ago. Now, you can do with one prompt. So you have to find something so much more complex. I mean me as a founder now push myself back to the founder mode. Uh starting again a company sure and coming with now almost

this like massive support of people that think well he's done it once so he can do it once again. This is easier than start for the first time. But they but still I'm looking at well entropic can do this open can do this the large organization can can do what I'm planning in a in a few clicks I I still believe I'll do that and I I'm still super overwhelmed with like oh my god that's so difficult. Uh so unless you push yourself into that level of feeling that it's absolutely impossible what you're trying to do but you keep pushing because you want to do that you're not a founder really or probably there are different types of founders some that will just pick something that is niche make money quickly and it's very

successful founder as well my path is pick something almost impossible and keep pushing right my story with never mind was there are already four clients one of them is from multi-billion dollar company and has 20 people uh it's open source. Everybody says that you cannot make money on open source. I'll keep building and 3 years later it starts working. This three years you can imagine were super painful. So I guess this is a bit like like I would expect the founder journey looks now. You start building and feel for two years you feel nothing that I made sense because everybody can just clone it quickly. But you keep building this understanding of which direction you go and very often it emerges like the founder starts and they

think that this is uh it's a lack that after two or three years they succeeded. The truth is that you start amassing that such a deep in understanding of the topics that you want to make happen and so many people heard your story and they start to feel like they want to support you in that journey that it it just takes time but it happens. So >> yeah, I mean I think people who are founders are just founders you know they will do it uh regardless like they like you know they're not going to stop because there is a new technology you know maybe they see it as an opportunity right so uh if I was a founder today uh and if I wanted to be a founder I'll still be a founder right and uh you know that's that's just the way it is uh

maybe you you adapt like maybe you you adapt faster uh and and you adapt to again a change is opportune time to start companies right maybe people are still slow to adapt to change and you know maybe that's where you can create an impact. >> So um I think we going further and further away from this idea that you create something and then that's it like yeah you um I I mean I think nowadays um if you start a project if you start a company um and you want it to be successful it's not like you make it and then like you kind of keep it up to date or something like that. It's really like add new features constantly, improve things constantly. Yeah. Because

everyone can just copy things. So this means a lot of knowledge is required um outside of the um tech ecosystem. So it's not enough to say yeah I'm good in reactjs. Yeah. So what right like um for example in event J do you know event processes? Do you know every single detail of the signup process and so on? A lot of details and knowledge is required to make these things happen. So there are a lot of opport opportunities in my view and um yeah I think like u um it shows like uh you are here you have interest and um maybe you are one of the future founders or uh company or project founders before we come now to the end of this session like so many things to

discuss about and I also see a lot of more questions I think we are here in India and I would like to um end on the positive note there's always something to learn or many things of course to learn um from the place where we are. One thing that I learned many years ago is the the idea of jugar Indian people that say oh no this is not good but I was like no come on this is like hacking you can do something in a day. So we even organized a jugard fest a few times in in Haidabat. So that was really cool and um I love this idea but uh we have you here now um of course as a um local really in Mumbai. Um so um I would like to learn what is the thing

you want to give us here at the end of the session um um for the voyage. What can people what can the rest of the world learn um from having a like from careers in India or like what's your what's your idea? Uh this is a very interesting question and um I know we're at the end of it so I have to give a very short answer to this but I would go back to Gandhi uh you know he uh he he's written one only like one ideological book called Hinsswaj and like where he says that you know he's okay with the British being in India you know as long as they behave like Indians uh you know he uh and and what he was really worried about was that maybe what India has to give to the world is this idea of spirituality and

it doesn't really make sense in a tech conference but uh but yes there are some things that are irrational and there are some things that um maybe Indians understand better because of their civilizational uh history. So yeah if you're coming to India that is what that is what has sustained through the ages. Yes. And the cuisine obviously but >> so um the message of Gandhi's life although Gandhi's life is a message yeah so come to India explore this um lots of things there's more opportunity at the event al of course to uh talk to you also to frappy there's a boo booth outside so please join us here and um thank you very much has been an absolute

pleasure >> [applause] [applause] >> Yeah, we will continue. [music]