The State of Talent and Work in Web3

Transcript

back we're back uh we have a panel uh for the next 45 minutes on the state of talent and work in web 3 uh so you got a quick chance to scan the QR code guys if you want to uh interact if you want to ask questions or anything like that uh the last sort of 10 minutes of the panel will be uh them addressing questions uh so feel free to do that if you want uh we have had a change of moderator so what comes up on the screen is not going to be the person moderating uh please welcome your new moderator James Ray uh and we have Amanda kah here kren pomales and Felipe maso put your hands together everybody hey guys how we

doing testing testing is the mic on there we go guys come on grab a seat oh mics are there as well just give them a little check so welcome today guys this is the panel discussion about the state and talent of work in web 3 so we've got a really exciting lineup for you guys today and what we're going to do is just quickly go around give a little short bio so you get to know everybody first of all my name is James um I'm a community manager at being crypto I'm going to pass around to the discussion so everyone can introduce themselves briefly just take a 30 second bio or so yeah um going to try to put my own personal bio and talent protocols in 30 seconds but I've um in throughout my career I've done a bunch of stuff from

computer engineering in to DJ to working in advertising and now a web three founder and throughout this journey I've made a lot of a lot of people helped me and a lot of people wanted to follow kind of my journey what new exciting things are you are you doing and talent protocol is basically way a social and economic platform where people uh can share their goals and share their journey and using crypto and tokens as a way to incentivizing um more support more interactions and more people help helping each other out Amazing Amanda if you want to go next hi everyone I'm Amanda ker I'm the chief people officer at consensus we're a leading uh blockchain web 3 software company you

might know some of our products we metamask um linear INF fura for some of them so um I'm really excited today to be kind of talking about I think we're going to talk a lot about hiring but my passion really is about the people within the company and what your doing to grow them and retain them because I think that that's a it has fundamentally changed um in the last few years for a lot of reasons and I think that our ecosystem is really going to be the space by which fundamentally changes how everybody works I think and I and that's truly fascinating to me so there you go thank you Kristen if you want to jump

yeah um thank you guys for being here today I'm Kristen with Talent l so my background I was a freelance developer freelance marketer for a while um I've always had software startups on the side was completely web to until about 2020 when I realized that blockchain technology was completely changing the paradigms of how organizations are structured and um the biggest issues that I've ever faced in my own like personal life as a worker and then uh you know as a hirer of other people has always been finding the right people and that that's something that you know most of us can relate to uh whether we're looking for work or hiring and really what talent layer is is it's our take on trying to solve the issues

of connectivity between people so right now in the way that we hire you basically have um you know a lot of different platforms a lot of data silos what we're doing is we're breaking down the silos that really prevent people from connecting with each other but I can get more into that later thanks thank you so much guys and just wanted to say to everyone everyone's having a great time at the event so far and this is a really important discussion for us today because really it's about opportunities in this space and how we can how we can get to them so I just want to say Obviously coming into this space there's three ways we can really invest in it we can invest in crypto we can invest in nfts and digital assets but really most importantly we can invest in ourselves and getting these

jobs and elevating each other in this space so I just wanted to try something very quickly guys so if anyone in the crowd is looking for a job currently and be honest just put your hands up see there we go and if anyone in the the crowd is also hiring right now can you put your hand up so this is what we're doing guys today we're going to be connecting people and this is what these events are about connecting with people that need what you have so we're going to jump into this guys we've got 10 amazing questions today I'm going to try and get through them all but I know that it might it might be a little bit difficult so Cur curing in and they all have a small miniature title so first question is and this is based around current trends how has the web 3 space

influenced the current trends in Talent acquisition today you guys can really jump in as you as you see fit sure um so the first thing that comes to mind is um like I I think it was maybe 20 20 maybe 2020 that blockchain was like the top keyword on LinkedIn to have on your profile so like ever since then there's been just this massive flood of developers like marketers creatives especially with the nft c that have been getting into the blockchain space um because of just more Awareness on on the technology which has been really cool so I think on one hand I want to say that

like mainstream interest in working in the blockchain sector is bigger than ever and this is something that I've seen not be impacted as much by the market cycle which was super surprising for me I would expect like you know all the hackathons and conferences this year to have like less people that are you know I'm a Dev and I'm teaching myself solidity and I'm getting into it but it's not like I've seen more than ever which is is super super exciting and then sort of switching to implications of blockchain technology for hiring more generally this is where we haven't even began to scrape the surface of everything that's possible um and really like what are the benefits of blockchain

Technology um I I think that in general we could look at defi as an amazing example of what blockchain can do so why is defi revolutionary you can have quick speed of matching uh need and want that's really cool you can have um basically uh composability fuel so many different applications so much Innovation um and you can have trust between parties that would normally never be able to interact with each other uh across the globe so I see all of these things coming into the hiring space and um and you know some of us on this panel are also Building Technology that we're hoping will create this future um I would like to add maybe from

more an individual perspective I think there was like a macro perspective on what's happening in the market I think from an individual perspective in web 3 we have a lot of bounties and I think that's kind of a new way of working and I think is related to the trend of kind of fractional work in the sense where um a lot of us have multiple jobs and multiple roles at the same time with different companies and that's I think getting more and more uh normal uh I'll give a slightly different answer I think what is interesting is there's a lot of talent out there and if you group it it will vary from people

who have got um experience in the space um you've got some where it's a little bit and then you've got curiosity and I think that companies need to be adjusting their mindset in terms of attracting all of that Talent it's really important for us if we want to grow our space we've got to be inclusive we've got to be bringing in all kinds of people and so I think Talent acquisition from a company perspective is you have to be really investing heavily in education and Learning and Development and the strategies in place within a company to be able to support these different levels of kind of understanding um and grow from within so I want to encourage everyone no matter

where your kind of interest level is or your understanding is don't shy away from the space but be really thoughtful and intentional about looking for those elements in the companies that you want to work for because that's what's going to support you and help you grow amazing guys and I love what you said there Philip because it's like the thing that came to my mind was you know wearing many hats in an organization and I think that's really important today because you know with you know the the rise of technology and AI we do all have to Pivot in the space and and find our little piece of it so and moving on to number question number two it's about decentralization so as we move towards and more decentralized systems within web 3 how do you see this impacting traditional HR structures and talent management I can't jump in it's going to

fundamentally change everything we're starting to see it now um you have to get your minds around where people want to work how they want to work you know when they're going to work is completely different and if you can't get your head around that I think that um you're not going to have a good time um following now it's starting to happen is the way people are compensated and I think that that's really interesting I always had this visualization in my kind of aspirational mind that like I want it to be like an allart menu where an you know an individual comes and starts with a company and they can choose the things that are meaningful for them but the package then relates equitably amongst everyone so like this is the kind of

thing I just did an offsite with my uh leadership team and we really thought a lot about that like we have have to match the industry we have to match the people who are in the industry and what they're looking for so I think over the coming years you're going to start to see um these things change fundamentally the one that's happening right now is the fluidity of the workforce so for example consensus is about 900 people we're in 40 different countries so the geographical footprint that you're dealing with means that you're now running a 247 company just from a time zone perspective so then you've got to be super disciplined in investing around working async because you can't have a

culture where everything is dictated by one time zone so you're going to start to sort of like see it everywhere and you have to be really intentional about it I can go I have I think regarding decentralization I was thinking one positive and one negative I think the positive and this is something that's been true for us Talent protocol as a compan is normally true for those kind of to um kind of fund people in their community that have ideas that contribute okay take some budget and go make that happen but in companies we we're also experimenting with this so instead of hiring full-time employees we're actually funding people in our

community that have good ideas and project ideas so instead of hiring for example a full-time marketing manager were um uh we just gave a uh a budget to two uh community members and now they're working part-time they have their own budget to manage but they are not our employees so I think that's a big change in terms of HR structure I think the one negative of decentralization is kind of the loss of social ties so uh I think it's will be much easier for people just to um change jobs uh much faster because they not tied to the as much tied to the other people in in the in the company

they're just tied to their compensation of what they're getting to do that partic particular job so yeah I think that's something we need to be careful of yeah um so before before this discussion um Amanda and I were riffing a little bit about like retention of people within organizations um even in like you know a completely fluid work environment and we were thinking like you know as long as people have um shared values and have ways of uh well I mean really as leadership like we need to be making sure that people are interacting with each other and getting fulfillment and this is something like within my own team that we've been trying to figure out recently so it's

been on my mind a lot um but that's sort of heading in a tangent Direction um so on this question completely agree with both of your qu or both of your answers um so I I won't won't like belabor those points but one thing that we have haven't hit on yet that I think is really important is the implications of like I guess like anonymity really and like less information needing to be shared about you as an individual with employers so in the like blockchain crypto sector we've seen that it's now relatively normal for companies to hire people where you don't necessarily know that person's legal name you don't necessarily know where they live and

this is something that's really really really powerful for inclusivity because as of right now like you know you could be female black whatever like all of the different things that usually people would be discriminated against and you can like you know roll up to a crypto startup and not have to disclose any of that and that's really really really powerful um I see that like basically once this sort of new way of working this sort of decentralized way of working becomes more mainstream and I think it already is but it's just getting started right now I see like Anonymous work and and work where you don't have to disclose your entire life to an employer becoming something that is more normal and I'm really really

excited about that because I think that that's just going to be unbelievably huge for inclusivity that's an amazing aspect that you brought you know to attention there and I think it's it actually moves perfectly into the next which allows this which is the next question about remote working because we can talk about web 3 and not talk about remote working so when the when the advancements in web 3 and the increasing tendency towards remote working and what unique challenges and opportunities do companies face in recruiting talent and retaining that talent I feel like Amanda would have an amazing answer to this U well we've been remote um from the beginning we're fully remote um what okay what do you need to think about what one thing I'm excited about remote work from a um sort of

inclusivity perspective and diversity perspective is I think we're really opening up the talent pool in terms of who we can attract so simple story I'm a single mom that lives in New York and I'm going to spend the summer in Europe like I 10 years ago I could not even imagined um a world like that and so I think that a lot of um restrictions that you may have had to talent in more traditional companies having to go into an office being in a specific location um are breaking down and that for me that is so exciting there's a place um for everybody but but you know what are some of the things that you need to think about with remote work again the 24/7 nature being really disciplined around async I've seen it so many times

when people come from web 2 into web 3 they're working remote and they're like responding to emails or slack messages at 3:00 in the morning and it's like stop no like you don't you don't need to to do that so you do need to be really disciplined around your culture around that I think that um the way that you're going to develop Talent within a company and the skill skills are going to be a bit different because we're on Zoom calls a lot I think your communication skills both written and verbal need to be really strong um because you're relying on those a lot more I think in terms of the social connections my biggest tip would be don't just try to do what you've always done in the past ask your people what they want and shape

those opportunities for social connection around that um we introduced six six months AG no a year ago I think actually Dow days because they're a big deal to people in our companies so once a month everybody just gets to have the day to work on Dows but we do a lot of Education piece so it's really thinking about what the PE be very transparent ask everybody what they want and then see what you can do to actually bring that together very well P um so in sort of my my journey as like a startup founder manager there's one um one sort of philosophy around how to

treat employees that I really like and it's called like entrepreneurial management so this is not you know referring to you as an entrepreneur but it's it's referring to empowering the individual people that are working on this stuff to feel like they have the autonomy to just really take charge of their tasks and that means like you're delegating a lot of the direction to them and you know in the more traditional hiring space this is stuff that's very scary like oh why would you want your employees to make all the decisions about the success of the company but if you are hiring people that are Vision aligned hiring people that you trust um even if these people are in like you know more fluid um like you know contracts or the way that you

interact with them then you should feel confident to delegate this important stuff to them and the really cool side effect of this sort of strategy is if people feel like something is theirs and if they feel like they have control on the decision- making and they understand that like they they have your trust really like as as a manager um if you even you know have those those Concepts in your your company um then that creates like so much excitement and enthusiasm and really makes people motivated to go and do the stuff every day um so that's something that I um I think is just super super important

regardless of what your organizational structure is um both in web 2 and web 3 but it's especially important in remote environments because um like from a logistic standpoint it's almost impossible to be like a hovering manager like my gosh if you try to do that in a remote environment then you're doing you know the crazy stuff that some companies tried during Co where you're you know tracking people's time on the laptops and it's just that's a bunch of like that doesn't make people happy and it also doesn't achieve the goal that you have as a manager because it can be easily faked it's I won't won't get into that tangent you can you can tell that it's frustrating to me um anyways yeah Empower your people Everyone's an entrepreneur yeah um I just want CU want

to touch on things that you both said cuz uh for people to have um autonomy like you mentioned and to have a good sense of how to manage their own time to have good communication skills it's very hard to have this when you were you on when you're in your first job so it's things that come with experience come with maturity and one of the challenges that I see and um and remote working is that is very optimized for very experienced individual contributors and in web 3 we see a lot of new people not a lot of young people a lot of people that never had a job before so a lot of these skills you get them but just by working by experience

by having multiple jobs in different uh contexts so I think it's very important for us as Founders and managers because when we're distant it's harder to coach people it's harder to identify this the these struggles so I think that's a challenge that we should be uh focused on and just to finish just a quick personal take that I don't think the word remote work actually fits especially in web 3 cuz remote I think assumes that there's a sensor and your remote from it and in the decentralized world uh I prefer the word distributed uh a bit more and also or also focusing on async which I think is

the important working asynchronously and not actually being I don't care where we where you are it just means working asynchronously I think that I think we should all adopt that from now on actually you know um and I just realized as well we're not we've not doing well on time at all guys so we're going to have to really be quick here but um this is actually a brilliant one because um speaking about those Talent pools and this is about skill sets and what unique skill sets do you think are in the most demand in web 3 in within your organizations and and how difficult it is to keep and or to cultivate those talents well um just anecdotally most of the teams that we come across including our own team like have a lack of front-end devs and I think that this is

really funny because like there's so many frontend devs out there and like a lot of times uh you know I talk to people that are trying to get into web 3 and they're like oh I'm I'm going to learn solidity even if they're a frontend Dev it's like I want to do the solidity stuff because that's cool like it's seems new and fun but like my gosh you can just take your existing awesome like react Dev skills and then go find a bunch of opportunities here and the learning curve to just you know Implement some of the web three function in applications like it's really not that high like so I think that that that's like probably one of the biggest uh things that I'd point out um but that's you know for a very specific uh

role I would say in general um sort of going back to the prior question the things that you need to have to succeed in in this sort of like environment is I would say understand the philos philos opy of like web 3 like you could of course like you know just learn the tech and come in and get a job but there's so much in this space that is deeply rooted in like philosophical Concepts that have been around for like decades like read read why Satoshi created bitcoin like read stuff from the cyppher punks and and then you'll be able to understand better like the direction of the

projects that you you're working on and contribute to that Vision as well um and then uh just you have to be good at managing your own time because like like we said like in in the async in the decentralized workforce like we're all we're all entrepreneurs we're all figuring our own stuff out so if you're not good at that find ways to become good at that and there's there's plenty of ways to like to force yourself into patterns and it's just about like getting into good habits yeah I would focus mostly I think the most important are the soft skills we've been talking about so good writing um uh passion for Learning and like autonomy being able to do things on your

own and um ask for ask for forgiveness not permission that kind of mindset I like that one I think I say that almost every day um have high levels of curiosity and have a growth mindset I think companies have a responsibility in the space that we're in to be hiring as I said those buckets of like experience mid and and um no experience but if you've got curiosity and drive and a growth mindset you're going to come in and you're going to learn from the people around you and all of the resources and everything so that would be my tip I like that guys and I like the ask for forgiveness not permission I was I was like saying this thing fail fast you know fail hard but fail fast

and just get up so um moving on provision security is a huge part of web 3 um given the security and privacy concerns surrounding web 3 how can an organization handle candidates information um and what measures are in place to protect it especially the sensitive information around it um I don't have much to say here I think I can give some ideas of what could work but I think in our cases I think both me and Kiren we have small organizations so I would say it's still very manual but I think just throwing it out there I think using ZK proofs instead of resumés could be one or just like the um um taking the Aon or pseudonym culture of web three and using

it in hiring to kind of remove some of the biases that we have or two ideas to explore I would say um collect only the information that you need to collect we are bound um unfortunately by regulations in all of the different countries and things like that so some information but just collect the bare minimum and be really really thoughtful and intentional about what we put everything behind OCTA we're we're very um mindful of security but just be thoughtful of the products and things that you're using and where you're storing the data we also delete a lot as well so we'll only keep data for the sort of minimum amount of time that

we have to so we we we try to be super disciplined around that so for for we'll say like the prior you know umine years of working in crypto and having you know most folks that work in crypto be paid in crypto this has created a lot of privacy concern around like where your money is going because imagine like you know you're you're working in a normal salary job like when that money gets sent to your bank account you know you don't have everyone in the organization knowing how much you're earning and for sure they don't know that you're going and buying cheeseburgers and a new TV and a car and like all that stuff but like you can see literally where all of

this is going you can see every trade um that people are doing and um a lot of people don't realize this like it's sort of an afterthought so I think that like one of the bigger things that we can be doing within our organizations as well as like with the hiring Tech that we build is like like Filipe said using ZK technology um so this is not just important for like hiding the wallet because even if you like are able to hide wallets then you can still like with um you know chainalysis and other things like really do some some tracing and figure out like who owns each wallet so also obus skating the transaction itself with stuff like rail gun or ZK

Bob um so with Talent layer specifically like we have infrastructure for hiring so this includes like uh you know identity management those payment transactions and all of that and we've been working a lot recently to try to find the different um you know ZK tools that are out there and then add them as integration so if people do want to have like completely untraceable payments uh we still having things like you know the trust that you have using blockchain technology and reputation um but just in like a fully uh undisclosed of who you are personally way then you can do that I like you and and coming on to the hiring process how has the onboarding

process changed do you feel um with within your organizations um with the Advent of web 3 I can tell you about the the our on boarding at least so I'll make it simple we don't hire full-time employees I mean people can get there but we don't hire them straight away I mean we did in the beginning in in the past and everyone that we hire through a normal process of kind of job posting candidates screening choosing one uh they were the worst hires that we did so now the process is simple you start with bounties you start working on smaller projects you kind of

move on to bigger projects and you basically go up our kind of community pyramid so to speak so it doesn't mean they're more important just means different commitment levels so they start with a very low commitment level and then if that goes well we they will evolve over time and this is beneficial both for us and for um uh the person that interested in working with us because we can both see if there's a culture fit if there's a values alignment if we work well together or not without wasting our time and also making sure that the time they're giving us is paid and these are have been our best hires and we have some of I think

half of our team full-time employees came through this uh process it also makes it easier that um for them going back to the initial trend of fractional work to actually starting to work for for for us without having to quit their current jobs um actually onboarding is something that a couple of years ago we invested pretty heavily in because we wanted to make sure that it was a great experience we um we give a lot of information as part of the onboarding so you're immediately put into the educational portals to be able to get into all of those materials um we make sure that there's no sort of time Zone sensitive nature to your

onboarding so that it doesn't matter where you are you can access those materials and those things once you're starting we're really intentional about putting like new higher circles together like we'll do a lot of introductions to start to create those manyi communities at the individual level so that you can start to navigate um and get to know um the organization through the different uh groups so uh yeah I don't know we're like just very thoughtful we do we do like a lot of company like Town Halls things like that so we're doing as much as we can to get people exposed just outside of their team to The Wider company as fast as possible so um the structure of the team

within Talent L is really similar to Talent protocol so we also just have um a lot of Open Source contributors that work on bounties and then we have core team members that are full-time um and you know exact same sort of flow that that Talent protocol uses um the the thing with that is is like it's amazing but when it comes to like scaling that we haven't really seen um seen how effectively we can do that because we're we're still small right so I wanted to mention one one community that I feel like has really really scaled that well um and that's Koda dot so Koda do is a project in the polka dot ecosystem it is a open- source nft Marketplace that's

currently the biggest Marketplace in the polka dot ecosystem and the structure of their team is fascinating because they have just you know like 200 some open source contributors and they have um basically like you start off uh doing doing some work and you're actually not paid and then after you do a couple of those well um people like anyone in the community that's reached a certain level can then allocate money for your bounties if they think that you're you know a good contributor and then you know the the more that those people progress upwards the more money that they can allocate and it's just sort of this nice autonomous machine that um you know the founders don't have to like you

know manage uh as directly so they they've done a super good job of allowing that to scale and I'm so so excited to like try to get to that point ourselves um yeah amazing and I'm just going to go straight in because we've got four questions left in about 10 minutes so and getting down to the NR so challenges what are some of the main challenges that you guys are facing in your organizations and when you're when it comes to HR recruitment um and how have you overcome them so I mean uh this is a challenge that we haven't quite overcome yet um and it it references some things that Filipe pointed out earlier and that is like getting the like the connectivity right amongst the people in the organization

um and you know we we have we we're trying like a bunch of things things of course um so you know trying to all meet up in person once every few months trying to have um you know ways to get to know each other like questions of the week uh which people like and um you know just hanging out in Discord popping in co-working stuff like that but it's you know it's it's an evolving process and um I think that we probably have a lot to learn from Amanda who's been been doing such a good job at this for so long challenges uh I think the pace at which things change is really challenging I feel like some weeks you know we're

formulating something we want to do and by the time we're ready to execute on it it's like probably like change so um and that can be like really exhausting I think the other one is company fatigue that is one thing that I've noticed about a remote work culture because you're just pushing everything out through sort of slack or email or another Zoom call call and if You' got a lot of programs happening and you know in our industry there's always something happening that it's it's so busy um and so I'm really mindful of that company fatigue people can get exhausted it's like so much information coming at them and you don't have the um the beauty of when you were in an office and you could see that so I think being really mindful

around that the um I think that the yeah the social connection bed is is really interesting we've been trying out an idea around cuz we have no offices um of doing these popup offices in kind of like core locations so we'll you know pop an office up for a week and then anyone that's within a certain vicinity of that you know go in and you know and no pressure of like you know normally a lot of companies will do the get together as like a retreat or a conference and that can be very overwhelming for people and they get exhausted just thinking about it and so there's something that's just a bit more like no no this is just a popup office you don't have to prepare anything you can just like you know come in hang out

do lunches those kind of things so we did do a pilot of that and that was really successful so I think um that's something you know that we're going to do but definitely the the fatigue bit information fatigue is one to watch out for perfect we can move straight into the next one um and this one's about future Trends guys so looking ahead what trends do you anticipate in the web 3 Talent Market in the next couple of years years I'm sure Kristen has a lot to say here given what she's building but I would say one thing that I think will be useful is like having an employer reputation kind of more public and on chain that will also open the

opportunity for like employer branding onchain employer branding almost so being a lot more open about uh how do you feel when working for um a company and being much more visible and transparent and that helping your process of choosing who to work for and I think yeah that will force employers to actually do the right thing because otherwise everyone will see it I think we're going to continue to see the evolution of remote um Workforce and what that means my hope is we're going to see even more diversity on all levels um because of that um I think you are going to see the internal structure

of organizations being much more like Dows and be very very Community kind of structured um that's very fascinating I don't know exactly what that's going to look like right now but I do think that that's where we're going to see things going and it's definitely what we're kind of ideating around now and seeing um what that means so yeah I think I think that we'll keep growing and what will be interesting is we will get more experience on the talent side in the marketplace and so you'll also see a shift in terms of how you're going out to attract talent because obviously you're going to have like more experience there we all have a big

responsibility in making sure that we're building the external um Marketplace as well and educating people um so I think that the biggest shift that blockchain is bringing to hiring is um people will be able to get hired not based Bas on who you are and who you know but rather based on what you have done and what you are doing and this is something that comes from the just the fact that this information is onchain and um things like onchain attestations from previous employers and having that be something that's transparent because the reason that we have um such um such like unintended

like sometimes bias is intended but a lot of the time it's unintended the reason we have so much uned bias in hiring based on things like where you went to University or what you look like or um or like who who you got an introduction from is because these are heris sixs so these are me me as an employer trying to figure out the best I can can I trust you without having really seen your prior work and this is really dangerous because it leads to things like you hire someone and they actually don't do well and also not hire someone because you you know accidentally discriminated based on this or this or that so if we have the ability to reference data that is

verifiable then all of a sudden like that becomes the best turistic we have like this is the thing where we know exactly what someone's outputs going to be based on their prior outputs so that's just going to be really it's going to fuel equitability and that that's what I'm really excited for amazing and now we're looking some for some of your words of wisdom um and advice and if you could give one piece of advice uh to HR professionals and entrepreneurs trying to navigate Talent acquisition in web 3 space what would it be go first okay uh I think my advice is a common one which is always be hiring so when you actually need to hire it's the worst time for you to actually be

hired because you you're under uh stress and pressure and you will much more uh likely to fall into this biases so always be hiring and I think in web 3 this means always having some bounties open so you get an inflow of people coming in applying for small things that they they can keep doing and also I think more importantly to make your onboarding process like we were talking about um permissionless so permissionless is a buzz word that we talk about a lot and but it doesn't have to be a technical thing or about smart contracts it's just about uh making it possible for people to to figure it out for themselves so if you're on boarding if they can do their the on boarding on

their own whenever they want it it's much easier than you having to do when you select the people so they will come to you they've done bounties for you they they're already self on boarded so it's much easier to hire when you have these pool of people to choose from I think this is a book but I love this saying what got you here is not what's going to get you there and that is really what everybody like whether it be an HR Management in companies need to get their head around I think you have to mirror the principles of um of web 3 you have to build trust you have to build communities you have to lead with transparency and these cannot just be

words you say you actually have to back them up um with actions and you have to understand the talent that is in the space what motivates them what how they're going to grow and you have to build your practices around that but I cannot stress enough the way things have been done before it's going to be different and if you're not prepared to change then I think that you're going to have a really hard time so my answer is a sort of a fusion of both of your answers so uh completely retweet everything that Felipe said amazing um I also agree that things need to be done differently from

you know how traditional hiring has happened but I also think that there's a lot of really good examples out there that we have over like the open source projects that have existed over the past decades because like open source technology these you know decentralized working communities isn't something that's new necessarily so there's plenty of like really old school projects like Linux for example that are just amazing case studies of how to like take something from a concept to a massive ecosystem with even things like Enterprise adoption um so learn learn history read the history books amazing and I actually we actually had time to get to my bonus question guys we we have to talk about AI right now um and how can AI technically you

know revolutionize the job search application and onboarding process for your organizations with within web 3 and are you actively establishing AI uh systems within your organizations so I would say biggest biggest like help that AI can have is matching so basically what we're doing as highers is we're trying to cast as wide the net as possible trying to find as many people as possible we can only physically review so many applications so many backgrounds so especially when we have like a lot of onchain records of people's work history put an AI on top of that and then it can digest all that information and spit out really high

quality recommendations for where people should work and who you should hire so I think that's the most powerful part and just adding to that I think it can even um help us um not fall into the our human biases although it can introduce some a AI biases that we don't know about yet but I think will probably be better than our own I think we just standing to scratch the surface on what it will mean in terms of like an HR side of thing or talents I think that'll be interesting to see how that evolves um I'm really excited about I mean I love technology and I think for me the space that we're in right now around it in terms of um sort of like a company perspective and I

mean like all companies is understanding what it means for your company and educating people I think that I think we're in the education phase from a company perspective and just um helping people like understand how they can use it so that we can then explore where you're going to be utilizing it across companies but I do think it will become really prevalent in the in the um the talent acquisition space for sure amazing and I just wanted to do a final comment there in terms of we we we spoke about it earlier in terms of diversity but how focused is the web 3 space on inclusivity uh diversity and equality for for everyone in the space um and how focused are your organizations on achieving that for for the for the wider

goal so that's two questions there how how focused do I think the the web three community space is not as much as I'd like to be honest um I think I I I think sometimes it's a little bit trailing and I think when you're in emerging space there's other kind of focuses and priorities so I don't mean that in a bad way but I don't think it's at the Forefront of the conversation would be my opinion um in terms of companies um and what they doing I mean like I said I think the very nature of how we're working where we're working when we're working is actually going to be amazing in terms of attracting lots and lots of diversity

into the space and I think that it is a responsibility of companies to um make sure they've got the right mechanisms and supports in place to be able to bring that talent in and also to to promote the benefits of of working um in with 3 so anyway I'm not saying that web three is not like diverse but I just don't think it's part of the major conversation at the moment um I I would completely agree on like the the state of web 3 I also think it depends on like uh what sub area of the blockchain sector we're talking about like defi my God most teams are doing a horrible job but then like you know moving into the nft space I think we

have like way more women involved in in this this sector which is really really cool um as far as like uh you know what what we can be doing I think think that there's sort of like active active ways of of helping with diversity and also passive ways so passive would be you know just the fact that you are able to get hired without disclosing all your personal information you're able to get hired in a flexible work environment I mean this in itself does mean that it's easier to get involved um and easier for you to like just not have uh some of the worries about biases and and stuff like that and then on the other side there is active which is like you're literally

going out there to events and like with specific targeted campaigns to get people of certain types involved I think that organizations need to be doing both um for us like we're so small like and and like you said like when you're when you're small when an or or organization and ecosystem is like really young there do seem to be other priorities so right now I will unfortunately say we're more so just doing the passive stuff as opposed to a lot of the active stuff but we hope to be able to do that soon uh I just want to reinforce I think two things we said here that can help with diversity I think the first is um that idea of funding the the community instead of hiring employees because this will mostly be based on past contributions and Merit and not on the

other biases that we have and the other one that you mentioned is also the fact that a lot of uh companies in the house pay people um in crypto on chain it means that what they're paying is transparent which will mean uh more equal pay to everyone no matter where you are what's your gender or anything else and just like to say that we were always going to go over time so apologies for to everybody but can we please get a round of applause for Kristen amand and Philip I I also I just want to I just want to say a massive thank you to to Manu the eth Barcelona team from the engineers at the back the sound guys the lighting the the the day-to-day work they're doing

shagan as an example coordinating everybody here is bringing has created this event and obviously a big thank you to all you guys John the MC of the most I mean this guy's got a comedy club right I mean go down and check his comedy out uh just everybody here just so much love for you all um so round of applause to all of [Applause] you