Wild User Interviews Podcast (Wuipod)

WUI Podcast Ep. 003
AVB: [00:00:00] Hello friends. Welcome to the third episode of the wild user interviews, a podcast about people, products and crypto produced by the Silicon craftsmen. This is product and User Experience Guild at NEAR. My name is AVB and today I am with Shreyas. Shreyas is a community legend within the NEAR ecosystem.

And I was doing some research before this podcast and I found out he actually brings many years of experience within the community space, open-source, world, crypto communities. So I'm really interested to dig into a bunch of those areas. Welcome, Shreyas.

Shreyas: Thanks I'm so excited to be here

AVB: I'm very excited that you were able to make it.
I know that many people go through the process of starting a new podcast, but it is often quite intimidating to invite people on as a guest. Because you know, the podcasts one day don't exist and the next day it does and since[00:01:00] you’ve been in this space, so very honored to have you.

Shreyas: Yeah. I'm definitely excited to be here with you And yeah just to chat with you.

AVB: Yes. That's exactly what we're doing. So the focus of the podcast is loosely aligned with products so I guess that really goes down to that core. At its essence, everything could be looked at as a product, also product lenses.

So we're looking at, what are the mental models, the processes, the frameworks that we can use to analyze a problem and turn it into a solution or sorry, reframing a problem to make it into an opportunity and a challenge to tackle. But also even when we identify something that is working, how can we make it into a repeatable process?

So things that would be really interesting to learn about. You are starting with the beginning of who you are and how do we get more people like you started in the crypto space? It is very novel. That is very foreign. And then we can probably move on to maybe what we're doing with the guild.

And that area is [00:02:00] also growing very fast. I'd love to know your role specifically, and maybe we can deconstruct a few things, looking at both of our experiences because we're technically on the opposite ends. I am technically your customer segment. If you look at it that way. So I'll let you get rolling.
Who is Shreyas? How do you get started into the tech world and where does the journey take you?

0: Yeah, absolutely. I've been building communities since the early days of my career, which isn't that long. I don't want to admit how old I am, but that's that's as

AVB: as a rule, I have it on the podcast.
Don't swear. Don't insult people and do not ask people's age and obviously respect how much they want to share privacy broadly, but also age. I don't know why I would probably run the same age, but there's boundaries if maturity, what I'm like. Yeah. Do not disclose that. [00:03:00]

Shreyas: Yeah. So I've been using internet forums quite a lot.

That used to be that used to be my life back in the day. It was fascinating. How people interact with these forums and how there's a sense. Privilege as you rise through the ranks because of the gamification and all of the things that existed back in the days. So that was super fascinating to me.

And I was also doing my engineering so it's a very common stereotype if it comes to India, right? Half the people are engineers and the other half are doctors. And so I will be the engineering half.

AVB: It's a good stereotype. And you can't go wrong between engineering and doctors, but it's say that it's a great time to be an engineer to be text-based

Shreyas: yeah, hundred percent.
And I guess that the subset of that is also like a erm erm within the engineering community, which is that a lot of people in India take up engineering and then. Then figured out what they actually want to do in life. So it's a good, four-year period during [00:04:00] where you're exposed to new people, new ideas and things that you weren't exposed to before.

So I think that's what got me into the whole idea and culture of open source. I see people I was interested in like doing things outside of the regular, university lessons. And that really got me thinking, okay, how do we do, how do we do new things? What, what does a new thing exactly look like?

And that's when I came across this whole open source world starting with the Mozilla project which makes the Firefox browser. Got involved with them about, I don't know, 12 years ago being doing different things within the community. And that's when I got involved in the concept of community building.

They had a student ambassador program. So I started as a student ambassador program, started going to different universities, talking about open source and getting into technology as a non-developer, which was super interesting. I feel because I, at that point in time, I was doing my computer science engineering.

I'm obviously between this [00:05:00] amazing people that can code that can create really interesting projects and build amazing stuff. At the same time, I felt like there has been this historical neglect in a way for non-developers, especially in open source projects which I'm thinking is changing right now with the importance of like documentation UX and just like the importance in the shift of talking to your users before trying to solve a perceived problem.

So that's for product. Yeah, exactly. So that's really been my journey. And then throughout I've been working at the intersection of open source community building and trying to improve technology and just bridge the gap between the two sites.

AVB: That is a really good overview and I've written some notes. Because there are few things I'd like to unpack there, before we jump into that, just to get there. I guess the full picture. Where are you located now? I'm cheating. Cause I heard the podcast beforehand, but I do often wonder how [00:06:00] people's contexts both in terms of, role models and the opportunities around you, how they shape, where you're going, and then try to place that in a global context, now that we can get people from anywhere into all these opportunities, how do we increase that exposure to them and create those pathways for them?

Shreyas: Yeah, a hundred percent. So I'm based in Bangalore in India right now which is in the Southern part of India. And for some context it's known as the Silicon valley of India. This is where startups come after they get funding to to hire tech talent and really build and scale their business.

Yeah, from a local context, I would say we have, we've been very much influenced by the Silicon Valley expects. Who were turning back to India, trying to scale their business, build their next billion dollar business idea. And so yeah that's primarily the reason I moved to Bangalore just because there's so much happening here, but yeah, in the last, I think 4, 3, 4 years I've been working remotely for companies, global companies.So yeah that's been my journey.[00:07:00]

AVB: I would imagine that, the Indian expert community, returning back home or setting up a local presence and leveraging some of the local talent, that's probably where blig fates and maybe in the vowel, there's definitely some very high profile in getting ex-pats that are leading many industries really.
Because they're more like thought leaders and their analysis really do span across industries. But I think it's an excellent example of how technology and the globalized world allows for that, brain circulation. I was a concept that I came across first in the book startup nation. It's a case study about Israel.

And it's really interesting because I could really relate with the brain drain end of the equation. I grew up in Venezuela. If people can especially wealthier or, more academically inclined, they pursue opportunities overseas. And that's obviously a big loss to the country. [00:08:00] The development of the country, putting political and social crises aside.

It's always going to be held back. If asked people arise through the education and professional ranks, they keep going overseas. So Israel. They've tried to create this brain circulation program where they encourage people to go overseas to gain experience, and then come back, even if it's just for a few years to relay that experience to the local community, and just keep it flowing as long as things are growing, it works.

So I'm really excited that at least within the tech space that seems to be happening. And if it wasn't happening before, it's certainly happening after COVID. So there's always something positive that comes out of tough times.

Shreyas: Yeah. hundred percent. And I see that sort of being, as you rightly mentioned, that has being accelerated because of COVID which is, which I feel is both COVID in general, is a bad thing.

There's no positive side to it, but but I feel like there is also this acceleration in terms of the whole remote work culture [00:09:00] now that everyone's just thrown into the deep end. And we have seen like extreme cases of that with surveillance tools and, people and companies tracking mouse clicks and cameras and all of that.

So it's an interesting time to observe this shift, the remote world especially with the Indian companies that are not accustomed to that sort of work setting.

AVB: And I'll let you bring the surveillance, ransomware, because when you, when I think about the shift to the remote world and all of this triggers, that comment of COVID.

I'd say that about half of it is a physical element. You can't be at the office and then you have to implement a technological solution. You download an application and you set up, whatever ways to communicate. But the other half really has to do with people's perceptions, both the necessity to be more flexible proving that it can be done identifying the challenges of doing it and even, yeah, just creating new paradigms.
A lot of [00:10:00] that is people becoming more flexible and moving into state or overseas because, the way that the governments reacted due to the pandemic, or, it opens up a new professional market for them where they are much better place, like the, so many things that were forced upon people.
And I'd like to think that, there's definitely a few positive ones and I would focus on those. There's probably some negatives as well. But I do think that. When we focus on that ideological base. And I think that, it's been what, almost two years, somewhere along the line, most people started to question, what was happening?

Are the people in charge? Do they know what they're doing? There was a lot of questioning of institutions and institutions broadly. So I think that. That kind of sentiment of questioning what exists now really helps the crypto movement because in many ways, crypto is building, these powerful systems that empower people to get things done differently, or at least to [00:11:00] experiment with ideas, without first needing a revolution and taking down the government.
So you can go and set up a DAO without having to change, the corporations law in your country, or you name it. There's so many areas of experimentation. Now that crypto enables you to create, as they call it now the metaverse, which a thing it's a new frontier, Mars and the metaverse, those are the next frontiers.
The physical lab has taken and we've ruined half of it. Mars.

Shreyas: Yeah. Definitely seeing this. I guess this is also something that sort of comes up with, the conversations that I have with people that are non crypto native, when they start, as you mentioned, which is when you, I think that, that level of questioning leads to some things we are yet to discover what those things are, but I guess we are still in the right direction when you feel empowered the question about the practices and the norms that the norms that we were following so far.

[00:12:00] Yeah. Yeah.

AVB: I think one of the best ads of all time is the 1984 ad by apple. I'll narrate it for people that haven't seen it, but I would strongly encourage everyone to look it up. It's on YouTube. It's this ad, which kind of captures the 1984 vibe of people working in a very systematized, structured, rigorous society.
Everything is gray. I think they walk into a cafeteria or an auditorium of sorts, and everyone's like very monotone and there's one girl. She, I don't know, sometimes she sprints into the auditorium and for whatever reason, look, I forget half of it as I increase. There is a big screen in the auditorium with a machine like big brother, like looking at people and controlling everything.

And she walks in and she throws something heavy at the screen and [00:13:00] smashes it. And then that's where the famous quote comes from. I believe, for the myths for the miss foods, the round pegs in square holes, there was basically a manifest. Of apple, colon, barring people to think different and really empowering the creative problem solvers and giving people tools to go and act on it.

Now, this is 1984, fascinating to me that if you fast forward, what, 30, 35 years, we know that ethos, which Steve jobs had led to massive success in apple itself and all the chain of innovation that you don't leash, the iPhone alone has been insane, but it's also, a little bit ironic tool, with what apple is now to look back and think that they embody that, hustler on the street challenging the status quo.

So it is interesting. The entrepreneur has always had that nonconformist [00:14:00] attitude, which is not well-received. Ah, I'll tell you what a few of the differences, what is the difference between a hustler as an entrepreneur and a crazy conspiracy theorist or your annoying friend that is complaining all the time?
The difference between those three groups is that the entrepreneur takes action. They would have higher risk tolerance. They like to have experiments and they're happy to keep pushing forward, to prove to people that what they believe in can be brought into the world. And it can change things. They are the two groups that are just going to complain and conspire forever.
So I think this brings us back to product in a really interesting way, because those two ideas seem to be at odds. When you are nonconformist, you're going to challenge everything. The entire world tells you that your idea is terrible, but you're going to do it anyway. [00:15:00] When you are that type and when you are prototyping, you are going to talk to users, you get feedback.

You, when an investor tells you no, because you take that into board. There's definitely a balance between third. I personally think it really depends on the stage of the product. And there's a time for both, you may be very bold and blunt with an idea, but when you do get feedback or when you run into a wall, stop and reassess, but even then you have a lot more experience, especially with open source, which brings in as special, different kind of variables, open source.
You're relying on people to show up and contribute. They have to be motivated to keep the project going. So I'm wondering. What your thoughts are on that and how you would unpack that. That was a lot.

Sheryas: Yeah. The key factor with the whole open source world is obviously this drive which that people [00:16:00] have, right.

The reason that they show up is not extrinsic motivations, like tokens or, swags and all of these different things, but it's really,

AVB: we super coders.

Sheryas: Yes. Yes. That's that's something that I feel like everyone should aspire to be

AVB: hundred percent. I don't even code.
And I saw what's his name and Neil something. He released a merge by shadow code or who do you now? And I'm going to buy it because I wear this jumper every day. It's starting I think it has the holes in it. Now I need some new marriage.

Sheryas: Yeah. It's definitely interesting how people perceive.

They especially like people in governments, right? Like people in a position of power when they can't pinpoint individuals, that's behind like revolutionary technology, there's always this inherent skepticism. And that's that's something that I feel like the trust listeners of the [00:17:00] whole decentralized world is really pushing forward to.

Which is where these two areas collide because especially in terms of like regulations and governance and also being able to control the narrative when people are in power, can't seem to do that. There's obviously the sense of like agitation that, that comes along within these two sections.

AVB: It's all related and I do apologize that I interrupted you, but I think that we're still loosely within the same topic. I think that. What makes open source or show up. And once again, this is me as a bystander, trying to analyze the phenomenon, making sure that they keep showing up because I rely on their technology.
And the blockchain space is largely open source. It's not the same set of incentives in the traditional world where you may have a contract and I rent moderation and you may even get status, but there is something in the experience that is very empowering as a craft, being able to write code and [00:18:00] bring your creation to the world.

I think it's extremely powerful. Any craft will give you that satisfaction and if people don't have a hobby, I would strongly encourage people to dabble into anything really, know, especially if it's like with your hands and you can see you're stuck nothing, and then there's a learning curve.

And then at the end of the day, you have something to show and, maybe pottery or whatever, and you show it to your friends and you really does look horrible objectively, but it doesn't matter because you didn't
have that crafts component. The second component is even more interesting because it ease a form of power, like developers know that they have the ability to execute code, which can have a huge impact on society. And they know that not many people understand. If we were to have a Powell, this would be like being in the 18 hundreds and you have electricity in your house.

So I think that there is a tension there with government, especially when government, they've got a few [00:19:00] things against them. Namely, no one understands technology. So technology is consistently three steps ahead but also, especially, depending on which hundred uranium is social indicators in Australia, because we have a big government, which has adopted a bit of a nanny state role where they try to control everything.

Whenever things go wrong, there is no one to blame, but the government. And if technology is the one providing alternatives and enabling you to do things better, government would have seen in power regardless because it's the same two parties and the both probably bad, but ones are getting pretty sliced from the app outside the system.
And people are starting to see alternatives. I think that's where they get a little bit nervous. And just to clarify, I don't think that the government is really attacking technology in a sinister way. There is a really good book called the three body problem. Have you heard about it?
Do you enjoy reading?

Sheryas: Not really. I can't focus a lot on books. So like I listen to like podcasts on like duets [00:20:00] and videos on three X kind speeds. You're one of my

AVB: people ADHD. Beautiful. Yeah. The good news for you is that the movie's coming out or a thing has already been released.

But the very brief overview of the storyline, which I love it's science fiction. It's set up in cultural revolution, China. And at some point, these, a girl at a remote, labor camp servicing, one of the and tennis. She receives a message from the universe and before anyone can see it, she's like.

Fuck these, she sends a message back out saying, please come to earth. I'll help you take over. So the book is fascinating because these things are obviously very advanced; they're on their way to the earth . And there is a race on earth to catch up. So [00:21:00] humans are divided in two camps, the ones that are like super pro science and they want this alien to come and take over the people and the ones that are against aliens.

And they're actually sabotaging the scientist and destroying progress because I think those are the two camps. Maybe I inversed them, but you can see where those kinds of extreme positions of, wanting aliens to destroy earth because you're living in very bad conditions or holding back scientific progress because of whatever reason.

Then the Finland seem to fit more within Saifai. I have no doubt that there are some people that maybe have similar views, but I don't think the government as an instrument is out there to stop science. Having said that, individual entrepreneurs are always going to be better at executing because they're more nimble, they're more agile.

They may be able to get better resources. So I think that, [00:22:00] yeah, there's a tension there.

Sheryas: Yeah. I also think that it's also upon the regulators and governments and all of them. Policy makers too, to have an open dialogue which has been a huge challenge, for example, in India, right? Where the initial reaction to everything that they don't understand, which unfortunately encompasses a lot of things is to just like immediately ban it.
And then they're like, okay now that we've banded, let's then figure out what we do. And that can take like ages which is then obviously contributing to this whole brain drain factor companies going to Singapore or other nations, which have like friendly regulations to set up their businesses.

AVB: And you would have this challenge at scale. My experience with Venezuela as a country is. It can be seen in many ways, like a ledger, or even if you look at it [00:23:00] in engineering terms, you've got technical debt. So the challenge a little developing countries have, is that you've got a bunch of technical debt and the government is usually focused.

If they're trying to do anything, they're trying to clear that debt. And then people that are building the future are obviously creating value elsewhere. So you can see the mismatch is where a backwards looking government, trying to undo all these, you know, historical messes, probably not the most equipped to then go tell people that are actually building new stuff, how to do it or what they can and cannot do.
So there's a bit of tension there. I love it that we can always keep coming back to it with a product or community. In Australia, it's interesting because the government is very receptive to ideas. There are commissioners and hearings and there are several members of parliament who were very pro technology, but they often tell you.[00:24:00]

The tech industry is very small and we're trying to grow it and they have constituents and there is a big challenge in their perception of the technology, the opportunity, the threat and the reelection. So it keeps coming back to, their doors are open, but we as a community and that's you and I, that's our, I guess that's our daily jobs.

Mine isn't really a job, our daily whatever you want to call it. That's where we come in and I think there's a lot of work and this may be a misconstruction of the word community. And that's something that I wanted to ask you. When you look at the role of community managers, I guess we are looking at the existing community for an ecosystem.

It could be product more specifically or. Within the parameters of an ecosystem that is different from talking about the community at large, main intersection of politicians with technology and my neighbors were 60. So [00:25:00] I guess I'd like to ask you, where do you think that the roads meet? We can probably, I do want to go deeper as we get closer to the NEAR part of the conversation on how to grow and manage within those ecosystems.

But I guess first I'd like to get your thoughts on how we can grow the pie, what are the mechanisms to acquire new people to the community? And yeah, I'll let you take over from here

Sheryas: Yeah. I guess my definition of community would be a group of people with a shared sense of purpose or vision. And within that, there is obviously room for, again, if you're building a good thriving community where people feel comfortable there can be, and there should be differences of opinion there can be debates all of these more constructive format. And I feel like that shared sense of purpose and vision is like the north star that people then look back to and reference to and say that, Hey, if there is a conflict or if [00:26:00] there is a debate this is what we'd all agreed on together.
Is this reflecting, our values? Is this, are we going in the right direction by looking at those, that, that preamble of your community, right? So that has been my sort of perception of building communities or in this case, an ecosystem of different communities.

AVB: It is an excellent definition, a shared set of vision and purpose.

Sheryas: Yeah. a shared set of ambition values and purpose.

AVB: Yeah. I love it because I can definitely see it in the very strong community around new year that has been created, vision and purpose. I feel the strength and the power of a community are when the individuals visions and purpose align very strongly with that of the project or the course. So I think that early stage group projects are magical because there are strong financial incentives. [00:27:00] People that get involved early are potentially able to see multipliers. Unlike those, that similar to the ones that VCs would get when they invest in a leading technology early on, but also because of the nature of open source and community, there is a big role for them to play, to make that a reality.

And it's one of the questions that I love more about this like simple go-to product frameworks of what would have to be true for this to be successful? When you create a hypothesis, when you have a vision, you start to deconstruct what are all the steps and that's when you realize there is no sense of competition or backstabbing, you are not going for the same role.
That can only be one podcaster, but it doesn't exist because we realized that there is so much that have to happen. And we're defining so much of that along the way. Was actually the opposite. We created very strong communities to support each other, to make sure that we can grow within our roles [00:28:00] and move towards the roles where we want to be.

Because we all started on the telegram channel. It was slowly grow from there, but also I think that, and this is where I think you and I are in similar roles now just recruiting people for the community. I know that you're looking for a guild coordinator. If anyone is interested, how are the interviews going?

Sheryas: Interviews are going pretty well. We’ve lined up, I think the challenge is primarily the role or the person that I'm looking for is from the Europe or Asia time zone, just because it's very easy to on-ramp them. Unlike, for someone, for instance, someone from the US where there's obviously the challenge of time zones and then working closely together can be a little challenging. At least initially

AVB: someone is going to miss out on sleep.

Sheryas: Yeah. We as an organization we've been trying to get better at less meetings and more sync to work. The whole remote world values of like [00:29:00] over communicating and having things in a written format, so we don't take decisions during calls.

We're trying to embody all of these things, but I think, given the nature of this role, that we want them to be onboarded as fast as possible. It's just easier to hire someone from like a similar time zone just so that we can get things going as, as early as we can

AVB: I think that is pretty standard I've yeah.
As a hobby, I often browse for job listings and real estate do things that I'm actually not looking for right now, or a job. And I'm not actively looking for property funds right now, but I do want something interesting and as the world has gone remote, I say, I love it in an ironic way because I'm in Australia.

But every job now, especially in tech, is remote, but it's remote within American time zones and European time zones. If you're in [00:30:00] Australia, it's still a little challenging on this, maybe probably an outlier because we really aren't too many time zones. We probably have a better overlap with some of Asia, but yeah, definitely.

That needs to be what I would call common sense. When you want to work with people, you need to have fun parameters. What is acceptable? You don't want someone to be online 24 hours. You don't want somebody to be keeping their family or their housemates or their neighbors awake. You don't want people to stop going crazy.
Sleep is very important and you're not getting much of it, or if you're getting it like me in a schedule, oh, I'm making a good case for the NEAR team to pay my relocation to Leesburg.

Sheryas: Yeah. Yeah, we've been super clear even with community members as well as the members, that. Especially in a community facing [00:31:00] role burnout is real. And unless we acknowledge that this is a creative role, right? It's not something that you repeat because humans are different.

So there isn't like a cookie cutter solution to all of the problems that people have and, adding onto the layer of the global remote world and the nature of our community, which is distributed all around the world. It's like the narrative of crypto never sleeps. So getting that together,

AVB: I guess if you haven't thought of this, I can tell you, you also want to minimize the surface for crazy hours because the true fees, if this person is going to be dealing with guilds, the guilds themselves are all over the world.

So you'd want to make sure that their interactions with the core team are within the same time zones. And then, there will be the outliers, but yeah, it's about managing the time. I'm extremely lucky because what I'm doing now, which is leading the Silicon Craftsmen Guild product and UX, and I've got a couple of side projects and I'm learning a lot [00:32:00] along the way to be able to execute on larger projects.

It's extremely flexible because I'm basically, my own boss. So I like it that depending on how your calendar looks, you can take a nap in the middle of the day or you go till 3:00 AM, or, I work on weekends. I don't care. I don't have anyone to complain to and no one is expecting me to do it.

So I think that it's interesting to navigate that, not everyone is the same, for instance, every time I talked to Claudio in Mexico, He's got a full-time job and he's got a family, you, a wife and kids, and I'm like, I don't know how you do it. Like the way that he manages time and his flexibility and his availability and he changes for everyone.

So I think that's a big part of being accommodating to the best talent. It could come in any shape or form anywhere in the world. So now I had a couple of notes here that I wanted to ask you from the very [00:33:00] beginning of the podcast, but we've gone down so many different tangents. So I'll just really briefly mention before we jump into more of the NEAR specific world, because I'm really interested to see what's happening now and where we're going and how we can grow together.

I want to say we, the thousands of people listening to this pod, so a couple of things jumped out at me from your initial introduction. And this can be like, like rapid fire questions. The first one is what was the subject matter of the forums that you were, spending a lot of time in back in the day.

Sheryas: Oh I was

AVB: sharing if it's some fanfiction

Sheryas: or so. Oh no. Absolutely. It's into technology. I was a super fan. So that was the time when Android and Symbian, which is the, operating system that Nokia had released. They were both, budging at end to end. And I was a super big Symbian fan boy.
I'm like, yeah, Android is just a fad. It'll never [00:34:00] succeed. Spoiler alert. I was wrong, but yeah, that was the community that I was leading.

AVB: It shows maturity and insight and integrity to admit when we're wrong. I actually had amazed it during one of the ecosystem Hangouts we had today on Twitter.

And I'm happy to put this on the record. Because I think I've grown as a person as well this year, and I'm on a journey to become the best version of myself. I was there when we were having the conversation and the governance forums for NEAR around the base currency for Aurora. And I didn't agree initially that it should be released , at the time I was still in a more tribal mindset, which is not a good place to be.
That's one of the examples of something of the near community that you become exposed to, and it starts to change the worldview and you really grow with it, you adopted, and I guess that's the reason why [00:35:00] we have this podcast, because the things that, if I'm saying it now off the cuff, it's clearly living somewhere.

And, the special guests that we have you have a lot of knowledge as well. And the insights that may seem obvious or may not seem special, but I do believe that there is tremendous value in saying it out loud and extending it to as many people as possible because we're all in different places in the journey.
So anyway these Eve near debate, I was very tribal. I was like, not, these better, we were near, we've got a paying near, we're proud about this, and now I'm happy to admit that I was wrong. Like now I can see very clearly the logic you create a much better user experience and you're able to extend the functionality of Ethereum.

There's just so much alignment that comes from that simple decision. And I guess the caveat there is, and this is something that I'd love to explore with you because you've got the technical background and you're working with community. Now, the [00:36:00] caveat there is. I didn't understand at the time what the technical implications were, or I guess what the technical capabilities were.

So now that I understand how the Ethereum, at some point it goes to the validators and it still pays gas and fees. And that fee that near, that gets paid ultimately in Elwanda still a Pittsburgh after I understood all that my mind was expanded in a Cambrian explosion kind of way. And I was really happy with the decision.
So kudos to the team, especially for taking the heat, it was an interesting conversation that took place in the forum.

Sheryas: Yeah, the Symbian version obviously happy to be proven wrong right now with the, with how big the Android ecosystem is and how Nokia has died down and burned to the ground.

But but it's an interesting experience, right? Are you still, I still cherish those days where, there was this like notional sense of power, as you grew through the ranks you had people that look up to you in those communities. When you're, in your IRL work, you're [00:37:00] still like a school kid or college kid, right?

Nobody gives a shit about you. So I think that's, that to me was an interesting time.

AVB: The reason why I came back to it is because once again, I don't want to date myself. When I was a kid, I don't say like a proper kid, like early high school. There wasn't really that much to do on my end. I remember when we went broadband and he was like, this is a big deal because, in the early days we had wetland blight and the fight to use the phone and connect means net on the one computer for the whole house.

I don’t know. I guess I'm older than I love that. So I'm going to say, I used to spend a lot of time on the side. Cars forum. This is like a 12 year old lecturing people who actually own vehicles and actually drive them. And I was [00:38:00] seven. So my family will tell you that they knew since I was a kid, I was going to become a lawyer and stuff.

I Joke. And then, because I'm not practicing as a lawyer, but I was Savage. I would turn people down and do my research and these and that. And I know what you mean because where I wanted to go with his story is that forums are very simple, very pure, very, old gee way of capturing human behavior in a quantifiable web online.

So at the simplest level, what you've pointed at ease recognizing people, you build an identity, you build reputation, it's quantifiable, and they know that there's a lot of tools now I think James is looking into some of them to quantify people's engagement across different channels. I think one of them is called orbit and there is a couple more. Is that something that comes across your role?

Sheryas: Yeah. So we've been again, like community is a really [00:39:00] interesting thing when you, especially when you're working on it, unlike. Product building or development where you complete the code, or when you put the pieces together as a product manager, you do have something to show, which is, this is done at this stage, right?

This is complete. Whereas with the community it's always like you, you take three steps forward and then you realize something is not working. You go like 10 steps backwards. So it's always this whole idea of what does a meaningful community metrics look like. And how do we get there?

So if someone is not from a community background that just looks at communities, they would probably say. You know what, numbers in community, the size of the community, as well as engagement look interesting. And then we say, but, okay, you can have 5,000 members in a telegram group with zero activity doesn't mean anything, it could just be bots and you could have 5,000 members with, so much activity, which could be just them bitching about how wrong you are and how bad the product is. So engagement. [00:40:00] Yeah. Hundred percent it happens. So it's about finding a meaningful metrics and, staying away from this whole rabbit hole of like vanity metrics, that's very easy to track and that we can go into.

So the qualitative vs the quantitative is always an interesting challenge.

AVB: I know exactly what you mean because I don't know if you read my recent post on the governance forum for the June, July of progress. So I looked at some of the formats that other projects had used. And initially I disagreed with it because they started with how many Twitter followers and how many subscribers hearing so many subscribers.

And I was like, okay, I can play devil's advocate on the one hand, if your Guild has no engagement anywhere that guild is probably not active. Maybe there's something you need to reconsider, or maybe it is time to kill it. But at the same time, I think that the number of followers tells a very [00:41:00] small story.

And this is something that people need to understand as part of people, because it takes intellectual honesty. To recognize that your metrics are bullshit. The truth is that in most startups and I've been a founder, I've been an employee of being a bystander on the street. You get to define your own metrics.

There is no playbook there is no, whatever credit rating system, you get to define your definition of success and you get to define quarter and quarter what matters to you and it takes a lot of intellectual honesty to dig through all the mud and all the technical debt and all the challenges that you have both as a team, as a product as a person to define what matters.
So for instance, when I think about community about NEAR, and I can do both community for near and the guild that we're trying to create now, I think. For me no matter the [00:42:00] metric for the community at NEAR I think that we've been successful or at least, we might have a survivorship bias. I can only see the successful cases.
I don't know how many cases we've missed, but to me, what matters right now is can we have a community where anyone can join? And as we mentioned earlier, they're able to grow into a more meaningful role. No, you and I know that there are more opportunities that we can get people for. Every project at NEAR is hiring.
Even the NEAR foundation NEAR Inc, is splitting off into new companies. There's an opportunity for everyone, any role that you can think of, community developers, product, everything. So that to me is probably what matters the most, we're able to attract people, engage them, they feel welcomed and they grow with the ecosystem.
With the Guild is something very similar. It's probably more a behind the scenes interaction now, are we able to engage with projects in a way where the product has a meaningful improvement [00:43:00] for users? Can we grow the pie? How many active users are there in the ecosystem?
How is their experience as a whole, that it takes different forms for us. And we keep tweaking with those metrics. Some of the content like this podcast is a one too many. So we just want to get part of thinking out there and have conversations that you and I are having a thing. We're getting some amazing insights.
How can we get as many people as possible to get the same insights? Some other things are more one-to-one, having design sprint workshops or having UX reviews. There's a bunch of user testing that we're doing now to capture specific feedback in time. So it's very malleable unlike that within your community role, you're aware that vanity metrics can be a problem because they are easy to nail.
Let's be honest.
Often, people choose vanity metrics, they may be hiding some other challenges that just need to be addressed. No start-up is ever [00:44:00] smooth sailing, even the most successful companies throughout have insane stories that eventually make bestselling books. And even today, some people will tell you that $350,000 a year salary is not enough to stay there.
So it's an ongoing issue.

Sheryas: Just Bay Area challenges.
AVB: Yeah. Now I've got a genuine question because some of the questions already know the answer, but I just love hearing it from you and add more perspective because I did my research for this podcast, but this one, I don't know. And I'd love to get a better understanding.
You've got an engineering and computer science background. I'm guessing that means that you've got some coding proficiency, even if you know the languages. What is the difference between a Devrel and community? I guess what are the similarities and the differences, and I guess why are both important?
Why do you prefer community more broadly?

Shreyas: Yeah, I guess the lines between Devrel and [00:45:00] community roles. Again, this is very, it depends on the kind of organizations that you're joining and the role they are shipping.

AVB: And just to clarify devrel, we mean developer relations.

Shreyas: Yep. Within NEAR. Yeah. So devrel in the whole devrel realm, there's, developer, advocacy, developer relations, developer, evangelist, all of these changes depending on the organization that you're in. I stuck with communities at the intersection of developers just because I realized early on that I didn't enjoy coding as much.

But at the same time, since I come from the background, I'm able to relate with someone, especially with developers in terms of the challenges that they face which, which I believe might not be the case with someone from, let's say a marketing background or a PR background. That's something that I've found too, at least in my sort of profession, professional journey to be working at the new foundation though, we have a diverse team that focuses specifically on more [00:46:00] on the top until now.

They've been primarily doing a lot of business side of things. So mostly getting companies onboard and partners onboard. And now, of late, we are now focusing on actual developer engagement, which is through the educational programs through one-on-one interactions and really getting individual developers up to speed.

Quick shout out. We also have a devrel opening on the community team. So if someone that's watching is interested in exploring, feel free to go ahead and apply and you'll get to work with the community team support, hackathons support, individual dev sprints, and all of those fun things.

AVB: That's awesome. That is a fantastic segue too, I want to pretend it was a question. No, we're basically going with the flow. I know there was a bit of an alpha league that we've got a few more hackathons lined up on global hackathons for the rest of the year. So I don't know if this would be a good time.

Do from out them, but also, I [00:47:00] guess go a little bit into the theory and the value of a hackathon, what makes for a good hackathon and especially, with me and other people that may be listening to this podcast, which are active community members, how can we prepare before hackathon to make sure that people get the most value and how do we follow up after hackathon?

And, I'm guessing that this is probably some principles and insights and lessons that you've gathered from doing so many of these hackathons over time.

Shreyas: Yeah. Yeah. One of the first things that I've done after joining NEAR was put together the rainbow hack. And I think one of the key factors that, that hopefully was also beneficial for the team to pick on from there for the, create base hackathon on the upcoming hackathons was creating these playbooks.
And just to add some context, I've been running offline hackathons and online hackathons. I've worked at a going list in the past. We did hackathons with dapp labs graph, ideal any big sort of name that you call out in this space. We've done, we've probably done [00:48:00] a hackathon or developer engagement activity with them.
And so we're doing the same thing right now, in the spirit of open source. What we're really trying to do with activating the community is give them playbooks, toolkits and more. Here is how you run a hackathon in a box thing. You're a five-year old. You have no idea. Theoretically you're much older we wouldn't want to impart

AVB: yeah. Value proposition. I have heard, long time.

Shreyas: Yeah. We are literally trying to document every single thing. So right now, if you go to the forum, there's a post by Rebecca about the hack nodes. So if you are listening to this podcast it's safe in your city to gather around in-person and put together an offline event. Do check the post out because we are supporting them.
We'd love to get people gathered offline where it's safe to do but at the same time, this is also a global hackathon. So it's not just, you know, if you're super competitive you are not just competing with people in your city, but also with different hack nodes around the world, as well as people who are sitting in their [00:49:00] own homes and hacking along as well.
Yeah.

AVB: First of all, I want to thank you and the entire team working on hackathons, you can definitely see the impact of it. a few years ago in 2018, I went to an Ethereum hackathon up in Sydney and it's interesting because even back then, I wasn't a coder, but it was mostly tainted hackathons.

I guess I knew I was going to be a product person and a professional, a talk shooter because my role for the hackathon was going from table to table at a group to group and basically just get them to explain what they were doing. And we’ve seen my beginner mindset and my humility. I was just asking them questions and they were like actually we never thought about that.
Like, why are you asking that question? And I would just explain to them how I would approach it as a user, which is what I would care about because to me, the judgment criteria I wasn't judging, and I have no idea what criteria the judges used, but to me, the judging criteria was easy. Something that people are going to use, [00:50:00] please do something that people are going to care about after the hackathon is over because it solves a real problem.

So I really loved the experience and I'm still very close to several of the people that I've met in the hackathon, including some that have seemed to relocate overseas. Some of them are still in Sydney. It's really nice how you can get to know people really well. Self-selection bias when you get people in the same experience that have an interest in common and you can learn together.

I think that's extremely powerful, but coincidentally today we had an ecosystem hangout on Twitter and we had someone join. I think I can say his name. Jameson. He is one of the developers for flux. I was really interested to learn about people's journey into the ecosystem. And especially as a developer, the tooling, the languages and what not.
And he mentioned that he found out about NEAR through geek coin and he got started with Rambo hackathon last year.

Shreyas: Oh, wow.

AVB: [00:51:00] So yeah, kudos to you and the entire team. I'm really excited to hear that we're creating those playbooks to make sure that we can replicate these experiences. More hackathons, not as a sheer number of events we can have in a calendar, so we can all claim.

We'll hit the KPIs and we all get paid more. What is it out? How many projects do we have in hackathon or Wix odds about, how many people stay within the community and move on to roles with the hack nodes? I hadn't heard of them. There's so much happening in the ecosystem, but I am a hundred percent going to go check them out because a couple of weeks ago, I also raced that.

I said that my phases for the next 18 months, assuming we don't get another black Swan event, ISA. We're going to enter a hyper social stage. We've been isolated for a long time and things have felt stagnant or deteriorating. So I think that as the world opens back up, we're going to enter a [00:52:00] hyper social stage where there's going to be immense value in seeing people in person and just spending time together and sharing and feeling part of a community again
Honestly, I am incredibly grateful to the crypto community cause I think it would have gone crazy without it during so many months locked down and stuff. It was great to be able to join everyone online and be part of a group. But I also think that it would be a big mistake not to focus on local communities.

So I think that these hack nodes, I want to go check them out. I'll contribute as much as possible, and then I'm going to blast them out because I think that there was so much potential and it'd be interesting to see what has already been covered in the playbook. But I think that. There can be a very powerful combination between approaching say universities or university clubs.

And if there is some sort of a partnership or sponsorship from the near foundation, which I'm confident that the community DAO for instance [00:53:00] could cover, it can be relatively easy to host these events, get students engaged and yeah, once again, hopefully expand the talent pool.

Shreyas: Yeah, a hundred percent.
We were targeting in all of the different directions. But ultimately we are, again, all of these are like very super high level, like best practices right here. Here's what you do. Here's what you don't do. Or here's what you should probably do differently, but ultimately relying on the local community and their background and their experience in terms of three, making it very culturally relevant and local at the same time, because they can't be like a high level direction that you give.

And then everyone follows that because that's not going to work. So ultimately these are just like pointers that, Hey, here's what we think might be useful from a participant perspective, from a host perspective, from a space perspective, here's what you need, internet and wifi and food and drinks and all of these things.
So that it's easy for someone who is just like very new to this, but [00:54:00] interested to just check things off a list and say that, yes, this I've done this. I've done. I can do this.

AVB: So my experience, and once again, while you use your interviews, we have a sample size of one, but we can deconstruct, as much as possible from the person.

And then just assume that there are more like them out there. Emma, those people that are different as well. My experience is I'm extremely good at networking, connecting with people and getting things started. I am less good at putting things in writing and like structuring things. So what may be a very simple document, which if you chain me to a chair I would do and layout annotating ready for an event.

If you can make it really simple. And I most likely when I read it, that'd be like, this all makes sense. There's nothing here that I didn't know, which is the fact that it's ready to go. It saves me a lot of time and it gives me a lot of confidence to reach out to universities because I've overcommitted myself in the past.[00:55:00]
And I don't want to get myself into new situations where I'm unfilled, like I'll be able to execute,

especially, because now you holding the brands, university and near as university in you're in the middle ready to be destroyed. So I think that there's things that we take for granted that maybe because you've done them a lot of times or because they're not near a super challenging , technically anyone could do them.
There still remains value in, just making it simpler for people, for anyone.

Shreyas: Yeah. And that's a hundred percent the idea.

AVB: Amazing. So with the three global hackathons coming up, is there any information that you're ready to share publicly? Anything that we should be looking out for getting excited about preparing.

Shreyas: Yeah. So we've just announced the dates for the first one. I guess it's the end of August and the beginning of September. So that's 10 days between August and September. So that's super exciting. There is a theme as well [00:56:00] I don't know if it's been announced yet, but that's another thing that you should definitely look forward to in terms of what the hackathon is about?

AVB: Let's play good cop bad cop. I'll say what I heard, because I think it hasn't been announced. I've read somewhere. It's going to be green NFTs.

Shreyas: There's also the, yeah. I That's, I guess one, one element of it, but I guess yeah,

AVB: we can edit this one out. If we get in trouble, most likely this won't be released until then.
Anyway, so we'll, we're safe.

Shreyas: Yeah. Okay. So I'm guessing it's very Metta focused in the real sense of meta and whatever that comes to your mind when you hear that. And if you get excited by that you should definitely check out the hackathon.

AVB: Can you see my pain meds is where it's at nowadays?

Shreyas: Yeah. Lots of things coming up in the pipeline. We also with the local nodes and hack nodes initiative we're really excited to see again, as you write your name. People are craving [00:57:00] that connection and you look at travel websites nowadays, like airplanes and travel restrictions have been lifted off and people are booking tickets left right.

And center. I think that's going to be the case with in-person community events as well, which is people are getting together to create these meaningful connections, which hopefully emerge from these events that we do. So I'm definitely looking forward to creating all of these different hackathons around the world, and then the possibility of connecting them so that, within the 10 days there is a, there's a flowing hackathon from Australia to India, to Vietnam, to US and all of these different places.

AVB: I think that it rising quite nicely with the decentralization theme that we were talking and about before, because I think that over the last few months probably leave like the golden era of having one global community because the community is still small and we're all online, but I think that going forward, but as the community [00:58:00] continues to grow, we will start to get those local groups of developers and local support groups.

Yeah. From my experience in those local communities and hackathons and events, that's where a lot of the networking happens and they create teams and they start projects. The successful projects here in Melbourne, and that are still going. They met during the 2017, 2018 days. There was a locked-in coworking space here in the city and they basically had an open door policy.

We had events we do have the week, Wednesdays was, I think it was Bitcoin Wednesdays or whatever it's called talking trade. People would just show up and learn and drink a lot. So I think that there's a lot of value in that I would support that strongly, unfortunately borders have closed indefinitely since March last year and there is no talk about opening them. But when they do we'll join that trend of booking flights, [00:59:00] literally anywhere

Sheryas: just get rid of the next one, definitely going to go to the hack nodes and the city nodes. So I was talking to the folks in Ukraine Valentin from transform NFT Kits yesterday.
We were talking about how they built this micro ecosystem of like people that except NEAR at local businesses. So there's a donor kebab shop that you can go pay NEAR. There's a cosmetic store. They're talking to taxis in the city to accept and so much amazing stuff that, that I was just learning about yesterday.

I'm like, where have you all been? Like, not. Knowing about all of these so that we can support you. So that's definitely something that I'm definitely looking forward to, which is the real world adoption of these things.

AVB: Yeah, I think Leesman has been a very strategically chosen cause there's a cluster of near projects and people that are already, but also the weather is pretty good throughout the year and it is a very inexpensive city.[01:00:00]

However, I was thinking and I'm, I need to post this on the Silicon craftsman community hub, but I'll run it past you. Now that we're on the line, I was thinking of creating examples of reframing a problem in one opportunity or a challenge. So when you present people a challenge, it's much more likely that you can deal with it in ways that yield a positive outcome.
So the problem or the setup was having the opportunity to go from Berlin to St. Petersburg all through the east of Europe back in 2018. And then one was in the Baltic states. I think it would have been Latvia and Estonia. I was walking tours through the city center, beautiful, like an unbelievable historical set of centuries, something else.

But they were saying that they have a big problem because all of the tourism is in the summer months, which is three months. The rest of the year is very cold, then I'm [01:01:00] getting any tourism. So I'm thinking, okay how could we reframe that? Local problem. And, maybe try to tap into some of the trends and create some opportunities, especially because we have a lot of community members now in Russia and Ukraine, those parts of the world.

So I think we could have an execution arm. Some networks or two to get things going. So I was thinking. people are becoming a little bit of a meme actually for stepping out of your comfort zone and biohacking, and always finding ways to improve as opposed to, you're always on a journey to become the better version of yourself.

So I thought I grew up in the tropics. I've lived in Australia, we're in winter now, but it's not the coldest time I would spend a winter in Russia or in Ukraine, just step out of my comfort zone and to leave something different. And I was like, in the right context, I would probably a hundred percent do it.

Like I've been able to leave the hardcore winter. So I [01:02:00] don't even know what clothes to wear. I don't know anything about layering. I don't know. But if we're able to identify, what is putting people off or what are the challenges? And then you create that extra layer of making it really cool and exciting.

Like how do you imagine just renting like a hacker house and people descend then there for winter. And you're able to leave a really unique winter experience while at the same time getting some work done and meaningful connections. I think there's going to be a great idea. I'm going to present it and hand it over to the Ukrainian team and see what they think.
But

Shreyas: Yeah, we've been looking at the creator's cabin, I believe it was the initiative that one of these folks were running. And that was super interesting. Like we were literally here to support creators and creatives. And so we were just talking about how we should have been doing something similar to that or maybe we like supporting what they're already doing.
So yeah, definitely I’m onboard with the idea of getting people together, getting interesting [01:03:00] people together to do interesting things.

AVB: The digital nomad space is growing quite a lot. So if we're talking about the same project creator, cabins are in Austin or somewhere in California, sorry, in Texas and the tiny houses and that I guess it's like seasonal or like periods of time and it's pricey, but they also have scholarships or an equivalent, but there's a few of those, there's one called Casa, which to me means housing Spanish, same there.
So like setting up these houses around shared interests, one of them is crypto and I think tech more broadly, the other one is called, I think it's launch house. They had some great promo material and they rented Paris Hilton's house in LA.

Shreyas: Oh yeah. Yeah. That's the one, Ross, have you met Ross from the team?

Yeah, I think [01:04:00] Ross was from, I think Eric met Ross at that place.

I dunno. I, Eric, I think he was visiting, he was doing this US door. And I think that was part of the tour and that's where he met Ross and that's how Ross came on board.

AVB: Wow. That is an amazing story. See, that just keeps validating that I have to get in a plane and go. I do dream of buying some land near Byron bay, north new south Wales, a fair bit north of new south Wales.
And yeah, just setting up a bunch of tiny houses and running a bit of a hackers retreat would be amazing. But at the same time, Australia is a little bit far. So I think you could go with the way people would really value, spending some time down here and having that cluster of innovation.

But at the same time, I think that. It'd probably be easier to do it in Costa Rica. [01:05:00] Your one-off flight to 20 capital cities in the US Miami or Dallas or LA.

So what work is in progress, my friend?

Shreyas: Yeah. Exciting times. Exciting stuff happening across the ecosystem and yeah. Happy to support however we can.

AVB: Indeed!! Indeed!! This is probably a good place to end. We've been going for an hour and 12 minutes. Although I may edit a couple of things out, including that the alpha league flip fun. If you think we should take that out. Thanks so much for your time. I am looking forward to continuing the conversation online and offline and probably not recording. Any way that we can help let us know. We should have probably said this at the beginning, but the Guild structure at NEAR aids, a fascinating experiment now on a scale in a decentralized way. So rather than [01:06:00] micromanaging people at the community level, the foundation, because it's just becoming hard to interact with so many people.

And especially when it comes to funding, the Guild model comes in as a way for anyone in the community to propose a structure around an interest or whatever it may be. And for them to manage that as a smaller, independent unit, but as a very strong and close relationship, which in the foundation and the guild around providing financial support, if that's what's needed access to people, it is very case by case basis.
So I'm running a Guild, a very new Guild. We're still getting everything set up, but things are going great so far. And Tracy's on the community side, over in a year. So we'll definitely be working closer together. And if there's anything that from the foundation you guys need from the guild, as an extended support network, by all means, let us know.

I think that [01:07:00] yeah, there's a lot of potential there, reaching the target audience or the users from different angles.

Shreyas: Yeah. sounds great. Yeah, I have absolutely enjoyed it. I have enjoyed being in this conversation and then chatting with you.

AVB: Likewise. Oh, that's the calendar going off the next meeting to enjoy the day

AVB: cheers!! to see you.