Let Your Spork (Creativity and Intelligences) Flow with Dr. Josh Lange

for the first time besides me okay wow about half of everybody right all right who's here at the first time at a like crypto conference oh wow several of you are you enjoying it yeah it's really really well organized right best organized conference you've ever been to right so I'm Josh they call me Dr Josh or the nft professor I'm the host of crypto Mondays Global so I go around the world and I attend different crypto Mondays and support them with sponsors and speakers and things like that has anybody attended a crypto Mondays all right all right so about the same amount of people that are here for the first time crypto Mondays is the world's largest and oldest meetups for crypto you can find them in 50 different cities around the world we have a one in E we just had one here for East Denver uh with the CEO of near so there's all kinds of different projects and we also highlight new projects as featured guests and so who's building something today who's building something yeah okay so several Builders if your project gets us to a certain space you might want to be on crypto Mondays and talk about that right but today I'm not going to talk about uh a bunch of the same old same old that you've been hearing over and over again about permissionlessness and trustlessness and decentralization and all these things I'm going to talk about something that's actually near and dear to my heart which is creativity and intelligences right and they told me so I wear sunglasses a lot on stage because I had an eye surgery that when that when that went bad and they told me hey Josh you know what if you're in Denver Colorado you got to get the proper skiing sunglasses so I got the proper uh skiing sunglasses and then they said that that Denver is a mile high is anybody from Denver here okay so is it really a mile high right and so does anybody know that uh book Alice in Wonderland in a book Alice in Wonderland the judge she goes into the and the judge says effective immediately anyone who is a mile high must leave the court and Alice says I'm not a mile high and then the judge says oh but yes Alice you're two miles high okay and so I don't know people told me to come out to Denver and get high they said it's pretty easy but when you think about Alice in Wonderland and what uh with a nonsense of saying well was she one mile high or two miles high right this is what's happening when you're building a lot of your products you're you're taking creativity and you're taking it too far you're taking it okay we're going to imbue creativity into everything and we need to have the most creative solution and our solution is going to solve all these problems in the world it's going to solve hunger it's going to solve debt it's going to stop starvation you know our solution is going to be the great solution and it's just this little bug and then you do the solution and then you add more solutions to it and then when does it stop when does this creativity stop and then how does it work all right so I'm going to just discuss mostly for people who are either investing in crypto or blockchain or web 3 or building different products let me ask you guys this how do you define creativity there's a lot of creative people in here right that's all you meet at these conferences I'm a creative I'm part of creative I'm building a platform a Marketplace for creatives I just heard somebody just now told me that a Marketplace for creatives well what is creativity anybody have a guess what does creativity include how do you define creativity well we definitely know it includes some type of imagination right you imagine something new or something different there's a possibility of something different and it also includes what else would it might include so imagination and idea how do I know something's creative what it's new it's exactly there's an element of originality and creativity now who considers themselves a creative person in the audience here there's a couple okay good so some people and you should you should because we're all creative in a small C creative way what they call small C creativity that's your everyday creativity that's where you're creating a solution to a problem at work or in your personal life and you do something creative you do something different that also small C represents most of the projects in this Hall in this city in this country and in the web 3 space globally most of your projects most of your ideas are small C creativity I want you to keep that in mind nobody here is actually created ethereum or Bitcoin that's a big sea creativity Nikolai Tesla alternating current these kind of ideas I don't know if the iPhone would be considered Big C creativity but it was pretty cool that I think the iPhone would be considered what's called Pro C or a middle C creativity that could be where your project is but certainly unless it's on the level of a Bitcoin or an ethereum it's not going to be Big C now when we reflect on that when we reflect on the originality of our thinking the imagination that we have there's a lot of it on our teams there's a lot of it in our brains you might be a designer you might be a CEO a Founder you might be a developer and you want to use your creativity especially if you're a creative type and then what else happens is that everybody on your team also wants to use their creativity so whose do you choose so I'm going to give you guys five different ways to get your creativity right on your team so that you can flow and create those projects I built one of the first nft platforms in ethereum back in 2016 and I've been involved in the space a long time and I'm on stage all over the world in a different city in a different country every single week and I'm interviewing people some of the best projects I just had Finance on a couple weeks ago we had near we have everybody on crypto Mondays so I hear a lot of stories and I see a lot of creativity in there the first question that you ask is who is creative on our team and in what way so who's the creative person and in what way everybody's creative if you're CR some people are creative in social media management you know they get creative ideas in that some people are creative in their developmental stage some people are creative in sales so who has what skills and abilities that are creative in the ways that we need them to fulfill the goals and reach the aims of our project because what I've seen over and over again is a super creative CEO right and he's got all the ideas and other people on the team might also have ideas too but those ideas are squashed or they're not really listened to because every day the CEO founder has a new idea and because all of his ideas are great as we know we have to implement the founders ideas at the expense of maybe other people that have creative ideas in another way so one of the things is saying well who's being creative and then the other question is what what is it that we are actually creating what is it what is our purpose for creating this all right do we need that additional thing to make it better or to add to it when I say what I always refer to when I'm talking to Founders in what we call MVP was anybody able to get an MVP minimum viable product out this weekend after the hackathon okay so nobody in our audience but if you say we have an MVP we can put this to Market then your creativity can stop for the moment and focus on the things that are valuable not on building building building as they say but an actual operations activation implementation of that minimum viable product because what happens if you don't try and apply that and Implement that then more ideas come in more ideas more ideas you try to implement different things and it goes nowhere so we got who we got what the next one is when when do we implement this idea this creative idea right this original thinking and of course when don't we how many people in here have a new idea every day for their business or for their protocol or for their system like new ideas all right I know yeah a couple people I know definitely new ideas every day how do you choose which ideas to implement and which ideas not to as a Founder I assume your founders is there a like a process that you use I'm gonna come into the audience audience question time you have a process yeah we just look which ones are going to move the needle which one's going to move us towards kind of like the end goal okay so and and then you reject the other ones or table them maybe not reject them but table them okay so he's got a process it says if the idea is going to move the needle forward meaning if that idea converges with the overall goal of the organization then we implement it okay and then they have obviously the procedures to do that and if it's not they either table it or get rid of it is that similar to what you do right but what's then the criteria for a good idea have did you think about that oh wait just a second can you make money so the criteria for good ideas can it make money does it help me does it aim towards that goal right well it depends on uh obviously depends on uh what you're creating um and then when to use there might be another goal of implementing people's creativity like for example if somebody's kind of discouraged and they're a creative type they like to create stuff and if they're not if you if you just have them doing administrative work because oh well we have to do whatever it takes to get the job done and they're not using their creativity then they're going to become discouraged and then they might not even want to work with your startup at you know five dollars an hour or whatever whatever it is at your P whatever it is that you're paying them right but if you it's just like with teachers we all I see all day around especially this country is a bunch of demotivated teachers and they have to teach through the Core Curriculum or whatever it is they don't get to teach with using their own creativity but they're creative types their creative personalities so what do you do in a situation in your amazing startup and I know your startups liquid acre it's amazing startup uh what do you do when you have these creative types but you can't Implement their ideas because it doesn't move the ball forward what do you do with that um maybe maybe see if they can uh be creative on how to incorporate their idea into the mission okay so that's one method you can take you see and this is you could try to incorporate their idea or you could tell them very nicely you could say oh you know Stephen I really love the idea that we have poodles in addition to um the other nft benefits that people get but you know uh maybe maybe later so you can if you're the leader you can defer it to a later time or you can say no I don't think that this is going to work with the overall aim with our organization and then they say well why not and we say well because it's a stupid idea no well you can say how about this one we've people have tried that before and it didn't work how many times do you say that to your team when you're there trying to create uh when you're trying to create something oh you know what this or that person did that and it didn't work or it didn't work like that you don't ask that question because you're not doing the research about what other people do you don't have enough research on your competitors your competitors can Spur new creative ideas and this is also a message not only to Founders I've been focusing on Founders but finding the creativity in a team is also a great investment approach so understanding where and when a team uses because I work with a lot of VCS and investors as well and they're oftentimes looking at the founders how about the founding team has this person a track record of success does this person uh you know does this who is this person who is this team but oftentimes they fail to look at hey is that team saturated with creativity and ideas or do they also balance that with getting things done do they balance that with application of their product or of their idea do they work together where to where they can actually go to the boss and they can present an idea and their boss says hey you know that's a cool idea but it's not going to work this time do they have that kind of emotional intelligence and connection within the team to do that and then the question is how do we spur creativity when we need to have a solution right so we have who what when where is the fourth one where where do we Implement our creativity in what ways what part of the business needs a creative solution I came up to this situation with my own non-profit which is designed to alleviate student debt for distressed people and we have a token and the question is how could we make this to where we could pay off student debt by we could negotiate by and erase student debt of our token holders without making it an Ico and the way that we do that so we had to come up with a creative solution to avoid the Ico does anybody know how to avoid an Ico in here the five people yeah no you don't right so that 95 99 of the projects are going to get caught into regulatory traps or just basically be bought or basically Fall Apart but if you find a creative way to move around a system for example in a regulatory system what we're going to do is people invest and then instead of giving them the money back directly as a return on investment we cash that out and then we negotiate that as cash and then we erase the debt collectively of our token holders so that way we avoid that Ico but you can have a small C solution at any time but just don't be afraid and that's the last thing I'll say don't be afraid to talk to your team to talk to your friend about an idea there are very rarely are there bad ideas there's just ideas that are not good at the moment so main thing is don't be afraid of your ideas if you're a creative person jump into that but don't fall into the Trap of thinking that you are the only creative person in the world or that all of your ideas are Big C ideas because they're most of them are going to be little see ideas and so use your creativity when you uh when you can and when it's necessary so who what when where and why why are we going to create something why are we going to add something or take something away I saw this sign in Princeton I was there the other day and I just wanted to share it with everybody because I thought this was the message um moving forward and thank you very much for your time become your most creative self and come check us out on crypto Mondays crypto mondays.io or you can start a chapter in your city um just get in touch with me all right take it easy thank you very much