Fireside Chat with Kartik Talwar & Austin Griffith

[Music] I want to kick things off by inviting our very first speaker, Austin, on stage to talk about all things developers. Please give Austin a big round of applause.

Welcome, Austin.

Thank you for having me. Um, Who here already knows who Austin is?

You're famous. This is great.

Um, so the thing I want to start off with is asking you from kind of your perspective, what do you think early stage builders should be thinking about as they spend more time in Ethereum and the impact they want to have in in our ecosystem?

Yeah, I think uh it doesn't go the way you think it is sort of. I think that like if you want to have impact, uh the first thing I mean in the end of it, you want to be building something that people use. I think that's like the the thing that you're skating toward, but there's a pit of despair in the middle where there's just a ton of stuff you have to learn. And I think the the key there is you just have to build a whole bunch of things. So kind of at the beginning in in build guild and now at the EF basically what we're focused on is education of course speedrun Ethereum but then just like getting people to ship stuff and you guys do that here too.

A hackathon is the best place to force someone to go ship some stuff and I think that's what like we're trying to do more and more with people all all the time.

So what does that actually look like? So if somebody gets to the website what are they presented as a choice? What are they actually doing on average? and and kind of what's that journey for a developer through buildg guild?

So I think there's there's a lot to learn, right? So with speedrun Ethereum, you go through you don't just learn like how to write solidity, you almost learn like what things actually work on a blockchain and why why you need Ethereum and and what kinds of things work on Ethereum. And you you kind of learn about like incentives. We always I I don't know if I've talked about this before, but like the web three cron job, right? the the the first like aha moment you have is that if you want this thing to run like Ethereum is going to be always on.

So when you develop an app and you deploy it here, it's going to be here forever and it's going to work exactly like you programmed it to do. And so when you need something to like check into that the a cron job that runs regularly, you're not just like setting up a cron job on a machine, that machine's going to fall over. You you have to basically create the code and then the incentives around it. And that that like aha moment of oh it's like this incentive system and I need to not only like write the hardware correctly but build incentives into it. You start learning all the things that you need to learn to build things and then you just have to ship over and over and over.

So that's more of a very guided approach, right? Um you kind of walk them through how things are set up and how you can sort of achieve the next level and it feels more like a course. Um, correct me if I'm wrong in any of these kind of statements. Uh, the kind of the thing I'm curious about is how much do you think from the feedback you received, these things are helpful for people to like understand the fundamentals versus discover possibilities? Is it mostly just they're trying to memorize these are the commands, these are the languages I like functions I need to know.

Is this how programming works in Solidity and I just like memorize that and get to the next part and now I think I know enough. or is it that we want them to be set up so they have to try something without too many instructions and they fail and then discover, oh, this is how you do something instead. Uh, what's kind of the balance between this for speedrun Ethereum?

We we definitely need to do more of like skating to where the puck is going to be, not where it is now. And I think that with something like the prediction market or the stable coin, some of the more advanced challenges on speedrun Ethereum, we definitely give you the answers a little bit more than we probably should. But in the early challenges, just like the staking app, there is a moment for sure where you get to the solidity and you're about to write the first deposit function and there's not a hint. It's like you've got to track their balance when they deposit money and you need to make sure that no one loses their money. No one gets their money locked up.

Go. And you kind of have to write that solidity. And there's definitely a moment and we program that moment in. We spend a lot of time teaching on a lot of like Zoom calls and other like more like one-on-one ways. So when we go to this like virtual curriculum, we want to have that same experience.

And there definitely is a moment where you have to think for yourself. And I think that like give them those moments where they have to think for themselves. They have to build. hold their hand a little bit more for some of the more complex things. But definitely what you're saying here is like we we don't know what the next best best app is going to be.

Like some amazing banger app is going to come out of a hackathon and it's going to be a whole new field of apps that we didn't see coming. We can't predict that. So we can't educate people. So the best we can do is just give them all the tools and all the education that we can. And yes, I think we need to do a better job of like opening that up and saying, you know, stop building these exact three things and go do something amazing.

Like we're counting on you in the crowd to come up with the next big thing.

Um, and that's actually exactly correct. Like you you can't force innovation or curiosity. And that's kind of one of the things that must be not only just inherent, but like actually uh derived from trying a bunch of different things. And and I feel like anything that's self-guided, whether it's uh following tutorials or kind of accomplishing challenges to building something at a hackathon, they all have to kind of build in that sort of mechanic to help people dis discover what could be possible. Um the thing I guess I'm curious about is that's kind of from the the speedrun Ethereum side, but what does the Ethereum Foundation look at when they're trying to get more developers to build on top of Ethereum or EVM?

And how do these priorities or does the goals kind of match overlay or just kind of think about like what what's important to the EF?

So I think yeah kind of early days it was just like me on my own deploying smart contracts to support developers. Then like the build guild came along and I brought some of those developers closer and kind of tried to create more Austinins and and teach some more and and yeah now it's like kind of the EF and the EF is making bigger changes. the ecode deev department of the EF is growing and we're focusing more on uh not just like educating developers and getting them to build more things but founder support and enterprise connections and a lot of things that the EF was not doing very much of before.

That's awesome.

Yeah, the the ship of the EF is changing. You've talked to Tomas a few times. you you know that like there's there's some neat things happening at the EF. And personally, my stuff is changing more toward let's make sure we show up. Let's make sure we we find out what developers need.

A a lot of it in the early days was developers show up because of the price. They come for the ethos or they come for the money and stay for the ethos. When you when you hear that you're able to program money, it's like very exciting. That was what brought me in. still is like 10 years later, programmable money still blows my mind.

Yes. So you you you came in and we we knew that like devs would grow when the pi price pumped, but it was more our job to catch them when they landed or we kind of had this idea of an orbit. And we're doing handtohand combat. We're going to universities. We're we're teaching as much as we can, but the flow of developers probably happens when the price spikes up.

And so our job is like let's be there for them and catch them when when they land. And now it's more like let's be there, let's catch them, let's give them an education, but let's create a pipeline for them to go all the way through that kind of pit of despair of learning all those things. Then let's be on the other side for founder support and and let's get them into an accelerator. Let's let's push kind of even like past like that first project and get the fifth and sixth project out there. Get them mentorship.

Get them funding. I don't know, even like Angel and all that stuff. Yeah.

And that's basically the full cycle of entry point to to a massive successful thing that everybody else can know them for.

Still learning though, like

absolutely. I don't think this can ever be kind of done as a as a as a goal as well. Um it's interesting because this is a fairly common thing that is not a unique problem to just crypto. It's every company has that. If you're a developer product, you kind of have to do this whole thing anyway.

You have to kind of solve someone's problem. You have to integrate things, help them understand what they can do with the what your product is.

It's permissionless here though. So cool. Like a lot of it is just like open source and out there. There's no gating. There's no like I've got to bring you in.

I don't have to get on a call with somebody to get access to the platform.

Yes. There's none of that. Yeah.

There's definely nice benefits, but there's also challenges, right? So the it means that you effectively have to think about how do you measure if things are working? Um I feel like I'm going to ask you a question but I kind of already know the uh the question applies to me equally as ETH global which is well how do you know that people who are doing speeder Ethereum are actually accomplishing something? Do they just stop after the course? Are they building something on their own after?

And uh and also do you want them to do something? Um how do you think about those things? And and I guess I'm curious on how do you think about broader ecosystem on that same topic.

We we could definitely see like speedrun Ethereum has like a whole CRM and we can follow people. It it's all open source though. So the best developers really don't even turn anything in. They just take it, they fork it, they speedrun the speedrun, and then they go on to building things. And I think it's that it's probably like we're looking at onchain activity.

We're looking at who's shipping what. Uh and it's it's actually really hard to track. Like I I have to almost like gut feeling track a lot of this stuff by

which is also funny because everything is also onchain. Like you think you can write a query about these things. It just doesn't work out that way.

You you never so you don't know what people use to learn like some person deploys an amazing protocol and you then go talk to them at a hackathon and then you find out they did speedrun Ethereum and Scaffold ETH. But we didn't know that until all the way back around. And then that, you know, justifies something we did two years ago, but it's hard to, you know, figure out the leading indicators rather than the lagging. And I think that's it's super hard in this space. Even though it's all on chain and everything's a public record and you can see these public apps, you really don't know their journey.

It'd be great if like, you know, there was like a there's never going to be that, but like a speedrun Ethereum token and people were buying in. we were like earning parts of each developer's like journey and then when that developer was successful it somehow fed back to the system definitely never going to do that

possible but uh

yes yes

yeah not investment advice um I mean one thing that we get criticism for a lot is well should there be companies coming out of hackathons u and I feel like that's also in a way the the adjacent uh sibling kind of problem which is well what are hackath hackathon's good for um should they be about education? Should they be about bootstrapping an ecosystem altogether or should they be like feeding in companies coming out of it because you have to justify how and why you're spending time uh kind of curating to a developer audience and uh and I guess like I'm kind of curious from your perspective kind of how you've seen uh the the hackathon world come come about. Obviously I can only answer from the global perspective but I don't have enough information or context by being involved in other hackathons on how these things work. So what do you kind of feel like challenges are for hackathons and should should hackathon projects become companies?

I so companies are kind of like the we need lots of companies. We need to be getting people hired into companies. Not everybody is going to found their own project and getting hired into companies and getting sponsorships is like critical. Uh so we need more of them. We need more of them mentoring.

We need more of them supporting. But I think if we just like zoom in on the hackathon, it's it's really the moment where you've been in the dark, you've been in a silo, you've been quietly building. Uh myself, I was pretty arrogant. I I went to my first hackathon like, I'm going to show off this cool app that I've built. I'm going to make a million dollars today.

And it just doesn't work that way. But you you need to come to a hackathon and get around everyone else and realize like, oh wow, this is this is hardship. And it's going to be I'm gonna have to learn a lot and there's a lot to learn. And so that that kind of pit of despair that we're talking about here is you have to ship a ton of things. You don't just have to like learn this deep knowledge of how all of stuff works and how re-entrancy and all these different hacks work and making sure your contracts don't have that and how smart contract wallets work and how batch transactions work.

All sorts of stuff you have to learn just to build an app. That's like phase one. And then you have to build a ton of apps. And I think those that's where the hackathon is really like this kind of forcing factor where then you just have to ship something over and over and over again and it brings you out and it gets you around other people and gets you around the competition and you understand the competition is fierce. We have some awesome app builders here today.

So I think the from the company angle though that's where they need to land. We we need to bring them into the hackathon. We need to kind of get them ready. Then you need to build a whole bunch of things and then eventually either found your own project or go work at a a company in the space. And usually it's almost like you think you can found a a project, but really you need to spend more time and you probably need to get hired at a company first and kind of see how they do it.

Meet your CEO and see how that CEO hustles and understand that like you have to be a very serious person to found something and then go be that serious person and grow up and and found that project. So I think companies are sponsors, they're mentors, but they're also like a jumping off point to starting your own company.

I I think that's exactly right. The the framing of this whole thing is that it's not that we should or shouldn't see companies coming out of hackathons or any kind of courses they take or any self kind of self-guided way to get into this space. It's that the actual timeline where somebody is learning something and building something for fun to making an impact in their own careers or in the space is not gameable. You you have to spend the time things may come out five years from now, five months from now, five weeks from now. You just never know.

Um and if you were to kind of measure, oh, did did a company come out of this occupant? Um you just can't answer that as a standard statement. And you have to kind of put that in in a time frame. Um maybe somebody who starts a company 5 years from now turns out this I met my co-founder there and we were having was having a good time building a project or we're sitting next to each other or we did something then we moved our separate ways and we worked at these companies. to ship these products and I own the the delivery of this product and I am the manager here for this whole experience and now I finally feel like I it's time for me to do something on my own and and tracing all that back to these moments is where you actually see impact but it's harder to see that on a good time scale.

Um, and I feel like that's kind of one of those things which is um you kind of have to figure out how do you sort of get people to stay curious and and and effectively challenges are one of these things like hey something new came up whether it's a new feature or we found a new uh bug um that can be sort of applicable to a bunch of things in the past. How do we get people to understand this context? Or you kind of say, look, there's like 10 new services that are out there, 10 different protocols. They do all these things uniquely, try out what you can can do with this. And uh maybe there's a possibility that you can simplify a portion of what you want to build by integrating someone else's work instead of starting from scratch.

Um and I think that to me is like what these types of options are for. Um and how they kind of help you learn basically quickly. simplify is like that's a great just piece of advice for every hacker. I I think that like we have a little bit too much of let's bring in this sponsor and this sponsor and this sponsor and make this thing and find one really good simple idea. Don't try to build this I mean maybe try to build this giant onchain game but what what about just like a really good inventory system for a set of onchain games and making a very composable usable piece.

I think simplification is is a good example, but then also like leaning into the, you know, the the hackathon bingo kind of thing. Like quit quit just going after sponsor prizes, quit going from hackathon to hackathon. It's really important that we help builders go even beyond the hackathon and use the hackathon as the the the excuse to go build something awesome. But then that thing that you're building needs to have legs and needs to go.

Longity matters, right? You have to kind of see things through and not just stop at like, oh, this kind of basic thing works. Let's let me try something next now and just kind of put that on on pause. You have to actually do the full cycle of get feedback, see if I can improve something, make something better, whether it's my code looking nicer to performance improvements or just people saying, "Hey, this is hard. How do I make that three less steps than before?"

And the upside is way bigger, too. If if you think of I'm gonna go get a $1,000 bounty prize or I'm gonna pay for my plane ticket, you should be thinking of I'm gonna buy a private jet. Like like you you're not talking about the $1,000 or the $2,000 to pay, you know, your trip here. And you should be. That's awesome.

I understand that. Like we got to you got to pay for that. But don't just like play bingo and try to get that hacker prize. Be thinking bigger. be thinking of hundreds of thousands of dollars and be thinking of the private jets.

Like I know that's a little bit too far and out there like I'm not flying in a private jet like

Ethereum Foundation wants to do in a private jet. Perfect is the video title. Um

but but have these higher expectations and shoot higher, aim higher than just hackathon bounties. Get make a project, found a project because there's serious upside there. I I think the thing that I'm realizing that we don't get to talk about a lot is that uh people feel like oh hackathons and any of these like self-guided experiences should like turn out companies and that's kind of like the the common narrative that that's out there. But I feel like I haven't really seen a focus around these things actually helping developers get ready to contribute to open source. uh that has a way higher impact especially in our ecosystem and I feel like that's probably better ROI for long-term value uh generation and and capture than just hey let me see if I can make this a company and maybe things will be good or or work out for me or seasonal uh but getting ready to actually make an impact on developers like hey let me simplify anywhere from a framework to a utility I use to even contributing to the programming language which we've seen the full cycles of is way more impact and doesn't get talked about as much.

We build guild batches after you finish the speedrun, you go into a telegram channel, you've got Philillip, you've got uh some other build guild members there, but basically we set up a repo and we start working on your GitHub etiquette like can you make a PR? Do you know how to do all of these other things? Like we make sure that you're prepared for committing to open source because that really is your gateway. If you find an awesome company, you want to go work for a go look at their their issues in GitHub and start contributing. You're going to get their attention and and that's the way that's like the kind of the gateway into a lot of these companies is get into their GitHub and start contributing and you'll you'll get their attention right away and you'll you'll be moved to the top of the list when they're looking to hire people.

That's the the real proof of work.

Yep.

Amazing. Well, maybe maybe as my last question, um, we kind of talked about a lot of these things, but as somebody also started by just building contracts for fun and kind of getting to where you are now and now actually helping educate thousands of people, I'm kind of curious to, uh, hear any advice you have for the developers in the room on how they can basically take advantage of what's out there for them and how do you think they should structure spending their time in the space to make a long-term impact? Yeah, I think kind of a lot a lot of the stuff we've already said like the the resources are out there. Uh you can go learn how to make a stable coin, a prediction market, a ZK voting app, like it's all on on out there like Build Guild, Patrick Collins, Rare Skills, like these guys have some really good content out there. Learning how is not the hard part.

Uh it's it's learning what like figuring out what to build. And you may have this idea or you may think you know, but you really have to just build a bunch of things to really figure out what and and be open to discovery and be open to finding new things. So yeah, don't don't get too married to one idea. Have an idea, try to build it, but see how it works. Be ready to pivot.

Uh and just you have to do that over and over again. It's a lot of work. You have to build lots of things and get in front of a lot of people, but uh don't don't stay in your shell. Get out of your shell, come to hackathons, build your first thing, build your second thing, build your third thing, build your fourth thing, and then get the first, you know, 10 people to use it, and then build your fifth thing, and get a 100 people to use it. And by that time, you're going to be uh you're going to get through that pit of despair.

You kind of go from not knowing what you, you know, I don't know what I don't know to I know what I don't know to now I don't know that I know and then I know I know kind of thing. And you you you get all the way through that by your fifth and sixth, you know, thing you've built that actually starts getting users.

Looks like the answer is always time. More time equals hard work,

better results. Yes.

Well, Austin, thank you so much for this amazing conversation. Please give him a big round of applause. [Music]