Developer Relations: Accelerating Web3 Growth | Emily Lin, Nader Dabit, Bianca Buzea, & Jenks Guo

I don't know how much time GM Denver 2024 hi everyone uh my name is Bianca buza I'm head of devil at luo also the founder of devil uni and today I have with me some awesome Deval panelists maybe we start with a round of intros Emily do you want to go first yeah okay cool I'll start um I'm Emily uh I work in developer relations for the Linea team that's my introduction I'm Nat davit I'm the director of developer relations for Igan ler and I'm excited to be here uh I'm JS I have the lowest rank or job level in this panel I think not a head not a director I'm just devel at Falin Foundation awesome thanks everyone so for today's topic uh we'll be covering developer relations accelerating web free growth and uh Innovation and I think that's uh specifically important for an ecosystem such as the web free space where there are so many protocols around so much variety if you want uh it's important to have like a strong developer uh Community a very good developer uh experience in order to have developers stick around and in order to do that you need Dev people so with that in mind I would like to invite you to kind of Define how do you see Deval uh when it comes to web free and why do you think Deval people are kind of crucial of making uh developers stick around a certain ecosystem yeah I guess since I'm sitting next to you I'll start um I saw this question and I was like oh I don't I can't I don't know if I can answer this question because I have never done devil in web 2 right so my first experience as a devil was in web 3 but I think if I had to guess and I'm comparing this more against like my uh my background as a software engineer in web 2 is there is an element of like I think web 3 is changing so much and like if I like as an engineer I imagine also as like a web 3 Dev rail there is a need to be a lot more flexible um and I guess work in a fast-pace environment right is kind of the catchphrase um alongside probably just like very unique kind of I guess uh what do you call it ways of thinking we are a very permissionless Network you have like the meme community you have the super hacker Community um and like web 3 I'm imagining addressing those like very distinct kind of groups of people is like a tough job but a fun job to figure out I think that with um can I can everyone hear me okay yeah okay um I've worked in web 2 and web 3 devell it seems like web 3 devell is it is different mainly because of like the network effects and how strong of a um I would say bond that developers end up having with the protocol that they they build on and become comfortable with and then the network effects extend beyond just the protocol becoming successful but they also kind of go into security because you have a lot of developers building on a network you have a lot of apps building on it you have a lot of people maybe like participating as a validator or an operator on the network itself and then the network becomes secure because um a lot of value is locked into that Network Network and it's kind of like this Snowball Effect so for instance if you look at ethereum that there's a very strong um Network effect that is happened there and then if you try to launch a new blockchain you're kind of asking a lot for a developer to kind of like leave that ecosystem because they have so much kind of already involved within that that ecosystem so that's kind of the main difference is when with web 2 I don't know it's just the network effects are there but they don't seem to be quite as strong uh I agree with that and um I've had five years of Devo experience three of them was in uh web 2 or traditional SAS company that's trying to turns into a platform um and then two two of my last years are uh for web 3 the biggest difference I feel like is um Dev real has a better kind of a has a first class citizen seat in Web stre projects and the reason why is most of the blockchain projects or crypto projects build primitive St development person need to use and typically it is a global system that allows other people to build things on and whatever problems that their user are solving are actually localized Regional issues so you really need to uh have Dev people engage to developers which are mainly the users of the the project uh and then engage with them if you think about a traditional Web Two company like a SAS company they don't need Dev real until they try to turn themselves into a platform or build apis or SD case they realize oh wow other projects is Dev real they look good on stage we should do the same we should win the win win the hearts and minds of developers but it's only when they have achieved certain mass in their user adoption uh when they when they start to do that but web 3 does it completely reversely if you think about that web 3 companies have you know before building a single line of code they have users already they have followers already so they understand that Community is their asset developer is their important customer custom so they understand the value of their real I feel like more valued here in web 3 even though it's a tougher job maybe a followup question to that uh I agree like the open source uh element uh it's key on and also the composability do you think uh because of the composability people in web free are let's say less competitive like protocols with each other I'm sorry I don't think I heard the question all the way yeah can you repeat yeah do you think in web uh because of the composability nature Protocols are less competitive with each others versus web 2 and they're kind of uh interact better web three project open by default it came from I think a lot of uh open source ethos so uh I think inclusivity is quite good here and most of the projects are building assuming there is no border uh between you know they're not making for a specific uh country or region so most of the projects sort of are inclusive natively and people talk about collaborations a lot um I I feel like it's much easier to actually know other including competitor projects uh if you think them they are uh much easier uh it's much years to have a conversation and sometimes even collaboration with I will say to like answer that question maybe the spicy take is yes I think protocols that are direct competitors are competitive with each other um but I think because we are in web 3 and in general the ethos is very much building things together we are competitive in a collaborative way like I think I see this especially so I'm on the Linea team where a ZK roll up right like amongst the cryptographers when I get to like kind of sit in their circles it's really funny because you know I think on the outside people see it as very much like how do we capture mind share which is true to an extent right but then there's also kind of the underlying thing of like research in general is like very much H uh what do you call it Hing upon copying each other's work and then making it better right um and I think to that effect like it's not that competitive because you know if you're doing something really cool actually like let me build on that let me ask you questions and everyone is very open with like the information that they have yeah I mean yeah I think that there's that like we as people that are working in this space ende Deval at least don't seem to be competitive with our friends like obviously we're working on things that are often competing with each other but we don't I don't see any like negative types of engagement on social media or in person I don't really see that sort of thing but the teams are yeah definitely like competing with each other like hardcore and often you'll see teams launch something that is almost completely unnecessary a million of those things already exist they instead of collaborating with what's already out there and trying to make it better want to um monetize a new token because it's very simple in this space so they do that and then they hire people to go Advocate on behalf of that product and um it just doesn't make sense a lot of times the product product itself and therefore like the I don't know the competing product doesn't really differentiate so I think that's kind of the main difference that I see in web 2 and web 3 I feel like most of the web 2 companies truly often have something to offer that's different but I think often in web 3 we see people launch something just because they can make money off of it yeah when when we were in Lisbon last year in web Summit I think the event organizer put us and polka do really separate because they think we're in web 3 we're competing against each other we want to be as far as possible but really what we are after is actually Network effects all all the projects are after that so we like to be clattered together even though if we are sort of competing in protocal level that's a good take uh maybe we shift a bit uh Focus uh do you have specific examples where uh Deval teams have kind of unlocked uh growth and Innovation within certain protocols with different initiatives I mean like I don't know if you guys know this but I feel like it's pretty obvious like Patrick Collins's course and like its relationship to chain link in terms of unlocking the community and like the Mind share and market share that chain link has right now I mean it's a fantastic product right but there's I think something very tangible about you know your first tool or your first introduction to something and like it kind of clicking you know when you want to build something with the price feed like and the very first thing you think about is like during my journey chain link is what I used I think that is like the canonical example right yeah that's a great example another really good example was Alchemy back two years ago they had um just an incredible devell team and everyone went from using infura to using um Alchemy almost like overnight I mean not everyone but it just seemed like that narrative shifted like within 6 months and it was 100% due to their Relentless like content creation and Devo um you know work that team has now kind of moved on and I don't see it as like much right now but people still use alchemy based on what happened two years ago and I thought that was just kind of interesting well also Alchemy is great and and fear is great they're both great I'm really excited today because my example is sitting right next to me near davit is uh it's my celebrity in derel uh so yeah your uh I think your dab example was uh first thing that I look into when I started um building on etherian so that took a lot of inspiration from from from your videos thank you for that um I think dev's job is to um so Devo is no different from Deo is I think it's a perfect combination of geeking out like doing Tech stuff and marketing and marketing people always know that the quicker you get people hooked down to your product the better you sell right but developers are special kind of customers where they have very short amount of time less patient and they hate being sold so what you can do is to be to make them fall in love with it is a uh build a really quick guy to make them fall in love with your product really quickly so developer guide digestible content like Nat dbits um and then make them feel like they're superhuman they're better than uh all the other people in the planet so I think if you can achieve those things with uh um with that you can you can help with the the ecosystem grows or developer community grows a lot I agree with that and also uh yeah indeed I think the educational element that devals do plays a crucial role and has enabled uh multiple protocols to be very successful because of their strong deal teams uh maybe we also look at some other uh Community uh building uh techniques that you guys use or engagement uh strategies that you wouldd like to share that you either uh did you uh Implement yourself in the past or you saw out there in the space of other teams executing okay I guess I'll just keep going first because I sit here um I actually think this is really interesting question especially from like a layer two perspective that just launched um so I guess background history right I used to work on the Truffle team which was very much like developer focused you know the success of it was based on like pure developers but then I I guess I switched over to the Linea team right and it's not just developers now I had this sudden like new ecosystem of like users on boarding right and so I think there is an element of I started to kind of lose my identity in terms of who I was trying to serve because you know ultimately I want Linea to be successful but Linea is not successful without devs and users right and so when it came to community building in the very beginning when it comes to ecosystems and especially chains that launch main net your number one priority is finding DB cuz users will come to use daps if there's no daps already on mainnet when you launch it's like a dead ecosystem so kind of for the past six months since mayet which was in July my primary focus was how do I Elevate these like existing Builders who have teams who are already looking for product Market fit kind of understand the web 3 Industry get the eyeballs and capture the attention that an L2 can get right um and I think we are at a point where our ecosystem is developed enough that I feel very fortunate that my team has kind of allowed me to say forget you know Revenue whatever Emily you can start to focus again on individual developers and people who are exploring the space you know maybe they never deploy AAP and maybe they never bring us Revenue which is totally fine right I think that's already being taken care of by our growth team and our business Dev team and now deell is coming into a play uh where I'm cooking on something right now the the headliner is called continuous engagement it is going to be frog themed I'm going to stop here but like follow me on or follow Linea and you you'll find out something is coming soon um but yeah yeah continuous engagement I think is the biggest piece of like how do you identify who your community is and then strategies to you know make sure not just when you talk to them but what happens afterwards I'm going to speak to like a new thing that I just learned that just kind of like came to me this week almost like just hardcore realization that I saw I noticed someone that was doing devell in an incredible way um but I I'll step back for a second I wrote a blog post called building high impact developer communities and it's it's pinned on my Twitter profile dabit 3 I've had at least 20 or 30 very high-profile companies like reach out to me asking me just to like spend 30 minutes to an hour talking to them to kind of help them with their devam just based on that blog post and it's been very impactful for my career and it's been really uh helpful I think to a lot of folks but if I was to name one new thing that I've learned there's uh this this person that I work with now her name is um 13-year-old VC on Twitter she's been running Jesse's Hacker House for like two years or longer I don't know but I never really knew too much about how that that was um organized I did go speak there about a year and a half ago but now that I'm working with Jesse and I've kind of seen her like for a while but uh I kind of learned the whole strategy behind Jesse's hacker house now she leads the ecosystem team at igen layer very successful um but she now has this network of all of the most cracked devs in web 3 basically on her Rolodex they they line up to come hang out at the hacker house they give talks there it's like a very high signal group of folks that she's created she's kind of created so I think like maybe thinking of that as an approach instead of like spending $100,000 to get a booth here and talk to random people walking by maybe have like some um approach like that where you have like this really big cool house where people can come and sleep and stay for free they they have food that comes every once in a while you have some really cool talks there and then like as you become really well known you can kind of like curate the types of folks that can stay there for free and things like that and you just end up be meeting one-on-one like some of the best devs in the world pH well if I buy that ebook would you sign it for me with your wallet sure also I I'm going to go back and ask my events team how much we spend on our booth You' be surprised it's not just the booth it's also like all the people that come just to hang out of the booth which I'm not saying they're not important sometimes I think it's like that's the only thing you do over and over and over you should kind of like switch it up anyone can be der and that's kind of one of your point right so yes so we uh we took more systematic approach in growing ecosystem um we had a top of the top of line amazing haakon operations or we call them Builders operations team before it's um it's two two people team maybe three or four now but they've done a great job collecting uh a lot of data around different funnels of developers and we compare them so for example in 2021 we have for the sort of early funnel of developers we uh actively engage with education platforms I think two at at least a year for major programs uh and then we have obviously have a lot of docs a lot of videos created workshops um but we also reach out to uh hackerson organizer developer conference we did not basically did not say a lot of NOS to proposals we went to 74 hackerson or sponsor 74 hackerson uh around the world in 2021 as a result we got 1,600 qualified submissions so we actually go through their code and make sure they didn't just do a read from ipfs this kind of a uh utilization uh in their in their logic uh they have to be pushing something to the ipfs network of fcoin using fcoin uh storage helpers in their code to to qualify or use fvm contract or something like that so we got incredible amount of data on how well each platform performed so that in 2022 bare Market less budget you can do you don't you can't do much uh but we do know which uh kind of platform is give us more yield so more qualified submissions uh so in 2022 we just focus on the ones that really helped us um with a smaller budget but still can make a lot of impact on that for Middle funnel we have gr program so in 2021 we gave out I think we approved 100 also grants and committed to the community $13 million in USD uh and then for late funnels we also have a very amazing accelerator team that work with uh I think a dozen uh VCS in 2021 and help 100 also teams to raise fund uh because we see the success of a program uh of a project going through ecosystem bu developer ecosystem or Builder ecosystem we see the success being successfully raised and being able have have the fund to continue their project so that's our approach to it kind of building on what n said earlier about Hacker House what other initiatives you would say uh you would like to see deal teams executing more and on the contrary what initiatives you would like to see they kind of getting rid of or not focusing that much let's say okay my turn again I mean like maybe people will hate me for saying this I think hackathons I agree with booths consensus loves booths I'm going to be very Frank here um our horrible Roi like number one I do think hackathons are incredibly valuable from the perspective of building a community like getting people on boarded in but from a I guess Dev rail perspective when I think about about Roi I think about hackathon opportunity cost right and it's talking about reach um when you know like I think one thing that we didn't do a great job of last year at least from my perspective on consensus' hackathon strategy was we met a lot of amazing devs um there we didn't have anything for them to do afterwards so like kind of the base package that we would do is like I would bring them onto a call or something or highlight what they had worked on at the hackathon but even then that's only like one month after um so I guess you can kind of talk about like what does it look like to incubate them past that right so from like a Linea perspective what I'm really excited about especially with regards to like inspiring individual developers is like how do we give them consistent opportunities to just build and break and have fun right um and I think like super fluid had a great thing with our wave pools and I think that's kind of the model that we're going to go towards is just like giving out like really small amounts of money I definitely cuz I think when they get bigger there's a bit more of like a grant Bounty Hunter Vibe versus when they're small and just like a continuous way of saying like hey I built something really cool this month and next month and whatever and ever and ever over and over again um I think it's a really great opportunity uh to do that versus like let me take the time and energy and manpower to like go and fly to an event um cuz it's opportunity cost I guess in terms of money as well as just like burning out your employees right is like a big part um that I think also probably devil who travel a lot experience maybe it's just me I don't know I think like one thing that I've learned um in the last few years with web 3 devl is like if you can do one really really high impact virtual hackathon a year that you actually spend a lot of time thought and resources putting it into you can reach a lot more people with just less resources but everyone in the world can participate and you can get a ton of people like engaged and involved and it'll be more more impactful than like 10 inperson hackathons if you do it really right I mean there's a lot of people that do like these um oneoff um virtual hackathons where it's just kind of a a second thought but if you actually really really you know spend a lot of time making this a real thing it actually does really well we did one at uh at avable for our left we had like 360 submissions which was really really a lot for us it was an order of magnitude more than we ever had really seen it in person AC and it was less money than we typically spent in an inperson haathon so 10x return um I would say like you do one of those a year and you do maybe six big inperson aath a year and that's kind of it like she said like you end up getting burned out you're on the road you're uh not actually doing any real work the work that you're doing isn't that scalable even though the inperson stuff is really important you don't need to just do a ton of it you do kind of balance it out more than um a lot of companies are currently doing today I guess so yeah we we did focus a lot on numbers but um what I want to say in Dev real a lot of things can be measured or it's very hard to measure and how to put a value on it um the qualitative feedback from developers is also very important uh one of the Su success story in fcoin ecosystem is this company called secure Finance which they're trying to do uh derivative on uh Falin CH but also um they also are interoperable in Ean and BTC so they participated uh a fcoin hackerson three years ago had the idea received hackerson prices and I think they they either apply for Grant wasn't successful um or or did get some Grant I need to check this but they successfully uh sort of pitched to investors did a raise and now they're in their series a so it's um uh I mean we can focus on numbers and a lot of project do want numbers only but what's what's equally important is some of these qual quality engagements that your Devo people have with the funders and you only need two or three of them uh that can that can be the like be the popular uh Superstar project in your ecosystem to make it yeah 100% I think that they're important to do but um like if you do one in every region one really big one in every region you're hitting like the whole world and then um you're not so there's these people in and I respect the hell out of them actually I would do this if I was a little younger right but uh they basically go to Every hacker and they just win prizes and then they go to the next one but they're not actually continuing to build on those apps after they leave and um it's really you know it's really I would say not a big Roi for the people that that are companies coming in and hoping to get those Builders to build something significant now often some of those people at some point decide to just continue on a project they do build and like build something great out of it but I would say for the most part A lot of those folks are kind of just you know um you know winning these hackathon prizes and then going to the next one which is fine again but like if your if your target is to build out like the next billion dollar company on top of your protocol those might not be the folks that are that they have the same goal so you want to find the people that gos the line with with what you're trying to do I guess yeah I do want to say also in terms of like hackathon specifically and how you measure them like project submitted is probably the worst number that you could measure I think what I'm really looking for especially now as we look into 2024 in terms of how I want to change where I see Linea devil going um is I think a few things right like the first thing is just like how often are you continuing to build and that's going to be something you have to do with like GitHub scraping as well but I think people forget about maybe like one other type of person where it's like maybe you don't start your own project but like how many of the developers did you interact with like actually get a job in web 3 so maybe they're not contributing as like a founder or something but like how many people did we land that became like an engineer um and something like that and I I don't hear that a lot I don't know how you would actually capture that information but it is something that I want to find out a way hackerson are addictive don't you agree you Cod for two three days and you win few thousand dollars and it's like drug for developers and web three hackerson are most potent for developers because the excitement I I actually met a few um really good hackathon goers that deliberately do not want a job because they enjoy being in hackathon I agree that this is a challenge kind of incentivizing people after the hackaton to stick to the ecosystem and continue building I'm curious what would you say are some of the best practices or what did you use and kind of work for you in the past to kind of incentivize those people to continue to work on the projects even after the hackaton I guess like the standard way normal people op like companies typically try to encourage that behavior is through like like grants and things like that um consensus actually and I think this is a really interesting take we don't offer grants what we offer is sort of like mentorship or like access right so we have something called the consensus fellowship program where we like onboard people like building their own daps we don't offer them money maybe they get money in the end but that's not the promise the promise is you leverage consensus as resources right so in the same way I think like and this is kind of what I'm envisioning what I want to do with individual developer teams as well as you know people I meet right is like onboarding them onto the lineal ecosystem not as like you know like obviously like as a developer right but kind of being on a chain is amazing because you meet so many different projects right we have a really strong ability to connect access and I think the best way you can kind of engage with people after a hackathon and again I want to keep hammering like you know maybe continue the project is like just I don't think that's really possible but like how do you continue to inspire you know the the Builder spirit that they felt there how do you continue to make them feel like accessing that is easy because definitely accessing that Spirit at a hackathon amazing you're like not sleeping you're like I don't I don't know everyone's there like kind of a little bit crazy so you can feed off that energy right but like how do you move that moving forward and like I just am in a very fortunate like position and role and Company where we have a lot of resources to Mentor them kind of afterwards um and that that's kind of also why I wanted to touch about the job aspect because we do talk to a lot of protocols that are deploying on Linea they need Engineers right how do I like be able to take that connection that I have and give it to the people that I meet cuz I'm not leaving consensus right so like somebody else should take that job um so not much time but I would just say we find the best Builders at these hackathons and we try to build and develop really great relationships with them over time and if they need money we try to get them money and um all the other hackers we we also keep up with them but once someone really really stands out we just go out of your way to kind of make them happy connect with them hang out with them as much as you can give them as much support as you can I think people who really needs your technology do not care about money they will build on it anyways and sometimes money can get in the way like grants can slow down certain things that's from my experience same goes for customers building relationships I think that's a very strong element well I would love to continue the conversation but unfor ly we're at the end of the time uh thank you so much uh everyone and also thank you to our audience thank you for having us thank [Applause]