Onboarding Developers: What Works and What Doesn't

oh can left well that one hey everyone welcome uh today we are going to talk about onboarding developers to web 3 and we have uh you know just organizations here three organizations that is educating developers around the world uh so it will be hopefully a fun panel uh with different views um and so let's start with introducing ourselves uh maybe few you can start and then we can go from there yeah sounds good um and yeah thanks very much uh for moderating Goan and it's a pleasure to be on here with with you Jeff as well so brief background on me um I'm Phil I'm the co-founder of eza founded eza almost about four years ago now uh today we're one of the biggest web three education apps um and really you can think of us like duelingo for blockchain so we're a mobile app you can check it out on iOS or Android while you're listening to this to get a feel for what it looks like but our main goal is is to lower the barrier to entry for developers coming into web 3 and our mission ultimately is to bring a billion developers into web 3 as well um brief background on me first got into the space in about 2013 through Bitcoin mining uh and then uh was doing a huge amount of software engineering ended up reading Law at University so qualified as an attorney in New York uh but then came back and saw the light again came back and founded eza uh after that so that's a a brief brief history on myself um grew up in the UK did my undergrad Cambridge uh and then founded uh eza together with my brother funf fact um who is now my co-founder as well so that's I guess the quick sort of one minute on eza and the eza app um but I know that Jeff has a lot more of a storyed experience in this space than even me uh thanks Phill uh I'm Jeff I am a co-founder of uh web three Builders Alliance um got into the space a few years back I spent 30 years as an educator teaching and uh as a school administrator in private schools here in the the states um and after the pandemic and some some health things decided I needed a new chapter and fortunately fell into uh learning about um about blockchain and smart contracts um got together with a group people and launched what at the time was the Terra Builders Alliance when terara was booming uh the good old days and uh the idea was that you know we needed to find a way to uh upskill train uh real senior professional level Developers um because they were hiring uh people that were not qualified and couldn't do the work so that was uh the seed of what we did we uh eventually went Cosmos wide after Tera crashed uh and then moved into salana and now work on salana and sui uh we specializ in Rust based uh smart contract development uh we run a uh cohort model live model which is uh like a master's uni Style Project based um uh cohort uh where developers have to ship to devet in order to graduate and then we have additional tracks after that where they continue uh to develop their skills and where they continue to find Opportunities to become Prof sustainable Professionals in the space awesome great summaries uh hey everyone I'm gjan I am the co-founder of ryen uh we also on board web 2 developers into web 3 like my friends here um and I guess we all have somehow different models so it it will be good to talk about those models today but how I uh enter the web three world is uh I have been always very passionate about education and uh back in 2016 uh we started a nonprofit in Turkey where I am from to address youth unemployment uh by like upskilling young people uh for Tech skills and we partner with more than 200 Enterprises uh in Turkey uh to open boot camps and train people in skills that these companies were looking for so the model was like the companies paying for all these trainings we are doing and they were hiring in cohorts from our boot camps so obviously it became a huge thing and we had around 200,000 developers from Turkey enrolling in our website uh to learn all these skills and then get jobs and around 2022 they they started asking us about more about blockchain technology and they wanted to be a part part of the global Workforce instead of just finding jobs in the country this how we entered the web three world and we uh publish online courses um they are reached by people all over the world now um but at the same time we believe a lot in local communities so we are very active in Turkey India and recently started some uh work in Nigeria Nepal Pakistan and Kenya um so that is the story and right now like there are more than 990,000 people on our platform taking the courses and joining other IRL uh events and trainings um so I would like to you know just discover a little bit about different models that we use in educating developers I think because like all three of us touch the Journey of developers from like different levels uh it would be good to talk about it because we see a lot of Education um initiative in web 3 and I don't think all of them are very effective so it may be good for us to talk about what we are working on what we believe in in our models uh and then we will come to what doesn't work as well so let let's start with what kind of models do you use a field for example at EA yeah it makes sense I guess for us to start CU you know you can think of us as being really like a top of the funnel in the sense that our big focus is on making web 3 very very very accessible and so just like if you look at Jingo compared to Rosetta Stone right does anybody remember Rosetta Stone or that language learning platform we've got a couple of people but more people are probably familiar with Jingo I think Jingo is used by you know pretty much everybody who's trying to learn a language today whereas with Rosetta Stone you have to sit down at your laptop and actually install this software put on a headset start trying to learn a language that way with Jingo it was in your pocket on the device that you were always with which was your phone and we're doing exactly the same thing for web 3 we're bringing all these developers into web 3 by actually making it very very easy and so you know to come to your question gam about the method it's really by trying to make it easy for people to get started and at the end of the day inspiring them so if you can make for example learning about suie or salana or any one of these other blockchains very very easy that's when you can get developers excited about and that's when we can all get excited about what this technology actually involves as Oppo as opposed to getting bored by for example setting up the CLI on your computer or the command line interface and so this is really where we begin with developers and then what we do is of course we nurture those people and really try to focus on attracting the best Founders and entrepreneurs so over the past couple of months we've had Founders who are funded by a6t gone through y combinator um you know got another batch going through the next a16z crypto startup school too so you know really really smart people and that's really what we focus on just empowering people to learn about this new growing industry and then at the end of the day providing them with those connections and opportunities also to actually learn um and take their skills to the next level so that's really our approach and our method um at the end of the day it boils down to the same approach that Jingo took to language learning that we are taking to web 3 learning um and of course we work with you know awesome partners that we have here as well in order to get people a little bit further down that journey in terms terms of maybe they um need a little bit of help actually going to the next level learning a little bit more in depth as well about that um actual uh actual ecosystem as well cool yeah I mean I'm at the other end of the spectrum um and really what we want to do is we we want to find um the people that want to do this professionally and uh so we treat them like that you know from day one um it is you know where there's a lot of programs where it's learning a lot of theory or you know uh copy and pasting a lot of code and or forking things over and and launching it those are all incredibly valuable because it lets people um continue to explore uh we we definitely target the people that um want to try to make it a sust sustainable lifestyle being a web3 professional developer um it our entrance uh prequisite is actually writing the code that's underneath the CLI to engage with the blockchain so it's doable but you got to work hard um a lot of our course which is live remote is about challenging people and challenging their existing thinking on what's possible um we you know every one of our Builders builds a unique proof of concept during the course um and we let them pick just about anything they want they just pick something that's not a viable product Market fit because we want them to think that this is real um we want them to work hard like this is real um because it is easy to pick up easa and put it in their hands but by the time people get to us the last thing they want is easy because they want to work hard to be able to get to the next level and so we let them do that we challenge them um and we encourage them to not just just take what they're given and accept it because if that was the way that the people are who built blockchain thought um you know we wouldn't be sitting here today we've got to challenge you know the thinking on how all of this works every day and we do we need to find new solutions to new problems every day and we can't be afraid of doing that and that's really um you know that's really what drives us every day is kind of this fearlessness of we're going to try it you know we always say we don't say know we say how do you plan on doing that okay let's get rolling um and the other thing is you know just about how hard or easy something is um it's easy to get started but I had someone in Discord yesterday say um I want to build my own protocol how easy is it well it's not easy it it's hard people go to school for four six eight years to learn how to be developers it's not easy um but it's doable if that's what you want to do and you're willing to put the to work in so those are the kinds of people that come to us uh you know we get about 150 applicants every cohor and about 60 of them qualify and about 20 of them graduate um those 20 they're ready they're ready to roll um the other 40 half of them come back and do another cohort because they know that with one more they can get there yeah it's great I think so just to emphasize the numbers here as well at EA you are dealing with maybe 10 th000 people or something taking one course right when you launch more yeah more exctly okay okay and you are saying like 150 people so you are really selecting like really Advanced developers to to your uh yeah and and really I mean look people are like well how much background do I need um you need to have two of the following three you need to be incredibly hardworking and ambitious you need to know a good amount about blockchain and house smart contracts work or you need to um have a programming background if you have any two of those three um you could do well with us nice nice That's great so yeah I want to just emphasize these differences you know like where we are touching the lives of people uh for Rising we are in the middle of these two models actually so we as I said we believe in a lot about local activation uh because of both our dnas as Founders I'm big in like community building and um you know Grassroots momentum building movement building uh so what we do is like we build courses but uh they are online for free anybody can take it from the website anytime but most of of the time people don't finish those courses I mean I'm sure all of us experienced that go to an online course and don't finish it so what we do is like we organize like local workshops boot camps or mini heatons and what we do is like we ask people to complete some part part of the course to come to those events and then we bring people together as a cohort and help them finish the rest of the course and build their first smart contract or build their first decentralized application and then from these people we handpick the ones that are really interested to build more and we keep supporting them through grants bounties or uh programs like web Builder Alliance we refer really uh like promising people interested people to those programs and the end goal is you know just to have enough people at the end who build like real products but we are mostly in the in the in the middle of that uh journey of the developers so just I wanted to emphasize there are different ways to onboard developers and there's not one size fits all I guess um so here I want to jump into the question of what doesn't work when we are on boarding developers do you think because like for me after I switch from web 2 trainings to web three I have seen a lot of things fail and we have you know just a lot of different experiences I'm wondering like if we become totally honest what do you think is that is not very effective uh when we are on boarding developers yeah that's a a great question um I'd say from my personal experience just in terms of my background uh before eza we co-founded two Marketplace startups um and I think I think that you know looking at that experience and what we found there is that when you're a developer and you're or even just an everyday consumer learning about something new or building a new product there isn't really a one-size fits all I think that people need to be uh need to have options they need to have different ways that they can explore there isn't just one single way of learning I think for easier that's really what we've tried to do and allow them to have that flexibility that they can do it anywhere at any point in time and I I think that that's you know where it fits really really at the you know in terms of hook capturing developers attention um I think that that's the most important thing for me I I wouldn't necessarily Focus too much on the uh on what doesn't work I'm more focused on like just opening it up to lots of different people I think that maybe some stuff doesn't work for certain types of developers other stuff doesn't work for others and I think it's just giving developers maybe that opportunity rather than saying you know what you can only learn about it by going to the docs um and you just have to read those and then you have to go and um and then you have to go and go uh and do an example dab for example uh that's already been laid out there for you and follow X number of steps I think that it's really just about creating a wide canvas so the developers can learn and then also start to engage more deeply with the material I think that's that's my approach to it yeah I mean I think that echoing the idea that that both Goan and Phil have mentioned you know one size doesn't fit all I think one of the things that doesn't work is assuming that the Persona that of everybody that comes to you is the same um you know there's going to be more differences uh in the in the Persona and the in the character of the people coming then there's going to be similarities so you know focusing on the on the things that are in common across those people well they're here so they've already taken the first step now it's not as much our job to you know get them here as it is to retain them and retention is huge and you know creating sticky opportunities is something we talk about a lot um what doesn't work um promising the moon when you can't um telling people that hey if you do this course I'm going to get you a web three job making six figures that's not how it really works in web 3 at the moment I mean you know 78 to 80% of the jobs that people are doing as quote you know professional web through developers are is gig based work uh it's freelance work the very few and far between are the big protocols that are paying you know six figure salaries to developers that that is not the norm um and you know being really truthful and honest about how the efforts are going to manifest into a sustainable livelihood um you got to be able to have that conversation with people when they get to when they get to us and they're like you know am I going to get a job off this or am I going to get a grant for my project or am I going to get investment can't promise stuff you got to be honest about how it works what is within the Locust of control of the Builder to you know get as close to making it happen as what you know with what what's in their control um that's what you got to do false promises are going to do more much more to turn people off and spread bad narrative about working professionally in this space the other side of it for retention wise is you know you got people that want to build an nft project cuz they want to get a mint and make a bunch of money well that's great but you have to have people building sustainable developer economy projects as well things that can get developers paid in any market conditions so what doesn't work is making promises that you can't keep you know keep or make happen for people and what doesn't work is assuming that everybody's the same yeah I think great points I will add three things to this because I think a lot of things don't work when on boarding developers in web3 uh in our experience the first thing is that I think connected to what you are saying uh Jeff uh a lot of developers like web2 developers are actually uh coming into web3 to build a career or to use the skills they use here in their daily jobs so we actually did a survey with 26,000 developers on our platform only six% of them said that they want to build a startup or a product in web tree most of them said said that I want to build a career here either like find a job in web tree or I want to use the skills I learned here in my daily job my 9 to5 job and when we look at a lot of web tree um programs for developers they are all like you know just we will give you tons of money to build a startup we will give you tons of money to build a product we are looking for Founders but let's be realistic we are talking about only 6% of people who want to build a startup we are all startup Founders here I know how hard it is you know like if you gave me a chance again I don't know if I would start rising or another company it is like super painful you know like to build a team to build a product that would people use so building a startup is not for everyone and so I think that expectation Gap is a big problem when on boarding developers that's the first thing in my experience the second thing is that we have seen an electric Capital report as well 98% of developers that joined web 3 left the field in like one year later so we are talking about 98% of people that is building a product today is going to leave so when we think about why these people leave obviously there are a lot of reasons one of them is lack of job opportunities in web3 right now but another thing in my experience is like lack of like local communities that people find we were talking with Jeff like some of the like really talented developers from Turkey they are like they have this lack of self-confidence about like language skills for example when they engage in a global community so I think like when we have more local communities in countries people feel more welcome in this space rather than just going and hanging out in a global Discord channel so that is another thing I think we need to be careful about when going into especially developing countries where tons of people are are more interested in crypto uh because like there is a definitely a correlation between interest of crypto and inflation and economic problems in countries you know why turkey is one of the you know top 10 countries in the world using crypto because we have a lot of economic problems in the country it means a lot of unemployment as well which means people are looking for job opportunities or income opportunities in the field I would say like these things are definitely like some things that don't right now in the industry and the final thing I would say is like the expectation setting is super important we talk with a lot of different protocols and when like protocols come to us like hey we want to see like great products out of these education programs we have to say like it is probably not going to work like we are not going to see a lot of like great products here but we will have people who have the skills that can help people Founders who will build these companies so I think I think that expectation setting is also very important in we Tre and as you said you know like let's be honest you know not everybody is going to find jobs out of these programs but let's provide let's create a Workforce that have these skills uh uh in we Tre so okay after after saying all these things uh I want to also ask like in your experience what is the secret source of your program what do you love the most about onboarding developers like what what is working the best in your experience oh yeah I mean I love uh I love everything that we do at EA I I think that this though is one of the most valuable and also most exciting Parts what I love is that because of where we are in terms of we sit at the stage of developers where our job is to inspire and our job is to show developers the opportunities that are available and that's why I find this so exciting what I love doing most is actually we have you know some of web 3's biggest social media med accounts so if you go on Tik Tok or Instagram you'll see us uh we have about 320,000 followers on Instagram we have about 415,000 on Tik Tok um you know we have uh billions and billions of views across platforms as well so that is what I actually really really enjoy it's crafting a narrative uh and also showing developers what they can do showing them their Journey um you know for example recently um I just hosted another podcast together with guy called Ryan sirant which you may who you may know of he's the guy on Tik Tok or Instagram who basically is you know pretty much America's most famous real estate broker um and he he was talking about the opportunities that are available for people who are entrepreneurs but also for people in web 3 um and you know talking a little about the eza app um he's actually got a Netflix uh show coming up which you should check out um basically what I love is I love crafting this story and also telling the story of different protocols if you check out what we've done together with suie for example we tell the story of the Fantastic 5 who are the founders behind it and we also tell the story about Facebook's or rather meta nowadays their failed project which was DM and that then gave rise to aptose and suie as well so I would say you know to take it back what I really really love is actually being active on social media I love it and I love telling stories about different Entre rurs their paths into it because we're really focused on the founders side of it and I think people love hearing stories about people who are very similar to them who are maybe who are a couple of steps ahead of them but they can see their lives actually reflected in the journey that they took ahead of them so I think it's that you know telling a story about other people who are similar to them and also I just love being active on on social media you are very good at it yes you are very good at it I on the other hand uh depends on who you ask um you know secret sauce and what I love I mean I think our secret sauce is is um we are small by Design and we are very people Centric we get to know our people really really well which allows us to support them not only while they're in our course but um you know as a startup that up until four or five months ago it was just the core four of us that were running this thing for a couple years through the bare Market uh we have now hired seven of our graduates to to be as part of our team um so the satisfaction of educating and working with people and working really hard and helping them over the times where they think didn't think they could do it or they didn't think it was a good idea or they didn't think they could be professionals in web 3 um to offering them a job and being able to pay them a good salary and get them involved that's part of it um that's super satisfying you know my education roots are are embedded in that um the other Secret Sauce is you know we have a mindset uh of as long as you um adhere to responsible stewardship of the blockchain we could do anything we want so let's build cool stuff I mean if you have a cool idea let's build it you we've got some super Innovative stuff that's that have come out of our cohorts um we've got projects that the foundations that that ask us to build things spe special for them are you know Innovative don't exist anywhere yet um that other people said you can't do that and we're doing it that's that's incredible you know I mean it's fun it's it's the you know it's the right that we've been given to be responsible about doing it the right way doing it safe and secure during it doing it a way that is going to fuel adoption help the unbanked get banked help people without governance opportunities be able to have transparent governance locally um being able to have Global impact from a very small group of people um and being very very close with the people that you work with on a personal level I mean that's you know I'm an old guy that this is a dream come true in a second career to be able to do this so and I think that everybody we're not everybody's cup of tea I'm not everybody's cup of tea but for the people that stick around um that feels really good yeah je Jeff know everyone's by name right all your students yeah he's he's amazing yeah for us I think the what is working the best is uh always like trying to find these opportunities either job opportunities or income generating opportunities for our students is the best part of our work and I think it um you know motivates our students a lot to it is again in parallel with what you guys are saying I think uh so some of the things that makes my day is like uh you know just when some of our students find a job at one of the you know just protocols that we are working with or like some of the startups in their ecosystem that's that's the best thing or we also hire from our graduates so we hire two people full-time and some of them are our teaching assistants as well so that is an amazing thing as well and another another thing is like when we give people some skills that they can put into their resume and that would help them find a job or like you know just uh have an income opportunity especially if you are from a developing country that that is amazing and I was so proud when our graduates in Nepal Pakistan Kenya and Nigeria started with boot camps in these countries by themselves like they came to us they said you know I I want to just do this I I want to increase this impact of rising in these countries so that is the best thing because it it is not just empowering them but also you know just giving them a skill um to put into their resume and find a job I know that like in uh you know in these kinds of viory conferences I see that some people are like you know uh I have seen comments like a good developer wouldn't apply to a job through Linkedin because they are already a good developer they will be discovered I totally disagree with this statement about like uh it is like excluding 99.8% of developers in the world so I think if we want to be onboarding more web web 2 developers into web 3 we should be more like realistic about how the web two World Dynamics work and aot of people are LinkedIn on LinkedIn yes that's that's the uh truth anyways um so I want to talk about a very sensitive topic now because I thought that we should talk about it uh about heatons so we have seen a lot of heatons and we keep seeing a lot of heatons that is like providing huge prize uh pools um so let's talk about the effectiveness of these because I have started to see some conversations in the industry about the effectiveness of these like really you know um big heatons just wondering what is your experience with these heatons well we're very involved in the salana heatons and they are they have really massive prize blls uh I would say that the prize blls are are great um I mean making them as big as possible can in some ways have the biggest awareness possible because when people see that there's a million dollars up for grabs in a hackathon they're like whoa how do I actually get involved in that and I think at the end of the day it's just it just gets more eyeballs on it um I mean of course you can do some analysis on is it cost effective to be giving away a million dollars um you know relative to maybe the number of builders that you get I think at a certain point of course you know there is declining efficiency in the sort of capital spend of needing to have a massive massive price poll um but I I quite like it when I see a million dollars on a hackathon um and I think at the same time uh you can it's about what your goals are I think if you have like a a huge price pool you can also structure it so that maybe that is also Milestone based grant funding as opposed to just being given to people I think we've seen with salana that these big big hackthon price polls are extremely effective um but I think that you know there's also room for other people to experiment with different size of price plls too um personally I like the way that sana's done it with the hackathons I think that they've had you know great success and obviously working on the global hack bonss together we've seen that they've done really really well yeah I mean I on a personal and organizational level i' I I do have mixed feelings and and I'll I'll share why um you know last uh last hackathon we were involved with we shipped 32 projectss 27 made the top one 50 and nine of them either one or got honorable mentioned from less than 40 Builders um if WBA was a country we would have shipped more projects to this hackathon than any single country in the world that's great it's exciting hackathon cohorts hit different the Energy's different it's amazing um the where I struggle is increasingly the hackathons are less about the technology and the tech skills of the Builders and more about how well someone can pitch an idea um and they're more pitch competition which for what we do is it it doesn't align um and we believe very strongly in what we do so we're we're not going to change that just to try to win a hackathon because we don't think that that serves our Builders and the people that we you know we work hard for them and they work hard for us um you know the hard part there is people that work really hard and build something really cool and Innovative but have a subpar pitch deck are are losing opportunity to people who can't do any programming but have a great pitch deck um and I think that that misalignment you know that you know that that is counter to what hackathons were intended to be but um look if it's a pitch competition let's call it that let's not call it a hackathon no it's fair um yeah I have mixed feelings towards heatons too um just one difference I realize in web 2 hecaton we have done versus web 3 heatons I see is like in web 2 heatons uh you know just we are struggling with how to select the winner here you you know there are so many good projects coming up and in web three heatons it's like they are so bad let's select a winner that is like not not so bad you know like it is like the quality of projects coming out of this heatons I think questionable um if it is not done well I mean there are really really some great Global heatons like Solana is doing I think like one of the best ones I have seen as well but uh like if it is not done well I have seen that like the same teams um collecting prizes from several different heatons by just you know converting that project to different chains as well so that is something that bugs me a lot lately to see the same projects same teams getting again and again uh I I I don't think that that is what what we intend to do um so just I wanted to ask this question so that you know we we we question uh more when we are investing this much into these heatons but thank you so much uh for joining I hope that this was kind of a a fun and informative session uh I really enjoyed listening to you guys same here thank you very much for yeah and thanks everybody for coming as well yeah thank you thanks y'all thank