Crypto Survival Handbook - Finding Your Community with Jarred Winn

good afternoon everybody I'd like to take a quick moment and thank everybody for attending our panel today our panel is the crypto Survival Handbook and a subheading of finding your community on our panel we have a very diverse group of people we have Venture Capital we also have an individual who is Direct in the weeds of managing communities and daos and that of respect so from this panel my hopes are is that we are going to share with you perspectives as to the key identifiers the things that you should look for when looking at projects what the experts think of or what they look for when they're identifying projects and how to otherwise ensure that you are joining the community that is right for you or you're joining the ecosystem that is right for you should I say so real quickly we will go around and give introductions and then we're going to go ahead and get started so uh Andrew how about we start with you uh Hey everybody uh Jared thanks for having me I'm head of Republic crypto we're uh digital Merchant Bank secondary Marketplace uh and primary issuance platform so uh we say kind about the Confluence of retail and uh institutions uh we have a series of venture funds that we run the MGP of advisory Services tokenization platform token sale platform infrastructure yeah um so I'm Hazel I'm the chief of staff from Shima Capital we are a crypto native 180 million found um so what I do every day is more like supporting all our 180 portfolio companies on the on their growth their strategies and how they survive during the spare market so looking forward to the discussion today hi I'm Ashley I work in the Dow space I am a core contributor and um operator of a venture Studio Dao in addition to a social media doll that exists in four market and I build crypto and non-cryptonative communities online my name is Jared Nguyen once again I am the founder of win Solutions and as well previously was a former vice president at binance now working in the the scope of advisory and assisting projects and scaling issues and ultimately helping them know overcome the many barriers related to marketing that's associated with that of crypto so in that respect uh we will go ahead and get started now the first thing that I would like for us to talk about is is the identifying traits as a VC for example pitched every day on various projects as a retail investor many of us look at projects every day and it's up to us to do the research and identify whether or not we feel a project is suitable for our investment or whether or not we want to participate in that ecosystem or even utilize the platform from that stance so I would love to go kind of from left left to right here and hear from Andrew and then move over as to what are some of the things that you look for in a project to determine whether one it's worth your time or two it's worth your investment yeah I think first and foremost uh this is not Financial advice and I'm not a financial advisor everything on this panel is not Financial advice yes be very clear about that um I think the most common bifurcation we see when projects are come to us and we saw 236 projects last month we have a pretty hefty amount of deal flow on our side because all the different services and funds and things that we provide but the most common initial bifurcation is whether or not the project actually needs a token like 90 of the time it's not we have a series of like leading questions that we use to kind of dig that out um because ultimately if the token is not really required it's more of like either a marketing play or you're trying to add some type of flavor in order to raise more Capital um and that's very very very common very common the second bifurcation honestly on the investment side that we see is people failing background checks it's like very the number of people that fail background checks would blow your mind what are some reasons that someone would advise you fail a background you know because the space is opportunist like the the industry in of itself is based on opportunist that's why you see a lot of overlaps other opportunist Industries like crypto industry and people in the blockchain space often overlap with like uh you know the marijuana industry as an example right like because that's also an area of opportunists so opportunists especially in the early stages always can bring out nefarious actors because they think that they can do something relatively quickly um so you know you see a lot of people with like bad financial crime history or you know identity changes or it's it's wild truly wild yeah I love how you also reference opportunists and I actually I haven't heard that word used and it's a perfect description of what this industry is oftentimes people are chasing that early cycle they're looking for that thing that's otherwise going to be you know I was first to Facebook I was first to Tesla I was first of these things and crypto is definitely one of those Industries where everybody wants to be early and they're just trying to find a reason to build something within it versus actually building real use case is what I find as well so thank you Andrew um hazel would love to hear from you yeah for me I think um there are a lot of things we have like a whole template of the I think the most of things we look for is in terms of the team we want to see a good execution um if they promise they will be doing delivering something in three months whether they are doing it whether they're on track we ask for a lot of details how many people are they hiring who are they hiring and what's their hiring plan whether it match like makes sense to match their implementation plan and also whether they have like active communication with the community if they actually deliver the things they promise to community we do think this shows the long-term execution capability from a team which is one of the most important part when we do a precedure seat run investment like honestly speaking probably 20 or 30 of our portfolio companies has already pivot of their like business model they figure out something else it's more interesting to build but the execution capability of the team will last long so that's the reason why we invest in the team we invest in their um future potentials probably they will just pivot somewhere else but like we know that the market changes a lot but the team's execution capability won't change absolutely and consistency is something in such a volatile industry as what we're in consistency is definitely a diamond in the rough in many ways I mean I like how you spoke as well about the communications with Community right and just follow through follow through is something when what you're essentially trading in terms of value is trust we're in a trustless ecosystem in many ways but trust is something that could be easily damaged and take a long time to restore if ever in that in that case so I I actually I think that really segues well into you with your role in community and so forth um I would love to hear from you about how important what is the value that you put in trust and follow through and execution like how does that tie in for you because well you might not be necessarily at the scale of getting all these business pitches you do run a fun and so forth I I'd love to hear about that but I also would love to hear more about how you enforce trust and how you otherwise ensure that that's stable yeah from my perspective Builder and a community the leader I am not writing checks I'm giving my time that's the resource that I have to give to these communities and so I determine what's worth my time the first thing that I look at that I don't think is much different from a VC is like founder product fit like is the person who started this community and is the de facto leader of this community aligned with what this community is doing right and then I think about the saying that I heard a while ago People Like Us act like this and so I think okay is this aligned with who I am and do all of these people you don't have to be like monolithic right but do all of these people actually have something in common Beyond wanting to have a financial gain especially if it's a tokenized community are we there to collect the tokens and then dump them a couple of months later or are people really built into the mission and are thinking five years from now 10 years from now and then I also really look to see whether or not people this seems simple but like whether you hang out together outside of community events like are people organizing on their own that's a really good sign to me that you're pulling people together there's a gravity that brings everyone um together that's genuine Ingenuity that in in itself I mean you really can't buy Passion I I'm I mean you can incentivize it obviously people are incentivized by crypto for you know their own reasons that it wouldn't exist if there weren't reasons for people to participate but as you're saying that that passion is something that cannot be bought you really have to find those individuals that can carry the torch right yeah I think especially in the like crypto community space now I look for communities that are not yet tokenized because that at least tells me that the people who have signed up for that Community do not have financial gain at the front of mine when I first came into this space I was looking at tokenized communities because I came from the space as like a swing Trader and it was the social tokens that were of most interest to me but then when I really started to think about how that plays into the health of the Dao and the health of the organization it actually really complicates the motives of individuals within the community and how do you see that a dowel operates how do you see a dow with its Community different than a project that is not a doubler say how do you see that the changes in that and do you see more passion when it comes to something of a dow like what are the main changes you see in that I I think Dao is just like a buzz term for a concept I was actually having this conversation this morning about the the Colorado Co-op law and why more Dows are not wrapped legally as co-ops like the laws are right there they kind of fit what's going on um and so I think that there are ways that communities are operating like a Dao without calling themselves that and so I sorry I'm like losing what your question was I think you're on point with that it's good what I'd like to do now is I I feel that the best way a lot of people learn there's different ways people learn and for me storytelling is a really great way to not only you know get a point across but learn a little bit more about the person so I would love to hear from everybody just maybe a bit of an example or a bit of a story of maybe a pitch you received from a project or something of that and what was it about that project that you just knew that this was going to be a gold star and how did that how did that go how did that Prevail and did they meet those expectations um Andrew how about we start with you I think one that would really jumped at us are probably two because we're early advisors to both Al Green and Avalanche and you know I'd known Silvio from MIT when he was working on zero knowledge proofs and when he started to put together this concept of algorand um and on this in the back of the teal which is a relatively difficult programming language then on almost unparalleled to that you had um uh Emin out of as a professor at Cornell uh rolling out Avalanche so there's a series of like Professor coins that kind of came out around the same time there's a handful of them not just those two those two that we were particularly close to and that we worked on from very early stages just had so much mental bandwidth behind them more so than like anybody else right and they weren't really you know Sylvia was coming by mental bandwidth specifically I mean you're talking about two brilliant cryptography minds and distributed system mines that were looking at rolling out like a text solution based off what they had built in their brain right and it was the first time that they had the ability to really do that and they could leverage the blockchain tech to to make that happen so those are super super interesting to us like right out of the gate and um they didn't have business people right like silly is not a business guy Emma's not really a business guy they're like heavily technically driven first and foremost and then they brought on business people you know later right and so you have like John Woo came on to help run Avalanche she's like an insane president probably one of the best presidents of all the on all the chains um and an algorithm about a whole Suite of like suits basically on board to drive algorand and that those are particularly interesting to us because of the technical nature of which of how they started and just the extreme academic layer they were built on well you actually hit a good point and there's plenty of Brilliant Minds in crypto I mean a lot of the founders and so forth are very brilliant what I find lacks sometimes is the link between brilliancy and execution so there's there's lots of grandiose Visions lots of Pie in the Sky if we are going to change the world we're going to do all of this and then three years later nothing has happened right so there's plenty of idea guys and girls like ideas are very cheap you weed that out how do you how what what did say Avalanche for example or the other what did they do to instill in you the confidence that it wasn't just a grandiose vision and they had the competency to actually execute yeah I mean so this was kind of before the time of like the napkin white paper right it's like shortly after that there was like a series of like napkin pitches basically right where like people would come to you with this idea and and Pitch it to you and it was completely vaporware there was nothing like for those two projects like they were building those Concepts like on an academic level like well before then uh and so they came with something it was not nothing right and had been like teaching on those topics educating on those topics you know building communities basically from an educational standpoint on those topics that was very very different than what you saw from I won't name other chains but like other chains that came around that time I I remember when you and I first started working together when I was at binance Andrew you when you talk to somebody I usually pretty quickly you can size up whether or not somebody's talk or whether or not they're going to take action and I think it's a really quick demonstration of how do they follow up how do they I mean do they follow their timelines do they execute and so forth so I think that that's for me that's a really big thing is do they do what they say and say what they do right um and there's track records you said background checks previously that is something where you can look at the history I think the team is really one of the core critical components a vision is a vision but the team itself needs to bring it to life so thank you for that Andrew and Hazel would love to hear from you yeah for me I think um probably Echoes the point of that deliver actually what they're talking about um but another part of this like um there's a project we were working with very closely it's called spies Finance we invested probably that for a second buys Finance Finance yes so it's nft liquidity aggregator um it's pretty impressive in working with the team so the team was coming from like pure the fact two Founders are coming from Pure products and engineer backgrounds and so they need help in terms of marketing and strategy go to market everything so for our first meeting I was saying that oh you can think of your go to market strategy by this field um key questions you need to have a quickly answer on these few key questions and you can use this template like Excel template to get charts to like just plan out your next three month activities next week Bill the thing's coming up and it's like exactly listing out what they're talking what we were talking about and they actually put in a lot of thoughts on oh we need two weeks on this three weeks on that we need this resource on this that resource on that you can clearly see they are in taking all your advice and they're doing their own research and their thinking and then two weeks later bill the website comes out and then three weeks later bill I was like oh how many people how many email address do you have right now in one minute they gave me the number they gave me the open rates they get me oh we think in the next month our nft style we should have this few hundred nft drop we should be able to sell it in an hour this is our pricing and the reason behind all the data you know that this team is putting everything together and they're actually taking in all the advice and I think this is something from a Community member perspective they can also tell that this team is doing their work and we can also from our investors that we can tell that oh this team has a great potential and potentially next round we will invest even more so I think that's a great part that I have been putting a lot of time looking in to see if we do want to do any follow-on investment later on I think that's a really great point that you made I think listening is such a core skill and coachability is another core skill that I look for personally when integrating or interfacing with anybody that I'm collaborating with doing work with and I I one time this person isn't here I had an interview with somebody and it was the worst interview that I had ever experienced in my life this guy had literally told me that he enjoyed being on unemployment for the last six months because he was able to play basketball every day and it was the best time of his life and I was like I was like well that was the worst response to an interview question that I've ever heard right and so we went through the whole interview and I said look I'll be honest this interview is really bad like you told me a few things telling me that you enjoyed being on unemployment as a boss that tells me that maybe you're not motivated tells me that's not he's like wow I did not intend to be that or for that to come off that way and in short he was coachable and I hired him and he ended up being my best employee that I've hired to this day so the they might the project it might not be where it is but the fact that they'll listen and the fact that they don't know it all and my employees are laughing in the front row because they know who I'm talking about um the ability to actually listen and then Implement and execute is really important and I think that you hit those points very well on that we'd love to hear from you Ashley sure so this is gonna sound like it goes against my original point about tokenized communities um but when I first joined my social doll we were very local it was based in Miami um and in less than a year's time we became a meta Dao that had these four sub-dials and four different markets and so when I came on the indicator to me early on um that we were on to something and this was going to be something that that spread really quickly even though I couldn't see the full vision yet was um the amm the automated Market maker which at the time for us was uniswap was telling me that the demand for what we were creating as a community was beyond what I could understand I mean I bought in at a dollar fifty and by six weeks later our token had almost hit twelve dollars um and that was off of just the demand of people wanting to be in our community and that led us to to go to the next city and then we watched that happen in the next city and so that took us to another city and so in that sense having the token um did make that clear for me that was my indicator of whether or not it would be wildly successful um yeah that's kind of how I knew early on oh passion it really can be contagious and you know you you mentioned about tokens and so forth I I personally think communities themselves exist and Thrive without tokens but I feel like tokens in a way can kind of be the blue to a community it sure in short it puts everybody on the same boat right is the way that I see it right well it's Collective economics so that can very much be empowering I mean the flip side of like potentially joining a community from a money motivation is that if we are now all co-owners however we choose to Define owner but if we're all co-owners of this treasury um and co-owners of this ship that we're all on I think that that really gels the community in a way where if there isn't an economic Factor underlying it might not have the same impact that's very fair thank you for that all right so we have a couple minutes left here what I would like to do at this point is maybe we could just give some takeaways if we could give one bit of advice to our listeners or our audience today as to if you're finding your community what is one important thing that you would give as a piece of advice to anybody that's making that decision and Andrew let's start with you what is it if you're starting a community what's if you're finding your community or you're looking for a community or you're something to participate in and identifying that what's any bit of advice or any takeaway you would give yeah I mean I think if you're an individual and you're looking for like a community if if your primary motivation is financial just know that that relationship will always be transactional from the very start and the people that you associate with will be transactional and the people that they associate with me and that is the people that you're going to be around so when you're looking for a community that's okay too like you might be all right with that like you might want that type of relationship I'm not saying that that's bad but if you go if it's a transactional environment and you go into it expecting something else you're gonna have a bad time very true yeah I would add on on Andrew with that if you are actually looking for belongings sense of belongings just look whether the team themselves are passionate whether this the founder the founding team or the community managers they're actually putting their efforts into communicating with the community whether they are passionate about their projects whether they're actually spending time working on what they're talking about will be very important if you are looking for a long-term Community to grow together thank you yeah you brought up a really good point about communication for me it's not different from shopping if I walk in a store after a certain amount of time if no one has greeted me I'm going to conclude that you don't want my money like you just if I go to a bar and you don't even like put a napkin in front of me and be like I'll be right back I'm gonna you know I have to help someone I'm coming that sort of initial acknowledgment that initial experience of coming in is really my first indicator of whether or not a community is for me um and then again beyond that whether or not I want to hang out with these people outside of the confounds of what this community is supposed to be but I love your point about transactional communities especially these crypto based communities especially tokenized communities again like Collective economics is very very very empowering it's very powerful but it also leads to situations where you are entering transactional communities with transactional people who ultimately um you know Dows our companies with an asterisk ultimately they're looking to sell ultimately they want a vce to come in and like buy up their treasury like they're it's not all just Good Vibes um and so I think that you really have to like the people that you're around definitely test the waters right and it use your intuition if it feels right if it feels like your community you're quickly going to identify that if it doesn't Don't Force the fit right I want to thank everybody for listening to our panel today again my name has been Jared we have Andrew Hazel and Ashley thank you for listening to us been a great audience thank you you