BBW22 - Day 2 - Let's Meet the Creators#1

foreign [Music] thank you for coming um like Ian mentioned I am Quincy Zone actually grew up only three blocks from here uh Quincy Center and Wallace and Hill um so very proud to be back um I actually now reside in New Haven Connecticut I dropped out of Yale a week ago to start entropy which as he so kindly mentioned is a web 3 security company we deal with fault tolerance and and transparency ensuring the fairness of games but uh let's turn it over to Christy to tell us a bit more about herself and and about Medici labs uh hi I'm Christy um uh my job at Medici I'm the head of design and the full stack engineer I this is actually my first job out of college I just graduated with my Master's in computer science from Tufts in December and started working for Medici in March we currently offer a platform that allows artists and musicians to upload nfts I mean sorry upload images or music files to create nfts smart contracts and mint websites on the fly so yeah super happy to be here thanks for having me Z why don't you tell us a bit more about yourself and taco sure I'm z uh Taco doesn't actually sell tacos but the first question we do get is what you know what is taco uh what we do is we gamify Commerce so when you look at games we've played in the past things like scavenger hunts visual passports we take the same kind of concept that have existed for 20 30 years and just putting them on web3 so tokenizing the entire experience using the public blockchain for that and that's what we do awesome hello everyone I'm Max I'm the co-founder of acre world we are an incubator based out of Boston Mass and partially based out of MIT and we are an NFC incubator primarily with a focus on the tokenization of real world assets I actually want to start today with how with what we are we are Boston blockchain week what brings everyone to Boston Christy do you want to begin sure um I went to high school actually pretty close to here as well in Milton at Milton Academy so I've been in Boston for like eight years I'm originally from Hong Kong but I love Boston I think it's a great place to be and the webview community here has been so nice and welcoming as I said I recently joined and have been loving it so I actually live in Lexington so I am kind of from Boston I got tricked into moving here in 2014. I was told it has amazing Lobster but then I found it comes from Maine should I move to Maine instead um but my first startup was a custom clothing company called blank label I did that in 2009 and we had stores in Boston so I moved from California and I've been here since 2014. awesome I'm uh Boston born and bred as I split my time between Boston and Milan Italy so I traveled back and forth um but uh yeah I've always been a Boston kid bread bread and raised from the start so happy to be here uh and for me I'm Boston born a pleasure to be back here sort of a homecoming for me I walked five minutes to go see my old high school and that was that was weird um seeing seeing some of my old teachers and friends so it is it is really wonderful to be back here I think there is um as evidenced by this conference and a lot of the events happening that there is a strong strong Community here and improving every year um I want to turn it to how he got into web free space as a whole so for me for example I was investing in um in I was a d-gen Forex investor uh Trader and options and I got into crypto naturally but I didn't start building until earlier this year when two of my brilliant co-founders were building a game and they needed someone on the biz Dev side and that's how I got into web3 and as I like to say I came for the tech and I stayed for the people tell us your experience getting into web 3 and about this overused term of community and and how that I guess with reflects on your journey and why you do what you do so that's a lot let's let's begin with Christy again said hey I'm stuck like I'm starting a web free startup we're doing nfts like come join come come to the dark side so I did it's been really good so far I honestly went into it not knowing anything or like very little to nothing other than sort of what I had been exposed to and sort of on a very surface level but I've just been really um really impressed by how welcoming the community is how accessible the community is and just like it's just been such a great time I feel like my life has it's a little cliche but I feel like my sort of daily life has just totally changed since joining web3 and I've done software engineering before and there are very few kinds of software engineering that make you kind of feel this way so and how would you recommend someone I've met great people here at this conference that are coming here to to educate themselves and we have people who have spent you know as we'll hear from Z you know 10 years in the space to people that are just getting into it how would you recommend if you want to jump um fully into web3 how do you do that because it's such a news scary world yeah yeah absolutely honestly I was so intimidated because I can totally understand how web3 from the outside looks so intimidating there's a ton of technical stuff and you might feel like you have to be an expert in order to speak up but that's definitely 100 not true I started I started my web 3 journey in March and now I um obviously building this product with my team but on the side I'm leading an NFC charity project to donate funds to legal abortion and I'm also a part of git coin's kernel Fellowship as a kernel fellow and this has been just a few months and it's just crazy how I think if you make an effort in web 3 people resonate with it so there's always a space for your vision you don't have to be a developer actually I actually think that more people who aren't developers should be in web 3 because there's space here for everybody's thoughts we're not going to web3 isn't going to succeed unless we have more people of different from different like different kinds of people it can't just be what it's been so far because I think when when you build you can kind of see the the weaknesses of that because there's so often times that we build something because we think it's cool or that it should exist on a Tech from a technical perspective but that doesn't mean it's actually a good product sorry I just talked a lot oh and we love to hear it Z tell us about how you got into the space 10 years ago you are you're a veteran and then how you got back into the space tell us your story sure so talking about developers I'm actually a technical founder um when blockchain was New this is back in 2012. it's like oh yeah this cool thing called Bitcoin and all you need is laptop to make money I mean it was worth nothing back then but all you needed was a good laptop a decent graphic card and you could like mine your own uh Bitcoin so we did that for a bit seemed kind of boring shut it down um fast forward to last year where we had a lot of uh founder friends who were like entrepreneurs and like d2c Brands and e-commerce and they had basically sold nfts to their customers or given them and they're like people keep talking about like utility but all I see is like these massive rug pulls and like Discord servers like what the hell is this is every brand gonna like create a Discord server and have people like living in Discord and that's how they get product and when I was trying to figure out like what I wanted to do for my next startup uh that's where kind of the word name Taco came up but the idea was like it shouldn't be this hard to get into web3 as a operator for brand you aren't going to have your team go learn how the chain works or how you basically use web3 and same thing on the consumer side like why does somebody have to go create a metamask wallet and a pesos wallet and a Solana wallet because one brand likes one over the other and like how can we just make it like a very simple experience so we launched Taco to kind of solve this problem it's a full custodial service for both Brands and consumers it's end-to-end basically what we do is we launch the games and we try to educate brands on web3 but they really don't care they just want to know are they going to make more money and other customers are going to be more loyal to their brand um that's how I got into web three and I want to ask just before we go on to Max so it's called Taco because you like tacos what what do you put on a Taco where's your favorite taco place uh it's not in Boston that's for sure we're a great City but let's stick to Seafood exactly even Seafood is sometimes questionable but Neptune oyster is safe trees moisture safe it is it is like a tourist trap but the weird thing about Neptune oyster is they actually have one of the best burgers in Boston actually the Marriott down in uh Back Bay has pretty good for the record my favorite tacos pork pork belly tacos gotta go with the pork belly lots of good ones Lobster hobbies in Boston yeah a little bit about how I got into the uh the space um my background is essentially in traditional Finance I've been in wealth management and Commercial Banking Middle Market for almost a decade I'd held three different VP level positions for uh two different International Banks and uh you know back then everyone was in the traditional Finance space and banking institutions were very anti-crypto they were very fearful of it and uh you know they they really uh sort of discouraged us and and our clients and um you know people who were in the traditional Finance space to stay away uh you know they discouraged them from entering the space and uh so a lot of us a lot of people in the traditional Finance space felt like they got robbed of that opportunity I was one of them um so you could say I came into this industry with a chip on my shoulder uh for sure um you know I had dabbled in and out sort of since the beginning but it wasn't until D5 really started coming on that I became really really more passionate about doing this full time and founding my own project and you know applying the principles and the knowledge and the experience from the traditional Financial World in order to create new and Innovative products in the web 3 space you know understanding how Banks work how investment Banks work how commercial businesses operate and how those deals get done it really helped me to come up with new and innovative ideas regarding some of the new web 3 products that we're developing today so that is all really inspiring I think people like to learn from Hands-On examples I want us all to talk about one specific customer or project in a way that we can explain our business model because in web3 it's all about it's all about building but often it actually becomes difficult to you know use web3 products because the industry is so early and I was talking with Christy and how Medici Labs actually makes that possible why don't you tell us about that yeah absolutely so uh when we first started building our product called launch there weren't very many options for an artist who didn't have either a technical experience or a budget to hire a developer to get into this space and as thus like I feel like the current meta of nfts was very obviously very saturated with a certain kind of collection which isn't really how it should be because the nft model is actually a great model to allow artists to monetize off their work so but they just weren't being able to take advantage of it so we started building it and we really wanted to make it community and artists Focus so we talked directly to past clients or like our users to find out what they really needed and a lot of these things were missing from existing Solutions so I think if you're not building for your user that you won't have a successful product especially in web 3 where the market isn't we're super early into the market and people aren't going to join the space unless they're are like usable products that actually solve problems for them I think there's a there's a funny joke that first time Founders focus on their product second time Founders focus on distribution so sort of you know building something and then making sure that people actually need it and it is solving a real problem in this world is something that actually is really important um Z you mentioned that you are you're building what you're building Taco uh its first use case is uh is is implemented in a car wash tell us about that because uh at least at least from my perspective that is something that I would never expect to enter in the web 3 space and that's super interesting yep so when we were first launching we were getting a lot of uh inquiries from Brands who had either sold their nft for like Millions um we actually did this gate for uh nft called Inbetweeners Club they did about 44 million dollars it's a Justin Bieber collaboration basically if you hold the nft you can get a gold chain so I mean if you wanted hype you could go to Twitter you could find hype around web3 and we're like if we're going to build a company that's going to be sustainable to five or ten years we need to find like the most boring kind of product we can think of that has like the least applicability of like web3 and a car wash showed up like perfect nobody had a car wash you know nothing against ageism but you know 80 plus with a caddy wants an nft and they definitely probably aren't going to sign up for a metamask to get this nft so we onboarded a car wash and basically it's complete end-to-it platform for them where neither the consumer or the brand had to figure out what web3 is um as far as the consumer goes they don't even know it's web3 they just know they're playing a game and what we saw was so we launched July 1st they have about 16 locations and we thought no one's going to use this maybe they'll get a few visits the way their game worked is every time you went to four unique locations you leveled up here so their goal was to like get people engaged go to more locations it's a subscription-based product they didn't want people to churn and they wanted to make like the product sticky just like you would like B2B SAS so people started visiting and July 4th of course the holiday on July 6th we got an email saying just so you know we had 25 people visit 16 locations in like five days but like how many times could you get a car washed um to like hit those numbers but transparently we thought maybe there'll be 4 000 nfts will drop at the end of the program which ends at the end of this month so far we've dropped close to 15 000 nfts they've created about 3 000 custodial wallets and some of the consumers on the younger side are now saying well this is great it's in the custodial wallet but how do I transfer it to my metamask like how do I get ownership of these nfts and slowly people are asking them like what is web free so the car wash now has put up a page it talks about what web3 is and it's not thinking of like the next game they want to create for the consumers so for us like doing a car wash getting validation that this is something that not just like can apply to any brand works but even consumers care about it uh was very interesting and they had their kind of case study come out and coined us on the 12th of this month which also the same day Starbucks announced the Odyssey program which is again a massive brand getting into consumers and web free but congratulations and now we do have Boston weather one of of our one of our love to hate them aspects of the city so let's make sure to enunciate as as this comes down pouring on us um max I had two misconceptions when I first heard about acre one was that it was acre because you deal with land you know like an acre of land and I'm sure there is a play on that and two that you're a metaverse company you are not either you actually do a real physical utility for nfts tell us about that that that's correct so uh acre is actually an acronym stands for art Collectibles real estate and experiences that's you know how we came up with the name and uh as you said Jose it's a bit of a play on words you know 40 acres and a mule right everybody understands uh land first question uh typically that we get when people ask about acre World they say oh it's a metaverse project right but it's funny because it's actually the complete opposite you know we focus on onboarding traditional businesses in the real world and tokenizing different aspects of those businesses and onboarding them onto the blockchain and web free so we do have a plan to enter the metaverse as well but you know for us we want to enter the metaverse at a later stage when things are a little bit more established right now it's very early in the metaverse game and there's a lot of horses in the race and so um you know for us we are trying to build something that is sustainable that's a long-term project and really what we want it to be as a catalyst for adoption because we believe that by onboarding web 2 users and investors from the traditional Market into web 3 projects that are based off of traditional businesses that are backed by real world assets that it's a complete Game Changer in terms of mainstream adoption you know because right now what we see is all these copycat projects um you know gaming play to earn metaverse you know we have nothing against that you know we love that but at the same time if we want the space to uh you know to transition to move forward into the next uh phase into the next era and to uh to increase Mass adoption we believe that this is the way to go so and tell us about like the first uh project is it in the Bahamas uh it's actually a resort that we're building right now in Phuket Thailand Okay so uh for those of you aren't familiar Phuket uh is uh the island island just south of Thailand it's the number four tourist destination in the world and uh right now we're working with a resort called Platinum Bay and uh it's a 150 million dollar construction brand new construction uh going up it's been being built for about three and a half years now so it's gonna be ready for the grand opening for Q2 and next year and basically what we're doing is we're tokenizing the resort into an nft collection that offers luxury membership benefits and and real world benefits to its users as well as giving them some exposure as well so um this is our proof of concept uh basically and it's a 432 rooms going up uh right on Kamala Beach so pretty exciting wow that's that's pretty serious yeah so the goal is to have you know if we can we we love the idea of resorts you know because people get a taste of luxury lifestyle and investing in things like hotels or commercial real estate it's normally an opportunity that you really see for um you know Venture capitalists accredited investors institutions right so by fractionalizing those opportunities you can bring them to the retail Market and onboard traditional investors people in web 2. so this is something that we believe appeals to not only people in web 3 but people in the traditional side as well now I think one of the most important things that is often overlooked in a Founder's journey and in web 3 as a whole is this idea of why why do we do what we do not only in our personal Journeys but also for web 3.

The Narrative around the space is that it's decentralized that encourages privacy and fairness and this idea of like transparency and that we actually own what we're part of Z was mentioning that uh in a in the car wash people are actually returning because they are part of something that they're monetarily tied to they're not just a you know it's a one-way parasitic relationship these are all fantastic ideas I want to hear how much we think this is actually going to come to fruition and what we're most excited for with web3 replacing web 2. let's start with Christy yeah um I think a lot of people are very excited about the technology of web free which they should be it's amazing like when I first got into it I was honestly shocked um at some of the things that people are building and they're building because they really care about it which is awesome and some of the technical Feats I haven't accomplished are amazing but I also think that that doesn't mean we have to totally rewrite the wheel when it doesn't make sense to uh something branding itself has this but on web free I think they need to be quite careful about what problem that actually solves as opposed to limiting their Market to be honest so I there it's definitely a balance and there are a lot of great things that web3 brings like like that Jose mentioned like transparency and fairness but like just like anything they have to be designed quite carefully yeah and I also don't think it would make sense like you wouldn't be able to onboard users if they already had an existing equivalent in web 2 because web3 is a space that unfortunately doesn't feel accessible or safe to people yet so in order to actually move to that point we need to actually address these issues in some way not that there's any one solution but as long as web3 doesn't feel safe it's not going to be adopted unfortunately that's a great answer how do we move towards that idea of safety yeah I mean I don't necessarily have honestly I think a lot of it is about for example I'm super forgetful and I could just like I could totally like leak my own private Key by accident but I think it's easy to say like to dismiss some that particular story is like oh that person just should have been smarter but this is an actual problem that is affecting a lot of users and that's not something that we should disregard especially because you shouldn't have to have a technical technical degree or a technical background in order to use it otherwise there's no point so I really think it does come back to Bringing more people into this space bringing more writers thinkers creatives people from traditional Finance backgrounds like this all makes sense to me uh we need more diversity [Applause] so usually the first question we get is why Taco the second question is why web3 um and and you know we answer that with like three different things uh but before I get to that I just want to make sure do we need to speak louder or can you all hear us with the rain go louder awesome all right because I can't hear myself with the rain um so why web3 so usually there's like three major reasons again this is from like the brand perspective a consumer brand or even a consumer looking at web3 the biggest question or the biggest thing we get back is well can't you just do this with paper can't you just do this with existing stuff so when we look at Wipeout three the biggest opportunity here is interoperability so for example if you own an nft or a token you got from Nike and you got one from a swim club and you got one from your favorite restaurant for us to deploy any kind of gamification or loyalty program or figure out what kind of consumer you are we just have to look at the public blockchain and build on top of that that data is available I don't need Nike's permission I don't need the swim clubs swim clubs permission I could basically create a store that sells amazing banana bread and say anybody who has a board ape can get 50 off my banana bread and it doesn't require any extra Tech right you just build it on an existing blockchain and you're live so permission this collaboration is something that it unlocks the second biggest thing when people think about like why web3 this is like what we saw in the first place last year which is the secondary Marketplace which is you can basically have a Marketplace you can make money on it that's a pretty big driver for a lot of people to do what they do outside of that the third thing that shows up is showcasing so when Tesla launched their cars they had the key fob so you don't have to tell people that you own a test logic all you have to do is put your key on a table and people knew you had a Tesla so when you look at the Next Generation that's coming along uh certainly Next Generation to me Roblox fortnite it's all about tokenized assets you're grinding to win avatars you're wanting to win digital stuff that you can show your friends in this online world or no matter verse so how do you do showcasing in a physical world today it has to be in person but if you look at fast forward five years out your entire identity is now online and some would say that the metaverse is actually here like Twitter is a matter worse or one one form of it is just not you know cyberpunk enough but when we look at web3 like it really comes down to like using the chain for either speed or launch uh verifying somebody has something so for example maybe the car wash no one had to send out physical mailers or Punch Cards nobody had to manually punch card your like claim that you actually did it if you play this out further you could basically do your own you know bring your own wallet where you have identity and you store it so when you think about web3 the biggest takeover that people could talk about is ownership side of stuff so ownership goes into like the money you can make ownership goes into like what you can do with the asset and then also ownership and like you have a piece of the brand how that executes and how you know the SEC is going to come into it later on it's going to be a big game changer for a lot of what to economics mean but when we think about like web3 and why it's important it's usually around these three or four different things yeah I agree with that I think that one of the most exciting things you know when I think about web 3 on the transition from web 2 to web 3 uh personally is you know everybody talks about things like art and collectibles uh right now but no one really well a few but no one really is talking so much about uh things like um you know real estate bonds and other Financial products um so you know myself personally I believe that in the future the majority of real estate transactions for example will all occur on the blockchain I think you know with reduced cost uh increased user accessibility and and ease of use it's just a matter of time before traditional businesses and institutions start coming on you know more and more and more into the space and before you know it you know regular users will be using the technology but they won't even know they're using blockchain right it's like when you open an app on your phone and you start using it you don't know like what's driving you just know that it works right when you open up your iPhone or whatever you know you launch an app people don't necessarily care but they're using it without even really knowing it so I think that's that's where we're headed and it's just a matter of time wow I want to I want to start with you actually what are some of the the challenges you see in this space like getting towards this reality but also just like on your personal uh your personal path you've taken as a Founder like what have been the the biggest obstacles um from yeah from within from your community it is not easy um starting a company uh nor is it building in blockchain sort of this intersection externally sometimes attracts some uh uninformed negative values so I want to hear about that from you sure yeah I think you know laying the groundwork uh for any startup is always a challenge from you know conception to building the team to execution you need a little bit of luck right you got to find the right people the people around you are are so important I can't say enough about our team and how committed they are and how much they believe uh in what we're doing and the vision for the future you know trying to move the space forward and Usher in a new era of nfts backed by real world assets with sustainable revenue streams that are based on uh you know lowering costs and streamlining processes for traditional businesses and it's it's not easy and that's why there's not that many people doing it right now or trying to do it because uh people would just rather launch tokens and do do gaming or metaverse projects and copycat projects so it's hard sometimes to find the true innovators in the space but when you do find those people you got to hold on to them like so tight you know and just don't let them go so I think building the team is uh one of the main challenges making sure you have the right people around you and something I was told as a kid that really stuck with me was you know you never have to try to be the most intelligent person in the room never have to try to be the smartest person in the room because the smartest person is the one who surrounds themselves with the most intelligent people and really brings their team together and connects them um well sad but one of uh you know for me in terms of like a personal challenge that I've definitely encountered is when you're so focused on the project and you're a founder and you're building everything from the ground up you kind of wind up living in a bubble you know and you feel a little bit sort of like cut off from the outside world so um my team really helps me there I get a lot of news from you know outside sources uh from our guys and keeping us updated so you can feel a little bit isolated uh sometimes so it's important to remember to remain connected to the people and the things around you because it's not easy that's really well said and I can relate to that as a you know as a last year uh Yale itself is a bubble but more in the traditional side of that as well as me being very integrated in web3 is a bubble onto itself and so having to you know tell my mom you know I'm going to leave so I can go build something and then telling the people at Yale and then the people on web free telling me to pursue this whole time and actually build what I want it's sort of a clash of the people in bubbles and the uninformed and that sort of creates a lot of problems and that's something that I've also personally dealt with uh so I totally get you there and also finding a team finding your people um you know feel like we're getting in stride now but still looking to you know expand that so absolutely I think you speak for everyone here when you say that absolutely and you know what you have to remember is you're going to get a lot of opinions and a lot of people you can hear a lot of different things from a lot of people there's going to be a lot of criticism along the way there's going to be a lot lot of pundits along the way it's people who just laugh you off they think you're crazy sometimes I wake up I think I'm crazy I don't you know there are days when you feel you feel crazy you know you just have to remind yourself that when you're the first one doing something you know with Tesla for example you mentioned uh earlier is the people laughed you know people laughed at Elon when he first came up with the idea so you just have to remind yourself why you're doing it why you believe in it and just keep pushing you know don't give up that's my advice to other Founders other creators you know the heroes of web3 out there just remind yourself what drives you why are you passionate about what you're doing why do you believe in it and why is it important to you and as long as you hang on to that it's just going to motivate you and drive you every day that's that's really well said I wanna I wanna say two uh little factoids the first is that in the web 3 based on the number of users right now we are at the point where the internet was in 1996. we are so incredibly early there are people saying that we can't do it we're crazy and there are people like the Boston Globe our very own who in 2001 during the.com bubble published saying that the Internet is just a passing fad people doubted Tesla people doubt these things because they're new and scary so our priority should be to keep building and to inform um the masses and make it easier for them to access like this technology so we can all use it and I think that's lying that is great advice to Founders listen and always make your own opinions without bias but do not let people do not let a spectator make decisions in your own life I want to hear I want to hear Z your thoughts on this and your and your journey as well we went into a lot of different directions so I'll pick one whichever one you want so I think when we look at how early we are like I try to think through like when internet or web pages first came out you wanted a website it was ten thousand dollars a page so five pages was 50 Grand I think that's how early we are right now with like what people charge for helping somebody get into web 3 or like a brand trying to use web3 and then of course I think in our space and like what we do there's probably around five-ish or so competitors and we're so early that we don't really compete with our competitors we compete with the status quo this is like Brands who aren't bought in yet um where I think right now the mission is to just get those Brands over to the dark side like you said um so I think like getting that Journey set up is really what makes it fun for us so you and I mean we talk to investors we talk to Brands there's a lot of knows there's a lot of yeses probably no more no's than the s's but at the end of the day we just ask oursel are we still having fun and as long as you're having fun building in web 3 you should keep building I've shut down a starter before uh it's not fun but you also can't have horse blinders on so in web 3 the biggest uh thing that's going to make it work is going to be the traction and this doesn't have to be your traction this is going to be how the market moves into webspray themselves and you have to pay attention to is it now or is it not now or is it never uh so my previous startup was in the audio space I'm sure someone's been on a clubhouse room before so mine was called space uh I don't see a lot of people talking about Clubhouse anymore but that's one of the reasons why we shut down because Kobe came out and we realized that audio wasn't really a product for today it could be something in five years could be something in 10 years but we shut down and moved on with web3 we're seeing enough changes in consumer Behavior where it's more than a fad but if it doesn't come to you know doesn't actually get to a scale it should get to in the next five or ten years uh you don't want to put your entire 401K savings and keep building yeah okay so I feel like we covered a couple different points there among um and I just told I totally agree I think the a struggle for us we're a very small team um CEO is a protocol Dev uh CTO has background in Quantum Computing I'm an engineer as well so we're all technical so we and our head of strategy Colin recently joined so but before Colin joined we were all Technical and we built a lot of things that oh this is cool we should build it and very quickly realize that there wasn't a market for it so I think that definitely goes back to the market and the usability aspect of it unless this web3 solution is solving a problem actively that web2 doesn't then there isn't a huge there isn't a lot of motivation for the market to sort of pivot that way so and it's really difficult for us and it really depends I totally agree that your feedback can really differ depending on your audience and your bubble for example when I sort of when I talk about what we do in web 3 spaces everyone gets it they're like okay yeah nfts I understand what that is but then when I talk to artists who are trying to make a living who are so curious about how to put their art in the space but don't know how they're like what makes an nft different and being able to sort of make that process easier it really feels like it's totally different when you speak to your users versus like I guess more of your peers not that either are like more valid than the other but I think when we started building for our users was when we really started to find our footing a little more we definitely pivoted in that sense I want to take it to a bit of a lighter note now this does not need to be about the company what is time that you're excited about looking forward to in the next week month year what is saying that would it what a sign that you're excited about Christy yeah so I mentioned earlier I'm a part of git coins fellowship program for web 3 kernel and we're on week one right now and I've been really enjoying it so far Jessica thank you just because um it was it's been so interesting speaking to all these people who I just feel like most people in Colonel they're not just a developer or they're not just an artist they're an artist who's also interested in this specific aspect of web3 or they're a developer who like feels really strongly about art um so that's been really nice to have that sort of the freshness of perspectives and I think Colonel has just been so they really emphasize the openness and the learning part of web3 and trying to make it a more inclusive and exploratory space so I really like that it's a really it really makes you feel like you're trying to determine the rules for the new internet or the new world and um it's just so nice to be with like such empathetic people congratulations thanks so mine has nothing to do with tech um if you actually look at my Instagram which is the same as my Twitter handle I travel for food experiences and basically I just travel for like two weeks and eat food in that country so next week I'm actually going to South Korea so I'll be there for two weeks just eating all the Korean barbecue I can have but then later this year I'm going to Miami for art bezel we're all you know Miami goes with nfts and blockchain but I'll be having tacos there so that's kind of what I'm looking forward to awesome yeah for myself traveling is a big passion of mine as well uh you know can't wait to get back to Southeast Asia Thailand it's so beautiful if you've never been I can't recommend it enough once you see the sunset there on the beach it's something that can really move you and you know bring you close to tears reminds you why you're alive you know what what you have to be happy about what you have to be grateful for but because a lot of our projects that we're incubating are international you know I have the pleasure of traveling around the world meeting these amazing so many amazing people whether they're in web 2 web 3 and just getting to know them food definitely can't uh you know you never eat better in places like Thailand Italy you know so definitely yeah I'm trim but I can eat a lot we'll see if they have tacos in Korea yeah I don't know about the tacos in Korea but if you can get them here you can get like uh Korean Style Korean yeah yeah Korean barbecue yeah it's awesome um but definitely uh just traveling I love meeting new people uh networking uh with uh you know people from various backgrounds and you always learn something from from everyone that you meet so I love traveling and I'm excited to get back Boston's home but you know you gotta have a home away from home I'm gonna add on to both of what you said both traveling and food and at an extra destination for food and that's my home country of Colombia so I'm going to Devcon and eat Bogota uh in two weeks and if you're going there would love love to meet up so that's what I'm excited for the food the country the family and of course the actual ethereum conference and last question I have for everyone um I right now like many and I'm obsessed with House of the Dragon uh I was a Game of Thrones Maxi and now seeing this new series for those of you who don't know it's a new series on HBO uh based off Game of Thrones uh I am super excited about it if anyone here I would I would love to talk about episode four and five I'm I'm obsessed talk to me about what's your favorite series right now or what is something that you do for fun uh how's the dragon definitely uh you took the words out of my mouth um I'm trying to think who my favorite character is uh probably Damon because he's the I like them yeah he's kind of like the villain or you don't really know if he's the villain or the hero you know yeah and uh sometimes you feel the same way you know sometimes they say there's a little bit of a villain a hero and everyone at times you know and uh sometimes you you sometimes it pays to be the bad guy as well but I feel like we'll see where it goes in the end he might end up being the heroes so the most recent series that I watched was actually a South Korean drama called tomorrow you should check it out it's pretty it's pretty light-hearted to spawn so I watched that recently but if I'm not eating or building Taco then I'm out watching Netflix and horror movies uh something I've been doing for fun recently as I've been traveling a lot I just went to Rhode Island for the first time this summer and I was I was told I felt totally in love it was just so great I had like for as long as I've been in New England I haven't really explored too much so it was really nice oh and I was in New York for work as well that's not fun very nice little thank you everyone for hearing us I've been Jose from entropy Christie from is he from Taco Max from acre world [Music]