I'm Philipe Medo, originally from Lisbon, Portugal, and I lead product at Talon Protocol. The interesting backstory is that I studied computer engineering like probably most people in crypto, but I actually ended up going in a different direction. I actually started DJing and when I quit my job and like burned my suit like I say and then started DJing and getting some recognition for it. Nike at the time sponsoring like non-athletes as well. So these are musicians, actors and DJs.
Um, one year one of the campaigns they were doing for the World Cup for the main star of the country, in this case Ronaldo from Portugal to be side by side with like real people from their country and [music] non-athletes instead of using like normal models. They picked like 10 people from Portugal to shoot with Cristiano and Madrid. And then I ended up making the final cut of three that actually got their face all around the world in all Nike stores. And that was like my [laughter] um very short modeling career. My cases was interesting how I got into crypto because it was the solution for the problem I needed a solution for.
What I plan to do [music] was sell shares in my sobatical as a way to help fund it but also mean that they had a stake in it. But then my co-founder had this idea of actually investing in talent in the core idea for the talent protocol was the ability to invest in people that you believe in. And then at the time we saw that crypto was making it possible for people to invest in people they believe in. One way to explain talent protocol is almost [music] like an economic engine for reputation. Making sure that talented people get the recognition that they deserve and that they don't need to be [music] selling themselves.
They don't need to be great at uh writing a resume. They don't need to be great at uh posting on LinkedIn or talking good about themselves to be found. So your work [music] should speak for itself and that's what we try to do. One of the hardest things was actually having success too early. We started building in a bull market that [music] our idea was simple enough to get people excited.
Everything is going super well and then realizing that most of this is not actually true. And then restarting after that was tough. But luckily starting in the bull market allowed us to fund [music] raise with good conditions and having a treasury that uh made us last until now. We've been building on base since the very first um days and I think since day one that we felt support from the team but mostly it's about uh being aligned in terms of values. It's been um a match made in heaven so far.
There are a bunch of things that are um important for us. I would say that since the [music] beginning that transparency is is one of those. This idea of building in public since day one and being very open about what you're doing is also the kind of builders that I think will not only win in the future, but also the ones that are benefiting the most from our product and protocol. So we look at the hundreds of different data points but I would say the main categories are GitHub of course but also a lot of the credentials that you might have. So hackathons that you participated in, hackathons [music] that you won, accelerators that you were a part of.
So basically we calculate the score based on all of these data points that make it easier for people just to find out [music] quickly who the talented builders are. My advice to new builders is to first start today and then to build in public. The shorter the cycles, the more feedback you'll get, the faster you'll be able to progress. In 5 years, I think it's a likely scenario that we have 10 times more builders than we have today. With the help of AI, talent protocol will be very helpful for all these builders to find the opportunity that they need to find.
Hi, I'm Philipe, one of the founders of Talent Protocol and I'm building on base.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.