#144: Talent Protocol, web3 in Lisbon, HR/Ed-tech, DeNites with Pedro Oliveira
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Kia ora, ni hao and hello. Welcome to the Chewy Journal Podcast. I'm your host, Camille Yang. My guest today is Pedro Oliveira. Pedro is the co-founder and CEO of Talent Protocol, a web-free professional platform where builders and creators can create their own on-chain resumes and find the meaningful connections and support they need to succeed.

I met Pebble in person when I moved to Lisbon and participated in many Web3 related events and conferences organized by him and his company. In today's episode, we discussed Talent Protocol, why Lisbon become a Web3 hub in Europe, and HR-Aid technologies. I hope you enjoy the show.

I'm super excited to dive into the intersection of Web3, HR and talent with you today. Thanks for having me on the podcast. It's a pleasure. We've known each other for a while now.

and just being able to contribute, absolute pleasure. Let's start with some fun questions. If you had a chance to recruit some superheroes from the Marvel or DC universe for your Web3 startup, which heroes would you choose for some key roles like lead developer or community manager and why?

That's a good question. I would say immediately the first character superior that came to mind was Iron Man. Mostly because behind the character there's a scientist with a lot of character, which

which I like. So I would go with my first emotional pick. My gut pick was that one. So I'll stick with my guns. Yeah, he will be very powerful. I think for him alone, he can operate the whole company very well. For sure. Or multiple companies at the same time, more like. Yeah. I know there are so many people very skeptical about Web3.

Could you explain the concept of Web3 and how your company, Talent Protocol, fits into this new paradigm of decentralized technologies? I think the skepticism comes from the fact that crypto, Web3 has been packed with a lot of trading mindset. Who likes Wall Street, right? So it's kind of like the same sentiment.

but towards a different demography. So I kind of understand the negative vibes about Web3, but

You got to really understand the technology to understand what's the driving force behind it. That's blockchain. And blockchain solves this super old issue, which is the Byzantine generals problem, where the Byzantine generals would work to solve, to save the Byzantine Empire.

but they wouldn't trust each other. And that's a problem because then the empire wasn't safe. I mean, at some point it ended, but it was always an unsolved problem until blockchain came in and created through technology a way for people to trust each other based on distributed system, you know, private keys, public keys. My background is computer science, so it's not...

something that is super new for me. But the technology itself, from my perspective, is fascinating. Bringing in these distributed systems with economy concepts. And there's this mysticism, you were talking about superheroes before, there's this mystic behind it with the first paper on Bitcoin.

peer-to-peer Bitcoin, which was like, who did it? Nobody really knows. There's this mystic behind it that I think kind of fuels the whole thing in a way, some people at least. But I think to answer your question, we've had different evolution waves for the web, for the internet, as we know it. The first one was a slow internet,

Not many people had access to it. The sites were very clunky. The utility was limited, but it was still great. And then we had a second wave, or we could call it Web 2, where the utility was there, whether it was gaming, whether it was e-commerce, whether it was social, it was just there. And I think Web 2 is the evolution of that by decentralizing the powers of technology

the previous two internet evolutions. And I think with WebTree, we're still in the very early days, we're still figuring out utility. But I think it makes not only is an evolution of the internet, but I think it's an evolution of society. We both, me and you, we have been exposed to Western cultures and

currencies that are more or less stable. Stable currencies. Even though you travel a lot more than I do. But I'm more based in Europe, in Lisbon in specific. And we are kind of privileged. We got a currency that is...

More or less stable, but I deal with people from all over the world, especially South America, Africa, Asia, through talent protocol where their regional context is very different. They don't fully trust institutions that govern.

themselves, that govern them and much less the financial institutions as well. Web3 is a transformation not only of the internet but of society in general. For them the utility is clear because Web3 is not an opportunity, it's a need on the day-to-day basis.

So yeah, I think with Talent Protocol we're trying to support talent anywhere. We're trying to help talent succeed and find fulfillment, find their purpose in life, especially those building in WebTree. And we have multiple ways we've been doing this. One of them you've been part of, which is the Talent House scholarship program where we bring people from all over the world to attend their first

web tree hackathon or conference and just understand more about this

ecosystem and bring opportunities to them. I think we've done a good job at it. We've brought dozens of people. Obviously, we're sponsored by amazing partners like Protocol Labs and Celo that allows us to have this program. And we've been able to do it, and it's a good way to support our mission.

Keep in mind that whatever I told you about talent protocol, I didn't mention blockchain. Because when you're building, imagine you were building Uber or something like that, you wouldn't say, "Oh, we're building a Web2 app." No, you're building an app to call taxi drivers or a substitute of a taxi driver. I'm not telling you we're doing a blockchain app or something.

Blockchain is involved because the things we do with talent, they go on-chain. So we're working on reputation on-chain. But keep in mind, when I did the pitch, I didn't mention blockchain. And I think that's the way to go. I mean, it's a natural evolution. And when you realize it, yeah, it's supported by blockchain, but awesome. I mean, and that's when you know we're there and we're not there yet.

Yeah, I know your background is in computer science. I see a lot of tech people, they're not that interested in HR or talent. So what motivates you to build this project? And what's your passion from like caring about people and caring about talent? Part of it is the way I am. Part of it was luck. It just happened. I think many careers have this

you know, luck component or random component, which is fine. And I just embraced that. The fact is, this is my talent protocol is my fourth startup. And the four that I've created so far, three of them were in the HR technology space.

So is that a coincidence? Probably not. So my understanding is that I've always been a people person. I think that, well, obviously I love technology. I think that's kind of the baseline for everything I've done with my life. But I think it wasn't like I woke up one day and, oh, here's my purpose. I think I just step by step.

started to understand, oh, this is actually something that really works for me, really triggers me in a positive way, which is building products, which is something I love. Not only like the technological part, but the product itself, you know, finding the fit between

product and market fit. That's what drives my energy up. But from a purpose perspective, that's when I started to realize, damn, I really enjoy long-term when I help people be more productive at work or find their purpose in life. So

it doesn't sound bad if i dedicate myself to that plus it it's not a narrow perspective it gives a lot of space on things to to build things like talent protocol like um i was doing a sabbatical which

which I recommend if anyone listening, if you have the chance, if you have the privilege and opportunity to do that, I think it's a fundamental moment in your life to take a step back and enter, go from focus mode to diffuse mode and allow your brain to just explore things you wouldn't explore in a normal setting.

And before I started Talent Post Gold, it's what I did. But anyway, to answer your question, it kind of happened randomly, but I started to understand gradually this makes sense for me, it's what I enjoy. So I'm going to double down on it.

And I would do this every time and here we are. Maybe I'll change my mind in the future, but I remain confident that at least for the next five to ten years, this is the space that I feel I can contribute. Yeah, you know, the development of AI is such a buzzword now. And a lot of people say, oh, AI will

replace our jobs and there's gonna be a huge unemployment rate raising up. So what's your opinion about that? Compare AI with human being, human resources. I think history tends to repeat itself just with different flavors or different sounds.

if you want to have a more musical approach to the phrase. I think this has happened before, just the pace is so much faster and we are more, as humans, we are more interconnected than ever. So it just seems chaotic and faster because we are exposed to a lot more information. But this has happened before in the industrial revolution, in the internet revolution. It's just one more. I'm using it every day.

Again, it's all about utility. I'm using it every day. AI is not something new. Artificial intelligence is a decades discipline. I mean, over since even before the Second World War. So it's almost a century that the discipline exists.

it's just that now we kind of have the balance where we have nice experiment across with the good models with machine learning models and with you know pretty interesting data sets so i think we we reach a point where the utility just emerged and honestly i think some of the jobs that got axed

Like let's say a translator or something like that, or simple translator. I think those jobs were already being axed away. I think like, I know you translated a book from Jordan Peterson, but I think that that involves that job. If you were to do it again now, I think you could embrace AI, whatever the tech was, open AI or other, and do it in a

in a more productive way and have more effectiveness. I don't think it removes the human from the equation. I just think some humans will embrace this new tech, some others will be left behind. For me, I love it. I think it's going to help, again, going back to my purpose in this life,

helping people be more productive at work, AI. The way we know it now that is very visible and present in our life, it's just that. So I'm using it every day. My wife, she's a developer. She's using it every day as well.

So very happy with where we're going with this. Not worried. Again, keep in mind, generative AI is very different from AGI. That's the next level. We're not there yet. But again, it does drive...

Other questions, especially around, you know, what if we reach a point where some jobs, you know, or a lot of jobs won't need human work or human, when I say human work, not just muscle work, but brain work as well.

uh is our society ready for that i don't think it is i think ours uh we need a new social i was going to say social smart contract but just social contract uh that uh allows people to you know i don't like the term ubi uh because it's very it reduces humans to to basic income it's like

It's only thinking about income. I'm thinking more about, it's not a positive term in my opinion. It's more about, it should be one day we'll eventually, I'll be blunt about this. I think one day we'll live in a society where being unemployed

It's cool. It's almost like taking a sabbatical. It's actually quite good. Oh, you're an employee. Awesome. I mean, what are you going to learn next? Have you been having fun? Where did you go the last three months? It just becomes different. I don't think we're ready for that. I think our society is too revenue-driven and it needs to be more ownership and revenue or mixable.

of those two. But anyway, it's just a very strong, very long philosophical conversation to have. But all in all, to answer your question, AI, bring it on. Let's do this. It helps us be more productive at work. I'm very excited. I recently listened to a podcast. Kevin Kelly is on Tim Ferriss' podcast, and they talk about AI won't replace technology.

but just to finish the task. Not to replace the jobs, but to replace the task. So they can help humans finish those unnecessary tasks that take up a lot of time. So we can more focus on doing some creative projects, which is such a good thing for human beings. We don't need to do this repetitive. For example, like translation. You know, it took me at least half a year to translate drafts.

Jordan Peterson's book. I think with ChatGPT now, I probably only take one month to do it. That's awesome. That's awesome. And then the other five months?

you could be focusing on something else you know i can't do something exactly so that that's the the the whole point i think you know sometimes i think we humans we don't challenge ourselves we're not ambitious with ourselves we have a very powerful brain yes it does it's limited because usually sequential only one thought at a time people who have when i say people who have are doing two things at the same time it's not it's only one at the time

I look at tools like GPT, it's almost like having a second brain. So I'm very bullish on AI and as you said, I mean,

But even today, I mean, I write a lot of stuff for either internal or external and even for legal decision making and fiscal decisions, I'm using GPT. Obviously, if there was a lawyer in this conversation say, "Oh, but take it easy because..." Yeah, sure, sure. Of course. I mean, of course, obviously. But yeah, it does help. It does help.

be a lot smarter. Yeah, exactly. I see so many talents move to Portugal in these recent years. So as a local Portuguese, why do you think people pick up Portugal as a destination, especially people working in tech and Web3? Cam, I wish I had like, yeah, this was part of a grand strategy that was designed 50 years ago.

The answer is no. It just randomly happened. It randomly happened. I'm glad it happened. Like, like I'm not saying, Oh, just because it's random. No, we're embracing it. So it's cool. Uh, it does come with some caveats, like, you know, a lot of, uh, pressure on local rents for, for, uh, locals or people who have lower incomes. So there, there's, there's that, but all in all, I think, uh,

Portugal, Lisbon in specific, but Portugal in general, kind of

It was a combination of factors. So I think the rise of... So we had this huge globalization path, right? And the recent years, since 2015, I think we can coin back to 15, this kind of was attacked by different forces, okay? The positioning of Portugal...

together with some events like Web Summit moving to Lisbon. All these things compounded into something much bigger than the country itself, where Lisbon right now is one of the hotspots when it comes to tech. And I would say almost like Singapore is for Asia, Lisbon is for Europe when it comes to WebTree.

Kind of like if you're not in Lisbon and you're working in WebTree or if you're not coming at some point, it's weird. And you're working in Lisbon.

At the same time, we had a lot of people because of Brexit, a lot of Brits or people were living in the UK. I was one of them. I was in London in 15. I moved to London pre-Brexit and then I was there during Brexit. And then after Brexit, I was like, first of all, my previous business was around recruitment and bringing people to the UK from the EU. So when Brexit happened, that depleted our pipelines completely.

I mean, that just stopped making sense to business. So we had to adapt. And we adapted by, you know, let's help UK businesses hire, you know, near shore, offshore, like from Portugal. And more than near shore, offshore, just be part of the ecosystem. Move there. Move there. So we had a lot of startups that moved there.

to Portugal or created like a second satellite. So for me, like Brexit is another situation that happened that Portugal didn't plan or anything, nobody planned.

but it helped because a lot of UK internationals moved to Portugal. And also this whole Trump, Biden, all this thing. Also a lot of Americans moved to Portugal and a lot of people also from Brazil. So it became this melting, super melting pot where you just have talent from all over the place. I think you are an example of that. But there's some...

Verticals that are more attractive than others. And WebTree is one of them. It just somehow became a beacon of talent. It's calling talent in. It's just non-stop. But yeah, it all started, in my opinion, I can coin it back to WebSummit, moving to Lisbon.

And it's just a snowball effect. After that, compounded interest and opportunity. And we are where we are. And I think it's going to continue. I see a lot of people now moving to Lisbon, staying a few months here and then buying a place 40, 45 minutes away.

from Lisbon. And this also drives opportunity for those regions which were kind of abandoned or left behind. In this way, they have a new life. So it's very interesting to see this new wave of income immigration. Very interesting. Yeah. Before I moved to Lisbon, I was in Aveiro for five months. I was doing a music festival. Yeah. It's nice to see

see some outside areas from Lisbon. So you can really see what local Portuguese people are doing and what the local culture there. And you can really feel like, oh, I might belong here or not. Because in Lisbon, I feel like it's more like multicultural city. For example, just before our recording, we were at a talent branch and I met two Chinese girls. One was living in Canada, one was living in Germany. They all moved here.

I never see so many Asian immigrants in other European cities, especially in tech, and female. So I feel like Lisbon is such a multicultural and diverse city. It helps that it's a safe place as well. Local population is calm and with

The culture is calm as well. Again, we need to pay attention because all these changes can create some sort of backlash. But all in all, I think we have a lot of interesting people moving in. Sometimes they are working to companies abroad, which is fine. A lot of Portuguese people are working to companies abroad.

So it's the same, but they also move in and set up new businesses and hire people. And, you know, just it's again, it compounds. So all in all, I think it's been very beneficial. My only concern besides the backlash or not a concern, but somehow it's a bit painful to realize that nothing was planned. Maybe the only planning at the beginning was with the Web Summit.

You know, that negotiation period with Patty from Web Summit was, I think it took a little bit. I don't remember how that process went. That was kind of planned, but I don't think there was a macro plan. Again, I'm down with that, but...

Could have been better plan. Can you tell me a little bit about your team structure? Because you are very into HR. So when you recruit your team, how it works and how it's structured? So with our team, it's a good question. So when I started Talent Force Golf, I had to learn a lot of new things. And when I mentioned what's different about WebTree is not only the evolution of Internet, but society in general, work as well.

So, for instance, you can go on my profile on Talent Protocol and you can see that I want to step down from the CEO role in the next three to four years, right, until 2015. Hopefully, I do a good job or we collectively do a good job, which allows me to step down.

It's very weird to see something like that in, let's say, in a non-web3 landscape. You wouldn't see this naturally. Or if this would happen, it would be very weird. I've seen it happen in a lot of places like Gitcoin, the founders, ex-CEO stepped down where the community took over.

What we're doing is essentially a centralized process until we become a decentralized organization. So we have a very decision-making, most of the work is being done by a core team, a team of core contributors, but our roadmap is to eventually become a decentralized autonomous organization.

aka giving back power to the community where they would govern themselves based on token and smart contracts and they would be the ones calling the shots. Because we don't, I mean, it's not from night to day, right? You take baby steps to get there. So we're already doing some of those community votes like which chain to go to next.

or we have this season KPIs, can you vote the most important to the least important? So those things we can do because we have community NFTs and people, even though we haven't launched our token yet, our community token yet, we do have community NFTs called TalentMates where people can use them, they represent their membership in the community and we can use that for voting. So

The way our team works is going from centralized to decentralization, but also we're building in public. So you can go on our Notion, you can check the team calls.

We try to make it as public as possible. Open source as well. I mean, the other day we had a couple of pull requests from random people. Some pull requests just found a typo. But, you know, it's awesome. I think being open is awesome. It is a trade-off between...

I think there's a mixed trade-off between startup and building a public because as a startup, you're always building new things. And there's a trade-off with building new things, but also making sure the things you've built are working seamlessly.

But also with building in public, there's a third angle, which is making sure that the documentation is all on point. Right. And to trade off, I don't think you can do all these three. Right. I think over time you need to pick your battles. Let's do more of this. Let's do less of that.

So it's always a trade-off between these three, almost like a trilemma, but not really. Yeah, I see. And how did you meet your co-founder? Not just in Web3, but in every startup world, it's very essential to find the right person to work with. So how does your decision-making process look like when you pick up a co-founder? Yeah.

I think from, I've been in the HR tech world for a long time and my previous startup was in tech recruitment. And I have to say, tech recruitment, recruitment in general is very hard. But when it comes to founders and founders dating, it's probably the worst type of recruitment.

The person you're "getting in bed with" will bring a lot of liability and financial risk to you personally. So it's a lot of weight on their shoulders, on yours. I think the best thing to do when it comes to founders dating or founder recruitment is to really understand if they are aligned when it comes to values.

But also, I think it comes with time. I mean, if you're a first-time founder, the probability of you doing it wrong is very high.

But I think with time also you understand if that person from a work perspective, from a values perspective, they are aligned with you. And also how does that fit in the long run? A lot of people don't think about things like equity shares and stuff like that. The split, equity split. They only think about the moment and what happened in the past.

but actually equity is a representation of financial and economical representation of potential of of the company uh of the organization and i think it's more important to think about the the future you know a lot of founders i see a lot of mistakes where they're only thinking okay we'll split the company like this because of the work we've done when the most important thing is but what's going to happen next okay who's going to put in and also because you want people to be incentivized

all in all is very complex so best thing to do is that you create some some or you have some level of trust with these people uh before a lot of founders meet us at school okay at school university it's it's very common why because you've been through the hoops together and uh i mean just build that trust initial trust and uh with the philippe is my co-founder we knew each other from from uni

And we always kept in touch. We've done a couple of projects together, which also helped keep not only in touch, but also rebuild and keep building the trust. And when the time came, when I was doing my sabbatical, I had the idea for Talent Protocol. He was one of the first people.

that I called to chat about it. We have another co-founder that is now an advisor. That one was introduced to me by yet another advisor, but I didn't know him before. And Francisco, which is the CTO and co-founder today,

We worked together in my previous startup. So I knew him for a long time and always kept in touch with him and the trust has been built. So my two co-founders right now, they are people that I've built trust with before. I think trust takes time. It's not from day to day that will happen.

And again, founder dating, founder matching is very, very, very, very, very complex. Yeah. I think I met Francisco today because I spotted his shirt, his talent house. He was wearing that pink shirt.

Finally, I meet all three of you. Yeah. Speaking of a talent house, I was in the first one, I think in Barcelona. It was such a fun experience because I never got a chance to go to the Web3 conference. And I even meet people from Brazil, Russia, so many young talents there.

So can you give me a brief introduction about how do you come up with the idea and how the journey goes with the Thailand House? So it goes back to our mission. So our mission statement is very simple. Helping the next generation of builders, especially those building or wanting to build in WebTree, help them achieve success and fulfillment. Now, there's multiple ways to get there for this mission.

And we've been involved in the Celo ecosystem since the very beginning of Talent Protocol. Because one of our advisors is a big fan and the tech is quite good. And it's almost gasless when you use the chains. It's very easy to use, very easy to build on top.

When it came to Barcelona, they were doing their Celo Connect, which is their year event where the Celo community comes together and builds together and just enjoys themselves together.

And I remember like three or four weeks before, I knew we were obviously going to go there, me and Philippe. This was right after COVID started to settle down. So I was quite excited to, okay, finally proper traveling for conferences. It's a thing again. Awesome. Let's do this. And we were going to give a talk at the conference.

which was awesome. But other than that, I mean, we're going to be there. There's a bunch of activities. We had a retreat with one of our investors. Cool. But I told Flip, we're missing something. You know, like there's something missing. You know, like we're not taking advantage of this. It's just, I don't know. Something is missing. Think about it. Sleep on it. Let's talk tomorrow. Good. And then the next day, Flip comes through with, I had this idea. Yeah.

you know, why don't we, we now have a growing community of talents, why don't we bring them together to go to their, you know, first hackathon or conference in Web3. And I'm like, that's a great idea. So how do we do this? So long story short, in three weeks,

Three, four weeks, we set everything up where we got the partners in, you know, Celo Foundation, obviously, companies like Ari, NFT, FlyWallet and others that supported us in this process. We did it collectively with other startups and communities, which was amazing. And then we brought a bunch, a bright bunch together in Barcelona to live together.

well we rented an airbnb we like a quite cool one i guess a nice location you were leaving co-living and attending different types of events and understanding more about the space yeah i can tell you like uh from from we had someone she was working at revolut she moved to uni swap afterwards like uh

a couple months after she was and it has been life-changing moments for many people for almost all talent house alumni it has been a life-changing moment we have this program running all over the world so the next two editions is Lisbon Paris but I've heard Istanbul is on the roadmap Bangalore a few others Africa is also on the on the roadmap for this year

And obviously we have sponsors that allows us to do this. Protocol Labs is one of the sponsors, Salo Foundation is another.

And, yeah, I'm very, very happy about the Talent House because people like you get the chance to, like high potential talent, they get the chance to go to where the opportunity is, learn from it, learn from other people, meet other people, you know, and then the opportunities just appear. And it's amazing. It's a bullseye in our mission. It

It's definitely a bull's eye. It just makes sense. We're now trying to understand like from a gamification and protocol perspective, all that fits in. But I mean, we're doing it with time. Building a product is not a one-off thing. It's an ongoing thing. So we're taking our time and just researching and doing the things that we're thinking the right way, hopefully.

So if people want to be participating in this, they can check out your website. I'll include the link so they can apply. Maybe you'll see them in ETH CC in Paris. I'll be there. So looking forward. Cool. Yeah. You know, in Web3 world, there is a lot of ups and downs, especially downs last year. So how did you cope with it? Have you ever like...

have the thought to give up or facing some tough decisions, especially in the not good year? So I'm a builder at art. So...

What attracted me to the WebTree space was not the trading component. I do understand that for many years trading was the only utility that you would have and stablecoins appeared so that more and more utilities started to appear. But for a while there it was only trading, which is fine. It's still an activity.

And obviously I don't see the world in black and white. You can be a builder, but also have your own portfolio and trade on the side, whatever. Do whatever works for you. So I'm not innocuous to market swings, obviously they do affect, but I try to just keep focusing on my purpose, what I'm building, our community, just making sure we're going in the right place. Obviously,

talking about market swings, I always say the number one priority of a CEO is to make sure there's money. If there's no money, there's nothing to do. You're gone. Keep the company running. Exactly. So number one, obviously a CEO has other priorities, but I would say without money, there's no other priorities. Don't even think about it. So it's almost guaranteeing the presence in order

to guarantee the future. And so basically, when all these things happen, I had to keep an eye open on this and protect our community treasury. So that's part of my job. I think I've done a good job at it. We were able to safe keep our treasury, especially when it came to the lunar crash. You know, call it part luck, part wisdom, whatever it was, we were able to safe keep our treasury.

during those rough times. But also it was tough because we had to make some team decisions, some community decisions on... I mean, we had to change our plans. When the market turned from a bull to a bear market, we had to adapt our plans. I mean, same thing with a company that is launching on a stock market, the IPO date,

It's very important. Same thing when SpaceX, I'm just using another dumb example, but SpaceX, when they launched the rocket to the space, I mean, they got to pick the day right, depending on weather conditions. So it's not only about the rockets, about other things as well.

We're not living in a lab, we're living in the real world, so the real world will affect you. So as CEO, you got to keep an eye open or two eyes open and make sure to protect your community and your treasury. So that's what I've been doing so far.

and um and yeah here we are yeah so what's your vision for the future of talent protocol i think like uh our our vision so first of all we're still like a pre product market fit i'm i think like in terms of north star for for product vision i see

a world where we can definitely measure, help talent measure their success and fulfillment through accountability, but also through competition, which is something we haven't been working on, the competition part. I think humans thrive when they're competing. And I think this, we need to work on these two components to drive talent forward.

I see, well, in terms of product vision, I see a gamified, based on these two components, accountability and competition, gamified experience, platform experience that allows anyone to build their products or, well, it doesn't have to be a product, it can be music, it can be writing, it can be anything. Any creator or builder to just move forward with their career goals. So that

That's where I see us going. Right now, you can do career updates on the platform. That's going super well. It's almost like a viral loop where people update others and then others update others. People just almost like accountability buddies of each other. Very interesting to see that in real time, which is a recent feature we've launched.

And so I'm very bullish on accountability and competition when it comes to our product vision. How we will build this?

Future will tell. We keep learning from our community. We keep experimenting as well. But again, I'm very bullish. I think we are on the right path. We keep having talent just organically, talking about us organically, joining the platform. And it's been an amazing... Because Talent Protocol is only two years old. And these two years have been crazy, crazy, crazy. Let's see what the next two hold.

What impressed me most is you keep launching new features and it's like a very vivid child, we'll say, talent protocol. There's so many new things. Every time I see a new feature, oh, I want to try. And yeah, just keep it alive, which is good. It's good, but it's also, again, a trade-off with making sure what you've built. So it's

I would say just so people like especially new first-time founders don't you know get ahead of themselves which is

i mean you gotta keep you know launching otherwise you're dead in the water but um it's the right balance between uh launching new things but experimenting with them looking at them as experiments and being okay with killing legacy i think a lot of startups die because you're too hooked on the things you've built

And the second part is not only focusing on the things you've built, making sure that the ones that things you build, but making sure the ones you've built already are working seamlessly. And again, it's very hard to do it. And if you had, as I said before, the building public part, then it becomes a nightmare, a living nightmare. But all in all, I appreciate your words.

We keep doing our best. Some of the things we've shipped didn't work. We do a lot of postmortems, a lot. I mean, I've never been in an organization that does this amount of postmortem. It's almost like we're killing bodies all the time and doing postmortems on the bodies. But it's good. I mean, we're learning from that process and documenting those learnings.

So that when we do it next, we can do better. So yeah, let's see where these two years, the next two years take us. But in the meantime, we keep helping talent gain self-confidence, be more visible, be more accountable, be more competitive, drive their goals forward. So I think we're definitely helping a lot of people and that's

yeah going back to my purpose uh uh bullseye on my purpose on my personal purpose yeah so what do you think the biggest different differ you from the traditional professional network platform like linkedin i think i think uh linkedin and by the way we have a great relationship with linkedin uh innovation team they they have

Obviously, they're looking into WebTree. Probably they're now more focused on AI, but they had a lot of focus on WebTree some time ago. But I think from an experiment point of view, our platform is future thinking. It's accountability thinking. Theirs is more about present and past.

They built a recruitment machine basically. So you're the data, they're monetizing your data for recruitment. Any company that needs recruitment, they use LinkedIn, which is great. I mean, it's great business. We don't have a recruitment angle.

on talent protocol. Like, obviously we know a lot of talent and a lot of, you know, a lot of people are either looking for jobs or hiring. We do, we do, like, I think the plan there is to have some partnerships and LinkedIn could be a partner to help with that. Okay. Because we don't want to focus on that component on the recruitment side.

Recruitment is quite hard and low margins and it's very hard to do it right. I mean, no one has been able to nail recruitment 100%. It's very hard because it involves humans analyzing other humans.

that makes things very, very complex. And I think AI, if AI solves that, I mean, then I would say, okay, maybe we'll be out of jobs, all of us, because that problem right there, like that would be, that would be fascinating to watch. Maybe we're closer than I think, which is great. So, yeah, I think that's it. Yeah. So apart from a talent protocol, you are also part of a,

D-Night, like an event platform to connect with local Portuguese Web3 projects and people. So can you tell me more about this one? Like how do you come up with this idea and how it works?

So actually it's a very good prelude to what I want to do with Talent Protocol about my own role because on D-Nights I was part of the leadership team until early this year but then I stepped down because my role was done pretty much so I'm still a member of D-Nights, proud member

um got my nft membership card and uh basically the night started out as what we were talking before with Portugal being so attractive to everyone and every organization in Lisbon in specific and when it came to web tweet it was this times uh 10. uh and we were like

damn, you know, all these events happening in Lisbon, this was like two years ago, uh, all these events happening in Lisbon, EF Lisbon, Solana, um, um, you know, Checkpoint, uh, all these events happening at the same time. Like, damn, it's like, uh,

Let's do something during this period of time, but do it differently. Join the local startups and just do events to onboard people into WebTree and just chill together. And we came up with this concept of D-Nights, decentralized nights.

where we would have like from 7 to 11, 7 p.m. to 11 p.m., we would host events and we'd have everyone chipping in some money.

So, and we did it over the first year, two years ago was, uh, I mean, the, the, there was a, the leadership team was organizing everything. Everybody chipped in, uh, was amazing. I mean, uh, uh, to, to see the, the community come together like that. After that, we were like, well, what if this was more like a DAO where D night DAO would fund, would

We'd fund decentralized, we'd fund communities who want to organize Web3 events. And that's what we did. So my main job as part of the leadership team there was fundraising. So I fundraised over 100K for the demo, which supported a lot of events during the next one year, year and a half.

And then when we did a bunch of them in Lisbon, Porto, Madeira, Braga, all over Portugal. And then when that was done, I talked to the other leadership members. I said, my job is done here. That's where I'm strong and

I want to give the room to someone else to take over. Paulo, which has been in DAOs for a long time, Paulo Fonseca, he accepted the challenge. But eventually the DAO needs to

evolve in terms of governance so we can have like voting on the leadership team or something like that funding you know like it needs to become more of a DAO but when I say more of a DAO it means it needs to become more decentralized and more autonomous as an organization from all perspectives autonomous financially autonomous

from governance models in many different ways. But all in all, it's been amazing. We've brought thousands of people together. People who didn't know anything about WebT, they're like, "Oh, this is actually cool." They even do parties, you know, like, "Oh, nice."

It's such a party, like a local. Exactly. And so such chill environment where you're like, you don't even feel the pressure. You're not going to a workshop or anything. Maybe sometimes we did a panel before something like that. Just if that's, if you really want to go a bit deeper, maybe you can have like some, some learning, uh, components before.

But yeah, we started to test different things as well. Sometimes we would have a co-work day followed by a party. So just a chill environment, get people to make real connections and get into WebTree. And yeah, I think we were able to deliver that.

So you can go on dknights.com and check it out. Yeah. And it's also good for newcomers like me so I can meet a lot of local people and learn some Web3 knowledge as well. Yeah. So what's your advice for young people who want to step into the Web3 world? What's your big advice?

three advices for that? Step one is set up an account on Talent Protocol. Start building your network of supporters, start to build up that self-accountability. I think Talent Protocol is creating a nice experiment for that.

Second of all, don't be afraid to apply for multiple grants that exist out there. And third, to go on events and hackathons and just get building. Don't worry too much about where you're building. Just ship it. Just show it. The more you show to more people, the better it is.

Even if it's part of my French, even if it's shit, it doesn't matter. Just the fact that you're putting out there, exposing yourself is 100x more than many other people. So hopefully that becomes the standard. And yeah, so I think those three things.

would be more than sufficient to, you know, ambitious, undiscovered talent to just resurface and get noticed. Yeah, because you mentioned that you probably will switch to education tech in the future. Yeah, that's my next. So how will you prepare this journey and what gets you most excited about this space?

I think education has always been around the corner for me. Like being in HR tech, it's always there. It's that thing that it always connects, whether it's recruitment, whether it's what we're building on Talent Protocol with all this belief economy, belief economy around talent. It's always there. You know, it's always been there. Now I'm a father.

And I think this kind of changes things a little bit. At least it brings more skin in the game for me. I started just exploring the educational tooling, solutions out there. There's very interesting stuff being built, right? And what I want to do, you know, post-Talent Protocol is just take some time off, do a sabbatical. And this sabbatical will probably be focused on, you know,

a couple of technologies whatever it is then in two three years time just go deep but also is um focusing on a vertical perspective on this edu tech so edtech um component so it's kind of the crossing between whatever technology i think uh it's fundamentally fundamental for me to to learn on a deeper level but also um going deeper in this vertical i think

The sabbatical I did before was quite successful in the sense that I started something new. I allowed myself to go on diffuse mode, so I want to do the same again. Allow myself to go on diffuse mode, hopefully more than three months this time. Just learn about the field.

And then go, go in. I think it can, I've seen a lot of solutions. I think I can execute better. Some of the things, some of the things I love, I think maybe I can execute better, but I want to give me the space, the mind space to learn. And I want to give, you know, I just can give me, it's not like I didn't work my ass off. Like I worked my ass off for days. I give myself the opportunity.

to go into diffuse mode learn but having this focus in in mind so that's where it's coming from uh the the going into this space which is HR tech I look at it as HR tech as well it's not the same but it's it's in the field of you know helping people find their purpose I mean working with kids is very interesting very very interesting that they're in a transformational

moments of their lives and their brains are developing. So it's ripe for helping them educate themselves. I don't want to go into how to do it. I have a lot of ideas every day. I just want to take time, learn, and then go at it again. Yeah. Okay, last question. You mentioned you're a father now. So what's one big lesson you want to pass on to your

Ciao. Yeah, that's a good question. Whenever I get a question in this context, I have this...

tile at home you know a Portuguese thing especially in Lisbon you have the buildings with tiles oh yeah and you paint the tiles and stuff like that so I have one at home because you have these phrases right you write on the tile so one of the phrase that I have there to remind me that's not it's not like I wake up every day I look at the phrase not that but it's there it's there it's an important thing for me it represents a belief and the belief is that

Life is hard if you're soft. So I think that's the biggest thing I want to pass to my legacy is life is hard if you're soft. So try not to be soft most of the times.

Try to make your life easier in essence by not being soft. This can have multiple meanings. I think for me as a meaning, for my kids will have a different meaning. Whatever the meaning is, the fundamental thing is if you don't know anything about it, it definitely will get harder for you. Thanks for sharing that. And thank you very much for your time. We'll see you soon. Cheers. Thank you so much, Cam.