Episode 14 is out: The Anonymous Alchemist with @scupytrooples of @AlchemixFi It's a conversation of both breadth and depth starting with his leap from teaching through to early Ethereum, DeFi, a fast-growing team and a project that reached more than $500M in TVL within about two months of launch. But growth brings intense pressure: security worries, team conflict and burnout. We cover leadership, authenticity in the space, co-founder conflict, anonymity and security, chronic pain and how therapy, physical therapy and time away helped him recover - all revealing the realities of creating frontier tech we seldom honestly share and underscoring the importance of taking care of ourselves and others doing the building: @scupytrooples: "one of my non-negotiables now is just take care of yourself, take care of each other and you can take care of the place by doing so.” Full conversation: youtu.be/29IWDvAdHrU?si=ZP1d…

Episode 13 is live - "Riding Out" with @SuperRareJohn, co-founder of @SuperRare 🌊 A nod to his passion for surfing, the title speaks to the ups and downs of creating one of the best known and most successful platforms for digital art and a core crypto application. We chat about BC (before crypto) times: architecture, civil engineering, a New York ad job and finding his people in the early @ethereum crowd. Pitching SuperRare to 120 VCs. All 120 passed so they built it anyway: "You have to be a little bit crazy..." SuperRare is a family business - John, his brother @SuperRareChar and his cousin @rareperkins...because they already knew how to disagree without it getting personal. Especially when debating about maybe giving up on SuperRare entirely and maybe pivoting into DeFi back in 2019... On the personal side of staying in it through the lows: "This may be pretty horrible, but I know where I'd like to go, and I think it's still worth it to get there. So I'll suck it up and deal with it. Every day isn't a good day, otherwise you wouldn't have good days..." Then October 2020: the first $1M month, the moment it started to feel like this is definitely something. And the honesty of going from the crest of that wave to having to lay off 30% of the team in 2023 - all in public, full ownership of mistakes made while growing. "I think the best learning experiences are always the most difficult." This is the yin and yang of building here. Full episode - youtu.be/C04m_9zqtF8 open.spotify.com/episode/0Mw…

Episode 12 is live - "Growing Up" with @evabeylin She joined crypto because she realised management consulting was just duct taping a broken system and checking crypto Twitter in the bathroom felt more alive than her stable job. Then it was the people, putting her energy into building alongside them felt so much more aligned. But that initial idealism slowly turned into realism - both personally and industry wise. Crypto has had a 10-year experimentation phase and stress test on human behavior: the culture "grew up" because people got more evidence. But experimentation wasn’t a detour, it was the education. She also makes a point we don’t hear enough about: technical fluency matters less than people think. What matters is understanding the framework, learning fast, and knowing how to sell what you build - if nobody sees the product, it doesn’t matter how elegant the code is... As we journey through the past nine years, we also go through her exit from @graphprotocol - five and a half years in, she was burnt out. Not because the mission stopped mattering but because she knew she wasn’t the right person for the next phase anymore. That level of self-awareness and knowing when it's time to end a chapter tends to be rare. So is her answer to burnout: removing Discord and Slack from her phone and a vision of crypto slowly becoming more “9-to-5” socially, even if the rails are on 24/7. Because humans need to set and practice boundaries... Full episode - youtu.be/bKrjn7RxaC0

"Be Less Worse" - episode 11 with @ricmoo is live! One of the most honest and heartfelt conversations about building, open source, crypto and what it means to be human while the world gets weirder... Ric's story starts far from “founder legend” energy: University of Waterloo, Blackberry graphics engine, Kindle work at Amazon. Then a Kickstarter experiment that failed and taught him more than its success probably would have. The early days of crypto - a small, strange community: meetups, random developers, @VitalikButerin, drinks with people who all seemed "normal" until you realised they were all building the future together. Then ethers.js - at first just a tool to scratch his own itch, then millions of people depending on it. The edge and beauty of open source: you build for yourself, then the world shows up and the responsibility kicks in. Throughout the conversation, there's a self awareness and honesty that makes it all incredibly relatable: from admitting he loves being on stage to going off on tangents, to taking a good few minutes talking about potentially killing a frog. This episode is part technical history, part philosophy, part cautionary tale and part frog-related existential crisis. “Be Less Worse” is brilliant - not fake perfection, no moral posturing, just a more realistic goal: make things less harmful, less captured, less broken, one step at a time... Full episode youtu.be/gGM9WoTNnHcBe

Ep 10 is out - High Stadards Build Resilient Ecosystems @kartiktalwar @ETHGlobal Kartik's first ever podcast interview dives into in his background in astrophysics, exploring complex systems and big questions blending into @svangel and the 8,000 pitches that shaped his high standards when it comes to...everything. Recognizing real value, real conviction and the difference between something that sounds good and something that proves it can actually become huge. Hackathons became the perfect environment for fast feedback, low friction and the chance to turn ideas into something concrete - @CryptoKitties was born at ETHWaterloo, @Uniswap and @1inch also sparked during @ETHGlobal hackathons. The thread connecting it all is that ecosystems get stronger when builders and projects share openly, learn quickly and hold themselves to a higher bar: "If you want things to get better, the only way they will get better is everybody is in the same room. And the second you go internal or solo or on your own track, you're bound to just be behind because ideas don't spread that way..." Full episode - youtu.be/49ZmG59hBm0