Nader Dabit: Yeah, it was just definitely not expected, but it was very welcome to me, seeing it… Because I was really worried about “Okay, what if I go into this and it’s not what I thought it was?” Or maybe I go into this and I’m able to not really network and create the relationships – or really keep the relationships that I had in the past with people that I really cared about, and I always wanted to continue building those relationships. It is a 24/7 market, but it’s also an accessible market, that doesn’t need anyone to tell you that you can participate or you can’t participate.

[20:14] I think one of the biggest things that is interesting to me around any revolutionary technology is that it really is something that abstracts away something that in the past needed a lot more time, effort, work, and people to kind of make work… And to me, what you’re seeing now, especially if you look at stuff like decentralized finance, where you have these multi-billion-dollar protocols that are doing the same work with about a dozen or two dozen people, that in the past would have taken orders of magnitude more people… So we’re talking about thousands or tens of thousands of people within a traditional banking system to operate the types of operations, combining both software and physical locations and all this other stuff, that are now being done and abstracted away by teams of much smaller people… So that really excited me. The fact that anyone in the entire world can create a wallet and get paid really excited me.

One of the things that really excited me at first, honestly, was also the idea of stablecoins. When I knew about crypto, I only knew about Bitcoin and Ethereum, and that they’d go up and down every day like crazy… But in reality, some of the most interesting stuff is happening in stablecoins. And stablecoins are pegged against another piece of value in the actual physical world. And this isn’t that important for people in the U.S, whose U.S. dollar is very stable, but in other parts of the world, it’s actually really possibly game-changing, because if your currency goes up and down like Ethereum goes up and down, or even more – let’s say that it goes down to almost nothing, like it happens all the time, what if instead you could be able to have a very easy way to get paid and hold on to your value in a currency that stays the same?

I think this has really hit home for me, because I had had a family member that was visiting – or not visiting, he actually had to move from Lebanon to the United States as an economic refugee, because all of their businesses, and even their life savings and stuff ended up being stuck in one of the banks in Lebanon, because of the financial and political crisis that they’re having over there… And having a conversation with him, and seeing how someone’s life can completely be ruined almost by the limitations in centralized authorities. A lot of it has to do with money; people don’t wanna sometimes say that money is that important… Most logical people do, but there are people that will say “Oh, this isn’t perfect, so let’s not even consider it”, and then they’re sitting back on their half a million dollar or a hundred thousand dollar a year salaries, saying that “This solution isn’t perfect yet, so let’s not use it.” Meanwhile, people are literally having to flee their home country and lose all their s**t because the thing that may not be perfect would actually have saved them a lot.

I kind of have gone off on slightly of a tangent there, but that is some of the stuff that I would say interested me about this space when I decided to ultimately make the move into it.

Jerod Santo: Very true. Tim, while you were talking there I did find, just probably to trigger your brain on a few of the companies and projects that are using Truffle in production, you do have some listed… To give you some more - you mentioned the Stablecoins, so there’s one called Stable; ShapeShift, which is like a currency exchange. Colony and Aragon, which I believe these are decentralized, democratic organization type of operations…

Gergely Orosz: And then a lot of people just left a lot of real money on the table to join the risky thing, but this risk was not really added there. So if you ask me, just from a pure financial perspective, if you join a startup that’s early stage, you might actually just want to ask for – like, rationally, you might want to ask for a premium. You might want to ask for more base salary, because it’s a risky place, which could shut down, and this could be worth nothing… Which is obviously not what’s happening, but that would be the rational thing to do. But we forgot about this risk.

So there’s a big risk with the startups… And one story of a software engineer who just got really unlucky, because they misread the market - so this person was working… I think it was – I don’t want to say the specific name of the company, but this is a real person, and they were working at one of the… Okay, I’ll just say, like, one of these three: DoorDash, Roblox or Pinterest. I just don’t want to like narrow it down. So one of these three companies, they were working there. And they joined in the middle of 2021, where – I think it was a new grad, or maybe a software engineer, too. So someone with a pretty early in career. And they got a package where it was base salary, and then a bunch of stock; like a pretty good stock package.

And six months later, by the end of 2021, the stock has already gone down for all of these companies by about 50% from just the middle of 2021. There was like these six months where – so their stock package was worth like half. And I think it was down even like 55%. And this person was like “Oh man, I’m only six months in.” I haven’t even vested my first vest, which will be at a year… But you know what - I didn’t sign up for this. My composition went down.” And here’s this cool thing called Web 3, that is doing really well… So this person joined the Web 3 company and negotiated his original package, but in Web 3 tokens; or maybe not even tokens, but equity in that Web 3 company.

[25:57] And then this person got really unlucky - and this is the actual true story - so four months later or five months later, around April 2022, the Luna token collapsed. There was this stablecoin, which was an algorithmic stablecoin, which somehow, some bad actor exploited, and as a result, there was this Anchor protocol that yielded something like 8% or 10%, or I think 18% interest, supposedly risk-free… And the startup of this guy held all their treasury in this Anchor protocol. And so they just went bankrupt overnight.

So there was this guy who left the company that the stock was going down, and it was a rational thing to do; like, why would you stay, when you can just make more money taking a bigger risk? Took a bigger risk, which went absolutely to zero, and I don’t know what actually happened with them; if they went back, or if they went somewhere else… But it was just a chain of bad events.

And then another person – these people find me online… There’s a person who was at Fast, which went bankrupt, and then joined the competitor Bolt, which then had layoffs, and I think they managed to miss that… But it just shows that it is now hard to find the company that will definitely not be doing any layoffs. And yeah, it’s a market we’ve just not seen. I don’t think anyone has been used to – the most common question I get these days… Like, a year ago it was “Hey, which company should I join that pays the most?” Now the most common question I get is “How can I evaluate companies that don’t have [unintelligible 00:27:31.14] layoffs?” And this last question is hard to answer, because I for example really thought for a long time that Meta will not do layoffs, because I looked at their bottom line, their profits… They’re a money printing machine; they still are. And they still did layoffs, because – I mean, we can go into that… But their profit was just dropping, because their revenue was flat, and their costs were going up, and shareholders will not take any of that, and their stock price was collapsing… Which - if they would have not done layoffs, they would have seen a lot of attrition. Because a lot of people are just – people I talked with at Meta, they’re just really unhappy, they’re gonna make a lot less money in 2022 than they did in 2021 because of their outside stock packages.