Taking Time to Think: How Talent Protocol Was Born

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Do you remember when we met, we actually met on a boat. It was a few years ago. You were organizing a festival for jobs. Tell me more about that. [00:00:12] Speaker B: I think that was in 2015. So my previous company, Landing Jobs, which is Attack Recruitment Marketplace, kind of our marketing kickoff was to, you know, let's do jobs on a boat. 1, 2, 3, 4. [00:00:43] Speaker A: Yeah, I think Subvisual was one of the sponsors. [00:00:45] Speaker B: You were. [00:00:46] Speaker A: Don't remember if we actually were already called Subvisual at the time, but that's another story. And yeah, we were. There was great. And I remember that it had a huge impact because I met a lot of great founders there that were doing either working in other companies and then created new companies. So it really had an impact on me. So I think it was a great event. [00:01:13] Speaker B: I'm glad it helped, really. I think back then Portugal and Lisbon was so different. Some things were already. Had already started, some things were kicking off and it was this kind of like pre web summit kind of thing. So you could feel the shift. The vibe was. The vibe was shifting. But he still had a lot of raw talent around. I think we got a bit more refined after that until today. But yeah, all in all was good vibes, good moments. And I have a special place in my heart for that boat. For that boat trip because he actually sailed off for like two or three hours and then he went back up, back to the marine. [00:02:05] Speaker C: So the idea was bringing recruiters, employers and talent together on the boat and then sailing off so that no one can leave for three hours. [00:02:16] Speaker B: No one can leave. [00:02:16] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [00:02:18] Speaker B: We had the contract templates, you know, just like get it done, you know, collect the fees right on spot. No, it was good. It was good vibes. Before we came together with talent protocol, I was doing. Do you remember CTO Portugal? Yes. Small community. AWS was very generous with us financially. And it was like 300, 400, 500 ctos that called Portugal home. And this phrase, ctos that call Portugal home was the outcome of a branding process that we did, me and my co founder of CTO Portugal, Pedro Tor, which I guess, you know, we hired Philippe and you hired the designer. [00:03:15] Speaker C: Yeah, right. [00:03:16] Speaker B: And they helped us kind of brand. Because before it was just a slight group. [00:03:21] Speaker C: A slight group. [00:03:22] Speaker B: Yeah, it was like we need. You started that while you were at. [00:03:26] Speaker A: Landing or before that. You don't remember. You are too old. [00:03:31] Speaker C: Too old. [00:03:32] Speaker B: Yeah. I didn't say it. [00:03:35] Speaker C: When I worked with you, you were no longer. You were doing the sabbatical already. [00:03:40] Speaker B: Yeah, but it was supposed to Be a one year sabbatical. It was like three months. [00:03:44] Speaker A: Yeah, I think we should talk about that. Let's go there. Because we talked and you were still at Lending jobs and he told me I'm gonna take a sabbatical and I'm gonna stop for a year. [00:03:54] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:03:55] Speaker A: And of course I was already totally red pilled by Blockchain and Webtree and I talked with you a lot about it and I think two weeks later you send me a message. I'm doing the sabbatical, but probably this will not last one year. And I think like a couple months later you're starting Talent Protocol. [00:04:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I think like at least I was self aware of my own lack of commitment to the one year sabbatical. So I started this thing called Entrepreneurs Break. Okay, maybe you remember which turned into more when me and the other guys that were doing it, we didn't have the time. It turned into a monthly thing called. [00:04:38] Speaker A: The Break which we organized one in Braga actually. [00:04:44] Speaker B: If you say so. [00:04:48] Speaker A: Don't you remember? I don't think he went. I think we organized it but it didn't work. [00:04:52] Speaker B: We ended up having Entrepreneurs Break in Barcelona and it went out of the country. It was cool. And so that was kind of a thing. Then I had a startup that actually started like with the support of my, with the support of our teacher, our university teacher to build this sort of traveling thing. Like you travel without a ticket. It didn't work out, it was really bad, but it was good experience. And then landing jobs just happened naturally. Almost like a leap faith. I always like to interact with people, help people, support builders, support people that are building people like myself. And landing jobs just happened naturally and I was able to kick off and take advantage of that. Those first moments of startup Lisboa back in the day in 2013, late 13, early 14 and be part of those first cohorts. And many of my friends are from that time that have built businesses that sold to Google or other things like amazing, right? And that gave me a sense of purpose. So I kind of matured and refined and calibrated my sense of purpose of helping others others to build. So this didn't happen. One day I woke up, it was like that's my purpose. It's not like that. It happened very organically. So when I exited landing jobs after nine years of hard work, it was time to take a sabbatical. So I had an accountability body. I had a learning plan for one year. I studied things that I wanted to study for so long because when you're doing a startup. You. You're in focus mode. You know this. You know this. Like, we're in focus mode or founder mode, whatever that is. Like, locked in. We're locked in. Right. And the sabbatical allows you to do the opposite. So you go into diffuse mode. Almost like taking a shower permanently. Yep, that's it. That's the way. That's a good way. [00:07:07] Speaker C: But, but. [00:07:07] Speaker A: But we got the line for the episode. [00:07:10] Speaker C: All right. [00:07:11] Speaker B: And so I learned. Learn, like psychology. I wanted to learn for a long time. Yeah, I remember that. [00:07:17] Speaker A: You know that I love psychology as well. [00:07:19] Speaker B: A great psychologist or a horrible one. Like, there's two options. I would make one. Maybe I'll go there one day. I learned, like, learning how to learn fundamental for kids nowadays. Like, this is absolute fundamental. And then blockchain. Why? Because during my time at Lining Jones, I met a lot of builders that were working in HR technology. So human resources technology, technology for talent. Right. And it always strike me, like, we placed thousands of people on landing jobs, and it always strike me as something like, fundamentally broken with the space, which is we could have done a much better job if we had better data. So it's kind of like the baseline is fragmented, bad data, and how can you do a good job on top of that? So that's why I went into blockchain. For the technology, not for crypto. I went for the technology, and then, well, then the rest is history. That's when probably I started talking to you. And I was like, oh, that's new. Oh, that's new. And I was like, okay, I'm falling in love with this. And then around the same time, in parallel, we were doing the CTO Portugal thing. So I left landing jobs, started a sabbatical. In parallel, I had the Community, which had been running for like, two years or so. And then I left because my tour of duty was done there, and it's still going in the community. And if you go to CTOS pt, you can see the result of the branding process. And he kind of, like, reconnected with Flip, even though we had been reconnecting over the years. When he went to London, I was living in London in the middle of my tour of duty of landing jobs. We reconnected multiple times throughout our careers, but it was with CTOS Portugal where we worked together. And I remember I started realizing that with Quito, not only you can solve the data problem, but it can create incentives for talent. Right. And so we had this crazy idea, what if you can use, like, crypto to invest in talent, increase their reputation. And because we were doing that project together and I respected him as a pro, a professional, like, hey, man, let me just share with you this idea. [00:09:52] Speaker C: And yeah, yeah, curious it was that. That I was also planning a sabbatical at the same time, probably in the same kind of finish, starting a cycle and beginning a new one. At least he got three months. I didn't get any because. Although I was. And that's why we worked together, because I was ready. I was already kind of out of the agency. I was just doing some freelancer projects basically because this was still kind of COVID times. So there was like lockdown. [00:10:21] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:10:22] Speaker C: A big part of my sabbatical, my year plan is traveling and doesn't really make sense to me to start it when I'm locked down in Portugal. [00:10:32] Speaker B: You invited me to a remote work. [00:10:36] Speaker C: Yeah. And like a workshop. So when he pitched me the idea about using crypto and tokens as a vehicle to invest in talent and to kind of to show people that you believe in them, I immediately made the connection with my personal project, which was only about investing in me. And then I think kind of how Pedro convinced me was like, isn't it much more fun to build the platform that allows anyone to be able to do this instead of just building something for yourself and for your project? And. Yeah, and that's good. I was already feeling the sabbatical kind of slipping through my fingers. Amazing, the sabbatical that was so carefully planned. But yeah, I mean, I still have the plan. I can still do it some other time. [00:11:23] Speaker B: It's funny, you said at the beginning that I called you and said, maybe the sabbatical is ending. I remember, like, our co founder Liyal, our CTO that I hired him for landing jobs before. So I worked with him on the topic of careers. We researched the topic of career years on landing job. That's really interesting because it totally connects with this. And then he went to do his. He didn't do consulting, more like software development for a software house in Lisbon. And we always kept in touch. Always kind of like what I did with Flip people that I felt like, okay, they're really cool people. Let's keep in touch. And then with Leal, I said, when you want to leave, just tell me. And that was the moment there when he told me, I think it was like on the second month. I think everything happened more or less the same time. He told me, I think the time is now. And I said, man, sure, great. But hold on for a Few months, please. Because I think I told him the same thing I told you. I think this is doomed. The sabbatical. Something cool he's starting. Something cool that we worked on while we were at landing jobs, like a research project. It's funny to think now, looking back, how old pieces came together, whether it was a boat or uni and then branding or doing research with someone that he worked with and all it came together in a weird way. [00:13:08] Speaker A: It's really amazing to see in detail how different lives and timelines cross paths and something happens. And another take that I noticed is that Talent Protocol is born in a time where you have time to think, which is something that nowadays a lot of us don't have the luxury to do it. We are always doing something, always engaging something, and we don't stop a lot of times to think about our lives, about what we want to do, and allow something greater to happen. And it's really funny because I remember talking with Pedro at the time and knowing his past and how much he understands about talent. And I think we actually talked about it about, you wanted to do a lot of different stuff, but talent was basically what you had done for almost 10 years. So it made sense that you continued to double down on that. And it happened. So now, something that I wanted to ask because people haven't heard it until now. What is Talent Protocol? [00:14:22] Speaker B: It's a great question. Just a quick note before is interesting to understand that there's different ways to start something, a business, a startup. A lot of people go through the pain. Like I have this pain. So painful. Nobody is fixing it. I'm gonna fix it. Maybe that can scale again. I see a lot of. I would say most ideas fall into this aspect. I think ours was slightly different. It's more like there's this dream. Because, I mean, investing in talent is cool. Yeah, it's a dream. You know, how do you do that? You do that in multiple ways. I mean, you guys at Suvisual invest in talent by investing in projects, by investing in startups, by investing in founders. And you also have your own team, so you're investing in a way. [00:15:19] Speaker A: What I feel is that we invest in people. It happens that they are founders, but we are investing in that set of people that will bring more people on board and create more talent and create value. [00:15:32] Speaker B: So Talent Protocol is over two years old. So obviously, and this happens with every startup. What do you think? On our first call, what we thought it was going to be, it becomes something different, it evolves, it reduxes Evolves at for evolution. So our first stage, we have like three stages in talent protocol. The first stage was that kickoff moment, as in, okay, how do we ship this? Let's invest in talent using tokens. How do we ship this mofo? How do we get it out there? So there was like five months of research with a lot of ups and downs, crazy ideas, meeting people from my past, people like you, but meeting new people as well. People like for instance, Sanja that you introduced us to, but other people that they all felt in love with. The concept of being able to be part of someone's journey, not only financially, financially, emotionally as well. [00:16:45] Speaker C: Yeah, I think like you were saying, so most startups start with the problem. I think ours started with the new possibility. So I think it's new, a new way to approach it. Like, what's now possible? What's the possibility? What's the dream? Not so much what's the pain. And also that means it's a little bit of a different problem process. So instead of going deeper on user research, understanding the problem, understanding the friction, how can we remove that friction is a much more. It's a bigger kind of exploration. So here's a possibility. How can we get to that imagined world? And that requires a lot of trial and error, a lot of experimenting, a lot of throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks. So it's kind of a different process from what's normally taught or kind of advised to. [00:17:38] Speaker A: That's really beautiful. I think it's amazing. But I'll say that the fact that you are saying that, it also happens that you knew a lot of pains related with space already. So you are not coming from zero in that regard. So you already knew the space very well. You had a good understanding of a lot of pains that existed there and allow you to focus more. What's the dream that we can build on top? [00:18:03] Speaker C: And I think it's mostly like structural issues, of course, how they affect the people in kind of in, in a personal way. Those are the pains. But we were aware of like the structural issues that are causing these individual pains. And I think the possibility or the dream is much more, okay, how can we bring. How can we build a better kind of infrastructure, a better system, a better structure that will allow for even others to solve this specific endpoint. [00:18:34] Speaker A: And also the plugin into blockchain and the web3 trend, which is a new. [00:18:40] Speaker C: Technology, that's what unlocks the possibility to dream more. [00:18:44] Speaker B: I guess the trigger was, I'm coming from ajar check talent Space. There's this cool tech blockchain. Why isn't this being used more? Why aren't the builders from MySpace looking at this? That was the trigger, that first curiosity moment. And then it became something much bigger than that, like it turns into them. We can actually use blockchain and the crypto. Like, I'm splitting the two because the blockchain guarantees we verifiability of data, portability of data, interoperability of data. Crypto is more on the incentives layer, the community layer. And so then we find out, like the crypto part, what it meant. And keep in mind that all of this is technology that is being developed at the same time. Exactly right. And has improved tons in the past few years. And so we found that, like, now we have this dream. How do we explore it, how do we build it? And that's stage one. And we felt we were onto something when we shipped it in late 2021. We had what I call a moon graph at some point. Not even exponential. This moon is more than exponential. But then the market starting to cool down, the war, you know, Russia, Ukraine kicked in. The markets were starting to cool down. And then we. We got our Mike Tyson moment. You know, we got punched in the face and it was a false positive. I'm glad it happened then because if it kept being a good market, we would keep fooling ourselves, even though, like, obviously we'd keep learning and intuiting. But it was good to get that punch in the face that wake up. And then we had an option, do we go to stage two or we pack our bags and go home? So we had. [00:20:50] Speaker C: Yeah, but maybe let's just kind of share one of the learning. [00:20:57] Speaker B: Stage one. [00:20:58] Speaker C: Which I mean something kind of, because I come from more like the product marketing side and kind of that feeling that you get product market fit at your first try, like you launch and then it's all the way up, is like you feel almost like invincible. And that I think. [00:21:15] Speaker B: And you make a lot of mistakes when you feel that. [00:21:17] Speaker C: But I think that's kind of one of the advantages and disadvantages of crypto. Kind of the incentives separating the signal versus the noise. Exactly. So with incentives is, yeah, we felt like there was organic traction and there was kind of intrinsic interest in the product, but it was mostly extrinsic interest. So people that were, okay, if I do this, I might win something down the line. So that was the main motivation for a lot of people that we didn't fully realize in the beginning. And then, of course, we learned the Hard way. But I think it made, made us much more aware of how to work with these kind of new tools, how they can be used for our benefit, or how can they kind of destroy a product. [00:22:04] Speaker B: The blockchain tech. So we had the dream. Blockchain tech makes sense. Crypto made sense, but not in the way we use it. And then we had to make a decision, do we keep going or we stop here? Stop here means, okay, let's give back to the investors the money that's left. We've always been good at treasury management, by the way, and very good at being frugal, which helps. And we felt we still had it, like energy wise, we still had it. So the next stage is actually quite simple. And there's no massive learning for the next stage, I believe, unless you think there is. I think the next stage was around and find out we fucked around and we found out many he tried and he tried and he tried, man. So we ran so many experiences. [00:23:03] Speaker C: I think there's the learning. There is that kind of the key to success is how many experiments you can make with the money that you have. So you have finite money, how many tries can you have until the more tries you can have, the bigger your chances to succeed. And I think what we learn is how to ship faster, how to have more or less a process to be able to ship faster, what things we can kind of reuse. And also I think the biggest, biggest starting is probably our redux culture, as you call it. So it's, it's almost as important as being able to build fast is to kill fast, because you can, we can build more and more, but if you keep the old stuff, that will slow us down. So it's like not only you need to build fast, but you need to be able to kill fast. Your best ideas and some ideas you really like and you still believe that they can be successful if you just change this or that. But most times it's a hard choice from the outside. [00:24:09] Speaker A: As an investor, you were both an inspiration. And I use your example to explain to other teams that we also invest what could be a good practice for what we were going through in terms of going through the bear market and trying different stuff. And the market was changing and AI was coming into place. So I always use your example by being really frugal, as you mentioned. But also the thing that I loved the most was the point that you kept the vision, the vision for the project, what you wanted to build, and you run the experiments in a way that was really spot on like, you tried something, it failed, it killed. It was not like, let's see if it works, let's see if it doesn't work. We were really pragmatic about making those experiments and making those changes. And I think it really was beautiful to see from the outside as an investor and keeping track of it. [00:25:13] Speaker C: Yeah, especially I think being able to see it, I think is also an important thing, which is trying to build all this in public as much as possible. I think create also a culture of accountability within the team. So every time we kill something or we ship new things, we need to explain publicly to our community, to our investors, to our users, why we're doing what we learned from it. And yeah, so just the fact that we need to do that because people demand us to do that, I think it means that we learn from each experiment and we're not just kind of repeating the same mistakes. [00:25:51] Speaker B: All right, so I'll call you in on the when it's learning part. [00:25:57] Speaker A: And now we go to stage three. [00:25:59] Speaker B: Stage three, which is the current one. And when we're recording this, we are at the end of that stage. We're now going to stage four, but we're not there yet. Stage two, there's a transition moment there, there's a trigger moment for stage two was roughly 13 months ago when we went to compete in EVE Singapore hackathon. I was actually going there to talk to lawyers on the ground. I don't like talking to lawyers just on a call. I need to see them face to face, looking them in the eye and, and look into the oblivion of lawyers eyes and have a proper chat. But we also took the advantage of participating in the hackathon. And just a note there, we all love hackathons. They're really good to run experiments as well, build something, ship it. And so we back then, crypto also evolved. Blockchain also evolved. And we started having things like count abstraction. I remember in our first stage for someone to buy someone else's tokens, it was a pain. It was very painful. [00:27:23] Speaker C: We had to write like full guides, what is a wallet, how to install metamask, how to transfer funds, bridge funds. [00:27:31] Speaker B: And he could tell us like, yeah, it could have done a better job. And for sure we could. But come on, the tech wasn't there. It wasn't there. Not saying we didn't have a false positive. We did anyway. If the tech was there, it was going to be a false positive, most likely anyway. Tech evolved. So you used EVE Singapore to test a new idea, but also test New tech. Or maybe the other way. Test new tech and test a new idea. Because we want to test new tech. And we ended up building this sort of place where you can buy someone's keys instead of tokens, keys. But it's a similar thought process to asking questions. But it was all very abstracted. It was called builderfy. We killed it in the meantime because it served its purpose. And then we reduxed it. But it was great for essentially three reasons. Reason number one, we tested the tech, we worked on it, and it was great. Reason number two, most awarded team. Absolutely stole the show. Best builders in house. It felt good. Brings up the confidence in the team. We were there, the two of us. The rest of the team was remote, but I think they felt it as well. It was good. The third thing I think, very extremely relevant. It opened up the door for us to work with other players in the industry. New players in the industry like Base. Base just launched their chain a couple months before or a month before, not that before August. And we were one of the first teams building on top of it and creating that relationship, building with them, learning with them, and having this work relationship with them. And that's the transition from stage two to stage three. It starts with the new product that gives us confidence, opens up doors, helps us learn new tech. Even though we ended up Reduxing BuilderFi, it was great. We made some money out of it, but it was great. And then we go to stage three. Yeah, but I think, do you have any learning from this transition? [00:30:01] Speaker A: Glaring moment? [00:30:02] Speaker C: No, I think that. Not the transition. I think it's what you said, it just brought us the energy to. To have another go. So basically, I think gave us the energy. Okay, let's take all of the learnings from almost two years and how. And I think the exercise we started with was something like, okay, how would we build this from scratch? If we could imagine that we just have the learnings, not any of the legacy, what would we build and how would we build it? And I think from this exercise size of kind of getting rid of mental baggage, I think we found kind of our way and we found like a clear vision of all of how all the pieces fit together. And then I think we started like from get back to the drawing board, what makes sense. And then of course, because we have Legacy, we have a bunch of users, we have tech running, how do we kind of transition to that, this kind of updated vision? I don't think it was even a pivot, was like, okay, it's not a Pivot. [00:31:04] Speaker B: Because the mission is the same, the vision is the same. We obviously. You trim a little bit the copy and all that, but same shit. It's a big iteration, though. It is, but it's not a pivot. There's a special moment there, which is, even though we're frugal, it's also important to invest in the right things. So we invested in the three of us, the three founders, going to Madeira, to Funchal, just for, like, three days. We rented up an Airbnb that was an ex office, so we actually had an office, which we didn't know until we got there, which is great because it really helped us, you know, like, post its, whatever. And that's when we defined Stage three. Stage three, what? Taking everything, we learn everything, the wins, the losses, everything. What do we know? [00:32:03] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:32:04] Speaker B: What's our next gamble? Let's go. Yeah, let's see. All in. Let's go all in on the next thing. And That's Talent Protocol V2 again, big iteration. We just call it. We're not very. We didn't change the brand name. We could have, but we call it just V2. And it is what you have today, which is this professional reputation system that's. [00:32:30] Speaker C: Like the big reveal moment, because we. [00:32:31] Speaker B: Haven'T explained what is Talent Protocol. The pitch is this professional reputation system that helps find the best builders. Yeah, that's it. [00:32:43] Speaker A: No, but it's really, really interesting. But tell me more about what is Talent Protocol right now, what the product does. Tell me a bit more about stuff like the passport. [00:32:55] Speaker B: So we like Stage three and building this reputation engine for professionals, for builders. We took everything that we learned, including that first moment of, why aren't there, like, more projects using blockchain, like that first trigger back in 21. And realizing we need to tackle. We cannot pretend there isn't a problem at the data layer. Let's just go in. Let's just go in. We think there's an opportunity here. And so basically, we have, like, three components for Talent Protocol. We have what we call a smart resume. I mean, who likes CVs? Like the fucking boring, man. They're boring. They're very AI driven nowadays. They're not very smart, you know, they're not very reliable, they're not verified. [00:33:57] Speaker A: There was a game, Portugal, 12 years ago, shouting very loud that CVs are newsletters and newsletters are spam. [00:34:04] Speaker B: So, yeah. What was the name of that guy? [00:34:09] Speaker A: Miguel Gonsalves. It was right all along. [00:34:14] Speaker B: He was right, but I think the way he communicated. [00:34:17] Speaker A: But Continue. [00:34:19] Speaker C: But I think maybe what if we start from the top? So what's kind of the. [00:34:23] Speaker B: Go ahead. [00:34:23] Speaker C: The possibility or the vision before you go into the details? [00:34:26] Speaker B: Yeah, let's go, let's go. [00:34:28] Speaker C: The project. Because I think that's what we're saying that how we started with the possibility or with the vision of how the world could be. And I think like Pedro mentioned, let's start with that. There's blockchain and crypto and how. So how can blockchain and crypto create a much better HR kind of market? And I think blockchain is kind of can help solve the data issue. Like Pedro mentioned, even much before, Talent protocol is like we don't have enough data about people to find good talent. Knowing where you went to school or where you worked in the past is not enough to find quality people. And most of it is because the date is very either closed in platforms like LinkedIn or worse, closed in our own kind of minds. Because it's still the most effective way is for you to hire, is probably asking people for referrals. And this is information that only us know and is in our minds and not elsewhere. So I think blockchain can help by making data open. Open in the sense that any, anyone can use it to kind of to search, to build apps on top is you can think a little bit like, like open source is to code, block and chain. Blockchain can make open data. And like open source, anyone can build on top, can review, can improve the code. It's the same with data. If data is open because it's in the blockchain, anyone can review it, can improve it, build on top of it. You can build on top of it, you can build your own apps. Imagine if you could Access all the LinkedIn's database to build your own solution. [00:36:08] Speaker B: Amazing. [00:36:09] Speaker C: And with blockchain, this is not only possible, but we can build business models with it. Because of course, the reason why LinkedIn doesn't share is because that's why they make money by selling that data. But I think with blockchain it unlocks new business models where you can share the data and still capture value. And I think this is where kind of crypto and tokens come in, because I think they allow for kind of more fair distribution of value for all the stakeholders. Because what happens next? Okay, there's a lot of companies willing to pay a lot of money to hire the right people, but there's a few, very few gatekeepers. LinkedIn being one of those, taking almost all of that Value. But I think with crypto you can share that much more effectively through the people that help you kind of scout talent to the recruiters, to the talented itself. Because now with CVs, I don't have any incentive to update my LinkedIn because I'm. I mean, I'm happy where I am. So people only have an incentive to go and update their data when they're looking for a job or even when they, when they, when they get fired. [00:37:20] Speaker B: Or when they are playing the LinkedIn. [00:37:22] Speaker C: Content game, like trying to be the. [00:37:25] Speaker B: LinkedIn top leader, Bitquench, sometimes LinkedIn thought leader. [00:37:30] Speaker C: But yeah, so I think being able to share the value more fairly will also allow for people to be more engaged, for the data to be more up to date. And also I think like Pedro was saying, what other thing that blockchain allows is for verifiability. So you were just mentioning, I think CVs like a newsletter. But most CVs in LinkedIn is personal branding. So all of that is you write, you can write whatever you want, you can tell, you can tell the story that you want. So that's, I mean it's a tool, but it's mainly a way for you to sell yourself is personal branding. And what we're trying to build is much more about real reputation. So yeah, usually people say that reputation is what other people say about you, not what you say about yourself. So I think it's a good analogy here. So LinkedIn is what you say about yourself. What we're trying to build is a way to show what others say about you. And we do this by grabbing all this data that others are saying about you and making it verifiable because you can check the source of who said this, who attested this. And this can be kind of companies or can be skills, can be the hackathon that you one like you was talking about. It can be some bootcamp or course that you take. It can be referrals from other people, it can be all of that, but you can track the source and it's others saying about you. So your resume actually builds itself. You don't need to input. [00:39:03] Speaker B: It's a smart resume, which is the first component. [00:39:07] Speaker A: Very, very interesting. And if you look back to the early days of LinkedIn, that actually was a very important part of LinkedIn and now they grew because you could go there and comment on your peers and people really valued that. [00:39:20] Speaker C: So. [00:39:20] Speaker A: But it was so gamified that I remember those times stopped have any kind of interest because everyone was going there, seeing Each other. [00:39:30] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:39:31] Speaker A: Endorsing LinkedIn. [00:39:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And now it's kind of still there, I think like if no one, if I own LinkedIn, I would do massive reduxes there. Yeah, that would be something I would kill first in order to be able to grow. [00:39:44] Speaker C: And this is a good example of how crypton tokens can be helpful because why don't they work those types of endorsements? Because there's no scarcity. I can do a million endorsements today. [00:39:55] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:39:56] Speaker C: And they're all worth the same. So if I had to pay to do it, I would be much more thoughtful about what I would be doing. So just the cost, but. And even tokens make this much easier, kind of introducing cost, introducing scarcity to these things to make them much more high signal and meaningful too. [00:40:15] Speaker B: That's another component of our product, it's the token, which is a product on its own because not only he has utility for this, what he just said, but he also has a new set of users, like traders, market makers and stuff like that. So I look at the token as a new product through shipping. At the time of this recording, we are not that much time away from launching the token. The token actually already exists on the blockchain, but it has not been launched distributed. But when it happens, we'll go to stage four, which is it's all beautiful in the white paper world and we can say everything we want about the token this, token that, reputation this, reputation that. But now we're going to test it for real. And it's funny because I've been saying this for like three weeks now. People ask me utilities, like do you want the real answer or the white paper answer? Real answer is like, let's ship this mofo and let's experiment with it. We have a lot of ideas. A lot of ideas. By the way, my favorite idea, I'm not sure if I share with you, my favorite idea is actually our smart resume has one new data primitive called Builder Score. And this Builder Score is basically a formula, is a number that is the output of a formula that essentially using all the aggregated credentials that you have, comes up with a number. But immediately when you look at someone's Builder Score, you'll know, or you have a very good reference point how much this person can ship, like what are they capable of? And that's the main purpose of the Builder Score. So actually I believe that the token holders should have an influence on the formula. The way the Builder Score gets calculated, it's a form of governance, but I see it More like a form of power. That's something I think we need to test and see. But as I said, in the white paper world, everything is perfect. In the spreadsheets, everything works or not. But in the real world we just need to test it, put it out there and learn from it. But in terms of ideas, we have plenty. [00:42:52] Speaker A: The buildup score is super interesting. I look at it as a benchmark for talent in the future and kind of see it as potentially. You see as law firms sometimes have this, they only accept candidates with number above something from these universities. Imagine Coinbase saying we only hire people with a builder score above 82. [00:43:25] Speaker B: Let's go into dream mode. [00:43:28] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the next question. Tell me about the future. Tell me about all the dream modes. [00:43:32] Speaker C: But we can still build. [00:43:33] Speaker B: We still have one component left. [00:43:35] Speaker C: Speaking on the score, I think it already happens with the credit score. Especially I think in the US the credit score is something very real that you can, you can check, you can see what your credit score is. And that credit score gives you different access to financial products depending if it's higher or lower. So are we that far away from having a builder score to in this case assess kind of this particular type of tech worker that likes to build projects, build products, ship stuff and having a number that gives you a first assessment of this person to make it. [00:44:11] Speaker B: Like dream, make a dream come true for us. A lot of economic policy that affects everybody's lives in the world is done still today with data. It could have been, it could be done with better data. And we see the builder score as one such data primitive that we could use. So imagine if the Fed, Jerome Powell came on stage and instead of, or you know, also using the builder score evolution for, let's say the builder score for the American workers has increased 50bps. So we're in a good path. The workforce is upskilling themselves. Good job. Therefore we are reducing recurring rates. Right now they use two job talent related data. One of them is payroll, which is legit, is legit information, but it comes late, it's not there to use, it doesn't allow you to. [00:45:40] Speaker C: And also it's self reported. So it's like they ask a bunch of companies how much they're paying and then they answer a form saying I'm observing. [00:45:47] Speaker B: But if the Fed is asking you the. There's a, the margin of error is low there. [00:45:54] Speaker C: You don't. [00:45:55] Speaker B: But the second one is the phone calls. 60,000 phone calls to households, phone calls. That's nonsense. We're Defining economic policy for dollar which is the most important asset in the. [00:46:10] Speaker C: World. [00:46:13] Speaker B: Based on 60,000 phone calls to American households. Is this how we do it? We can do it much better. You could use Talent Protocol data. And that's the part three of what Talent Protocol is today. So Smart resumes, our token. And the part three is we're building a data business. Yep, that's it. So we are a data business. That is this blockchain that is crypto, that token. And now we started to use AI because we have data. So we can use AI to help people make like 10x the way they take advantage of our data. And so we open up. So we have, as of today, I think we have over 80 applications using our API since we launched a few months ago, which is amazing. Zirion is one of our customers using our data. And we have over 1 million passports, 1.3 or 1.2 million passports. So things are growing like a lot. And it's kind of like that gamble we took based on everything that we learned kind of paid off. In this stage three, we already made mistakes. This journey is packed with mistakes. Okay. It's packed with learnings. So we already made a lot of mistakes and learnings on stage three. But things are looking good. And as a Data business, even LinkedIn could be our client. Yeah, we definitely need to upgrade our infrastructure for them, but they should be our client. That would make their business better. [00:48:00] Speaker C: Complementary data, mostly. [00:48:04] Speaker B: Another data point and interesting. You were talking about credit scoring. So because it's open, it's out there. Things that you don't predict happen. So we had people building credit scores, apps that calculate your credit score and for loans using the builder score. Using our data. Yeah. [00:48:25] Speaker C: And using Builder Score as a way to calculate how much could you loan without the collateral just based on your reputation. [00:48:33] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:48:34] Speaker A: And that's a huge problem in the blockchain space still to be solved, which is under collateralized. [00:48:42] Speaker B: But it can in a way that people weren't looking at. And so that's what started happening. We have a few, actually, one that we know quite well. Araka. They see value in what we're building. We're going to eventually work with them. [00:49:03] Speaker C: Makes sort of to use reputation as collateral. That's the idea. [00:49:07] Speaker B: Yeah, it's just normal. So, yeah, that's. That's pretty much it. We're also working on a Smart Resume Pro, which is like 10x the resume, but you need to. [00:49:21] Speaker C: And I think it's more like thinking about the other audience. So when you say smart Resume, we call it the talent passport. We're mainly thinking about talent. So kind of how can we make this resume better for talent? I think kind of when we think about pro is okay, how can we look at the other side, the other side of the market that also wants this data in this case kind of recruiters and other people looking for talent. What's the best way for them to kind of plug into our data and find the talent that they're looking for? And kind of the experience of the product is slightly different. [00:50:00] Speaker B: Any recruitment platform, many like, like those PO platforms like linktree, any of those platforms can integrate with our data and use our data. So it's really hard actually when we talk to listings and stuff like that, it's really hard to position ourselves in, put our project in a bag because everyone is defi or refi or whatever, fine. And when we come comes to us it's like, it's almost like it sounds like we're building our own segment. [00:50:34] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:50:37] Speaker B: Whatever. [00:50:39] Speaker C: Sometimes they get put in like in the box of like Social Fire. [00:50:43] Speaker B: Social Fire. [00:50:44] Speaker C: But it's not really. But it's not real because they make the comparison with LinkedIn. But I think LinkedIn is two things is your professional profile and the data from that. And there's social media platform where you share content and where you read content. I think Town Per Call is just the professional profile part. We have and have no intention to have like content or because we actually believe the opposite. So the talent itself shouldn't need to be posting about their achievements in their life to get visibility. [00:51:16] Speaker B: Talk about it. [00:51:17] Speaker A: So usually it's best when you show what you have done or other people are telling what you have done. [00:51:23] Speaker C: Yeah, your reputation and what you've done should speak for itself. [00:51:26] Speaker B: You start here with the builder score. Boom, that's it. And so yeah, actually the builder score for us is going to be a very important thing. As in almost like a spearhead, branding wise but also like meaningful. It can be a standard benchmark, standard for anything. Really Amazing. So this goes beyond HR. So we started with HR and don't get me wrong, HR is a multi billion dollar business growing 10% on year. Like it's great, great place to be. But now we realize that it's any market, any industry, any segment that needs talent to operate it or it's servicing talent people. [00:52:11] Speaker C: Yeah, amazing. [00:52:15] Speaker A: Where are you right now as founders and what do you see for yourself next? [00:52:27] Speaker C: I think like Pedro said, Token is a new product. So we're about to launch a new product Kind of to complete kind of the ecosystem. So we have kind of this data business which kind of a B2B more kind of infrastructure product that we think about. We have the consumer facing one which is the app that people interact with the smart resume. And then we're launching the third that will complete kind of the ecosystem and kind of close the loop. And so it's exciting. So again it's stage four. So it's like I think we're very excited about especially next year and not only about all the possibilities that the token will unlock, all the things that we will be able to finally kind of test in the real world, not just in the white paper and also really excited about all the mistakes and the learnings that will come from having a token live. Because usually for startups, until you get to kind of ipo, which is going to be something that you can, can compare with this which is you have like the market evaluating your success and your value. 24 7. [00:53:38] Speaker B: Yeah, they're doing the price discovery. The thing is we need the token. Yeah, I know there are a lot of projects in crypto that the token launch is the final goal or we could say like it's the exit scam kind of thing. I think, you know, if you're listening to this, you know, we, we're building for the long run. So it's just the first day. Day one again. Back to day one. Let's go. So it's a new product. So I can totally resonate with that. As a founder, I know that a few months from now I need to 100x myself actually gonna build myself a chief of staff, like AI chief of staff. For me to help me navigate this, having business discussions, learning more about trading, all these things. Spitballs. Like discuss business, discuss anything really. Everything from private to business wise. I'm more focused on the business. It's going to have different modules and I'm going to build that. So even though we had like a coding sabbatical in a way everyone on the team is a bit builder. Everyone can cheap code. Anyone can, I would say design even. Yeah, we're builders. You know, we like. I'm excited about the next stage because it's a new phase of building. It's also a new phase of reduxing. Never forget, keep building but keep reduxing as well. So you keep going, keep going light and fast and you don't need like hundreds of people on that team. I think we've done with that trend of hiring thousands of engineers. I think we can call it that it's done right or there's still startups doing that like grow, grow, grow, raise, raise, raise. [00:55:32] Speaker A: I think a lot of people now are talking more and more about the one billion dollar one man show. [00:55:39] Speaker B: One man show. [00:55:40] Speaker A: And I think that's really cool to see because with AI the possibilities are there for really small teams to do. [00:55:47] Speaker C: One man, one man unicorn. [00:55:49] Speaker A: Exactly. Like it's much more possible right now with a small team. Do a lot of stuff and I think you are a good example of that. But I don't think it's a real hand in the sense that there will be cases where it still makes sense to have a lot of people, but definitely the number will reduce. [00:56:09] Speaker B: You want to be a 1B, 1B company, 1B community business with 10 people tops. Yeah. And this 10 is a entrenched number on my head. I'm okay with going further. And by the way, we are 10 people on the core team, plus contractors. [00:56:34] Speaker A: There's a huge community support the community. [00:56:37] Speaker B: So it's kind of like there's the core team and then there's like an extended version of that team that involves contractors, platform providers, the community itself, ambassadors, moderators, investors, investors, the whole token holders, the whole thing. Right. So definitely excited about that. I think like what I can tell you, like for me after Town Protocol, I probably have one or two more startups in me. My next one is going to be on education. I don't know what, I don't know how. Maybe I'll do the nine month sabbatical. [00:57:19] Speaker A: I have the previous version of talent. You need to start early. [00:57:26] Speaker B: No, for now like it's all in on talent. Like stage four, let's go. And then pretty sure there's going to be a five. If we make it through four, we're going to make it to a five and definitely a six. Get to that one B10 people. I really feel strongly about that. I think after like education is something that is really close to my art. Also having a couple kids now, it becomes more relevant. It was already but it became more. [00:57:59] Speaker A: Talent Protocol works a lot with talent broadly so could serve a lot of different types of talent. I want to focus on one which is founders. How do you see Talent Protocol helping with the process of finding new founders? Being yourselves founders, Is that a possibility? Is that something that you could help with? And if someone is right now building their talent passport and they have the ambition to be a founder, what advice do you have for them? [00:58:37] Speaker C: I think the first question is that successful founders will likely have built A lot of smaller projects and products before. So most successful founders are successful builders. So this I think is where town protocol can help because this is where we focus. How can we identify good builders, People that have good track record of building stuff for them, for others in jobs or as freelancers, whatever. And because I think the opposite or kind of the cases that I know of, founders that want to be a founder but have no track record of building, they usually want a startup or to be a founder for the wrong reasons. Maybe they see like the. [00:59:27] Speaker B: They watch these podcasts and like. [00:59:30] Speaker C: Like the. Culturally how we kind of worship. Founders nowadays are like tech see people. [00:59:37] Speaker A: Around them making a lot of money. [00:59:38] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. So I think kind of the. For the status of it or like that idea of becoming respected and famous. But I mean, they'll probably fail because you need to learn by doing so if they haven't built before, they'll probably fail with other people's money instead of their own. So I think that's. I think where. [01:00:02] Speaker B: But even if they are straight out of uni or even if they don't go to uni or uni dropouts, I think we can still help with the legion because the builder score and you can still do some stuff like even when you're a kid, they can go to hackathon, stuff like that. So the pattern is you have to have data points. [01:00:22] Speaker A: Yes, you have to have data points. I think we saw that from your own stories. Like the amount of things. Small things, small details. Like even being a DJ at night. It's something that. [01:00:32] Speaker C: Yeah, because I had to promote my parties. There's you building stuff even. I mean, if we go into. When we were younger, I'm sure there are stories. I remember that I sold copies of games and videos on my high school in my locker until I got. [01:00:50] Speaker A: Of course I also had that business. [01:00:54] Speaker C: But I mean I made like brochures and stuff. So everyone had like full menu of everything that I will. There's other examples. So even if people are young, you can still find that entrepreneurial spirit in them because they cannot sit still. They will build stuff. They will try, they'll experiment. I think the key for us is how are we able to track that, to identify that. And I think of course we're starting with tech and builders and more very focused on developers because it's very easy to track what you've built as a developer. It's very easy to track code, how much code you built, how many products you built, and even the impact of that code of Course, there are other types of builders that are harder to track, but I think, well, that's kind of where we plan to go. And I think in the future, where more and more data comes on chain, it will be also easier to. To access that because people will more kind of voluntarily be putting some of that information on chain, for example, for creators, for artists, A lot of artists already on chain. So that's something that we can track. That we can track, and that can count for kind of for your reputation score as a whole. [01:02:07] Speaker A: Amazing. And how can someone that is building their talent passport right now, what advice do you have for them? Or for new founders starting a new career company? [01:02:18] Speaker B: My advice is keep building. Keep building and keep whatever that is and keep dreaming. [01:02:25] Speaker C: And keep reduxing. [01:02:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Don't forget to redux. [01:02:29] Speaker C: When there are personal projects, it's more like, okay, just kind of move on. Don't get too stuck to it with the things you built, because it's. Almost all of it is about what you learn, not about what you build. I mean, some of them will work and will be about that, but most of 90% of the things you build is about what you learn while building it. So letting go is also, I think, an important part. Yeah. [01:02:53] Speaker A: And I think that's a really good advice, even specifically to Portugal, because I think in Portugal, we tend to be very loyal to the things that we are building. And I see a lot of people sticking with projects that hardly will see success in their feature for too long. [01:03:10] Speaker C: You get like, the sunk cost fallacy as well. I already invested so much here, I need to. [01:03:17] Speaker A: I don't have data points for that, but I think in Portugal, I noticed that a lot compared, for example, with. [01:03:23] Speaker B: The US if you have that, if you're watching this and you're running through that problem, hit me up. [01:03:30] Speaker A: Call Pedro. [01:03:31] Speaker B: I'll talk to you for one minute. [01:03:32] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:03:33] Speaker C: He will kill your idea in no time. Awesome. [01:03:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it comes naturally to me.