NEAR Began as an AI Company, Plug on Public Goods | Brussels

Transcript

0:01 Sam, you have weed still? That's the first thing you can get on record? Stop playing with me. Sam, you still have weed? Just give us an after after. Do you have any more weed? I like that. If you roll me a joint, I'll be greatly appreciative. Is this gonna be the start of the interview? I mean, maybe. I had long an interview before. Alright, alright, alright. It doesn't have to be, but... It can be, it's funny, but... He said stop playing with my image, Maceo. It's okay. It's okay Yeah, I mean, he can roll up, are you trying to roll up right now? He seems distracted, but what I had to say was heard, and that's all I needed

0:38 All I needed was for someone to hear that I'd appreciate it if a joint was rolled for me Okay, okay Alright, so what's up everybody, and welcome to another episode of We Them Niggas We're out here today with Shot in Brussels, Belgium Niggas are really in Europe AKA Web3 Plug AKA Web3 Plug, stop playing with him Plug Relations, Plug Rel, everywhere Yeah, shout out to the guy It's exciting to be here with you We connected earlier this year when I was in Austin for South by Southwest I got to hear a little bit In Denver too, yeah Oh, that's facts, that's facts We actually did connect in Denver, but I really got to spend time with you

1:11 I would share a space with you and really get to hear about what you're working on In Austin, which is why I said that In Denver, I was honestly No, no, Austin for South by Southwest before too Yeah, I know, I know, I'm saying I felt like Austin was where we really got to have a lot of conversation To get to know each other In Denver, I was supposed to come and document your potluck But what actually happened was I rented a car and it ended up being an electric car and actually died on the road And I ended up getting there in like the last 20 minutes of your event

1:36 And I didn't get to do any interviews, really any documentation Which definitely frustrated me, especially because, you know, I really want to be supporting Russ I feel like Russ has been such a support to me coming into this space and learning and connecting with more black people in this space And that's really why I've honestly been really excited to interview you Is because I know that, you know, he works with you closely and you two think a lot about how to build in value-aligned ways And so, you know, anybody who's building with my brothers, you know, I'm here to build with And so, it's super exciting to finally have you on the podcast. I'd love to hear about how your time in Belgium has been, but first, I'd love for you to introduce yourself to my audience.

2:05 Hi everybody, I'm Plug, aka Shot. Yeah, I'm just a builder in the space. Mostly right now, I build on public goods. Building public goods and building public goods funding mechanisms and building public goods that better fund public goods and funding other people who do the same. and part of a lot of DAOs, part of a lot of different communities. We're really excited to grow Web3, grow technology, and use this as a way to facilitate positive impact at scale. I'd love to hear about how you got into the space after you shared a little bit about how this week has been. You guys had the Bundt.activation today, but you've also been spending a lot of time here at the Regen Village.

2:45 I believe you might have been at Gitcoin earlier this week. What events have stood out to you and been important to you this year at ECC? Yeah, I mean, Web3 is full of all types of niches and all types of communities. Web3, like AI, like tech, has so many other different facets, and you can find your tribe there. So I hang around more around the regenerative space, or the, people say refi, which is regenerative finance, but the regen space, the impact space, the people who give grants and support open source technology, specifically a lot of times at the RevenGen Village, also been at different AI events, like Nears AI event, I heavily work in the Nears ecosystem for a while.

3:19 Do you want to share about what Near is? Near Protocol is a performant L1 blockchain. It originally started as a way to pay people to train LLM, so it started as an AI company. I didn't know that. Yeah, it actually started as an AI company, one of the co-siders, Ilya. He co-wrote the paper, Attentions All You Need, which is gave birth to the T, Transformers, like ChatGBT. And so when he was at Google and TensorFlow. What does GBT stand for? Generative Pre-Transformers. Generative what Transformers? Pre-Transformers? Yeah, pretty sure I mean, I didn't know that I didn't know Transformers I didn't know what to do with GBT

3:53 I never really thought about what it stood for That's the T So like that whole thing A lot of open source research was there And so, I mean It's a very performant on one You know, it has native account abstraction You can change your private keys And you have named accounts built into the protocol So we know the names Every account is a smart contract We know the names of our contracts We know the names of our accounts And we can change our private keys So this allows us to not only have a fast-performing Layer 1 blockchain, but allows you to essentially have a UX similar to Web2 where you can actually create a bunch of accounts for users, like Bill Gates, and this is okay for Sweat or Ka-ching, and then they can take self-custody and change their private keys and take ownership, which now through 4337 and account abstraction and smart wallets, that's just the outcome against Ethereum space, but on the protocol level, that's built in on there.

4:43 So there's a bunch of dope stuff built on Rust But now we're kind of building out the user-owned AI stack Which is essentially all the AI primitives that come with that So there's been an interesting intersection of that And I'm focusing a lot really now Not just on public goods funding mechanisms But how to leverage AI Specifically on the agentic level Of automating funding and grant workflows And then allowing anyone to kind of build these systems to allocate funding more efficiently and lowering overhead. But yeah, so I was hanging around with a lot of near region people, a lot of homies in the space. I have a lot of friends like Russ and stuff.

5:24 We travel so much, we only get to tap in when we actually come to leave the bed. So outside of just the BD part of things, learning and reading a lot of dope founders in the space, It's really just a chance to get back together with the homies until we hit the road again So yeah, I've been very excited here, met a bunch of dope people I've been on the pop-up city type of movement So I'm getting more comfortable with not just coming here for the network, but actually linking up with people, chilling through activities and connecting with people on a deeper level So, yeah, really excited about ETC and then on to the next one in Tokyo pretty soon, so, yeah

6:08 Oh, that's super dope, super dope And I appreciate you sharing about that I love, so, BD is Business Development People Don't Know And that's really about, right, finding people that you can partner with People that can potentially buy into what you're doing such that you're delivering value to them And they see that as such, you're giving value to you generally in terms of money, right? Yeah, I mean, BD stands for a lot of things BD is also Blunt DAO Damn, I didn't know Blunt DAO is also, like, a very social thing And a good way to connect with people. So a lot of times we say we're doing BDA blend out because it's double BD. But business development, I would say as a founder, you have two primary jobs. It is to like build product, like make sure from the product perspective, from you're building something that users want, you know, the engineering side of things, that and actually selling it. And who you're selling it to may have different audiences. You know, you you're selling a lot to a few stakeholders, you possibly selling to sponsors and patrons, you're selling

7:00 to, you know, you have the guest acquisition to make sure that you have quality guests and you have the user acquisitions. And a lot of time, BD is more towards the revenue generating, the client generating things here. So a lot of founders do the BD and they also do the product. And maybe BD, something that drives their growth, is like selling software. A lot of these companies are layer ones. So it can be a mix between developer relations and BD and actually getting people to adopt your technology. So yeah, if you guys are very people-oriented You're coming from a traditional sales background And like to actually party with dope crypto people

7:38 It's a great way to come out and practice those skills To actually grow your business Which I think is essential We don't have too many big companies in Web3 And this is one of the places where we can make not only competitive salaries But game-changing technology as well And where it's not too much gate-kept where anyone who delivers something on a global value can build something and then connect a network with the most relevant people in this space. So a lot of minority founders are coming out, but not just minority, because we often see ourselves as minorities. You know, we're from America. We see ourselves as like minorities within the country.

8:15 But if you go to Africa, you know, they're all Africans there. Yeah. And so they can, too, also come and be players in their space. So it's a really decentralized, globalized network of a startup community that is very mission aligned in doing amazing space network It's funny because I'm in a shy season and we're in the middle of the park and I see all the white people reacting So it's a good, behind the scenes it's funny It's a good reference too, yeah I mean, I'm really curious to hear more about your work, what you're saying we're minorities I know you have a background where you've had a project with Minorities Programmers

8:50 I love that you can share about that project It's still around. It's still a crew. So minority programmers were essentially international networking developers building socially impactful software projects to spread STEM education and also help with upward mobility. And a lot of times if you look like if you have a computer, anyone can build. And I think software getting into the tech industry in general, whether it's BD or whether it's project management, software engineering, you know, even marketing. There's so many different jobs based on a wide variety of type of traits that you could use technology to actually get a job and become someone who creates jobs in your space where it's really, really like you can shoot up from like $0, $100, $200 in like a development country to all the way up $100,000.

9:36 I hire a lot of engineers and I'm realizing the actual arbitrage opportunity that getting one thing for something lower and then selling it for something higher is actually decreasing. Now I saw people in India making more than engineers in America And they have all the same skill sets and all the information is on the internet So minority programmers was how do we take that goal of bringing people into space And actually give them the tools to build And that kind of methodology we used was actually making projects and building by doing So we've been doing internship programs, we've been actually building a lot of things

10:13 a lot of people from our programs with their companies like Amazon and NASA and Accenture a bunch of those stuff but then we kind of a lot of us got into the game and we started building more software and software more software and more applications and now we're in the process of like just a lot of us are scaling our own stuff but so we are we are we we are we are essentially and right now I kind of scale that back a little bit and I'm now focused on how do I build an open funding stack and target the real issue is actually allocating funding to projects that need it the most and then building these systems that bring positive impact at scale and kind of begin to change the behavior of how we act enabled by software. That was kind of my background there and I met a bunch of dope people. That's actually how...