A Lisk ambassador on teams, equity and failing.
Four minutes at a Lisk event in Abuja with one of the organizers, asked how long he has been at this and what has been hardest.
He introduces himself as an ambassador for Lisk and as a working developer: “I’m also a software engineer”, and “I’m a blockchain dev.”
The timeline comes in two figures, since he counts building and using separately. As a builder, “roughly over 4 years”. As a user, “But as a user? Okay, 7, 8 years.” The earlier stretch was the NFT run. “I was more of the NFT guy”, he says, “Going Discord groups, all of that, uh, hunting airdrops, if you may say.” That ended with the certification. “I switched to building, uh, full-time after I got, um, certified as a software engineer.”
Asked how the four years have gone, he does not dress it up. “To be honest, it’s not smooth”, because “once in the Web3 space, you constantly learn”, and “whatsoever technology you know today, before tomorrow morning it might be obsolete.” What he counts as the return is not money. “the journey has been full of ups and downs”, but “it has been rewarding for me in terms of the knowledge I’ve been able to gain”, the people met online and in rooms, and the projects he has contributed to. Lately the work has moved: “now building the human side of things”, and “So it’s now all about the human layer.”
The most useful answer is about the hardest part of building, and it is not the expected one. “For one, I’ll say mostly getting the right team”, he says. “some people say funding, but I don’t, I don’t believe so.” The distinction he draws is between a skill existing and a person being available: “it’s good to have someone that has the skill, then it’s another thing to have that person on your team.” His conclusion: “always having the right people on your team is far more important than anything.”
Pressed on why that is hard, he lays out the economics. “It means that people are busy. People have different things they are pursuing.” Startups pay equity while employers pay cash, and a working product needs “not just as devs but as, um, people that write your documentation, the writers, the designers”. Hold that group together long enough and it becomes a new problem, because “they will gain more skill and then they will definitely want to fly”.
His advice to teenagers is about time horizons: “Don’t seek immediate rewards”, “focus on the long term”, and failure is expected. “it’s okay if you fail. I fail. Everybody fails.” The instruction he ends on is a developer’s: keep trying, keep debugging.