NEAR NEARCON | 2021, 17 Nov 2021

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From YouTube: THE VAULT - Day 2 - Todd Murtha & Marcus Ribeiro: NEAR Foundation

Description

The legendary Todd Murtha & Marcus Ribeiro give a world class presentation on how to Fast Track a Vibrant & Self-Sustaining Ecosystem!

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Discord: https://near.chat/
Blog: https://near.org/blog/
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GitHub: https://github.com/near https://github.com/nearprotocol
#Blockchain #FutureIsNEAR #NEAR #nearprotocol

A

Welcome to the first session of the vault at the last day, second and last day of near khan. Thank you so much for joining us here today, uh shout out to everyone out in the near verse. Today we have a very exciting session with uh core members of the near foundation and also the open web collective, and we will be able to see where the ecosystem is going, how it's being grown and the people that are growing it so the first session we have mark and todd from the ecosystem success.

A

Team todd is known as the team dad of the ecosystem. Success team because of his charming and charismatic character, but also his dad jokes and mark is, is the charming.

A

Djen of the uh near uh ecosystem success team, also known as knockout meowdo dot near. Please welcome, mark and todd to the stage all right.

B

A

B

uh Yeah, thank you rim, a pleasure to meet you for the first time uh so yeah we're talking about we're on the ecosystem team. At the near foundation. We are three soon to be. Four people uh focused on a few different things which we'll get into um I come from the traditional tradify and technology world. I spent some time in the ethereum ecosystem. I've been with near for probably five months now. It's super exciting um day two of near con uh is amazing. The vibes are great like this is a uh unlike some many things.

B

I've seen um mark you into a quick intro.

C

Yeah same here I come from a fintech background uh really used to talking to startups and scale up so hoping to leverage that kind of information to help entrepreneurs and development teams on board and scale.

B

Up their business.

C

In the near ecosystem,.

B

Awesome uh so we are in the ecosystem, team sort of a nebulous uh title, uh so we're gonna get into what we're doing uh talk about expectations versus reality in the ecosystem and the ways that we support builders and kind of like what's next for the ecosystem team and the ecosystem in general.

B

As we talk about getting uncomfortably open.

B

So the three sort of pillars of the ecosystem team uh today and this took a little while to form since we joined at least since I joined about five months ago. uh Three pillars we bring entrepreneurs and builders and ears.

B

Think of this, as like a bd function mark leans a little more on this side, uh just talking to people out there in the ecosystem or not even in the ecosystem in the blockchain world, or any entrepreneur that might not even be interested in or know the applications of blockchain technology uh selling them on the near dream. Right.

C

B

And bringing them in we're not selling anything other than like. This is the place.

C

To be, it is literally selling a dream. You know these guys want to know the art of the possible and it's about letting them know. You know you have these cool ideas. You build these ideas, we will hold your hand through the entire process and help you navigate through an entire ecosystem, which specific purpose is helping them succeed. Yeah.

B

The other pillar is ecosystem success, so that is people who are already committed to building on here. How do they do it? uh Some people come to us and they are more technical, there's a lot of developers. Obviously, in the space, uh some people are just entrepreneurs and they need help on the technical side. There's a million things, and actually that's the main challenge that we find ourselves dealing with. Is that there's so many moving pieces? This space is moving so fast, nier is growing so fast. How do we help people?

B

How do we coordinate resources and then the third one that we're really still building out is monitoring the ecosystem health, so that's sort of like a data analytics on-chain data market data just like.

A

B

Accounts like we're just trying to track where near's going uh and how it's doing it just helps us like be strategic about our resources, uh all right, ecosystem expectations versus reality. uh I said ecosystem is this sort of nebulous term. It's like everyone in the near verse, right building things uh contributing in their own special way, not everyone's builder. I am not super technical. uh I mean.

C

I'm not any technical, yeah.

B

Awesome, that's.

A

B

We're in the founders uh side of the workshop- I was here yesterday and it was the developers uh I saw the graph and capsule social and it was hyper technical, but um yeah we're catching up anyway, uh expectations versus reality. um Does anyone know what movie that's from it's not dune. I mean I haven't seen it yet uh you got it so I feel like everyone in blockchain's, been to burning man, at least, if maybe you live in the u.s.

B

I have not- and I think I might have aged out, but um the reason I'm showing this is it's actually a beautiful example of. I think what an ecosystem is. It's completely self-sustained everything you need to literally survive out there, water food other things music, uh like they bring it. They do it like. That's it they they they're self-sufficient.

B

um I think that's the expectation that people have about a a vibrant ecosystem. Are we there yet as near uh there's another burning man reference? This is actually, I think the man um who gets burnt um eddie bernard here. I think I see my purvis okay. um I think this is a little closer to the reality.

B

It's early we're building the foundations, we're like literally the cranes and like what are the major pieces and people are wearing hard hats and running around um I had when I was looking for burning man business. Like pictures, I found this one too. uh We love the management speak, you know we're building the plane while we fly it. I this was like, I think, a burning man, installation where it was an art installation, but uh clearly there yeah there's challenges here um and we are building the plane as we fly.

B

This ecosystem is changing super fast, as I mentioned um like yesterday, josh is going to speak next about the funding, that's happening here and uh the different infrastructure pieces. We.

C

Need different spin-outs, you know near foundations going left right and center with the different areas. The d5 spin outs, the nft spin-outs. It's literally changing it'll be different tomorrow than what it is now. That's the honest truth.

B

Yeah, um so how do we support builders in this world and I use the word builders pretty generic or generally because builders like I said they could be entrepreneurs, they could be founders, they could be independent developers. uh A group.

C

Of people a dow anyone with an idea really is a builder yeah. We could be builders.

B

Okay, maybe um oh good, my transitions didn't come in. That's all right. This is a little bit of a night chart, but as we talked about sort of the like bringing new people into the ecosystem and supporting them, there's like the two sides of the equation here um to encourage new builders. uh What do we do? We just participate in in conversations web 3 conversations. That's it like who's interested. How can we help you?

B

Hopefully we know all of the moving pieces at any moment in time and we can connect you with those resources, spinning the flywheel another like business management, speak thing as I wrote this down, and I don't know why I have this like propensity to write like it's like management, speak jargon, maybe it's because I'm like 95 years old, but uh in blockchain years, uh but spinning the flywheel I work like in my later my life. I started working on engines and I was like actually now. I know what a flywheel is. I was like.

B

I don't think most people do it's a giant, heavy disc of metal and it's hard to get it spinning, but once it starts spinning, it's like it's a force to be reckoned with, I'd say so we are getting that ecosystem flywheel, spinning right and today it's still early like main net, was what a year ago last week I think, um like it still needs that push that gentle push to keep going.

B

But I mean, if you can feel the energy here yesterday, like this whole week, like it's starting to move, the momentum is picking up um right now I can tell you we are focused on infrastructure, mainstream and crypto native plays. That means people are blocked from building really important things because they're lacking really basic infrastructure financial stuff, like fiat.

C

On ramps, legal resources, legal resources, operational resources,.

B

Recruitment resources, yeah, plus technical stuff. We I see my friend from covalent in the back and like we need indexers, we need uh um exchange listings oracles. Exactly all of these things are required for uh dapps to be developed. So we're really focusing on that.

B

Now um I put all the asterisks here and like a thank you to, we are not the only people working on this on the ecosystem team, the community team marketing, which includes marketing funding and josh, and the education team at the near foundation, are all driving driving this ahead on the es ecosystem success side, uh not as much detail but sort of four general buckets that we're really helping people with today, all right you've committed to building on year. Maybe you've got a grant. You probably got a grant.

B

um Maybe you you have some developers that are familiar with near technology or rust or or not they're learning, because this is new to a lot of people uh founder support. uh You mentioned it. It's like legal operations, hiring anything the nf does internally. We are offering it as a service to builders. uh So, of course we have legal. We have finance like there's a lot going on.

B

uh Like our hr, slash people team, they will be making themselves available to the community to help them with their initiatives in that domain that they might not have experience in uh developer. Support pretty self-explanatory.

B

If you haven't worked with our developer team, they're amazing they're here today, uh they'll be up at the near booth on the partner showcase that we are also sitting at for a long time. um That's developer. Storyboard I mean uh we can also.

B

We have access to a lot of other internal resources like where is near going roadmap when sharding coming private charts like we can help communicate that to people that might be facing challenges. We just have to talk to you uh and product support is sort of a catch-all for a lot of things. There are many guilds out there that are willing to help and we're trying to catalog the guild ecosystem through community um silicon craftsman is one that comes to mind. They help with user research, uh product design.

B

Things like that and there's a bunch of guilds out there that we will start leveraging um right now. I think I just did a tally. Two days ago we've touched or worked with, or are planning to work with about 200 qualified projects and partners, which I think is pretty impressive for where we're at right now- and these are just the ones we know about- um and we're approaching this obviously in a little bit of a centralized way, which is why I wanted to talk about getting uncomfortably open.

B

um It's a little bit changing gears, but everything I'm talking about means we are doing it all we're sort of the central point of coordination.

B

We often refer to ourselves as air traffic controllers or switchboard operators, but it's really important openness, nice.

B

It's really important for us to start leveraging the community and being more open like this is supposed to be an ecosystem, uh not the ecosystem team. At the at the near foundation, helping everybody do everything, um so we are making a concerted effort to be very open to all of these things that you know we come from probably more traditional business world than a lot of people here, where everything's a secret. It's it's. uh You know that's sort of your competitive advantage.

B

We are going to do the opposite, and I think this goes with the ethos of decentralized open source uh systems, so the tagline nier has proven itself to be simple, scalable and secure. It has momentum and has a flourishing ecosystem, but we need that openness. We need the the flywheel to keep spinning.

B

um You guys have probably seen this before it's a nice little eye candy, but we are bootstrapping and that's why I had to picture the boot there before we are bootstrapping the ecosystem, uh publishing all of our resources on the near wiki wiki.neier.org uh work in progress, but everything every resource we have at our disposal will be listed there does it mean we can scale and they can service everyone.

B

No, I think that's the next challenge um as we're working with 250 projects now, as that goes to a thousand five thousand projects in the ecosystem that we're tracking um we're gonna have to like bob and weave and figure this out. um Proximity can't handle every d5 project. uh The legal team at near foundation can't help every project, but eventually, I think legal guild might start picking up the slack so we're working with them to like develop this, this entire decentralized ecosystem of service providers. We call them sort of a traditional term.

C

Yeah yeah, I think I think you've got a slide on it. uh The next page.

B

C

Yeah exactly it's.

B

The first time he saw this deck.

C

But yeah the near foundation, we're scaling up as a business ourselves and working out how we operationalize all the things that we do. um As todd mentions, we really want to scale out and empower the community via the guild model, and we do that via the dows, the the funding um programs, the grants- and we want these guys. We want to make ourselves redundant essentially in the ecosystem.

B

C

Team over the next few years.

B

Uncomfortable truth,.

C

Yeah yeah, I have no problem with that. No problem, no problem. We want to give the ecosystem the power. You know if you've got a skill in recruiting people. If you've got a skill in business development, if you've got a skill in tokenomics, you know we want to empower you to build a business and we've got the pipeline to throw your way. There are so many founders and businesses building.

C

On top of near that, we speak to and they're looking for all these resources- and you know they've got a bit of money that they need to pay for these resources. So we want to help them to spend that money with you via a dao. So it's like todd said earlier. Getting that flywheel going build upon near upon near upon near and ultimately increasing the the user numbers, the transaction numbers all those kind of things and just keep that going. So I've got no job soon.

B

Yeah, I think we'll still find at home, though- um and I just have say uh this is like heavily influenced by- I would say, ilia. He is like whole hog into like decentralization and obviously it's near protocol no, but literally like like into it like the way we run the business. The way the foundation runs like like there are other chains not to be named that uh promise decentralization, but we know the truth like like this is not an option for us.

C

It's a long journey. It's.

B

A long journey and.

C

It just it's true with all the chains over time, you get more decentralized, all.

B

Right so ecosystem success, I'll call a release candidate too, in like real nerd lingo, um because I've been here, four ish, five months um figuring out, what's going on the ecosystem, it's all changed in that time. uh What kind of services we can provide? That list is growing all the time. So what coming out of this meeting today, uh you know we're pointing you to the wiki, that's at least a a resource, a list of resources that we use that you can ponder come to us. If you have questions.

B

Of course, um I talked about that the wiki it's to have all the stuff governance forms. That's a satoshi, naki meow, though yeah that's.

C

Me much much better. We we just docs dude.

B

um He did an inspirational post that was in there near needs you, it sort of summarizes this talk about how the ecosystem needs to step up and start helping. It itself.

C

B

C

We said earlier, you know I I'm not a technical person. I've been spending a lot of time, working out how I can break into the blockchain crypto industry as a professional, and this forum has got a good post for for many different skill. Sets that we need you don't need to be a developer to come into this space. We need you so by all means, please check it out and if you think you've got something to contribute, you know look us up and, and we can speak.

B

And finally, we just launched a discord channel. um My kids are on discord, um hey dad, yeah, exactly yeah. Should my daughter message me on discord now, but uh the newer discord is very active. Now, there's an ecosystem channel find us there, uh it's no. When moon talk. This is about projects, building resources you can use or like ways we can help you um a super quick case study. I know if you guys have seen this before near knots.

B

It's kind of getting really hot right now, uh as we figure out our processes, uh my colleague marcus, who is not in the room uh he worked with them. They literally came in I think three weeks ago and got a fast grant and josh will talk about the grants program uh right after us. They got a fast grant. It takes like a day or two um to work through it. I think uh immediately. Oh this guy who came in it was ted. I believe he is a he's more of a entrepreneur, not a developer.

B

Oh he's, the artist too.

C

B

I don't know him, so I I hope I'm getting this right, but marcus marcus filled me in we, okay, all right, um so he got a fast grant. uh We immediately connected him. He didn't have a tech talent, we communicated him with communities and uh the community team and they found a amazing developer, apparently like full stack, front-end back-end, smart contracts he's doing it.

B

um The founder worked on the art, they're planning a launch in like four weeks, so this is like less than two months from idea to funding to uh finding tech talent to launch uh they've already done some of the artwork. This is one of the previews, so I don't think I'm spoiling anything if you look at their discord.

B

um What's next uh we're already engaged on launch support, so we're engaging with marketing and community to generate buzz, and there was, I think, a thousand people joined the discord yesterday um and now and now we're connecting them with uh astro dao jordan. I don't know if he's in here, because now they have this community. This is like a pfp nft project. Sorry I should have.

B

I should have explained that um and they're going to launch an astro dao to determine the future of that project and we're connecting them with collab land, james young, a good partner of ours to uh he does like the gated community channels and discord if you own an nft, pretty cool. uh So one of our our recent success stories, uh uh we don't have to get to this one of my dad jokes. It was supposed to no near misses, so we are tracking the universe. This is uh we.

B

We do it sort of by vibe check right now uh we're building out an analytics platform or our product. That's.

C

Going to do this, if we ask you for an nps survey, please help us and fill it in, because eric really really wants those nps surveys.

B

It's important: we need to know how we're doing yeah yeah um no near misses. There are always nervousness here where we are the the resources, the prioritization, the uh like it's it's changing day by day, so uh we're doing our best to like match people up we're like a matchmaker uh and I'll leave you with this, our near ecosystem zen. I love this picture. This is literally like an ecosystem. I don't know if you've ever seen these things, it's like a self-enclosed. uh What do you call.

C

It is that you I wish.

B

uh Yeah on most days, uh a self-sustaining ecosystem that can produce all the necessary components for a thriving community right that thing stays sealed. It's got the moisture, the bacteria, the leaves fall off, the bacteria digest the leaves it makes co2 like it lives. This is what an ecosystem is, and I think, we're very close to near having that level of self-support and being a self-sustainable ecosystem, but uh please hit us up we're happy to help. We are just trying to jump start this machine.

C

Yeah we need you we're nothing without you um yeah just let us know if we can help you. um Let us know what you need and if that facility doesn't exist within the ecosystem, we'll make it exist. Yeah, okay,.

B

Thanks yeah I'll have one of these shirts on later, so you can find me thanks.

C

C