SFO -> DEN
The year of conference travel begins..
Flew from SF → Denver over the weekend. I’m in town with a couple thousand other folks from around the world to attend ETH Denver, the largest and longest-running Ethereum event in the world.
Lots to catch you up on.
Web3 Links of the Week
Alchemy announced its C1 fundraising round two weeks ago, raising $200M at a $10.2B valuation.
Elan’s thread explains what the heck we do, really well :)
Coinbase had the most viral Superbowl ad of the year, helping them get to the #2 app spot in the entire Apple app store.
this crypto social engineering scam was insanely scary to read about
Something Interesting..
I always get a little reflective when I'm traveling. There's something about going in between two places that allows me to think about where I am now.
So here are some random thoughts:
Working with Samsara, one key lesson I learned was to always listen to your customers, listen to the market, and find ways to automate away pain points.
In Dec 2017, the ELD Mandate became law in the US, requiring all trucks to have Electronic Logging Devices.
Hundreds of thousands of drivers recording their working hours on paper logs now needed hardware and apps, so (almost) overnight, every trucking business was looking for an ELD provider.
Samsara, as an IoT platform, was in the perfect position to help. Our ELD product sold well, but it was new and had a lot of room for improvement. From the moment I joined the Compliance team in 2018 until I left in 2021, I experienced three years of non-stop iterating and scaling.
We had so many edge cases and rules to build support for, based on the law: https://eld.fmcsa.dot.gov
But we resisted complacency by constantly talking to customers (fleet admins, safety coaches, truck drivers...) We'd visit our customers at their truck yards, watch them use our website, mobile app, & even ride along on trips.
We even had American Truck Simulator in the office hooked up to a virtual ELD gateway so that we could empathize better 😂
The one question we were always thinking:
"How can we make this better for you?"
And.. by being customer-first ALWAYS and iterating quickly, we successfully created the best experiences for our products (vs. competitors), and we rarely had any throwaway work.
Working at Samsara was definitely a fun time. (a blog post from 8 months in)
I learned so much from working with great engineering mentors, hiring new teams for our Atlanta office, and even getting a patent for an auto-annotation algorithm.
At Samsara, we were bringing cutting edge technology to an outdated industry..
...and it worked.
It was so insanely exciting to me to work at a company that went from 500 to 1800 people and IPO'd at $11.5B.
So how about now?
I've been at @AlchemyPlatform for 4 months, and I'm already seeing the same kinds of industry patterns I saw at Samsara, but accelerated 1000x.
Web3 developers are now bringing cutting edge technology, not to one outdated industry, but to the ENTIRE WORLD.
across ALL INDUSTRIES.
FAST.
There are so many use cases being explored, some facetious, some serious. NFTs, cryptocurrency trading, DeFi, new vehicles for capital formation, the future of work..
and the #1 reason why I love building at Alchemy is that we're at the infrastructure layer, fundamentally supporting an entire ecosystem.
We're barely in the first inning.
Every single day. I'm talking to amazing institutions and individuals, DAOs and contributors, builders, investors, community managers.
Everyone has the same motivated glint in their eyes, and that's what gets me out of bed in the morning.
So anyways.
I'm excited to be at ETHDenver this week.
I'm excited to continue building, teaching, and connecting people in web3.
and I'm excited to see where Alchemy goes.
P.S. We’re hiring across ALL FUNCTIONS!! Come work with me :)
This Week's Web3 Challenge
I challenge you to read this thread and follow its instructions to code a fully on-chain NFT:
