Human Protocol

Episode 16 is live - ChainSafe, Lodestar, Sprinter & Sandwiches 🥪 with @gregthegreek

Greg Markou co-founded @chainsafeth, helped launch @lodestar_eth and is now building @sprinter_ux.

In this episode we chat about:

- The @VitalikButerin grant that landed while he was at a Christmas market and everything that happened next including..."Nothing about this protocol worked."
- A hip surgery that changed his path
- Scaling ChainSafe from 5 to ~140, then back to ~60
- Why he is a builder first, entrepreneur second, manager third...
- The path from 12-hour days to Saturdays off and learning to say no
- 50+ sandwiches and coffee table book
- Hot takes: Toronto vs. New York and why he thinks the ETH roadmap was "fumbled"...

Full conversation: youtu.be/VxY5rNKqrk8

🎧 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cha…

open.spotify.com/episode/2mX4Wl…

Episode 15 is live - Inbox Zero & The Meaning of Life with @DennisonBertram

It's a wide-ranging and highly entertaining conversation that moves us from his pre-crypto life in robotics, political science, life in Prague, high level fashion photography and creative technology into the early days of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

We trace how a founder’s worldview was shaped by post-communist Europe, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis and the personal side of years building in crypto.

Key arcs:
- why humans should stop doing computer work
- bureaucracy, passports and verification theater
- Prague after communism and why Bitcoin felt so real after 2008
- his main founder lesson: if it’s hard to use, it’s probably wrong
- what kids and mortality do to your sense of time and money

Full conversation:

youtu.be/79i2tSNt2uQ

open.spotify.com/episode/5Af2Wj…

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/inb…

Episode 14 is out: The Anonymous Alchemist with @scupytrooples of @AlchemixFi

It's a conversation of both breadth and depth starting with his leap from teaching through to early Ethereum, DeFi, a fast-growing team and a project that reached more than $500M in TVL within about two months of launch. But growth brings intense pressure: security worries, team conflict and burnout.

We cover leadership, authenticity in the space, co-founder conflict, anonymity and security, chronic pain and how therapy, physical therapy and time away helped him recover - all revealing the realities of creating frontier tech we seldom honestly share and underscoring the importance of taking care of ourselves and others doing the building:

@scupytrooples: "one of my non-negotiables now is just take care of yourself, take care of each other and you can take care of the place by doing so.”

Full conversation: youtu.be/29IWDvAdHrU?si…

Episode 13 is live - "Riding Out" with @SuperRareJohn, co-founder of @SuperRare 🌊

A nod to his passion for surfing, the title speaks to the ups and downs of creating one of the best known and most successful platforms for digital art and a core crypto application.

We chat about BC (before crypto) times: architecture, civil engineering, a New York ad job and finding his people in the early @ethereum crowd. Pitching SuperRare to 120 VCs. All 120 passed so they built it anyway: "You have to be a little bit crazy..."

SuperRare is a family business - John, his brother @SuperRareChar and his cousin @rareperkins...because they already knew how to disagree without it getting personal. Especially when debating about maybe giving up on SuperRare entirely and maybe pivoting into DeFi back in 2019...

On the personal side of staying in it through the lows: "This may be pretty horrible, but I know where I'd like to go, and I think it's still worth it to get there. So I'll suck it up and deal with it. Every day isn't a good day, otherwise you wouldn't have good days..."

Then October 2020: the first $1M month, the moment it started to feel like this is definitely something. And the honesty of going from the crest of that wave to having to lay off 30% of the team in 2023 - all in public, full ownership of mistakes made while growing.

"I think the best learning experiences are always the most difficult."

This is the yin and yang of building here.

Full episode - youtu.be/C04m_9zqtF8

open.spotify.com/episode/0MwxJA…

Episode 12 is live - "Growing Up" with @evabeylin

She joined crypto because she realised management consulting was just duct taping a broken system and checking crypto Twitter in the bathroom felt more alive than her stable job. Then it was the people, putting her energy into building alongside them felt so much more aligned.

But that initial idealism slowly turned into realism - both personally and industry wise. Crypto has had a 10-year experimentation phase and stress test on human behavior: the culture "grew up" because people got more evidence. But experimentation wasn’t a detour, it was the education.

She also makes a point we don’t hear enough about: technical fluency matters less than people think. What matters is understanding the framework, learning fast, and knowing how to sell what you build - if nobody sees the product, it doesn’t matter how elegant the code is...

As we journey through the past nine years, we also go through her exit from @graphprotocol - five and a half years in, she was burnt out. Not because the mission stopped mattering but because she knew she wasn’t the right person for the next phase anymore.

That level of self-awareness and knowing when it's time to end a chapter tends to be rare. So is her answer to burnout: removing Discord and Slack from her phone and a vision of crypto slowly becoming more “9-to-5” socially, even if the rails are on 24/7. Because humans need to set and practice boundaries...

Full episode - youtu.be/bKrjn7RxaC0