My personal hackthon topic: leadership

I've been very involved in Web3 community recently and on of the things I explore is technical leadership. While I lead several teams successfully it was always ad-hoc and never very successful (more like lessons to be learned) and so this year I applied for a couple ETHGlobal events and joined several online communities with hopes to build and lead a team to basically let them self-actualize without much my own personal involvement (I have important research to conduct at Inference Labs - and they are cool about it and even sponsored my team but my work is important and I would rather pay a team to explore something than get distracted for a week myself).

While I am hand-on with this project and provide as much support to my hackers I expect them to be self-organized. To keep it neutral I just selected a sponsor with infrastructure who loved the idea of a PoC and I'll tell more about that once the hackthon project is submitted and published. I had a lot of support and I'm not sure if we're actually gonna win the prizes but I don't care because today we passed an internal checkpoint of my own and I've seen the team effectively communicating between themselves and with me and I don't really care about the project, tbh, as long as it's basically functional and lets me assess the skills of the guys.

I think this is a small personal success for me and I want to thank Inference Labs and personally Ronald Chan for this opportunity. There will be an offline round in Singapore in a couple weeks and hopefully prospects of this tiny secret lab of mine becoming a more serious business will be more clear. Thanks for your support!

I am looking for a co-founder here with a knack for managerial things (real PM experience not necessary). Spam me with your CV only if you are serious. You already know good ways to reach me or this probably doesn't apply to you.

Google sponsorship

I was writing a lot of letters to sponsors this week and I should really thank the Google guys for all the years they allowed me to use my G Suite subscription for free. It started when it was a beta product (and called Google Apps if I'm not mistaken) and I applied for a free licence for a non-profit I worked with at the time (a local spelunking society if you can believe I ever was involved in that - I actually had dived into some really cool caves when I was young). The website I built for them never took off but I grandfathered a licence and used it for organizing my files for countless non-profit and for-fun-and-profit startup ventures since 2008 (or since when I have that subscription, it was way before my pro career and before many things).

I currently use it to have space for my decentralized hacker collective and Web3 community support army in training, and it comes so very handy. I don't have any funding other than what my dear friends and colleagues at Inference Labs have graciously provided (beer and pizza hackathon money) and having a free subscription for Google helps a great lot.

Thank you, Google, I really appreciate it and especially your not removing my account during all the years despite not understanding what I'm actually doing here. ♥️💫🫶