Sorry for the embarrassing title but given the awful things happening in the Web3 space right now I figure it could use a change of pace. Everyone in the industry talks about "mass adoption" as a solution to the space's liquidity problems, but most reasonable people know that the crypto projects aren't quite ready for "prime-time" yet - we need dApps that actually solve real problems, and infrastructure that will allow for smart contract agreements to scale beyond the needs of single founders or startups here and there. But that will take some time, realistically speaking, since there's still a lot of work left to do. (The tech is ready and has been ready for a while, but it's the culture that needs changing - arguably a much more difficult thing to do.)

In the meantime, though, how do we keep interest and recruitment alive in the blockchain/crypto space? Well, looking back at how I ended up joining the Tezos community and eventually ended up starting my own company teia.cafe on here, I thought it might be worth exploring different perspectives on "tech recruitment" normally not talked about.

Tezos: A Labor Of Love 💖

Another embarrassing header (😂), but that's what the project really is - even up until a few years ago, the founders of Tezos (husband and wife co-founding team Arthur and Kathleen Breitman) used to talk about how on their honeymoon they brought with them Ethereum's whitepaper, analyzing and critiquing it during their trip. They mentioned this story a LOT, actually - it was part of the project's genesis and they brought it up pretty much every time in interviews and press releases as well. Well, the two of them - they shared a mutual love for this blockchain idea and were clearly obsessed - from a potential investor's standpoint, that's not necessarily a bad thing, really.

In an industry mostly dominated by male founders in their 20-30s who almost always come specifically from backgrounds in computers/business, that alone was enough to make Tezos stand out, narrative wise. Not only was their marriage based on this project, but it was a team effort, rather than the whims of a single founder, as is typically the case in most Silicon Valley projects up until now. Were you looking for something different from your run-of-the-mill crypto startup? Well, here you go.

So, XTZ's story of how it "came to be" has had a pretty strong influence on how the community itself developed, starting from the types of developers and DeFi talent they initially attracted, to the way its governance system was designed (Tezos is one of the most functional governance systems in Web3 right now because it requires real compromise to operate, not hard-forks), all the way onto the burgeoning art scene in Hic et Nunc/Teia that emerged "spontaneously" as a result.

As with all marriages, it has had its sets of challenges and obstacles to overcome, too. But the gist of it was that it attracted all kinds of idealist and romantic types into the ecosystem that believes in the "power of love 💖", whatever form that may be. And this happens to be very compatible with art-making and creativity as a whole. If you think about it carefully, the fact that Tezos was one of the few places that attracted the interest in artists - including those from the traditional art scenes - may not have been a coincidence. The tone for it was set for it a long time ago, after all.

💗How 💖Love💖 Affects the 💓Community💖

OK, maybe you can tell I'm hamming it up quite a bit at this point and maybe I'm getting a bit excessive with the use of emojis. (🤣) But! There are some things that the Tezos community has that stands out as different than the others, even on the surface.

• The gender balance (including LGBTQ-identifying) on Tezos tends to be much better than most other chains I've looked into, which tends to be mostly male-dominated, as is the case with the tech industry as a whole. The crypto industry as a whole tends to do a little better than the wider tech industry since it deals with issues people care about more universally - money, governance, autonomy - much more interesting to the average person than tech as a topic in-it-of-itself. Though not perfect, XTZ also has art as part of its identity - which helps to add to that balance as well.
• Tezos is widely known for its effective on-chain governance system, where its fork-less upgrades requires the community itself to reach a consensus with each other through negotiation and compromise. And a husband/wife co-founding team already has two layers of compromise built into the culture, which set the tone for how things developed up until now.
• Compared to other chains where the core team often have "backdoors" to protocol level decision-making (Ethereum's EIPS proposals are gate kept by 5 people right now, for example), Tezos is a sort of place where people can carve our their own space and do their own thing in an autonomous way. A lot of people do complain about the Tezos Foundation doing this and that but if you choose not to let it affect you, it's very much possible to do so. (This is not true on many other ecosystems - though ironically, they talk about it less, even though it affects them more. Funny how that works, eh?) The result of this is that the chain has allowed people who don't quite fit in anywhere to come in and carve our their space - which adds to the diversity of the ecosystem as a whole.

I've been in the crypto space since 2014, and I think it was around 2015 or so where I decided that blockchain/crypto events were not where I would be looking for things like dates and personal connections in any form. Gender disparity aside, it was more about the vibe of crypto events that made it feel weird to even think about that stuff on any level. (The industry tends to attract a lot of single males looking to "moon" their way out of desperate situations, sorry to say.) I didn't even really want to make friends at these events, honestly - I was there for work and information gathering, and kept it a very much separate thing.

Then Tezos comes along and all of a sudden there's a bunch of people I actually like hanging out with (the TEIA art even in NFTNYC 21' was one of my highlights, even now), including a few romantic interests (which I definitely will not get into 😉), and a team I was comfortable enough to share co-founder status with to start a new business from scratch. I like to call Tezos a "family friendly" chain because there are a lot of married people with kids and other familial responsibilities in every area of the chain, too. What was it that drew me in? It was something about the people here (most of them very nice) that had my attention, even before I knew what a Baker or FA2 contract was in any way, shape, or form. They, I don't know, just seemed more human to me as a whole, and that was a refreshing sight to see in an industry where the conversations are typically dominated by non-stop talks about technical details and the money associated with it.

Compromise is something that everyone says is important but seldom do - especially in a relatively new industry like crypto where the idea of rugged individualism is glorified to an excessive degree. The idea of coming together and reaching a consensus/compromise is a relatively mature perspective that has yet to be appreciated by the industry as a whole - but is largely what is needed right now if the industry wants to evolve beyond its pump-and-dumps and endless hype-cycle games that destroy more value than it creates.

Ironically enough, the Tezos ecosystem as a whole used to be better at actually talking about their own project on a personal level - which used to be more narrative-based than just talking about money all the time, the latter of which became the main focus for most coins during the bull run of 20'. People got caught up in the greed and sort of forgot what brought them to the project to begin with - to change the world - to build something together with someone, together - or perhaps, just simply to meet people that they can connect with on a deeper level and be truly understood.

Honestly, do most people really need NFTs and an understanding of they work? Not really. But everyone wants love, and everyone wants to be understood. If we can start talking about it in that kind of way, people will become interested in joining the cause - even if the reality itself might be messy to talk about. Just the fact that we are trying is enough for many to take a chance - there's not many places out there that offer this type of potential, after all. Crypto is still new - therefore, it still has potential.

If this sounds too difficult for people, there is the next best option - have the professionals who are trained in this area to handle that sort of work for you. Who are these people? Artists. Regardless if the love is romantic or platonic, it is something at the core of every artists' work, and something that many spend years training and refining for.

Oh wait, we already have these people here too. If we build a few things that support them just a little, success is just around the corner. 🥰