A Chat With Mateja Sela

Speaker 0: Yeah. When I was leaving the startup role, I was like, I'm gonna chill now. I'm gonna, like, take it easy. I'm gonna, like, you know and then I went to my job and I was like, I wanna keep this job, so I'm really stressed out. I really want to, you know, work with people and show that I'm worth it, right?

So I think I'm never gonna be happy. That's the conclusion. No, I'm kidding.

Speaker 1: Hey, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us for this week's podcast. With us, we have Matea. Matea, I'll let you introduce yourself so that you can give you your best introduction and representation of yourself. Why don't you let everyone know a little bit of a brief background of who you are, where you're based, where you're located, and then we can kinda get into the questions after that.

Speaker 0: Sure. Sounds good. I'm Mateo. I'm a techie. I'm an engineering manager currently at Bolt, which is a ride hailing company mostly.

We do a lot of stuff like food delivery, and, yeah, grocery delivery. So, it's a pretty big company. And, yeah, about myself, I don't know. I just ate, like, I cooked dinner in 5 minutes, and I ate it in 3. So I think I broke the record for, fastest eating and cooking of a meal after work.

Speaker 1: Well, you know, real real quick inter real quick interjection. I used to work with a firefighter, and he was a record fast eater. He would eat a huge burrito in in probably 2 or 3 minutes.

Speaker 2: Oh, man. I could never I need to sit there and enjoy it, but, yeah, I get it sometimes.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Me too, usually. But if you're here. You okay? Yeah.

So sorry. That's it. Yeah. I'm I'm yeah. I used to work for Artano.

I mean, as as a CEO of Artano. It's an NFT platform. I guess that's the main reason why I'm here. And, yeah, I mean, generally, I am into, yeah, just, like, trendy new technologies. I was into crypto, have my own theories around that.

Like, yeah, we talked about it briefly, before about, AI bros versus crypto bros. So I I think that's a topic probably we'll have to touch at some point. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

I'm based in Estonia. Sorry. I forgot to say that. And I'm from Serbia originally.

Speaker 2: Awesome. Sounds great. And what's your what do you do at your current role at Bolt?

Speaker 0: So I'm an engineering manager. I manage a team of, 8 developers, mobile side, and, some Android, iOS, and back end. Yeah. And we are responsible for the app. So the, yeah.

Yeah. I I don't think I can talk much about it yet because I'm new to the company as well. So yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure. Sure. Well, let's dive in a little bit into some of your previous experience. You mentioned you were a CEO.

So let's go even further back from that. When did you first starting start getting into technology? Did you go to school for it? And then I guess we can circle back around eventually to to becoming a CEO, but I'd love to understand, how you got into technology. Was it from a young age, or did did Twitter get you into it?

Did you see somebody say something cool? So, yeah, I'd love to learn how you first started getting interested in technology.

Speaker 0: Yeah. I think my dad is mostly to think for that. He's, somebody who introduced me to computers. He is a big Linux fan. So I was probably 4 years old when I ran my first games from Linux.

He, like, forbade me to use the Windows. He was such an anti Windows guy. He was like, yeah, it's like the devil basically. And now today, you know, like, we think of these things a bit differently, but at the time it was like, you know, Linux is the best thing ever, and open source is the way to go. And, it's I guess that was the crypto of the time, right?

And now we have a bit of a different, yeah, outlook on things. And that's like the first time. So I was like 4 years old, I think, when I first started, like, a kernel command. But I'm not like I don't think I'm like a project kid or anything. I just, like, learned by heart how to run a game because I want to play it.

Speaker 1: So you were smarter at 4 years old around technology than than most people are even still to this day.

Speaker 0: I don't think it's that hard to learn a command to write, like, open a kernel and write a command. But yeah. Maybe. I don't know.

Speaker 2: Do you think it's any harder or easier than learning a language?

Speaker 0: Sorry. What what running language?

Speaker 2: Do you think it's any like, learning a coding language is any harder or easier than learning a, you know, verbal or written language?

Speaker 0: It's an interesting question. So I'm somebody who likes learning languages. I speak fluently like French and German and Serbian. So and English, I guess. And I'm yeah.

I think it's something that's very interesting to compare, like linguistics of a language and how linguists learn things from, you know, how how, you know, programmers or people who code, how we learn things from linguistics, between I think music as well. Music is very mathematical. But music, yeah, computer science and and linguistics are pretty interesting. And

Speaker 1: yeah. Nice. Nice. I I speak English, and that's about it. So, same with when it comes to coding languages.

I only know a couple. I was not as talented as yourself. So I I believe in our previous conversation, you mentioned going potentially to Oxford. So I'd love to understand what you went to school for. And did did your time at at university kind of lead you to want to start your own company?

Or, I guess, how did that transition go from going from university to eventually starting your own company?

Speaker 0: So, yeah, I went to uni in the US. I went to Middlebury College. I studied computer science and German language. I did liberal arts. So that allowed me to, like, spring into different things, right?

Like, to to touch on different topics and mostly writing. I really liked writing, research. And yeah, so I went to Oxford for a kind of an independent study, independent research thing, in my 3rd year of college. And I was lucky enough to, you know, see this, how this world works. You know, you have a tutor, you have a 1 on 1 with a professor at Oxford, which is pretty incredible.

And that's how they do things. It's like very 1 on 1 based, very like research based. You have a lot of readings. I don't think I've ever read that many books in my life. It was like stacks of books, on just like random medieval history topics because I just, I don't know, enjoyed it at the time.

And I don't know, like that helped me, I think, in analytical thinking. Right? Like you have always, some kind of learning from these things that are unrelated to computer science to technology. Right? So I think you can always learn from history, not as a like a history repeats itself sort of way, but as in like analytical thinking, how people were, you know, to put yourself in a mind of somebody 200 years ago or 300 years ago, and then write about it because what we perceive, I think in technology as well, what we perceive for, from the user perspective or as a developer is much different than the user, right?

So, user is someone who is actually gonna use your software, and you're somebody who writes the code. So sometimes these 2 don't click. And that's when a lot of businesses fail, actually. I believe at least.

Speaker 2: So, yeah. Go ahead, John. Yeah. I was

Speaker 1: just I was just curious because, you know, Pedro and I both have started our own businesses for different purposes. Mine was not technology based. Pedro's was a little bit. So I'm curious, again, what what led you to start your own business, and then, what were some of the lessons that you learned in running a business? Because, obviously, you're in a different position now, which we can we can kind of transition into later in the conversation.

But, what were some of the lessons that you learned starting a business and then running a business?

Speaker 0: Oh, I think the biggest lesson is, to not follow your gut instinct and follow the money, however awful and capitalistic that sounds. You know, I had this dream of a marketplace that was, you know, open and curated by the community and very, yeah, like, just, open to to, let's say, new markets to especially African market, Asia and South America. That's where we focused our kind of initial, let's say, first wave of of, sales. And, like, yeah, you just learned that sometimes what you dream of building and the the ideals that you have as a person don't necessarily reflect on your business, on the numbers. Right?

So yes they reflected on the people we got. Like we got amazing artists who had the same vision, the same goals as us. We got an amazing you know team but it just didn't translate to business every time. So we learned over time, of course, to to follow this, like, smell of money, I guess. But, yeah, that didn't work out as as we expected.

Maybe we'll talk about it as well a bit. But, yeah. So that's it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. How did you go about, like, when you started the business, getting people excited? Because you mentioned, you know, you need contributors. So what was one of the ways that you you sort of found these contributors? And and to your point about, you know, following the money, is it that you weren't able to find people that were contributing back Or or what ultimately led to, you know, the next steps and decisions there?

Speaker 0: Yeah. So so initially you know, it's like when you have a young business, everything's like super fast. Right? Like you have one decision that can make or break your whole business. And, you know, we had made some, like, hard lines that we just didn't wanna cross in terms of, like, quality, for example, on the platform and the amount of NFTs we want to sell.

So that definitely, you know, we pay the price for that. The contributor side you mean the contributors in the contributors in the sense of code or contributors in the sense of art? Because we needed both. Pedro, what did you mean by that?

Speaker 2: What was that? Sorry.

Speaker 0: I'm sorry. Did you mean, like, contributors in terms of code or contributors in terms of arts, like, artists? I mean, both.

Speaker 2: I mean, you've you've built a market place so there is that 2 sided, you know, you need the buyers and the the community in terms of art. But in terms of code contribution as well, I mean, you're looking to build this out in public sort of. So

Speaker 0: Yeah. In terms of, like, Paul, the developers themselves, we, applied for well, I was writing in a in a in a forum, called Project Catalyst. It's like a funder fundraiser for Cardano blockchain specifically. And, there, this, well, this team showed up. They have a consultancy.

They have developers. They were interested in the story. And that kind of how we want to build a marketplace. NFTs were just starting. So nobody even, you know, talked about it.

And then we were kind of probably the first NFT marketplace on Cardano, given, like, the timeline of when we started, like, this whole journey. And, of course, there were other players who started, you know, kind of picking up on it. And they actually used the market much better than we did. So our our market match was not there, even initially. But we just pushed this idea, and we kind of had it.

You know, people were asking us, hey, when are you gonna sell your coins? When are you gonna have a coin? You know, all this stake, you know, when, ICO and stuff like that. So it was like a lot of, like, hype there that we just didn't use properly. So so yeah, the devs came in.

And we had the artists who, you know, they had the same idea as us, which is a community curated marketplace, a high quality marketplace for really, really high quality artists. And we found some, of course, and they've made NFTs with us, and they sold them, but the volume was low. And so that kind of started kind of affecting us much more as we kind of turned to. And, yeah, we're here now.

Speaker 2: So Do do you think any of that had to do with leveraging Cardano and sort of tying yourself into the Cardano ecosystem when there were other you know, there's obviously so many players, in the space. Cardano being obviously always in the in the top ten, I'd say for the most part. And as a fan, personally, I've, you know, I've invested in Cardano as well and, have followed that community for a while. I know there's a lot of ups and downs. But if you were to do it all over again, would you have chosen, perhaps a different cryptocurrency?

Or do you think there was a risk of of choosing, you know, Cardano to base everything off of?

Speaker 0: It's dangerous to say I would choose something else in the crypto space. I'm kidding you. I would definitely no. I am kidding. I would definitely choose.

Yeah. I would definitely choose Cardano again, actually. Because it was a unique opportunity in the market. There was no NFT marketplaces. Right?

There was already like OpenSea. There was, I don't know, super rare. You know, these things were like, we were like super rare, a bit more like super rare. I don't know if you know these NFT marketplaces, but super rare was more like, yeah, high end art rate. So, and 101 NFT is what we call like unique NFT.

So, yeah, There was definitely opportunities that were, you know, there in on Cardano In the Cardano ecosystem itself. But I would definitely choose it again. Like, Yeah. I don't think that's a question of Because it scales, right? Like, that's how we went.

Like, if we're gonna build a business around a cryptocurrency, we have to pick something that scales. And that's gotta stay there in 10, 20 years. Ethereum, unfortunately, doesn't scale as well as we know. Right? Right.

Right. High fees. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. You you've touched on a couple things I really wanna kinda dig a little deeper on. Number 1, startups are fast and furious, like you said, and there's a lot of decisions to be made. And so one of the things you touched on was people asking questions of when are you releasing this or when are you doing that, also making the right decisions. So how did you as the, you know, leader of the entire organization, how did you balance, making the product stable, making things that people wanted, also trying to tie in experimentation for new features?

Because, obviously, the the blockchain community kind of took off so fast recently, and and so there's a lot of changes happening. So how did you find that balance of leading a team, building what people wanted, and trying to to put in new features into a product as well?

Speaker 0: Yeah. Good question. So so, like, at the beginning, as I said, we were like, we stuck to our goals and like we had this vision. And then we saw that that wasn't working as well as we wanted it to, so we started listening. And one of the things that, you know, we knew was missing from the Cardano ecosystem was auctions.

So an auction kind of automated and on chain auction system. So that you have a permissionless auction. Basically, you send your NFT, you send your money, and basically the the smart contract itself spews out the winner. Right? So this was never, built by anyone else.

So we knew that there was, like, this unique market opportunity and a lot of requests for that. Of course, there's tech debt, right? It's a startup, so everything is breaking all the time. You have to fix things. You have a backlog.

Like, you know, we had a a Trello board, I remember, for bugs only. We had, like, GitHub for developments. Like, we used, like, a bunch of different tools for different stuff. And, you know, the trail board was just like getting filled up all the time with bugs and and customer requests. So it was even small stuff, right?

Like, if you have something that should work and somehow doesn't work for one user, and you try to fix it, and you're like, okay, let me, know, I have to dig in and, you know, fix something up. I mean, that's so really great job for them doing this, for our tunnel, definitely.

Speaker 1: How did that transition go? You know? Because, obviously, you're in a you're in a new position now, and there's been a transition period in general. Do you find that that type of, leadership that you're currently in and development life cycle or development type of development that you're doing currently is a lot more rigid in a in a larger company, or is it a little bit more freeing because you're not you're not the ultimate decision maker, but you obviously do have people underneath of you. So is it is it less stressful but less ability to to be flexible now than where you currently or previously were?

Speaker 0: Yeah. When I was leaving the startup role, I was like, I'm gonna chill now. I'm gonna, like, take it easy. I'm gonna, like, you know and then I went to my job, and I was like, I wanna keep this job. So I'm really stressed out.

I really want to, you know, work with people and show that I'm worth it. Right? So I think I'm never gonna be happy. That's the conclusion. No, I'm kidding.

It's it's basically like, it's and I think it's it's a mix of things again, like, you know, like, as a as a CEO, you really are everything to the company, you're doing everything. Everybody's looking at you for decisions. There's no other person, you know, who can make it for them, right, if it make the decision for you. So, so and now it's like, I am a contributor, but it's like, I have my own team, I have my own bubble. And whatever happens outside of it is out of my control.

So I don't have to think about that. But then at the same time, I really have to think about my team and develop their skills and, improve their processes. So it's a bit it's a really different kind of work, I think. As a CEO, you're also sales, you're marketing, you're a developer, you're a team lead. Right?

And as a team lead, I'm just a team lead. But the focus is different a bit. Right? Like and also, you have some expectations from your bosses, and it's a bit of a different dynamic. And working with people is hard.

Right? Like, it's just very, difficult at times, right? Because you have to put your ego behind, and you have to listen and say, hey, you're right. And, as a CEO, you don't get to do that that much because you're always right for the good or the bad of it. Right?

So yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And and when you're leading a team, you know, obviously, there's a lot of responsibilities that you have as a leader. But when you're talking about, like, you know, if you were to look at a a pie chart and see the percentage of your time spent across doing different things, what does that look like in terms of managing teams and just managing people? Sometimes maybe being a a babysitter, versus, like, actual or, you know, psychologist, versus actual, like, decision making and and strategy and all that. Like, what is that that split look like for you?

Speaker 0: It's a very good question because I have no clue. It's, like day to day.

Speaker 2: Any given day. Yeah.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Because like, I mean, I remember like some colleagues in my previous company, they were like, oh my God, this is like a psych session. Thank you so much, you know, for listening to me. And I was like, okay, great. So, so yeah, I think there's definitely some psychology there.

Like, I would say, you know, 1 on ones, you know, you have them, I don't know, maybe a full day every 2 weeks. So like half, like half a day every week, You spend on just being a psychologist for people, you know, listening to their problems or finding out a way to solve some things and help them, you know, either prioritize, help them. Yeah. Like just vent out sometimes, you know, so it's important for people just, you know, you're just as a manager should not talk at all and just let people, you know, let's team out on you.

Speaker 2: Right. And that definitely sounds like some some some good advice. Sorry, John. You had a question.

Speaker 1: Well, I was just gonna say, you know, for for quite a while, it sounds like even back, I guess, to college and as as growing up, it seems like you were always a go getter and whatnot. Have you ever thought about ever stepping down? Maybe this is even towards retirement, but stepping down just to be an individual contributor and be that person who needs psychiatric help from your boss, or do you love that type of day to day constant change in what you're doing, chaos, but also controlled chaos? You know? You know, have you ever looked at it from the other side of the spectrum even though you've been in leadership for quite a while now?

Speaker 0: Code is like Kryptonite. Like, you just wanna get close to it and get yeah. You know, it's the as closer you get to it, the weaker you get, and the more you wanna kind of, do it. Like, you the more you wanna, I don't know, like, to contribute individually. So I had recently, like, I was pairing with some devs, and I was like, oh my god, I missed this.

And then I step away, and I was like, I don't think my personality is made for this, because I'm like more like active, more like change experimentation, you know, making decisions. And And some people are not like that. And when I look, you know, when I was an individual contributor, I don't think I was fully happy, because it was more like just listen and do things, right? And here's like, you know, you make your decisions, and you're responsible for those decisions, but you maybe have some skill set and some communication skills that individual contributors don't have, right? So so, I mean, not always, but let's say I don't know.

That's how I feel, at least in my experience. So, yeah, I do feel like, you know, the draw towards that sometimes. But, you know, in in then I'm like, okay, I really like actually managing and, you know, leading people and talking to podcasts. I don't know.

Speaker 1: It's kinda like a slings it's kinda like a sling shot. You get closer or an orbit. You orbit close to what you really like, but then you kind of go outside and do your leadership type of stuff. So you're, like, constantly orbiting around a center of gravity, which is coding.

Speaker 0: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, we're building software. Right? And if there's no people to build it, then it's well, your job is worthless as a manager.

So

Speaker 2: Yeah. Exactly. And then I guess the other side of it is, like, what to build. And you you had mentioned before, you know, kinda chasing the money. Is that something that when you're looking to make decisions based on, you know, technology and business alignment, is that where your head's at?

Like, what's going to, you know, what's gonna please the the customer the most or what's gonna bring in the most revenue? And then, like, how do you manage prioritizing that with the engineers? I know that sometimes engineers, developers wanna build really cool stuff. Other times, it's like, no, we need to focus on revenue. So I'd love to hear about that balance of how you make those key decisions and which direction to head.

Speaker 0: So it depends on the company, I think, and on your role. Right? So sometimes as an engineering manager, you actually do make product decisions. Sometimes you don't. So so for me, I think it's just important to balance things out.

Right? You have tech debt. You have something that is there's like bugs, right, in the code. There's something that is waiting for you. Always there constantly in the backlog.

And then you have also this new shiny thing you wanna build. So, yeah. I think the most difficult question is how do you balance building new stuff and fixing the old stuff? And that's something that I don't know. Maybe there's a book on this or something.

But, I, you know, there's ways to figure it out yourself. But, I think it's hard. Right? And you have to kind of constantly look at both and say, hey, there's a pile of stuff. You know, crap is piling up on this side.

And we're not or we are not developing anything new. And we're just, like, boring and not, you know, not enjoying our work. So I think it's a balance.

Speaker 2: Is that anything that's happened recently that you can share, like, specific example of that?

Speaker 0: Not specific examples of that. I think it's just constantly happening at any organization. Like there's no specific thing that I can point out because it's so common. Right? It's like every day you do this and every day you of have to prioritize what am I gonna do.

You know, where am I gonna spend my money, time, life, energy on. Right?

Speaker 1: Yeah. And you and you've traveled quite a bit and lived in quite a few places, that we discussed in our previous conversation a little bit here. You're currently in Estonia. You've you've been in Germany. You've been in the United States.

Do you find that that type of, those types of changes and seeing different cultures and whatnot has, number 1, enhanced your leadership, enhanced your introductions to the people who have different coding skills that you then can also, inherit, and then also helped you become an inclusive manager and leader, for all types of people?

Speaker 0: Yeah. I think it's important to be an empathetic leader because you just want to people to be happy and, yeah, work with you and communicate well with you and just, like, be, you know, be there for you. I know it's cheesy, but, you know, I don't like this, like, comparison with, like, family and stuff. But, you know, at least you're comfortable with your team, and that's important. And I think you learn that through having these different experiences, living in different places.

You just learn how to communicate faster with people. Get get to know them faster and get to, like, kind of get to them faster, and then to you faster. And that's really important, I think, as a manager to be, not just a professional, right? But also be a human, and to understand that sometimes we don't like things. And being able to explain that you have to do things that you don't like to others is super important as a leader.

So yeah.

Speaker 1: So so if you're an unempathetic robot, you might not want to be a leader?

Speaker 0: I think you wanna be a contributor. I'm kidding. Yeah.

Speaker 2: AI is not gonna replace the leadership team then.

Speaker 0: Who knows?

Speaker 2: Who knows?

Speaker 0: I mean, there's an empathy you can code into it. Right?

Speaker 2: Yeah. There you go.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So you you've been in blockchain. You're currently doing what you're doing. Do you have hot takes on things like AI? Or or I guess because you are in a leadership position, you do have a little bit of ability to do some forward thinking, figure out where you might wanna experiment.

You know, what is the next wave that you see being able to take advantage of? Are you digging into AI, or is there something else? How do you feel about those types of things?

Speaker 0: In my piece I'm looking into the camera right now, but my piece of advice for everyone is to take notes on what happened to crypto and do the same thing that to AI. Because in crypto, we had, like, this use case for everything. Crypto is gonna solve all our problems, and now this is happening with AI. So so I think that people are having this holy grail moment with technology in general. Right?

We had phones. We had social media. Now, crypto, AI, next thing is probably VR headsets with Apple, what Apple's doing, right? So we have these like wow moments. And these things are just gonna integrate into our lives.

And I think that's the whole point of technology, just making things smoother, easier. Right? And I think that with AI, I I mean, I know that it's something that will probably make things easier, but not in the ways that maybe we imagine it right now. It usually doesn't turn out the way, you know, these predictions that we, we make them. So so I think, you know, there's a holy grail in technology.

Yes, it's gonna help us. Yes, it's a tool. But you still can't rely on AI fully to do, you know, I don't know, doctor's exams because, yes, it can check your body and it can give you a diagnosis, but you will still need a doctor to proof proofread it or proof. So it's the tool. Right?

It's like anything else. It's a tool.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I guess there's there's, sorry. I was gonna say there there is that argument that, you know, essentially, it's it's software. It's stuff we've been doing for a long time. You know, it used to be called big data or maybe before that called something else.

And really, it's just the larger and larger you scale this data out, now you have really large language models because of the capabilities of GPU's and, just where we're at today. So yeah. You can see extrapolating that out to just be larger and larger use cases of of, you know, just running heavy computations, essentially. But, yeah, interesting to hear your take.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think that's a really smart view that you take because you were obviously so ingrained in the the cryptocurrency blockchain world. It's phones came around, and they did change our lives, but we just it's in integrated into our lives. Technology, the Internet, you know, it came around before that, and it's now integrated in into our lives. And it's really just to make our lives easier.

It's I I personally don't think AI will take over the world. I don't think robots will take over the world. I think it'll make our lives easier. It'll it'll help us make do things quicker and faster. We still have to proof check it, like you said, or maybe we'll get to a point where we don't have to proof proofread it as much.

But I think right now, we've we're hitting this burst. You know? Everybody's really excited. Everyone's creating something new every 5 seconds. Eventually, you know, all of the useless ones will fade away, but then AI will integrate into our normal daily lives.

And so I think having the experience that you had, kind of allows you to see it from that point of view. Like, yeah, it is something that could change the way we do things, but it'll just integrate with how we already do that or how we already do things. So

Speaker 0: Yeah. Do you

Speaker 1: do you go to AI at all for advice on management or whatnot? Do you say, how do I be a bet how do I tell this person to get to work?

Speaker 0: I used to do I never used it in this new role. I used to do it in my previous role a bit for some presentations, as this, yeah, as a CEO, I didn't use it because it just wasn't a thing chat gpt wasn't released yet. So, it really came as like NFTs were fading away and crypto was fading away. You know? Yeah.

I kind of came to replace it, which you can see on social media as well. I guess there's some research probably on this. I would like to read it. But, yeah. Sorry.

Yeah. Basically, a bit. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Well, if anyone would read up on AI as opposed to having AI tell you what AI is, it's something to you. Because you read a lot when you're at Oxford. So I'm sure you'll you'll read how AI actually works.

Speaker 0: Oh my god. Don't get me started with that reading thing. You know, sometimes I get messages in Slack, and I'm just, like, I read the first sentence and I already kind of conclude what the whole thing is about, like the whole chunk of text, and I answer already. And I'm like, and then I go back. I like, because I used to do this, like, I would just answer it.

And I'm just trying to like, you know, slowly read it. And, because you don't have time, right? You just wanna do things fast. Yeah. Sorry.

The aggression.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Again, I guess, what kind of were there ever challenges? Because you've you've had a lot of roles. You've got a very diverse background. Were there ever challenges that you you came across where you just felt like you couldn't climb that hill and you you thought you couldn't do it and you did.

You know? Obviously, technology, there's a lot of challenges. And so I I guess, did you learn most of your experience from being a CEO and a leader, or are you learning I guess you're a little bit newer in your role here, but, do you think that you're gonna be able to climb those hills a little bit easier where you currently are, overcome those challenges a little easier with Bolt?

Speaker 0: I had a role in between Bolt and and this being a CEO, also like a manager role, similar size of the team. And I think that was my kind of playground, I would say, for a lot of these mistakes. And I made a lot of mistakes there, and I can see it now. And I'm really thankful for this experience. So I think, you know, as our career progresses, we just get to learn.

We just get to make some smaller mistakes over time, right? Like, it's smaller and smaller, hopefully, until we are, you know, like an actual leader or manager or like whatever we wanna become like a software developer. It would just, you know, recognize patterns and recognize, you know because now, like, when I'm in this role, like, I'm just thinking, you know, oh, I've heard this before, you know? So you get to that kind of stage where you're like, oh, okay. I know this type of person.

I know what they're expecting, or from me as a manager, or, what they wanted from their career even. So so, yeah, it gets easier over time. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Awesome. I I think, you know, I personally appreciate people who travel and and work when they're traveling and see different cultures, see different things, learn from all of their experiences. And, again, as as both Pedro and I have our own side businesses, some that are still going and some that have succeeded and failed as well, I think there's a lot to be learned from your experience. So I guess if there's any any, you know, remaining thoughts that you have for people who might be looking to follow a similar journey, you know, if they wanna be a CEO of a company, if they wanted to get into blockchain, if they wanna be a manager as opposed to an individual contributor, you know, what are some thoughts that you would have, some advice that you would give, either to your former self or to some of those people who might be listening who have similar aspirations?

Speaker 0: Yeah. I would say that you should probably, as somebody who's, like, let's say, a contributor individually, you know, make a big leap in your career, but also be sure that it's a safe leap, that you don't throw everything out, that you just don't quit your job and without funding and, you know, find your find your own company without a team. You know, you have to kind of prepare. It's a process. Right?

Like, in going from a contributor to manager or let's say to CEO, a big jump. It's just like something that you need to kind of have a cushion and make sure that you're not losing it all at the end of that journey. Right? Because a lot of people are doing that. Right?

Especially in the US, you don't have a, I guess, a safety net. Right? So like social security, all this stuff is like a pretty, yeah, spicy topic. So so, yeah, like, you have to have a cushion, a financial cushion or funding or family support. I think that's really important.

So so then you can kind of journey forward without fear because fear is pulling us back.

Speaker 2: Right. So the really pragmatic approach, line everything up, really think it through, and have, like, a mission oriented, yeah.

Speaker 0: Start with a job. Like, I was working, you know, 12 hour days plus. And, I mean, that's not even a lot. I think some people work 16 hours. You know, sometimes I wake up at AM AM.

I would end my day at 2 AM. And it's tough, but, you know, there was no for me, there was no other way to to, you know, make sure that I'm safe into going into a business.

Speaker 2: Thanks so much for joining us. Definitely learned a lot. Really appreciate your time.

Speaker 0: Thank you, guys. I hope to see you soon.