Simone Cicero:
Hello, everybody. We’re back at the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. Today with me is my usual co host Stina Heikkila.

Stina Heikkila:
Hello, everybody.

Simone Cicero:
And with us, we have Adam Jackson.

Adam Jackson:
Hello, thanks for having me, guys.

Simone Cicero:
Adam, thank you very much for joining us. And we are super excited to do this kind of double-click on Braintrust with you tonight. We had Gabe on the podcast, I think, maybe a couple of months ago. And we introduced Braintrust to our listeners. And after that date, we have been seeing the coverage of Braintrust increasing even more. We got this very now famous post by Packy McCormick. But in general, everybody’s talking about Braintrust. That’s my impression, you know, when I speak with people, everybody’s going to refer to Braintrust at some point. And I think it’s very interesting because you guys are definitely pioneering the space that, let’s say, interconnects Web3, with real-world work and invoices and services and that kind of stuff. Right? So, I think that’s the exciting part.

And I definitely suggest that people listen to this podcast, too, if you didn’t. Go back first and listen to Gabe’s, and then come back to this. So, let’s just start from an initial, big question. Maybe that is the one that brought us to record a second episode, which is really about for you to frame a bit today, let’s say the story, the steps that led you to build this very complex institutional system, made of now six collaborating nodes, adding seven because another one jointly lately, if I’m not wrong. So, these nodes, the foundation, the people from the network, so if you can maybe give us an overview of who is contributing value now to the system and how these value flows are being compensated, are being attached to governance rights? That’s the kind of initial framing that I would like to ask you, for our listener to start with.

Adam Jackson:
Yeah, absolutely right. Let’s see if we can make what seems complex sound a little bit simpler. You know, at the very high level Braintrust is a decentralized talent network that exists to connect talent. In our case, that’s developers, designers, product managers, etc., with clients that need them. Right? And we host the transaction. It could be a small, one month contract, or it could be an ongoing contract. Those jobs are paid for in Fiat, usually US dollars, or euros. And then where the Braintrust token comes in is it’s the incentive and governance mechanism for the network. So, most Web2 marketplaces are actually for profit corporations that operate the marketplace, right. And their job is to extract as much revenue as possible from the two sides of the marketplace. That’s usually in the form of transaction fees, right, a percentage of the dollars flowing through their network, the operator will try to take as their fee. And what this does is it creates misaligned incentives, right, between the for profit network operator and the folks who make their living on the network.

So, the whole idea about Web3, or user-owned networks are, instead of a for profit entity operating the marketplace, the community that makes their living on the marketplace also owns and operates it. And when you have that new paradigm, what we call user-owned, you now don’t have the misalignment of incentives. If the network is operated and owned by its users, they don’t have an incentive to charge themselves high fees, right? And so fees can drop to zero for talent as they have on Braintrust, and then a flat 10% fee charged to the clients, which is really just meant to sustain the network, right, to sustain the protocol development. And so that’s kind of the first layer. So, we call, instead of Braintrust being a for profit corporate entity, it’s actually just a public good, right, what we call in economic terms, a public good, something that exists not to seek profit, but to create value for the people who make their living on it.

So, drilling one layer down from there, we have this concept on Braintrust called of nodes. It’s a bit less formal of a description of nodes than, for instance, like a Bitcoin node or an Ethereum node, right. Those nodes run a specific kind of software and they have to do so with a certain type of up time, and they’re hopefully going to get rewarded with block rewards for doing that work. A node on Braintrust is very different. It’s typically a corporate entity that is providing some kind of critical service to the Braintrust network. And those nodes are then rewarded in some way, with tokens. And the token, the primary use for our token is to use it to vote, to control the network, to propose new amendments, new changes to the protocol, and then one token, one vote to vote them up or down.

Simone Cicero:
One thing I wanted to ask you essentially was, can you make a list or describe what are the services that these services providers provide to the network, to the public good? Can you make some examples? You know, I’m thinking of running the platform or doing software development, doing marketing, are these things that you’re talking about?

Adam Jackson:
Absolutely, yeah. So, in no particular order, some of the services would be Fiat payment processing. So, we have several nodes that have Stripe and TransferWise and PayPal accounts that help clients and talent transfer money in Fiat, right. So, that decentralized network can’t have a Stripe account. A company has to have a Stripe account. So, some of the nodes have to provide that service. Other nodes are development nodes. So, they create the software and host it on different cloud instances or another node of ours writes the smart contracts and make sure they’re audited, and security inspected and handles the Ethereum connection to the network.

Another node called Muses, runs the Braintrust Academy. And that’s just like her job is to build an educational aspect of the ecosystem, so people can onboard and grow within Braintrust more efficiently. And then there’s what we call commercial nodes. So, the seventh one, Kunai, I that just joined is a good example of this. These nodes bring clients, right. Clients in our world generally don’t onboard themselves, right? So, like a big company, like Porsche, or Nestle, or Nike or Goldman Sachs, you need to get through procurement, and you need to have the proper insurance and that sort of thing. So, the commercial nodes will help with that sort of activity. So, those are just some of the examples.

Simone Cicero:
And how does the system govern itself? So, who takes decisions? How work is allocated to the service providers? I know the service providers are now paid in Braintrust. Right? And when it all started, it was a little bit different. So, maybe we could explore essentially the transition, right, in terms of both decision making from you and Gabe, starting to raising capital into now with seven nodes, every node producing a certain service, being paid in Braintrust, the fee converter. Can you maybe just help us to connect these institutions that we have now exploring a little bit how these institutions takes decisions and executes with the process that led us to this?

Adam Jackson:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, so it’s now a decentralized network, so there is no central coordination of efforts. Each node can contribute in its own way without permission generally from the other nodes. Right. So, one of the commercial nodes wants to add a client, and that client needs some kind of specific feature built so they can invoice talent, or talent and invoice them properly; they just do it. They just write it, right? They get it done. They don’t need to call me or Gabe, and the code gets committed. And there’s a process for that, as far as resource management goes, I mean, there’s a large Treasury that includes dollars and Braintrust tokens. There’s a Swiss association that manages some of the Treasury, and some of the Treasury is managed on-chain in the DAO through token voting. So, participating, you don’t have to be a node to contribute. I mean, in fact, the majority of contributors to Braintrust are unaffiliated with a node. They could just be independent folks or a small agency or whatever. A node just means you have sort of a specific contract with Treasury for payment.

But we just launched this big grants program where anyone can apply for a grant and get paid in usually some mixture of dollars and tokens, Braintrust tokens to build something. And then the smaller version of that is the bounty program. Right? So, maybe we need some articles written about something like the fee converter, there’s a bounty for helping explain the fee converter to the general public. So, that’s kind of how Treasury gets managed and how the protocol grows. You asked about the fee converter, this is a relatively new feature. This was interestingly proposed by the community, voted on Snapshot and passed by the community and then implemented completely by the community. Myself and Gabe actually had no involvement in this. And what the fee converter does, the community decided that the 10% fee that clients pay on every successful invoice, gets paid in cash.

The committee decided, well, if we keep paying referral bonuses and other you know grants and that kind of thing out of Treasury, Treasury will ultimately deplete itself. So, we should have a way to replenish tokens into the treasury, which is that’s stored in our on chain DAO, the Braintrust DAO. And so this proposal basically said that the 10% fee collected by the commercial nodes from the clients needs to be sent to a new smart contract called fee converter. And this fee converter takes those dollars that goes out in the open market and buys Braintrust tokens and deposits those tokens into the DAO. And you can see all this on chain, by the way, it’s all completely transparent. If you go to Braintrust.com, you’ll see links to Etherscan to see all this stuff. It’s actually really cool. And then those tokens get stacked up in the DAO and then token holders can propose and vote on how those tokens in the DAO should be managed. That’s completely community controlled; one token, one vote.

Simone Cicero:
These fees that Braintrust, this take rate, right, this 10% take rate that goes into the fee converter and gets translated into Braintrust; does it get back to the node that I’ve been doing the commercial work or how is the commercial node being rewarded otherwise?

Adam Jackson:
Yeah, good question. So, no, the 10% now it passes through the commercial node, but it goes straight into the fee converter, buys tokens, and those tokens go to the DAO. So, the node is not keeping that 10% anymore. There’s two ways, however, that the node could be compensated in that situation. One is the referral fee. So, let’s say this node brought the client, let’s say Nike is the client, that node could be entitled to one or 2% referral fee paid in Braintrust tokens. So, because the node brought that client, and that client is transacting, the protocol’s actually paying that node, the referral fee, and that all happens programmatically. The second way a node might monetize this relationship is if they bring, so Kunai is a good example, our seventh node that just joined, they brought a lot of specialized talent and a few big clients to the network. And they’re paying the 10% fee and they brought CitiGroup, and a few other big banks and they have hundreds of really amazing talent that all joined Braintrust.

And so they’re paying a 10% fee, but then they’re going to be able to have an option to acquire tokens at a discount as one of the rewards for being a node. And then another one is Braintrust gets so many inbound client requests that Kunai can now grow its business as a software development firm, by servicing these new clients that come to the Braintrust homepage and say, hey, we want to hire talent as well. Right? So, it’s this kind of cool, like, you join the network, as a node if you’re a software agency, you get to grow your business by getting new clients, almost like if you’re a sandwich shop franchise, would you rather be independent or would you rather be Subway, right? Because Subway is going to bring all your customers to you. And so you get to grow your business and also acquire tokens by being a node.

Simone Cicero:
Right. I have another quick question. You mentioned a Swiss association, right. And I know that there is also a foundation in the ecosystem of institutions that you created, how are they related? is the same thing you mentioned. And in general, what is the role of these associations and foundations? There’s no profits in the system.

Adam Jackson:
Yeah, the foundation basically just minted the token: that was their job set up as a nonprofit is to create the Braintrust token and initially distributed. The association in Switzerland, it’s a trade group. It’s called the Ownership Economy Association. It’s a bunch of companies and individuals that believe in growing and furthering user-owned networks, Web3 networks. And so it’s a group, I’m a member of it, there’s a bunch of others across Europe and Africa, and Asia that are — It’s just about promoting Web3 economies.

Simone Cicero:
You said for example, the nodes are independent, right? But who makes it coherent, who makes Braintrust coherent then? How do you share a decision making space as nodes and because not everything become — can happen to proposals, I guess, right, through network proposals. And maybe you can also mention some of the things including the fee converter, the creation of the fee converter, that was prompted by the community. But how does the Is ecosystem, this institutional ecosystem that you created where you have these seven companies; the foundation, the association, how this stays coherent in terms of strategy, execution, and so on?

Adam Jackson:
Yeah. I mean, they are all independent. Gabe and I only are associated with one of the nodes. The others are completely independent entities all over the world. You know, we coordinate. We’re friends and colleagues and folks that have come together for a common goal. And that is to make the Braintrust network bigger, and attract more clients and attract more talent and build a bigger, better ecosystem. And so the coordination is simpler than you think. Right? It’s like Zoom calls, and Google Docs and things like that. There’s some things we need to coordinate on and some things we can contribute independently to. I don’t have regular communication with most of the nodes right there. They’re all incentivized to do their part and make the ecosystem more valuable for all of us.

Simone Cicero:
That’s really fascinating. The last bit that I would like to clear up a bit maybe is the role of capital with this. Because I know that you collected, I mean, I may be wrong, but my impression from what I’ve read, that you collected the initial capital to essentially two rounds, one seed round, and then some kind of series A round, 24 million or something like that. And then you move into a larger round, some other intermediate steps, like the coin sale, or some other things, but mainly through this 100 million fundraise with Coatue and Tiger if I’m not wrong. So, what is the role of capital into that? Why these investors are investing into Braintrust token since this is not security? What’s your thesis about how these patterns are changing the way networks get investments to create these public goods?

Adam Jackson:
Yeah, absolutely. This is an interesting topic. The big idea we had when we started, this was user-owned networks will grow faster and be more valuable than investor-owned networks. Now, that is not to say there’s no role for investors, right? That just means we don’t think investor controlled corporate marketplaces are the future. We think user controlled marketplaces are the future. And so the role of investors in a network like Braintrust is really to bootstrap construction of the software, the platform, the smart contracts, and the economy itself. So, to finance this thing, you could have done a public token sale, and then sell more tokens to raise more funds to pay people, to pay developers, etc. And it’s sort of a tough way to finance a project, I think. So, instead, we didn’t do a big public sale here, we raised money from private investors, a lot of VCs are involved. And that money is used to build the platform, and today to pay most of the salaries on some of the core teams.

So, the network has a chance to grow and attract more talent on its own, right, without us having to constantly worry about selling tokens, right? We don’t sell tokens right now. And so that it’s a great way to sort of bootstrap and network until the network effects are strong enough to where contributors want to just build on their own, which is where we are now, right? Like you see, if you follow us on Discord or Telegram or Twitter, you see tons and tons of people just contributing things on their own. Some of them are through the bounty or grant program, but others are just building things because they want to see them. Right? And it’s not us asking for them or paying people for them. There’s plenty of that too. But we’ve gotten to the point now, where it’s a healthy ecosystem of people contributing to Braintrust.

Stina Heikkila:
Well, yeah, I was curious about some things about the nodes as well. When thinking about if there are any limits to how sort of big they can grow. I know you have like one token, one vote. So, it’s not, let’s say, democratic in a sense, one member, one vote. But are there any checks on how big one entity can grow in your network or how do you think about that?

Adam Jackson:
Yeah, good question, Stina. We don’t have any safeguards right now. It is one token, one vote where as you can imagine you could have some sort of a plutocratic entity come up that has a lot of control because they’ve acquired a lot of tokens. And we think about this vector once in a while, like, what if some hedge fund comes along and accumulates a lot of tokens and then proposes something in governance that it says, hey, we’re going to upgrade the smart contracts and say, instead of 10% client success fee, it’s going to be 15%. Oh, and all of it has to be sent to this address every time it’s collected, right? Like, no more fee converter. And so you can imagine an attack like that. I think one of the most interesting things about crypto networks is, this is open source software, the community is very transparent, everyone sort of knows who the other people are and where they are.

And I think if an attack like that happened where the economics got hijacked in the network, it would be pretty straightforward to fork the network and for the other token holders to come over and basically just start Braintrust 2, right, almost like Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. And the clients obviously would want to come wherever the talent is, and the talent, if the talent felt like they were being stolen from that they would just kind of copy the network and start over. So, that’s a hypothetical I hope we don’t see play out, but it’s one that makes me not as worried about sort of the plutocratic one token one vote angle. That said, I think there are some really interesting experiments, we’re going to start running around quadratic voting, that I think Vitalik has been a thought leader on and the guys that GetCoins, I think, are doing some really cool things with so I would call what we’re doing right now, like not that sophisticated, and I think there’s a lot of room to improve.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, I mean in general, as the system grows, right, as this public good grows, it will be out there, right, to attack it through that factor, right? Because you have to buy, maybe a Braintrust is going to get more valuable as a token, essentially, right?

Adam Jackson:
Exactly. It would be very expensive to do this right now, not impossible, but the bigger the network gets, the harder these attacks are.

Simone Cicero:
Right. I was talking today with some friends around the topic of comparing tokens that are pre-minted, like you in your case, and other approaches to token release, like for example, augmented bonding curve in the case or other approaches. And I know that for example, in the fee converter context, there is a large question around the liquidity as well, right? Because as the fee converter goes and buys Braintrust on the market, it needs to find this Braintrust liquids on the axis, like Uniswap or something like that. Do you see that it’s important? Because a lot of people when they launch these tokenomics projects, they kind of become obsessed about the design of the tokenomics, right? And I must say, my impression is, we don’t understand much about these yet.

Instead, I’ve seen that you guys have approached this in a much more, I want to say much simpler way, right? You have pre-minted 250 millions, if I’m wrong. And then the fee converter came up just from the community and completely changed the tokenomics and the value model of the token. So, somehow, my question for you is, do you see, in the future, a broader role of the technicalities around creating these tokens, so maybe with multiple token releases or other patterns? Or it’s just about just having a token involving people, and genuinely like you do seem to embrace this community-owned perspective?

Adam Jackson:
Yeah. Look, this is what makes this space so fun, right? Like, I’m sure this is why you guys have your podcast. And this is why I’m an active investor and community member in so many different projects. We are witnessing in real-time, just global innovation around token economies, token utility. Braintrust economy is actually pretty simple. Right? You earn the token by helping the network that’s usually by making referrals or screening talent, right? We don’t require our users to buy tokens. I don’t think that’s appropriate, at least for our category. The clients now since the community upgraded this, the clients fees buy tokens in the open market and to replenish treasury, I think that’s a cool recycling factor that they thought of and implemented completely without the core teams. And the token, like, doesn’t matter what the cash value is, like, it’s one token, one vote and that seems to work so far. I think we’re seeing other interesting models. I just love watching the experiments. You see these two token economies starting to pop up and I’m not totally sure that’ll be as straightforward as it needs to be going forward. But I just love all the experimentation in this space.

Simone Cicero:
Right. And what do you think about the perspective of the typical investor, right? So, what are they seeing valuable in investing in a token? For example, I was looking into the approach that another project had to these especially more specifically, the project is called demo where there, you have one company that is starting to weave this network and has been raising money, both for the company and for the token, right, both in equity and token value. So, it’s a mixed approach. Instead, you guys have just raised money for the token. So, actually the node didn’t sell any equity to investors, right, just to clarify. Can you maybe expand a bit of what is your perception in terms of what an investor values in investing into such things?

Adam Jackson:
Sure, yeah. I mean, it’s much more complex now than it was in the Web2 days, right, where you just bought equity on a safe and hope for the best. I do see projects selling equity and tokens, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that really done well. Actually, other than Compound. Compound Finance, they have Compound Inc, which sold preferred shares, and then the Compound token, which they just gave half of it to their cap table, and then the other half to their users. I thought that was like a really smart and simple and fair way of distributing tokens to users and investors. That’s probably the only one I can think of that’s done tokens and equity. I think it gets messy if one of them becomes more valuable than the other, and you have to negotiate a conversion rate between the two. And that’s where you see lots of disagreements and potentially lawsuits.

And so with Braintrust, we kept it simple as you say. It was tokens from the beginning because there is no equity, there’s no Braintrust Inc. Braintrust is a public good. It’s a decentralized network and the token is the useful piece of the network, right? It’s the thing that controls the fate of the network. And if you make your living on the network you should want to accumulate and use those tokens to exercise your point of view. So, a pretty simple model for us, other investors, for some, for kind of pick and shovel businesses, like the Anchorages, and Coinbase is of the world, it’s all equity, right? They’re SaaS companies. For protocols that could change the way two-sided marketplaces operate like a Uniswap, or a Compound or a Braintrust, you know, probably the token makes more sense.

Simone Cicero:
But it’s interesting that you refer to Braintrust making these parallels because for me, it’s a bit different, right? You spoke about protocols, but Braintrust doesn’t really — it’s not just really a protocol, right? There’s a lot also that happens beyond the domain description layer. It’s much more action, much more execution. So, for example, in Demo, when, as I understanding, and I’m not even sure that all this information is available public. But I spoke with someone from the team, and they raised money both for the protocol and for the company, because the company is supposed to do some work in the ecosystem, right?

So, in that case, it’s a Data Broker, for example. And I find this very interesting because I’m thinking of talking with people with companies that want to launch these ecosystems, and just entering into this mindset, right, into this mental model of, I’m starting an ecosystem, but over the long term, I’m not going to profit from rents. I’m going to profit for the work that I contribute to the ecosystem. So, it’s like you, as a company, you build the ecosystem, because it’s going to be good for your business. And at the same time, you have to embrace this really cooperative mindset. Because it needs to be good for everybody’s business that wants to compete fairly, and provide value in the system. So, I mean, it’s a complete mindset change versus the traditional approach that an investor or early stage entrepreneur may have, to, at some point, extract some rent from the system.

Adam Jackson:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. I think Braintrust was a simpler value prop. It’s not about rent extraction. It’s about bringing together buyer and seller in a two-sided marketplace, which those two parties couldn’t have been brought together in a high fee Web2 marketplace, right? Really, it’s about using disruptive economics to grow a market. I mean, that’s what Braintrust is always about. It’s not — There’s no discounted cash flow model that I’m trying to get a good multiple on so I can sell my preferred stock for more money someday, right? That was just never my motivation as a founder. My motivation has always been just to prove that user-owned networks grow faster and are more valuable than investor-owned networks.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah, I’m curious if we could go a bit into what type of talent and maybe what you see coming up. Because I mean, I think if I’m not wrong, you have some specific niches or some specific sectors of talents like software developers, designers, and so on. And so I wanted to hear if, like, what is the variety first of all, and then if you see some kind of evolution or if that’s completely left to the network to kind of self-guide itself. Or if you see this more as a sort of societal level transformation that you somehow would like to see expand to new fields to new professions. And yeah, just curious to hear your thoughts about that.

Adam Jackson:
Yeah, yeah for sure. There’s a couple of good points in there to unpack. So, let me sort of go in the reverse order. So, starting at the very top, like you mentioned, kind of societal impact. So, I don’t know, I know you guys are in Europe, and your corporate culture and whatever, it might be a little different than ours. It certainly couldn’t be worse than ours. You know, people don’t like corporate America, like most people unless I guess you’re at the very top. Corporations warehouse talent, and then they grossly under utilize them. And then when they do utilize them, they sort of, they have to work on things that they’re not specialized to work on, or that they don’t want to work on. And now, starting next month they’re forcing everyone to come back to the offices in this sort of anachronistic corporate America kind of BS. And so there’s two main reasons people don’t leave corporate America and become their own boss, right, become their own freelancer, kind of a solopreneur.

The two reasons are, one, they don’t want to, like have to pitch clients all day, right? Like, they don’t want to turn themselves into an agency, right? Most people don’t like having to pitch and sell and whatever, right, they just finding work as an independent has traditionally been hard. The second thing is this, sounds dumb, especially from your standpoint, Europe, because you guys have figured this out. But health insurance is the second reason people don’t leave their corporate jobs. And so my goal with Braintrust has always been like, let’s create a marketplace owned and controlled by talent, where those two problems are solved and people can leave their corporate jobs that they hate, they can work wherever they want, for whomever they want, when they want to at a rate of their choosing. So, there’s no more commuting, there’s no more being told what to do, like by a boss, that you don’t want to work on. There’s no more consulting firm taking half of your money as their fee, and there’s no more schlepping to an office like sitting on a highway or a subway. And so Braintrust solves those two problems by — Well, first, we have basically unlimited client demand, right? There’s way, way, way more jobs on Braintrust than there are talent, in the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of pent up demand. So, you don’t have to pitch yourself, you just have to set up your talent profile and get verified and just bid on jobs that look interesting to you. And whatever your rate is, like, if that’s competitive, you’ll get it, no fees.

And the second thing is health insurance. And we’re just rolling out two different health insurance partners. One of them is a crypto partner called Oculus. And so now there’s no barriers, right? So, that’s part one, Stina, and sorry, for the long answer. Like, people shouldn’t have to go to college and go into debt and then have a job that they hate, right? It’s just not right. And so I hope that that’s like our long term societal impact. As far as categories go, we’re in IT right now, as you say, and IT is a narrow, but extremely deep category. There’s something like $1.3 trillion, a year of global IT outsourcing. We can never leave that category and Braintrust could get really, really big. But I know that Braintrust will expand into other categories. We’ve had law firms approach us, we’ve had accounting firms, compliance firms. Basically, like anyone who makes their living as a knowledge worker in front of a computer can eventually; can, will, should eventually use a network like Braintrust, if not Braintrust itself, to create these dynamic labor markets. It won’t be me. I’m not a lawyer or an accountant. But I know people who are already thinking about building these categories out on Braintrust.

Simone Cicero:
Adam, I would like to ask you, maybe, what would you do differently? So, that maybe we can focus a bit on your lesson learned from kick starting this network. So, let’s start from there. Because it seems that you have been doing such a pioneering work that, I guess, people would like to know what they should avoid?

Adam Jackson:
Well, look, I’ll tell you this, I don’t have any real slam dunk answers off the top of my head because I’ll say like, we’ve been pretty lucky here. You know, when Gabe and I started the network, we were pitching remote engineering teams to companies in the US that wanted in-office talent, right. And there you can still see it today. There’s this anachronistic thinking in corporate America where they want people butts in seats, they want to look over their shoulder. And that’s just dinosaur behavior and it’ll go extinct eventually. But then the COVID lockdown happened and remote work was the new normal and that made Braintrust go from a nice to have to the new normal. And that’s not going back, right? I mean, we’re lucky to have that change. So, look, if it weren’t for that we wouldn’t be growing as fast as we are now.

There’s little things along the way, like when you’re launching a token, like make sure you’re compensating people fairly with that token. Like, we had some mistakes where we were paying people in static numbers of tokens instead of dollar denominated numbers of tokens. And so that resulted in some gross overpayments, but you know, no big deal, right? So, you give a little bit too much to your community and no harm, no foul, right. They’re all good people and we’re happy to have everybody. So, little mistakes here and there. But I just think, like, keeping the incentives aligned between the people who operate the network, the nodes, the folks who make their living on it, the clients, like keeping everyone on the same team, right? That’s the North Star. And I think we’ve done a reasonably good job of that, and we miss steps here and there, but you know, be honest about your mistakes and keep moving.

Simone Cicero:
So, final reflection, what’s coming up for Braintrust? What do you think? And maybe also what’s coming up for the industry and society more in general? I mean, you spoke about knowledge workers, but I’m talking about your impression with regards to how this technology is changing society, like the printing press did several 100 years ago.

Adam Jackson:
Yeah. Look, I think the big impact of this technology on society is that it’s giving literal control back to people who trade their time for money. Right? Like, it’s making the labor class almost merged into the investor class, if you think about it that way. But it’s not necessarily about necessarily wealth creation. It’s really about control. You know, it’s like if the old way is, you leave college in debt, you still don’t know anything, you go work for a consulting firm, you have to go to their office, you have to work on the clients they assign you to, and then you give 75% of your income to them. That’s the old way.

Simone Cicero:
I was there.

Adam Jackson:
Yeah, me too. Me too. I mean, all of us in this generation sort of started there, at some point. The new way is, hopefully you don’t go to college, right? Because college is a horrendous waste of money in the United States. In Europe, it’s free, so good for you guys. We haven’t figured that out yet. It’s still a criminal empire in the United States. One that pays no income tax or property tax, amazingly. Figure out what you love to work on, learn how to do it better than anyone on YouTube for free, then join a network, maybe it’s Braintrust, maybe it’s something else where you can find clients who need what you do, and then control the platform by earning tokens and don’t pay any fees, right? Just pay your income tax, and control your destiny. You know, don’t commute, don’t sit in an office, and don’t give 75% of your money away.

And so look, to me, that’s what Web3 is all about. Braintrust is a very small sliver of that story. But this is why blockchain matters, right? I know, it’s easy to make fun of the technology and there’s plenty of scammers and other pieces of shit trying to take advantage of people. But that’s not what the technology is about. Right? Technology is about personal freedom. And so that’s the future, I think, right? And the little things Braintrust is doing this year, it’s interesting, fine, but like, this is why I get excited. This is why I think the Web3 movement is so big and important right now.

Simone Cicero:
And what’s coming up for you guys, something exciting that you may be sharing or working on?

Adam Jackson:
Yeah, I mean it sounds kind of funny, but like the health insurance thing I mentioned is a big deal. Like, that opens the gates for many, many more millions of Americans to leave corporate America and come over and be — have health care, just like everybody else. There’s some interesting discussions going on in the Braintrust discord about what to build next. And the grants program just got off the ground. So, I think we’re going to see a lot of interesting folks proposing grants to expand Braintrust into different, maybe we’ll expand into Asia Pacific, and maybe there’ll be a new category expansion dimension. And it’s not up to me anymore. I’m a mere observer now, and I really love that.

Simone Cicero:
That’s great. That’s great. I mean, Adam, thanks so much. Where should people connect with you on the internet and get informed on what you’re up to, listening to your reading of writings?

Adam Jackson:
Yeah, sure. I’m pretty active kind of on Twitter, at Adam Jackson SF. And then Braintrust is just Braintrust.com. And then hit our Discord which is linked off the bottom of Braintrust.com There’s just an awesome community on there. I think that’s how all of us connected initially. Lots of smart people sharing ideas on there.

Simone Cicero:
Thank you so much. That was worth as a double clicking on Braintrust, such a great project, and you Gabe, such a great people. I’m really thankful for your time.

Stina Heikkila:
Thank you so much. This was really interesting.

Adam Jackson:
Well, I appreciate both of you taking the time and letting me explain. Hopefully, some of the complexity is a little simpler now.

Simone Cicero:
I think we did a good job. I think we did a good job in clarifying some of the key points that I was very fuzzy about and I think other people as well. So, I’m sure that we’re adding some value here. Thank you so much. To our listeners, catch up soon.