Simone Cicero:
Hello, everybody. Okay. Let’s come back to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. Tonight with me I have my usual co-host, Stina Heikkila.

Stina Heikkila:
Hello, everybody.

Simone Cicero:
And with us, we have Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski. I hope I said it well, Gabe.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Yes, yes. Perfect. Wonderful to be here.

Simone Cicero:
Acceptably well, I hope. And so I mean, let me just reinforce that we are so excited to have you here. Gabe is among the founders and the leaders of this project called Braintrust, which is one of the few, I would say, really exciting projects we are seeing now, nowadays. One of the few that are really transcending the usual and making more tangible also this, chatting about the Web3 that is happening. So, Gabe, maybe most of all, I think we should start from you giving a quick introduction from your experience in explaining and communicating this project in a way that our listeners can understand the basics, so that we can really dive deep into the most advanced thinking that is behind this project.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Sure. So, Braintrust is a decentralized talent network that is owned and governed by a community of people around the world. And so if you contrast that with traditional Web 2 which I’ve spent my entire career building, those are typically highly centralized organizations that are owned and governed by their investors, and where the users typically have no voice, no power, and really no ownership in the network. So, it’s this, I would say, big transition from the old way to the new way. Happy to unpack it with you.

Simone Cicero:
Thank you so much. And I’m really, really interested in letting also our listeners understand the steps that lead to creating Braintrust as it is today. What is the organizational structure that basically governs this project, runs it, runs its strategy and interacts with this amazing community that you have created? I know you have a no profit. I know you collected money through an SAFT process. And so I’m really interested in, again, unpacking a bit the institutional complexity that you built.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Yeah, it’s a great question. So, I think the way to think about it is that the association that essentially governs the Braintrust protocol is a nonprofit entity. It’s not intended to make profit. It’s essentially as a shepherd or as a way to govern the protocol. There are many for-profit entities that operate on top of the Braintrust protocol and platform. You know, a great analog for this would be like the Ethereum Foundation, right? There’s many, many for-profit entities that build on top of Ethereum. But the Ethereum Foundation is essentially a nonprofit. We follow a very similar path and a similar structure as Ethereum.

Simone Cicero:
You know, I guess the nonprofit is the one that essentially is connected with the token that you raise, right, that you created, that you minted, partially, no? And the question is really, for example, I know that there are six players that are running this company. So, I’m interested in understanding a bit more of what is their role versus maybe, especially in relationship with running the communication and all this process that is not on chain, let’s say?

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Yeah, great question. So, when we first started, essentially, the primary developer of the Braintrust protocol was Freelance Labs. And it remains essentially one of the nodes. And now there are six nodes, providing a variety of different functions and development capacities for the Braintrust network. So, there’s six total networks. And they provide a variety of activities ranging from actual blockchain development, to community development, and then enterprise development. So, currently, there’s six different companies that actually are nodes and are helping to build out the Braintrust network.

Simone Cicero:
And that’s really interesting. I mean, especially thinking about you and your story. You know, I’ve been listening to this a few times. And your story as an investor and these way that you went through raising money through these SAFT process, which is essentially a safe invention, but related to releasing tokens, right. Maybe you can unpack a bit this aspect also and the role of the token, I would say, for our listeners as well.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Yeah. So, the mechanics in Silicon Valley, a common instrument that people are using to raise capital, is called a “safe” (simple agreement for future equity). Y Combinator came up with this structure. It’s very similar to a “convertible note”. The differences like there’s not typically a confined timeframe or an interest rate that’s associated with it. Those are kind of like the core differences between a safe and a convertible note.

And then with the advent of token projects a new instrument was created, which is essentially a SAFT. And it’s basically a derivation of a safe, but for tokens, because in Braintrust there is no equity and nor has there ever been any equity. And so the early supporters were, essentially investing. And then when the token was minted on Mainnet, essentially, they receive tokens versus when a company typically goes through their other structures. Again, we are not a traditional company. And so the structures are quite different for a nonprofit token project.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah. You said that you’re not a traditional company. I’m very curious to see, so when you started this, how did you attract basically the first talents and a little bit how did you solve the chicken egg problem? Like, what came first and how did that differ from what you had done with other marketplaces in the Web2 framework?

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Yeah, great question. So, I mean fundamentally marketplaces are there to essentially bring together supply and demand, right. And the vast majority of them fail in what’s called like the bootstrap phase, which is they fail to basically get enough of both sides or the right amount of both sides to show up, to be able to have essentially network effects or liquidity between supply and demand. And so that’s always like the primary challenge for any marketplace. And so when we first started this, we actually started by hand curating talent that we had worked with in the past. We actually started with 50 talents that we had actually built companies with in the past and had worked with in the past, so we had personally vetted.

And then we actually gave each of those talents a few invites that they could then invite other talents. So, we went from like, 50, talent to 150 to 400 talent, basically all through this kind of referral mechanic. And so that’s kind of how we bootstrapped the I’ll say, like the talent side or supply side of the network. And then in the beginning we were demand constrained, right? We had to actually go out, and bring on companies that were looking to hire. And frankly, this was really difficult when we first started for a couple different reasons. Number one, that you have to remember, like it, whatever, even just a couple of years ago, the idea of remote work was still an idea. It was people writing blog articles about it. But global enterprises wanted butts and seats. And so we would go and talk to companies and they’d say like, “Yeah, this seems interesting. We know we need to hire remote people and freelancers, but we’re really not set up to do it”.

So, they would kind of dip their toes in the water. And it was a slog, right. Like, we hadn’t talked to a lot of companies. Fortunately, we were able to get a couple big enterprises like Nestle on board in the early days. And then something just like completely shifted in June of 2020 where basically, all companies became remote companies. And that anachronistic thinking around butts and seats was literally wiped away. And when we came out of stealth in June of 2020, we had 268 inbound enterprises in one month. And we signed up some of the biggest companies in the world. And they just started growing and growing and growing and using the network. And that’s how the flywheel really started to turn in Braintrust.

Simone Cicero:
And this growth, I bet, it’s something that also other platforms have seen, right? But there is this, yeah, I mean, platforms with regards to freelance work. But from what I see your company is really positioned in a space that is attracting very high caliber customers, probably because of the quality also of the providers, right? And it seems that this referral mechanism that you built that allows these people to gain access to the token, it’s really decisive to improve the quality of the supply. And also what are maybe other elements, other processes that let these people that participate gain skin in the game? How can they generate these tokens? How can they earn these tokens? Maybe you can mention a few other things that differentiate essentially Braintrust from the other competitors.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Yeah, it’s a great question. So, I mean, if we go back, like, I’ve spent my entire career building and investing in Web 2 marketplaces, right, like over 50 of them across all different industries and categories from ride sharing to healthcare and gig economy and kind of everything in between. And when you’re involved in that many, I would say you start to develop some pattern recognition and you also See like the dirty little secrets. And the dirty little secret of all Web 2 marketplaces is that the rate, right, or the fee taken out of the middle, is it kills network effects and it kills community, and it kills NPS or net promoter score.

And so when you extract disproportionate rent or value from your users, they start to hate you. And you can’t build a long term sustainable company when one or two sides of the network hate you. So, our kind of fundamental thesis when we’re starting this was on the talent side, if you dropped fees to 0%, like immediately if people were coming from another marketplace, they would get a 30 or 40% raise, right? So, it’s a very attractive economic incentive for them to do work on Braintrust. And there’s no incentive for them to disintermediate or go off platform, right, because they pay a 0% rate and we ensure all the payments and the reputation is online. So, that’s the kind of part one on the talent side.

And when you drop the fees down to 10% for the enterprises, what you enable, our thesis when we started and this is really proven out is when you drop the fees so low on the enterprise side, you enable a whole new class of transactions that frankly, never have appeared on the traditional freelance or labor marketplaces in the past. So, as an example, I think this is pretty recent, the numbers for the average job on Upwork would range between like $250 and $350, the last data that they put out.

Contrast that with Braintrust and the average job currently was $76,000. And so when you drop the fees down to zero for both sides, there’s no incentive for people to go off platform. And so what it enables is a whole new class of large ongoing projects with big enterprises and great talent. And so that’s like the unlocking fee structure, right? There’s this financial incentive of like, why people want to come here and why people want to stay here. So, that’s one very kind of important part of what I would call the legs of the stool, right? But that’s not everything.

The second part is, listen, when you’re running your business on these platforms, you care quite a bit about things like the fee structure, or the governance or the new categories, or how these things operate. And you’ve seen this in Web 2 marketplaces, right? Categorically, where the users, like, when something changes in governance, right, they raise the fees, they change the structure on the users. And in Braintrust, the users actually have a vote. It’s a one token one vote system. And in order for any changes to be made to things like the fee structure, the community actually needs to vote for that to happen. And so that provides a really strong incentive for the community to stay really involved. And also to care quite a bit about the future and the success of the network, is that governance component. And that’s, again, it’s a fundamental difference between kind of, I’ll say, Web 2 and Web 3.

And so when you package those together, you say, like, well, why do people want to work here? Well, they want to work here because we have the largest and most reputable brands around the world with large ongoing jobs. And they get to actually earn Btrust and they get to use it to control and govern the network, right? So, when you package all those things together, it’s a, what I would call like a 10X value proposition.

Simone Cicero:
And essentially, these people gain Braintrust, if I understand well, and you can help me out if not, essentially by vetting other people, when they join, for example, that’s one thing. Then they do referrals for roles or for jobs. And what are the other mechanisms for participants to — for the community to gain Braintrust?

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Yeah. So, those are great call outs, right, is it we don’t spend a single penny on marketing to get companies or to get talent, right, but yet, we’ve scaled incredibly fast. And that’s due to the fact that we have a global permissionless referral system where people actually can earn one or 2% of the dollar value that the people that they invite spend on the platform, right? So, it becomes this very strong and recurring financial incentive for people that refer more talent or refer clients. And that’s been a huge driver for our growth over time.

The second way is obviously people performing functions that the network needs to grow and also stabilize. And so in a labor network or telling network that needs to have curated talent, a lot of that job is actually screening, vetting talent, and then actually educating and helping to do peer to peer reviews of profiles. And so there’s these whole kind of core actions that are either education or like network activities, network operations that are all done by the community, and people earn Btrust for doing those activities as well. So, the core concept if your peel all these things back is let the people actually control the network, but let them earn their control of the network by helping the network to grow. And so our fundamental belief is that these networks should be owned and operated by the people that make their livings on the network.

Simone Cicero:
That’s great. Last point on this token just to make it clear for the listeners, and then I know Stina has some very interesting questions on the team forming and other aspects. So, one thing I want to clarify also is, these tokens, of course give you, let’s say, governance rights, because we have these fantastic mechanisms for off chain discussions, but then on chain votes. And so people having access to these tokens actually become part of the governance of the organization. But there is also more, I would say, financial perspective. So, these tokens, for example, I know that they are on Coinbase now. Are they tradable? Can people — I know that you can buy it. Actually, you can buy it from Braintrust, of course, but maybe people can trade it? Am I right?

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Yeah. I mean, of course, like when a token is listed on an exchange, anyone that has an account on that exchange could purchase it, right. But our belief, when we were starting this was that like people’s on ramp into crypto and especially in this network should be like earning it. So, I would say that that’s been the prime, like for our core community that they joined a long time ago and they’ve been working on this for years and earning Btrust all along the way. So, again, of course, people could buy Btrust on any one of the exchanges that it’s listed. And of course, they could sell Btrust on any of those exchanges as well.

Simone Cicero:
And it doesn’t make any difference in terms of the rights that you have when it comes to if you earn the token or if you bought that on an exchange?

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
No, you have to hold tokens in your wallet. It’s a one token, one vote system. And so you have to hold tokens in your wallet, obviously, to participate in governance, to propose new things and also to cast your votes.

Simone Cicero:
So, if I buy the token from one of these developers, for example, that are working in the community, can I then have access to the governance even if I’m not actually part of the community? That was my question. Sorry for not making it clear.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Yeah, absolutely. So, it is a one token, one vote system.

Simone Cicero:
That’s great. So, it’s a kind of tradable reputation, if you want. Stina I know that you have other questions, so more about the mechanics that you see happening on the platform.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah, I was curious to understand a bit about those providers, basically, the freelancers. Do you see that they also join up forces, people with complementary skills? Do they provide sort of a suite of services? Or is it really more like individual? And how would that work? I mean, do you also see that you have some teams that maybe stick around for some time? Maybe they also somehow navigate towards the same decisions in the governance? Or if you see what I’m getting at there, this kind of dynamic?

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Yeah, absolutely. So, I think when we were originally doing this platform, our thesis was actually there’s going to be a lot more like projects from companies, right. So, company comes in, wants to build a web app and wants to hire a full stack team or a squad to attack that project. Our experience has been so far, it’s more actually, like individuals being hired and plugged into a company’s existing squads. We do have essentially, like an agency functionality where people can form agencies on the platform and either operate as an individual or operate as essentially like an agency on the platform to tackle a project. So, both, that functionality exists for the talent to either operate individually or as part of a team.

I think your second question was around, like are there people that have similar interests that participate in governance in kind of, like pods or interests, right?

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah, that’s right.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Yeah. What we’ve seen there, there’s about 10 proposals that have happened in the last, I think, four or five weeks that have happened in governance, and many of those things have passed. It’s really interesting. You can actually see all this on snapshot.org. You can see all the kind of the history of these proposals. So, I think it’s actually a little too early to call that one. Like, ask me again after we’ve had 100 proposals. So far, what we see is there’s basically collaboration across what I would call trades, right. So, you see, like, engineers and designers proposing something. And then both of them kind of having different perspectives about things like bid staking or job staking or public roadmaps, things like that. So, it’s actually really nice because you get this kind of cross functional expertise and perspectives.

Stina Heikkila:
Fascinating.

Simone Cicero:
I’m very curious about one thing. So, if I think about governance happening through these kinds of democratic proposals, it feels slow in terms of the typical move fast and break things that that we got told is the rule of Silicon Valley. So, the question that I have is more about, what is the interplay between the community and the tokens and the blockchain elements, the Web 3 elements, and let’s say, the partners because there’s no company and the Web 2 and the actual process of innovating, for example, the user experience or taking even maybe minor decisions about the strategy and the execution of the organization. Who motivates these six partners to take over these roles? Is it just the value that accrues in the token as a promise of selling it tomorrow? How do you see that unfolding?

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Yeah. I mean, one of the great things is that these teams, these kind of like six core teams have been working together and building this network for years. And so there’s a ton of collaboration across those teams. And also, like, they have both different expertise, but they’re aligned around very similar things, which is growing GSV or gross services volume. Which is basically that the revenue in the network, because that means that more and more people are getting hired, and more and more companies are hiring, and that’s essentially kind of the North Star for the network. And so many of those decisions don’t need to be on chain decisions, right? They can be things like core user flows, things like that, that are product decisions that those teams need to be able to move super-fast on.

And then there’s what I would call governance decisions, right? Things like fee structure, things like new categories, things that are more governance related or like up and coming when we do grants, programs, things like that; where the community needs to be involved and needs to vote and govern those things. So, I personally think that my observation of investing and operating in this space for many years is that, I think, too many Web 3 projects try to do everything all at once, and actually too early. You know, there’s a great article, I think, that a16z wrote about, I think it’s the path to progressive decentralization.

Simone Cicero:
Right, of course, that’s a massive.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
And it’s funny, before they wrote that article, that was our thesis, right, was basically that you have to first build a functioning and high value network that delivers value to the participants. And then you progressively decentralize more and more attributes and push more and more activities on chain over time. And that is how you build a sustainable and enduring project. Because you know, when you first start it, you need a point of view, you need a perspective, and you need to actually move fast in those early days.

And then as the network reaches maturity, you push more and more things on chain. And so that seemed crazy a couple years ago, but it’s proven in the growth of our network and the sustainability of the project, that that path has been the right one for our particular project. Now, something like DeFi is quite different, right? Like, everything needs to be on chain in the beginning. But in a labor marketplace or a talent marketplace that’s just not the case. So, every project is a little different, has different fundamentals and needs differing levels of, I’ll say, everything being on chain or everything being off chain. There’s not a yes or no answer, it’s really project dependent.

Simone Cicero:
No, but yes, I mean, I totally understand this and it’s super exciting. And we have this idea, we wrote about this a few weeks ago on our blog, of out cooperating the competition, right. So, it sounds like you’re kind of building this as the network would. So, it’s really a way to embody the full expectations of the ecosystem of players that are interested in this space and in a way to essentially create a very solid the last mover on the market, because basically there is a much more positive I would say, I don’t know how to explain in English, but the case for joining is disproportionately better than the case for competing because how can you compete with something that the network itself is designing? So, I think you’re totally right.

My question was more about your motivation as an investor, it seems that technology is making a new investment thesis kind of possible and at the same time inevitable. And you are so smart that as an investor, I mean, that you’re already into this, and you’re already embracing this wholeheartedly. Maybe some others are more slow and they want to protect a different mechanism of monetization that are much more in line with the things that you have been talking about at the start as “wrong” and as dysfunctional.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Yeah. With each iteration or shift of the web, there was some fundamental shift both in the technology that enabled the new business model. And I think we’re witnessing that right now. So, if we go back in history, we kind of look at Web 1.0, it was incredible. The innovation was being able to essentially connect people around the world that did not know each other before, right, like that was an incredible innovation. And then came along, I’ll say, like Web 2.0 and in my experience, I think the innovation there was like payments, right, trust mechanisms, right, like escrow services, things like that, and then the advent of the mobile phone.

And that created this explosion of new businesses. And for me, I looked at that, like the explosion of marketplace business models, that essentially brought people together that didn’t know each other, didn’t trust each other from either locally or all around the world to be able to transact in a trusted way. And that those businesses have been the most dominant of the last 20 years. And the business model, especially in those market and Web 2 marketplaces was basically provide those additional services of payments and trust.

And then the business model is extract the maximum amount of fees from the transaction as possible, and consolidate that into the enterprise value for the for the for the investors that are on the cap table, right. And that model, frankly, has worked really well. And then you have to ask yourself the question, which is like, what’s the new technology that enables a new business model that’s happening right now. And my fundamental belief is that the new technology is blockchain and obviously smart contracts, and tokenization.

And what that enables is a new business model, which is dropping fees to as low as possible, and distributing ownership and control as wide as possible. And I think what that enables is, is new categories of networks and marketplaces to be created. And also a whole new section of transactions that typically never touched these marketplaces before because of the fee structure or because people didn’t want to participate in those networks because they feel like they were being extracted upon. And so I think it’s never been a more exciting time in history for people to be working on this space.

Simone Cicero:
That’s great. I’m curious to know about your impression around this kind of maximalism that exists sometimes around Web 3. And in relationship, also to the hurdles that you have experienced in building something such visionary. But at the same time having to entertain the problem of UX and letting people on board to this platform. And not just developers, which are on their own, as you said on some podcast, even fairly smart in terms of digital adoption of these kind of strange things. And on the other side, you have companies. And you mentioned, for example, in a podcast, nobody wants to own his own treasury or maybe doing things through wallets. And so companies have to pay actual invoices.

So, my question, as a recap, is about embedding still some of Web 2 into something that is definitely Web 3, what do you leave there? So, in terms of, for sure, you’re better UX, but what do you leave in terms of security, for example, in terms of resistance to censorship? So, for example, another thing that I had in mind is, how do you polish this platform? Does somebody polish it for malicious behaviors, for example? So, the typical questions that emerge from a purely decentralized network versus a partially decentralized network, somebody said once, you cannot be partially censorship resistant, for example. So, what do you think about that? And what do you leave there? What do you sacrifice where you compromise Web 3 with Web 2?

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Yeah. Obviously, there’s a lot to unpack there, right. But I would say that before we started this project, we went through a really extensive customer development process, right. We interviewed over 100 enterprises and looked at the challenges, the problems that they had, theses and hypotheses that we had and really shaped a lot of our perspective before we wrote a single line of code. And so we did a ton of customer development on the enterprise side. And what we found was like, people want to access talent, they don’t want to buy or custody crypto, right, and they didn’t want to install MetaMask to be able to hire a developer, right? Like, that’s too much friction for them to adopt a new platform. Right?

So, we knew that we needed to build something that didn’t require a bunch of behavior change on the enterprise side, but enabled them to essentially use a decentralized network. And for many of these companies, this is the first time that they’ve ever used a decentralized network, right, for Nike and Goldman Sachs and for Nestle, they’re using a crypto network for the first time and they don’t have to go through all the kind of the brain damage that many people do when they start to use one of these projects as I’m sure you guys have experienced.

And so that really came from a lot of really in depth customer development to understand where do we need to innovate? And also, where do we need to, I’ll say, minimize the friction or the onboarding, specifically on the enterprise side. And then frankly, we did the exact same thing on the talent side is we really looked at and we said, what are the core innovations here? This doesn’t need to be crypto for crypto sake, right? Like, a lot of the stuff that we were seeing at the time was like, it was unnecessarily difficult, and unnecessarily hard. And like marketplaces at their core are about reducing friction.

And so any areas where you can essentially use user experience or user design to reduce friction, but still get the benefits of some of these areas of decentralization, and some of the areas of governance was like our North Star. So, we wanted both sides to be able to show up and actually use the network and get the value prop without having to go through the huge learning curve that is required, typically to use other crypto networks. And so that was a very, very intentional kind of design decision that we made early. And we felt like, that’s how we go and get like — That’s how we onboard hundreds of the Fortune 1,000 companies into crypto for the first time. And that’s how we onboard 10s of millions of users that are not currently crypto users. Right?

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
And that was always our play was like going after the people that are already in crypto, unless you’re doing gaming or NFTs or something like that is frankly, like a really small market. Like we were going after the, essentially building a protocol for internet labor. Which meant that the design decisions that needed to be made here were quite different than the decisions you might make for whatever, building an NFT or DeFi or something like that.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah. I mean, I was saying that that’s great. It seems like using Web3, but in a way that essentially generates incentives that are functional to building great marketplaces that serve their community, or it’s not about any of the ideological adoption of technology. But at the same time, I think we have to understand that there are maybe some radical properties of Web 3 that you have only if you embrace it if you want in this very radical and this somehow post-institutional way that Web 3 embeds. So, maybe we are looking at — [crosstalk] Yeah. Go ahead please.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Listen, I’m a core believer, right I bought Bitcoin back in 2013. I’m a believer in this technology. But I also believe that in order for these networks to build enduring projects, they need to deliver value to their users and they need to actually build real serious value for both sides. In some ways, I saw a lot of ideological projects that floundered and never got off the ground. And so I think that, going back to our conversation around the path to progressive decentralization, I think projects have to really look at the fundamentals of their project and then decide what to do and in what order. Just being a fundamentalist without building value for your network or building usability for your network, you end up with some projects that are frankly, like great blog articles, but that no one uses.

Simone Cicero:
I mean, that resonates a lot with me because I’ve been somehow questioning, for example, movements such as the platform cooperative movements for its lack of tangibility. And you are here to demonstrate that some crazy revolutionary ideas in terms of ownership and distribution of value can come from the VC space, for example, much more easily, maybe sometimes that they come from the ideologically piloted spaces. I mean, let’s move on on this because I don’t want to get into this rabbit hole. But I would like to ask you for the last bits of this conversation, I know we want to close in an acceptable time, to look a bit more into the future. And I know Stina, you have some considerations, maybe that can guide us through this last bit of the conversation, right?

Stina Heikkila:
Well, I don’t know if it’s really looking into the future. But I was sitting and thinking about this onboarding of large corporations. And personally, I’ve worked quite a lot in public institutions. And when I’m listening to this and thinking about how such institutions could engage with this kind of new way of hiring talent, I could see so many obstacles in terms of procurement processes, for instance. You have to collect your proposals, you have to choose according to a defined set of criteria. I’m not sure if you encountered that also with large corporations, and if you manage to hack that in some way, or if you have had any experience with public institutions. So, that’s maybe more a question in the present, but also if there is an ambition looking ahead.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Yes, it’s a great question, right. And I think one of the observations from doing a lot of that customer development in the early days, and also, frankly, the fact that me and my co-founder built eight companies, many of which have dealt with the Global Fortune 1,000. So, we know that space quite well. And you know that a $50 billion company is not going to onboard themselves, right? Like they need some assistance to be onboarded. And so there’s community functions and node functions within our network that actually help to get those enterprises onboarded. And then people can earn Btrust for doing so. And that’s worked really, really well for us.

We also have on boarded organizations like NASA, who have, I’ll say, an insatiable appetite for the engineers to help build the future of space travel. One of the interesting projects that was on Braintrust a while back was actually building software to track shipments to the space station. So, we always say if it’s good enough for NASA and if NASA is using Braintrust to find the talent they need to literally send shipments into space, like why shouldn’t every enterprise be using this?

Stina Heikkila:
Wow. Yeah.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Currently, I think we have over 100 of the Fortune 1000 companies that are using the Braintrust network to hire talent, ranging from big tech companies like Twitter in San Francisco, to enormous CPG firms, like Nestle out in St. Louis, and large banks like Goldman Sachs, and frankly, kind of everything in between.

Simone Cicero:
Gabe, just a little maybe last technical question because I went back to my mind and I think this is essential. So, you spoke about referrals and onboarding as one of the mechanisms you, Braintrust, rewards its community for the work in tokens. Then you mentioned vetting, we mentioned that thing. So, I know that there is a process for people to gain Braintrust by essentially validating candidates. And if I’m wrong, please correct me.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
That’s correct.

Simone Cicero:
And then I think another very interesting innovation that you brought to the marketplace ecosystem that was really revolutionary, to some extent, is the mechanism — you’re using staking to improve the bid ordering system. Can you maybe spend just a little bit, a few words on this because I think this is radically important.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Yeah, it’s a great question. So, fundamentally, marketplaces’ job is to do a couple of different things, right? Like, number one, the job is to essentially aggregate supply and demand in a marketplace, as in essentially balanced the liquidity and then handle and process payments. And then I think one of the other is essentially provide a trusted place for people to transact, right? And so there’s ways in which Web 2 marketplaces handled trust, ranging from quality scores and ratings and reviews, things like that, right.

And we do all of those things, plus they can do background checks and things like that on the platform that some of these large enterprises need. In addition to that really like the — this was actually proposed by someone in our community we didn’t actually propose this, was how do we think about what’s the new primitive of trust in a Web3 world, right. Where people don’t know don’t trust each other and how do you develop new trust mechanisms, and how do you innovate on that idea of trust. And so something that was surfaced from the community was this idea of essentially what’s called job staking and bid staking.

And so what job stake — and actually referral staking. So, I’ll unpack each three because I think they’re super interesting. So, job staking, essentially, the proposal that was submitted was basically that companies when posting a job, especially if it’s a high priority job, they would actually like, stake some Btrust token along with their job post and then if they did not hire, that Btrust stake would be lost. So, essentially, what it does is it basically provides a confidence guarantee that these people are really serious about hiring and provides a another trust mechanism for the people that are on — If you’re a talent and you see that somebody put up a stake to hire somebody, your confidence in them hiring obviously goes up, right. So, that’s kind of like the concept of job staking.

On the other side, obviously, companies are now hiring engineers from all over the world and how do you develop new ways to essentially trust those people that you’ve never known, never met. And so the concept there was, basically, if you’re an engineer, let’s just say that it’s a development project, you could actually stake some Btrust along with your bid, and show up in the top of the listings. And essentially, from a company standpoint, you’re like, oh, wow, this person is staking some Btrust along with their bid. And if they don’t complete the job, according to spec, they could actually lose that stake. So, again, it just develops another trust mechanism.

And then the third component that was proposed was actually a referral stake. Which is I’m willing to stake some of my Btrust token that Simone is a great developer. And if he does something bad in the network or doesn’t deliver then I lose my stake. And so I think this is a really, really interesting area of innovation that has been surfaced by our community. And this is like how it’s intended to work, which is the people in the community that run their businesses on this network have a high vested interest in making sure that the network delivers value for all the network participants. And so I think this is one of many proposals that happened in our governance system in the last four weeks.

Simone Cicero:
I mean, this thing is just a fascinating, careful exercise of putting skin in the game everywhere and I totally love it. So, thank you so much for taking the time to share this with our community. Gabe, it was amazing to have you. So, last bit I would like to ask you is anything that you feel it’s important to share with our community, please do. And of course, if you want to point out, of course, I mean, everybody knows where we can find Braintrust, but maybe something special you want to talk about coming up or something that we have to pay attention to?

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
Yeah, that’s great. I mean, fundamentally, what I found is, like resources like this are incredible to really help people develop the frameworks and develop some perspective on what areas of this developing space are interesting for them, right? It’s so broad and wide, it’s like the early 90s of the internet. And so you got to find a space that you really want to go deep on, right? Like you can’t know everything at a really deep level. And so my encouragement for people that are learning about this space is like resources like this are incredible.

And then the next layer is going and participating in one of these communities, right. Whether that’s being in governance or volunteering, whatever it may be. That’s at its core, the concept and if people will gain a tremendous amount of experience from participating in a community, even for weeks or a month, and it will really help shape their perspective, whether they’re an investor, or a developer or a builder. So, that would be my advice or guidance is participate. It’s such an interesting and exciting space that I think that will accelerate people’s knowledge and expertise.

Simone Cicero:
Right. Every time I speak with someone doing Web3, I always get this, people telling everybody participate, join discord. And it seems like a broken record, but that’s important. I think it’s really about getting in touch with the communities of practice, people that are doing things, so really encourage everybody to do that. Thank you so much, Gabe. It was an amazing chat. So, again, thank you.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski:
It was wonderful to be on. Thank you for having me. And thanks for the work that you’re doing to help educate people around Web 3 and cooperative networks and really the potential there. So, really, it was a pleasure to join you. Thank you so much for having me.

Simone Cicero:
Stina, thank you so much as well.

Stina Heikkila:
Thank you. It was a great conversation.

Simone Cicero:
And to our listeners, catch up soon.