GRTiQ Podcast: 122 Julien Genestoux

Speaker 3 (00:00:01):

The following podcast is for informational purposes only. The contents of this podcast do not constitute tax, legal or investment advice. Take responsibility for your own decisions, consult with the proper professionals and do your own research.

Julien Genestoux (00:00:14):

I do think at some point you can imagine The Graph being something that indexes content from all kinds of data sources, whether they’re blockchains or not.

Nick (00:00:55):

Welcome to the GRTiQ podcast. Today I’m speaking with Julien Genestoux, founder and CEO at Unlock Protocol, a blockchain-based access control protocol that empowers creators to monetize their content directly and enables users to manage subscriptions and earn rewards for sharing valuable content and applications. And as you likely already note, Julien was recently announced as a new member of The Graph Council.

(00:01:21):

During this interview, Julien shares his remarkable entrepreneurial background. We first talk about his time at university where Julian launched his first successful business. Then we talk about his incredible journey with his next business venture, Superfeedr, which he eventually sold to Medium. Then we discussed Julian’s newest venture, Unlock Protocol, along with a great conversation about how Unlock uses The Graph, how Julien became a council member, and his vision for the future of The Graph. As always, we start the discussion talking about Julien’s educational background.

Julien Genestoux (00:01:58):

I went to school, was not a great kid. I mean, I’m sure a great kid, but I wasn’t a great student in most of my studies. But I got better as I grew older and maybe as my field of study became narrow and narrower, and then became more interested in how actionable these the things that I was learning were. I did get a software learning degree from a university in France called [inaudible 00:02:20]. It’s the [inaudible 00:02:23] in Leo, my hometown. And I actually was lucky enough this is only a five-year degree, but I cheated my way by sleeping the first two years.

(00:02:31):

But because I went to another agency and I was good enough that they would admit me, and then the last year I actually spent in Chicago at IIT, which stands for Illinois Institute of Technology as an exchange student. Out of the five years, I actually did only two years on campus at that school in France. But I did get a degree from there and I’m very proud of this. It’s actually a pretty good degree. I’m happy about this one.

Nick (00:02:52):

Your degree, as I look at your educational background, you have an education in finance and you also have it in computer science and software engineering.

Julien Genestoux (00:02:59):

That one was actually computer science. But one thing that I didn’t tell you was that as I was a student, I was actually a bit bored for a couple times. I don’t call it company first because I created a job board for students almost by accident. It was actually one summer in 2000 or 2001, I don’t remember which of the years. I was just the first year at university and I was really bored in that summer and I was looking for a summer job. And again, if you go back 23 years now, everyone is like, “The internet is magic. There’s everything on the internet, internet, internet.”

(00:03:27):

And it was like, “Okay, I must find a summer job on the internet.” And there was no way I could find a summer job on the internet. I was like, you know what? If I could find a summer job on the internet, I’m going to create the job board for this and I’m going to learn how to use the internet that everybody’s talking about. And so I started my way tinkering at first with slash, which was very early on with MySQL, with PHP, and I created that job board. And almost it was an accident.

(00:03:49):

I did create this, put it out there. I didn’t want to register the dot com domain because it felt so commercial. And I registered the dot net for [inaudible 00:03:57] which literally means student job in French. Put that website out there and I will say, forget about this, but put it out there and say, “All right, cool. This is cool. I’m done with that project.” After a few months, McDonald’s, I don’t need to describe this, but the Happy Meal company, suddenly put job offers on that website because they were hiring students from that website.

(00:04:17):

And for me, that’s when my head started to explode. I have the emoji exploding heads coming to brain right now because I realized this internet was magic for that reason. It allowed people to put stuff out there for anybody else to use. And if it was useful, then great, people would use it. If I had taken more traditional route of saying, okay, I’m going to create a business that’s going to have a job board all night, I would’ve never done this. It was just too much work and too much hassle to do all of that. I’m not even sure I would’ve been able to do that from a legal perspective being that I was 18, but just wasn’t really a business owner.

(00:04:54):

But I created that website and then run it without being a business at first for four or five years until actually ended up in Chicago that last year of my engineering degree. And when I was in Chicago at the time, I think it was 2004, Google introduced AdSense. And for people who don’t know, but Google AdSense is basically ads that are shown on Google but also can be shown on third party sites. And my little job board was starting to be pretty popular with tens of thousands of daily visitors and then eventually hundreds of thousands on a monthly basis.

(00:05:28):

And I put AdSense as a, “Okay, this is fun. Let’s try this.” Put ads. First month, I think we got almost $8,000, and this was magic. Great, a check. I got the check, put that on my bank account without any afterthoughts. My dad who was in [inaudible 00:05:44] called me because he had access to my French bank account and say, “What is going on here?” And I’m like, “Dad, it’s cool. It’s just money that I got from Google.” He’s like, “What? You can’t really have money from Google. That’s not how it works. You need to create a business.” And he says, “Whenever you’re back from Chicago, you’re going to go to business school. You need to learn about how to do … Actually, that a business is not just a website. You need to think about accounting, you need about finances, you need to think about hiring, you need to think about strategies, marketing, all of that.”

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And so that wasn’t necessarily the most exciting part, being a software engineer. I was like, “Oh, okay. Sure. But okay, I’ll do this.” And I went to [inaudible 00:06:24], which is another university in France to get that one year degree in finance and business strategy, which is really learning everything about business, and that is not the actual business itself. I won’t call that an MBA, but think of it as a lighter version of an MBA. And after this realized the business side of things was not the most interesting things, but was a requirement if I wanted to have any of my idea eventually succeed. That was kind of a useful check mark that I put on my resume while knowing very well that it wasn’t going to be the last thing that I’m going to do.

(00:06:56):

That said, advancing your question, at the time I’d spent a year in Chicago, was back in Paris. I wanted to come back to the US, and I know there’s no way I could get a visa for no reason, basically. The only way to get a visa was to apply for, not quite an internship, but a first job, at what was usually hiring a ton of people outside of school, which is banks. I applied for [inaudible 00:07:23] after I actually worked for doing internship in French for [inaudible 00:07:26], which is another French bank, to get a job in San Francisco. And so my whole goal was to get as close as possible from the valley so that I could get closer to the entrepreneurial startup-ish ecosystem, get a job, get a visa, fly, and then when I was there, figure out what the next step was. And so that’s actually what I did.

Nick (00:07:44):

Your first exposure to entrepreneurship was this job board, and the way you talk about it, it sounds like you were almost an accidental entrepreneur. But was it always your intention to be an entrepreneur?

Julien Genestoux (00:07:54):

Completely accidental. Never my intention to be an entrepreneur. But at the same time, I’m somebody who loves to play. And when I say play, love board games. I play [inaudible 00:08:08] a lot, for example. I love this idea of, “Okay, making my plans in my head.” I’m kind of trying to look at my resources, allocating there, think about kind of strategies and playing the game to win.

(00:08:17):

And so I realized, and I know this is not always that for everyone, and it’s not always that for either, but entrepreneurship is a lot that. It’s a lot thinking about solving a problem, thinking about the strategies, the tactics that you’re going to put in place, thinking about what kind of resources you have, maybe going to raise resources to actually win that game or at least advance your ideas on the board, which I guess in the real world is life.

Nick (00:08:40):

During your studies in software engineering and computer science, did you ever come across some of the concepts that you would later find yourself working in with web3, or was it too early on?

Julien Genestoux (00:08:52):

Oh, it was way too early. I mean it was 2000. I mean, basically I went to university between 2000 and 2002, then to [inaudible 00:09:00], which is that engineering school, 2003, four, five. There was no blockchain. It was obviously pre-Bitcoin. It was kind of the throw of the solution meant for the internet itself. It was around the time that the dotcom bubble crashed. Most of the people in my class, about 120, ended up working for big, how do you call this? [inaudible 00:09:23] or the US Accenture, big consulting company on the change management and all of that. And that was the dream for them. And for me, it was like nothing was less exciting than this kind of large, “I’m going to be a project manager for this big thing, installing some kind of system, database system, Oracle or SAP into that SMB.”

(00:09:46):

That wasn’t my excitement. I think I’m probably the only one who took the entrepreneurship carrier, and one of the very, very few one that actually worked on the web. A few other of my colleagues I know now are in web light industries or ended up working on mobile and things like this. But at the time this was definitely not the sexy path or the one that people wanted to take.

Nick (00:10:08):

An entrepreneur can obviously go into a wide range of industries, but you honed in fairly early on, on technology. How would you explain what it was about doing technology that interests you, versus other things?

Julien Genestoux (00:10:21):

I’d say it’s not even technology, it’s software. Technology can be rockets, it can be a lot of different things. I care very much about software as this thing that allows you to do anything without actually having to worry too much about the physical consequences of that thing. When you build rockets, you have to follow a very straight path, and you are kind of limited by the physics of it. When you do software, you can hack a lot of things without having worried too much about the physical impact of these things. And so, really, that was the part that was exciting to me, this very flexible matter in some way that you can play with to create interesting things.

(00:10:59):

And so that job board [inaudible 00:11:01] was really kind of, “Okay, let’s see what it takes to do that.” And I realized, “Okay, it’s not that much.” I won’t say it’s not that much work, but I can do that. It’s not crazy. But if I had to take the idea of building something tangible, physical, even if it was highly technological, was very scary to me, and it’s still very scary to me. I would have no idea how to even fix a lot more, which would be technology, I guess, in that work. But I do think that I’m much more at ease with the idea of software.

Nick (00:11:31):

If one of the reasons you were interested in entrepreneurship is you were able to gamify it and put your brain, which enjoys play and gamification, to work, what would you say are the important qualities that makes an entrepreneur successful?

Julien Genestoux (00:11:46):

Yeah, it’s a good one. Honestly, I can only talk about my own experience. I think for me it’s the stubbornness that is maybe one of the most critical aspect of entrepreneurship, and it’s kind of contrary to what you hear, what I’ve seen many times where you say, “Oh, you need to pivot.” Or, “You need to be very flexible.” But at the same time, if you have a vision, that vision is going to take a lot of work to actually be shared with other people and then pushed through hustle, I mean through challenges, over and over again. It’s the stubbornness, it’s the resilience, it’s the determination, I think that actually matters much, because this is a tough job. In practice, it’s very tough. Also, from a perspective where you have this vision and you see how things should be, how things could be, and then you have the real world, and you have the thing that you’re doing on a daily basis, which is usually very different from that vision.

(00:12:35):

And you’re trying, just with your will sometimes, to get from that world that is what it is today to something that looks more like your vision. And I think this is a very frustrating kind of exercise where you always kind of have to reconcile this vision that you have, that you’re selling to people, and the day to day and the challenges that you have to face every day, the bugs that you didn’t expect or the people that are complaining about something that you did not expect from the work, or the competing, or the employees that are leaving or joining. And it’s the, for me, the number one criteria for successful entrepreneur, that the zero to one energy that takes something that doesn’t exist to something that exists is that kind of determination that, well, that stubbornness, that I don’t think I see in other manager roles.

(00:13:20):

I do think that somebody that scales a business that exists to something else doesn’t have to be industry as stubborn. Maybe they need to actually be a lot more flexible to be able to actually do the thing that they want to do. But the entrepreneur has to be relentlessly focused but kind of stubborn, right? What they want to do. And if they fail, I think it’s okay, because in practice, I’d much rather fail at trying to do what I want to do rather than succeed at doing something that I don’t care about.

Nick (00:13:46):

Longtime listeners of the podcast know that I always like to ask this question to guests like you who are entrepreneurs and have had some success, which is a lot of people have interests or have ideas of things they want to do in their life, but maybe they’re crippled by fear of failure. And I’m curious when I meet an entrepreneur to ask them how you think about failure. Are you afraid failing?

Julien Genestoux (00:14:06):

I think I am, yes. And that’s part of that stubbornness, right? If failing wasn’t a problem, but it’s not. I mean again, failing is maybe not the same description as a lot of people think about. For me, failing is not doing the thing that I want to do. Failing is actually not being able to do what I want to do. If my vision is to paint the house in pink and I ended up painting it in blue, that’s failing, even though it is paint. I want to build the house pink, and I’m going to fight really hard to actually make it pink. If it’s blue, and you might say, “Okay, fine. You painted the house. That was the goal.” It’s like, “No, the goal for me was to paint it pink.”

(00:14:40):

There’s a great energy here. But failing is basically not doing what I want to do. And actually it’s funny because I did, I’m lucky enough to have sold one of my companies, which was success and is success in my mind as well. But in the end, I did feel, I don’t say miserable. But I didn’t feel that happy once I sold the company because I was now working for somebody else and I was not able to choose the color of the house anymore. And so it’s deeply, in my mind, I think the success of an entrepreneur is not about whether you achieved your goal or not, it’s whether you actually worked on that goal. Does that make sense?

Nick (00:15:15):

It makes a lot of sense. And I want to talk about the company that you sold. It’s obviously an important part of your story. Going back and tying this all together, you moved to San Francisco, you go to work in the banking industry with the intent to be super close to Silicon Valley and the entrepreneurship. What happens next, professionally?

Julien Genestoux (00:15:32):

Yeah. Basically, very quickly, I start thinking about a lot of ideas of stuff that I could work on instead of my nine to five, which was really kind of more of a 10 to four at the French bank there. It wasn’t just me, literally no one was working at the bank, which is kind of always surprising to me. But anyway, the rest of the early days of web2, one thing that I would say, a lot of people here that are listening to this are probably very well aware of web3 and kind of criticize web2 for what it is now. But the ideals of web2, way back in 2008, nine, were actually very similar to the kind of ideals that we have in web3. It just got perverted by how the web eventually worked out, but I do think that some of the ideals around that, around user generated content, giving a voice to everyone, they were actually very similar to some of the ideals that we have now.

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But anyway, I was, myself, using a feed reader, and I don’t know if everybody is familiar with feed readers, but RSS feeds. I was using kind of this tool that allows you to subscribe to multiple news sources and get the information in a single place. This was kind of pre-Twitter or early Twitter. This was pre-Facebook or early Facebook, really kind of the beginning of that. And the names that might come to mind to people or stuff like Flickr, like Delicious, I was going to even mention WordPress, but I’d say it’s even pre-WordPress, like Typepad, which was one of the early blogging platforms, or MovableType, which was actually the first blogging platform out there. And it was the idea, “Okay, that feed reader allowed me to read content from many different places in one go.”

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And I wanted to build something that would be kind of like a feed reader but in a push way rather than pull way. The feed reader, you have to connect to a web page and you have to refresh and it just loads a lot of the information. I want to build something, a system where basically I would get notified whenever any of the sources of content is subscribed to would publish something. And so I built first a service that I called [inaudible 00:17:14] that was basically a notification service when my favorite blogs or website would update, when the weather in San Francisco would change, because I was using RSS feeds from a weather app, or anything like this.

(00:17:25):

I built this, didn’t get a lot of success around this, but we had an API that started to be used by multiple companies to a point where it’s like I emailed these companies and said, “Hey, would you pay us to actually use that API more?” And they said, “Yes, happily. If you build this, this, and that, we’d pay for the API.” And so that’s how I ended up building a new service kind of, I don’t want to say forking away, because it’s kind of the same. It was the API powering [inaudible 00:17:49]. But an infrastructure called Super Heater, which is still exists today, has been sold to Medium, but still exists, an RSS feed API system. It’s basically an API that allows people to subscribe to changes in RSS feeds and being notified in real time when these feeds update.

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You’re listening to this as a podcast, all of the podcasting infrastructure is all powered by RSS, Really Simple Syndication. If you’re using some app on your phone, it’s likely pulling the data from the GRTiQ website through an RSS feed. But again, many, many websites were using this, and Superfeedr quickly became one of … It’s now the most used RSS feed API out there. We were basically pulled constantly by services like Google or Facebook and syndicating content from all of the big newspapers, e-commerce sites, social networks, all together. And so we built kind of an API that was doing both ways on one side, pulling the data and then pushing it to people on the other side.

Nick (00:18:49):

What was that experience like for you? I mean, it’s kind of like lightning has struck twice in your life, and maybe three or four more times where a lot of entrepreneurs fail, but you had the job board success. But now you’re working on Superfeedr, and this is also a success.

Julien Genestoux (00:19:04):

It wasn’t always a success, it was honestly a lot of work. There was a bunch of years where, damn it, nobody cares about RSS. And the fact is you weren’t sure. People cared about this open web between 2010 and let’s say 2015, there was definitely an era of everybody was building mobile apps for iOS and Android, people cared about the Facebook platform, and not so much about the open web anymore. And so for me, that was actually a struggling time. Roughly, at the same time, I started to also get involved with W3C, the worldwide web consortium, and I worked on this application called Webs Up. It was basically an evolution of the API that Superfeedr has built, into a protocol so other application could easily do that, that kind of pulling or pushing.

(00:19:43):

I mean, it wasn’t always a success. Eventually our biggest customer, Medium, reached out to me and said, “Hey, we’re going to build all of these new things and we think Super Feed might be a great fit for us inside of Medium. Do you want to sell it to us?” And that’s how, actually, I ended up doing this. There’s a bunch of personal story behind this as well. Even though I was in San Francisco when I created for theater, I had to go back to Europe in 2010. My wife didn’t have design anymore, so we had to move back to Europe. So it was a whole like, “Okay fine, we’re going to move back to the US after this.”

(00:20:13):

I had two kids in the meantime. Lots of personal challenges, but it wasn’t always a success. But what I get is like, oh, this vision of syndicating content is the right one. I want to keep pushing for that one because I do think it’s a better version of the open web than just everybody’s using Twitter to push their content. I eventually sold Superfeedr to Medium, worked for Medium for about two years on lots of different things.

Nick (00:21:36):

How does an entrepreneur know when to quit? I know that stubbornness and resilience is something that you’ve clicked on a couple of times there, but it’s rational to think there is a point at which you should quit? Or, no?

Julien Genestoux (00:21:47):

I’m sure there is. I don’t think I’ve ever made that decision. The Medium example, this was obvious to me. There was a big check, I had two kids and a wife. At some point you realize they’re going to keep Superfeedr alive, and as matter of fact, it is still alive. I can maybe have more impact at Medium building some of those similar things, and actually did work on similar things at Medium after I joined them. I don’t know if it’s quitting, and maybe you can say, yes, quitting. I think life decides for you when it’s time to quit. And I know some people are founding a startup and they run out of money, and I say it’s okay if you give it your best shot.

(00:22:30):

It’s not failing, basically. It’s being not able to work on this. And if you give it your best shot, if you didn’t get distracted by building something that were not interesting in that were not your initial vision, I think it’s okay. But again, I think there’s many types of entrepreneurs. I know people that are very good at jumping onto the new hotness, actually very successful at this and they’ve done five companies in five different fields. That is not how I work, because I’m, again, somebody who cares about what I do more than the outcome. But I don’t think everyone works the same.

Nick (00:23:03):

If you learned at the job board company that you started, at the prodding of your father, to go back and learn finance and some of the business basics, what are the key lessons you learned out of your experience launching Superfeedr?

Julien Genestoux (00:23:17):

Yeah. First, I mean one of the big experiences is thinking more about the landscape. Superfeedr, RSS feed, open web, was built at a time where very few people actually cared about the open web anymore. And fewer and fewer people. And so I think it’s more of the timing aspect of things. I realize you’re going to make your life much harder if you start something when the market is not there or when the market is leaving. And that’s definitely one of the lessons that I taken from this. I actually wrote a blog post about, “You can be right at the wrong time. It’s going to be tough.” And that was kind of the story here is it’s a matter of getting there. And as a matter of fact, RSS today is getting actually more steam behind it than it was for a long time.

(00:23:58):

There’s a lot of people that are thinking more about, “Okay, syncing content between different publishers, different creators.” When it was that it lost a bit of steam. We regularly see on Twitter people complaining about the fact that Google shut down Google Reader, which was the biggest feed reader, and I think it would be a better time to launch a feed reader now than it has been in 2012 or ’13, for example, when I was spending my energy doing that. I think there is the timing aspect, is maybe one of the big things. They say a rising tide lifts old boats. I think it’s much easier to build a business when the tide is rising, basically, than it is when the tide is low. That’s maybe one of the big lessons.

(00:24:38):

Another lesson which I had taken there. We raised money and then … But I always very frugal. I was at the mindset that we need to be profitable as soon as possible, and we ended up being profitable less than a year after raising funds. I do think that we could have grown more if I’d actually invested more of that money into growing rather than into becoming sustainable. And that’s something that I learned later, in Silicon Valley at the time, and I think it’s still the case, doesn’t actually give you that big of a premium for being sustainable, profitable. It gives you a premium for growing fast. And so that’s something that I learned as well.

(00:25:11):

It’s not the normal way of doing business. I’d say most businesses in the world, they need to be profitable more than growing. But the VC world, the Silicon Valley world actually doesn’t care if you are profitable. There’s even a saying that you’d rather have stories than have numbers. It’s kind of like, even if your numbers look good, they don’t look as good as a story that you can make up if you don’t have numbers. And so I think there is definitely something here to be learned as a founder, is be really good at telling stories, and you might not ever need to actually show numbers from your work.

Nick (00:25:47):

That’s great advice, and again, longtime listeners of the podcast will remember that that was advice from Ryan Selkis, the founder over at Messari, that the first lesson he learned as an entrepreneur is to be a masterful storyteller.

Julien Genestoux (00:25:58):

Yes, absolutely. And I think that’s critical. But storytelling is not just pitching, right? It’s basically showing the whole journey and explaining why you do things, how you do things, and being your whole self, not trying to be someone else. I think a lot of people assume storytelling is basically telling a nice story. It doesn’t have to be a nice story, it has to be a true story. I think it’s a much better, more impactful thing than a nice story, or a sincere story I’d say, more than even true itself.

Nick (00:26:28):

I’ve had a lot of entrepreneurs on the podcast. Some are early stage, some are further along, but I haven’t had many that have sold one of their entrepreneurial ventures. And you’re one of the few that have. Talk to us about that experience. You’ve referenced it a couple of times, but you eventually sold to Medium. Everybody listening to the podcast knows who and what Medium is. What was that experience like?

Julien Genestoux (00:26:48):

Honestly, it was really smooth. Medium, despite being a company that a lot of people knew, I hadn’t done any acquisition before Superfeedr. We had a lot of conversation with the tech leadership, with Evan Williams, the founder, honestly had a great time. They work with really good people, and so the whole process was a lot easier than what I thought. We very quickly already agreed on the base numbers, and from there, they really gave me opportunities. Say, “Hey, okay cool. We’re hiring you. Acquiring the company and then you are going to work for us. Please tell us what you want us to do or what you would work on.” And so that was really powerful to me. Really great experience.

(00:27:29):

Medium, I think, was also at a very interesting step in their journey. They were trying to monetize with ads because that was the number one thing that everybody was doing. It’s like, “Hey, we’ll just monetize with ads.” And so we did there a couple trials, we put ads on the website in some specific places. And the result that we’re getting, the CPM basically, which is the revenue per a thousand pages was so low that there was no way we could actually monetize Medium completely with ads without completely degrading the experience. And Ev, being stubborn, which I think is a good thing, really wanted to build that kind of very simple, clear reading experience away from this Christmas tree-like experiences that you might find on some other websites.

(00:28:18):

And so we had this interesting realization, “Okay, if we want Medium to be financially viable at some point, we will need to change the business model. We cannot do ads, we need to think more about what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do things.” We looked at a bunch of other models. We looked at New York Times, and New York Times was closing on a million subscribers. We looked at Patreon, we looked at [inaudible 00:28:42]. But we looked at a lot of other places, Spotify, Netflix, and realized, okay, this preconception of the early web that everything needs to be free was not true anymore. There’s actually a way to make money by having some kind of model where your customers, your users, rather, become customers.

(00:29:01):

And so that’s when Medium embarked on the journey of launching a membership program. That was kind of a very interesting moment to get Medium because this was kind of like, okay, we’re kind of moving away from this attention driven model, which is not going to work for many reasons, including the fact that it was economically not viable, toward that membership driven model. And Medium did this first couple of days. Actually, first day we launched this, we almost had 10,000 subscribers. 10,000 people paying $5 a month. That’s day one, $50,000 in the bank. And for me, that was kind the aha moment. It was like, “Okay, people are fine paying for stuff.” What’s even more surprising is, even though there was a paywall, very few of these people that were paying on the first day actually had read any of the article that were paywall.

(00:29:50):

We messaged them and said, “Hey, why are you paying? I mean, please keep doing it, don’t get us wrong. But why are you paying?” And the answer was consistently the same. “I pay because I support the vision, the mission that Medium has. I pay because I care about that application. I spend my days on this and I think it’s good. I pay because I want the green halo around my avatar.” And for me, that’s the beginning of that thinking that, okay, wait, from the beginning we thought of attention as the only way to make money of the web. But actually, membership is a much more powerful mechanism. And I realized, even though I do pay for a bunch of people on Patreon, I actually don’t listen to their music.

(00:30:26):

I don’t say I don’t care about the music or the content they produce, but I want to support them because I care about them and it’s cheap. I am a subscriber to New York Times. I probably don’t read more than a couple articles a month, maybe more than a couple articles a month, but four or five articles a week. I do play a bit with the games, especially since they acquired Wordle, but I care more about being able to access when I want to. I care more about the status than I care about the actual story or a specific story that I could read from there.

(00:30:54):

And so I realized that membership model is something that could exist on the web at scale. If you go back, 2000s, the bulletin board systems, these kind of forums that you would go to, and there was people that had kind of an OG status. If at the time there was an easy way to pay to get the status, I’m sure all of these companies would’ve monetized that way, would’ve been a much easier model than put banner ads everywhere that would end up being blocked by ad blockers anyway.

Nick (00:31:20):

There’s a lot to unpack there, and that’s a super interesting story. But I want to ask you this question about the dichotomy between web2 and web3. As somebody who was successful in web2, went to work at a leading web2 company. Medium is very well known, very well established. How do you think through the ways in which web2 incumbent firms will deal with this rising interest in industry of web3?

Julien Genestoux (00:31:46):

Yeah. It’s definitely a good question and one that I wonder, I mean, not on a daily basis, but a lot about. First of all, I think we should … I know why in the web3 space we tend to kind of [inaudible 00:31:57] web2, but I think it’s wrong. I think it’s not about web2 versus web3 or any of that. It’s going to be how can we make web2 people more successful by embracing web3. That’s the only way web3 can succeed. And if you think about other era eras like this, the internet, early days of the internet were not built against Microsoft or Windows.

(00:32:20):

It really became powerful when Windows actually started to have internet explorer as the default navigator, and it became kind of a true piece of their on the ecosystem, kind of an anecdote. But Apple almost died but was saved because they realized that we need to have Microsoft Office and Excel, and word and Excel on the Mac in ’98 or something. And so they basically hired a team to just work on a version of Word and Excel that will be compatible with the Windows version of this. It’s really, if we want the web you to succeed, we’re going to have to find ways to make web2 again, platforms more successful because they do things with web3 technologies. Because they’ll allow people to connect their wallets, because they’ll allow people to have NFTs or show PFPs on their profile.

(00:33:10):

And because in the end, web3 provide them opportunities that they wouldn’t have if they’re stuck to their existing models. For me, that’s one of the thing that I think a lot about every day, and we can talk about how Unlock does this specifically, but for me that’s the critical part. It’s like, “Hey, we’re doing a better thing.” They’re not going to merge. We’re doing something that lets Instagram, Amazon, Apple, LinkedIn, Google, be more successful or solve a problem that you have because they do have problems, however big they are. However big, they have problems. They have things that they’re trying to solve. And I do think web3 provides a bunch of solutions to some of these problems.

Nick (00:33:51):

It’s a question I ask. Yes, all the time. Are you then envisioning web2 and web3 sort of coexisting or melding together in the future, and you don’t accept this idea that it’s an either/or battle?

Julien Genestoux (00:34:03):

Yeah, absolutely. I do think they’re going to be, I don’t say merged, but I don’t think it’s up. What you’ll be able to distinguish in the same way that when you think about the mobile devices, can you distinguish them from the web? Is there a mobile web that is not the web? No, it’s the mobile web is the web, it’s like the thing that used there. Or can you think of the web as something that is not on computers? Of course it is not computers.

(00:34:28):

And so I do think that will have to have web3 component of our tech stacks and the tools that we use today, we’ll need to embrace that no matter what. That doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be new players, that’s not going to be new applications, new successful products and companies that are massively popular that didn’t exist before. But I do think that the only way to success for us in the web3 space is to convince the, again, web2 with other air quotes, crowds that web3 is an opportunity for them, not something that goes after them.

Nick (00:35:03):

How do you make sense of the emergence of web3 then? I mean sometimes it’s framed as a revolution against web2 other times it’s framed as a natural evolutionary phase or step of progress. How do you make sense of it?

Julien Genestoux (00:35:17):

I think it’s both. In some way it’s a revolutionary, again, not quite against web2, but moving away from some of the limits of web2. Kind of data ownership, control of information and that. But it’s also, for me, a logical step in how we build that collective brain of ours, which is the internet. Let’s take maybe a little of a side here, but I think we barely realize how impactful the internet is on our lives. But if you shut down your connection for even a day, it is actually really, really hard to do a lot of things that you take for granted. We’re recording this podcast. There is no way we would be able to do that if it wasn’t for the internet. After two years of pandemic, most of us didn’t lose their jobs cause of the pandemic.

(00:36:05):

If it wasn’t for the internet mean there wouldn’t be … I mean most of the jobs that have been lost, for sure. We order food, we interact with our … I live far from my family, obviously my parents and my friends. Some of my friends are in France.

(00:36:19):

If it wasn’t for the internet, it would be really, really hard to keep in touch with them. And yet I’m able to keep in touch with them almost as if I lived a couple miles from them at this point. This is all because of that collective brain that is the internet. I do think this tech stack is evolving and constantly getting better. We’re doing this in video. I remember the early days of the internet where you had to download real networks to kind of have a video. There was no way this that worked in the web browser and yet it is working. I think the web is slowly but surely … The internet is slowly but surely evolving, having more and more capabilities and these capabilities are what allows us to build better apps.

(00:36:52):

I think for better or worse, Bitcoin introduced a new kind of capability into the … Or actually, maybe multiple kinds of capability into the internet tech stack. First of all, the money nest. Basically introduce programmable money, which I think is a good way to describe Bitcoin, but also I think introduce the concept of DAO for or shared infrastructure that we all collectively use that nobody controls. Nobody controls Bitcoin and yet we can all use that. And I think now that model has been taken over obviously by The Graph and multiple other tech stacks. I’m thinking, for example, stuff like IPFS is doing or Protocol Labs is doing on that front where nobody controls any of that, but then we still have the emergent network that is collectively owned or collectively controlled, shared infrastructure.

Nick (00:37:40):

Going back to your personal story, you sold to Medium, you stayed on board for a couple of years to help with the transition and support Medium. What did you do after that?

Julien Genestoux (00:37:50):

Yeah, so when I was at Medium, actually, we did that membership thing and I was like, this is really interesting, but I want to build something that is actually web scale, not just Medium scale. And I had the idea and it was kind of the beginning. I was like, “Can we decentralize the Medium paywall?” Can we make it so that on my own site, which I have had for 20 years, can I paywall content so that only people that are paying for Medium actually see my content? And can Medium as a business go to publishers and say, “Hey, New York Times.” Maybe not New York Times because they have their pretty successful paywall. But small new publishers, The Atlantic for example, what if we gave you money to pay all your content so that the Medium membership would become kind of a paywall for the web?

(00:38:36):

People pay for that membership and then they access content on the medium.com website, but also on The Atlantic or USA Today or other websites. And so thinking a lot about that, how can we decentralize that membership model? At the time, looking for different options, none were crypto. But that was one of the ideas that I started work on. I also worked on one of the fun ideas that Medium had, which I think they still do, which is to pay creators. If you are a writer and you write on Medium, and you token date the content, you put it behind the paywall, you’re going to get a share of what people end up paying on a monthly basis. This was good, but this was actually really hard to put in place.

(00:39:14):

In the US, we use Stripe chargebacks to actually pay people on their cards when they were making money from the words that they were writing on Medium. But that only worked in the US. If we wanted to pay a writer in Hungary or in Mexico or in India or in France, it was really hard. And so I was like, “What are the solutions for this?” I was like, “Wait, maybe Bitcoin or blockchain were the things.” Maybe we can actually send money. 2015, ’16, right? Or actually ’17. Maybe we can send money to these people rather actually do wire transfers, which would be a nightmare, wouldn’t scale, send them money using cryptocurrencies? And that’s how I kind of rediscovered Bitcoin and rediscovered that crypto offered an interesting thing.

(00:39:56):

It was like, okay, if we pay people using cryptocurrencies, maybe we can be a bit smarter and not just pay them to do that, but kind of incentivize them or not just give them money, but give them some kind of reward in tokens for work that they could do on the platform. One of the, I wouldn’t say issues, but one of the topics that Medium had at the time was a lot about curation. How can we find the best stories of the platform? And we used AI a bit, we used other kind of machine learning techniques like, okay, if you like this, you like that kind of scenario. But we also realized there’s actually people that are really good at surfacing articles.

(00:40:29):

There’s an expert in botanistry that can find the best articles about botanistry. Is there a way we can reward that person with some kind of token? I explored crypto 2017, early ’18, a lot with the idea of trying to find models that we could build inside of Medium that would reward users for the work they were doing here. I did design, I don’t remember, I think three or five of these models. I mean, I actually even built an experiment and then tried to pitch Ev and the rest of the leadership team at Medium. It Was like, “Let’s do this.” Every time, they were pushing back. At some point I say, “You know what? I’m too excited about these ideas. Rather than actually be disappointed by the fact that I cannot work on what I want to work on, I’m going to leave and start to work on this by myself.” And that’s how we ended up creating Unlock.

Nick (00:41:15):

It was the first time that you really got interested or serious about crypto during this period? Or had you heard about it before and just didn’t think much of it?

Julien Genestoux (00:41:24):

I heard about it and actually played with it a little bit, which is luck more than anything. One of the contractors that I was working with at the time with Superfeedr in 2011, asked to be paid in Bitcoin. And I was like, “Okay, what’s Bitcoin?” And I remember at the time I messaged my CPA and tell her, “Hey, this contractor doesn’t want to be paid in dollar. He’s actually in Europe and doesn’t believe in the dollar.” And it wasn’t entire US, but a strong critic of the US policy around the world that doesn’t want paid in dollar, how do I do that? And the CPA was like, I don’t care how you do this, you’re not going to do this. You’re just going to pay yourself in dollars. And then with the dollars that you get on your bank, go buy Bitcoin, whatever that is, and then send that to your guy. That’s going to be easy.

(00:42:08):

I had to actually do the work. I downloaded Bitcoin, QT or a few other wallets, started to even mine a little bit. I don’t think I earned anything on that front, but I actually did buy some Bitcoin from [inaudible 00:42:19], which was the very first exchange that a lot of people ended up buying Bitcoin from way, way back, June 2011. Played a little bit with this, realized that this is actually very interesting, but didn’t really understood the path to making it something that was user-friendly. Okay, this is really powerful, but it’s way too complicated for normies to get. And honestly that’s a problem that I keep making, a mistake that I keep making.

(00:42:47):

Again, played with this, found it interesting, didn’t really explore much further. Got back to my day to day. A bit later, I think it was 2015, my good friend [inaudible 00:42:58] was at Switzerland at the time, tells me about Ethereum. And say, “Hey look. This blockchain stuff. Bitcoin is interesting, but Ethereum.” I mean, Ethereum was not made up yet. It was pre-home state, I think it what’s called, and told me there’s this thing that allows you to create smart contracts, which are kind of interesting. And then I downloaded Mist, which was one of the very first wallets. It was actually a web browser with a wallet. And I play with this and I was like, okay, I see something there, but still, I mean, way too complicated, way too messy, not going to do something.

(00:43:29):

It was kind of, really, the third time that I, “Okay, I’m going to explore this.” It took me a little while. I was a bit naive I guess, or it took me a little while to actually get to a point where, “Okay, now I see this. Now I think we have something that is usable-ish to start thinking more about these technologies.”

Nick (00:43:48):

What did you notice in the evolution of the UX from interacting early in 2011 with that contractor living in Europe to 2017 and applying it to what you were doing at Unlock? Did things improve drastically?

Julien Genestoux (00:44:02):

Yeah. I think one of the big thing for me was the fact that, okay, now this lives in the browser. Bitcoin QT was a standalone app. There was no really easy way to actually make that work on the web app. Mist, web browser-ish, but still people are just using Firefox and Chrome. Why would I ask them to use these kind of different things? When it started to be in the browser, and that meta mask extension was kind of the thing, now I realize, Okay, this two worlds are, wouldn’t say merging, but they’re collided. Now it becomes possible for people to use crypto, it wasn’t called web3 at the time, in a way that doesn’t really require them to kind of start from scratch with a new stack.

(00:44:43):

And for me, that was kind of the starting point. And maybe the difference between Mist and Bitcoin’s wallets, at the time. Bitcoin wallets were bitcoin nodes. You actually had to sync with the network, which was kind of insane when we think about this because it were taking days. And there was no way this would get to a point where it’s usable. Mist, even though it had a node, if I remember correctly, was already connecting to RPC providers. There was already progress there in terms of UX. And I think we’re getting there to a point. Okay, now we have wallets integrated in browsers and it, I’m using Brave and it has its own wallet in it, which is great. But I think we’re moving even further than this with stuff like abstraction and that, that actually allow apps to have wallets without users knowing or caring too much about that.

Nick (00:45:51):

You’re working at Medium, you get the idea for decentralizing the membership model, and then you go out and you found a third entrepreneurial venture called Unlock. How has Unlock evolved? What types of problems are you working on now?

Julien Genestoux (00:46:05):

Yeah. Unlock is a protocol for memberships. It’s basically a way for all kinds of creators, developers, to deploy membership contract, and then not only on one side, sell these memberships in the form of NFTs that expire every month. They can have recurring revenue but also provide benefits to people based on whether they have a membership or not. Basically, token getting is the number one benefit that people can think of. You cannot access unless you have the NFT your wallet. We launched, very early on actually. I mean the first version hit in January 2019. It’s your main net, it was the only network at the time that had any kind of EVM smart contract infrastructure in place.

(00:46:43):

And we launched it. And that was kind of the first of our attempts. It was actually version zero of the protocol. It’s still out there, it’s still usable, I guess very limited, very expensive on your main net. And since then we’ve happened, stopped iterating on that idea to make it easier, simpler, more flexible and support more features to cover more use cases. One of the first thing that we’ve done, for example, initially the memberships themselves could only be priced in the native currency. In ether of the chain. But quickly, we had a bunch of users that told, “Hey, this is great.” But honestly it goes up and down and up and down. It reached $1,200 and it went back to like $80. As a quit, I cannot have my income be up and down every month based on currency itself. We’d love to be able to use stable cons. That’s when it started to emerge as an option. And so we start to basically add support for EFC 20 as the currency that PO could price their membership set. That was one of the first things we’ve done.

(00:47:45):

After this, we’ve added the capability to support payment because we add a bunch of people say, Hey, this is great, but half of my fans, or maybe even two third or four quarters of my fans don’t have crypto wallet and asking them to press down the crypto wallet, then go to Coinbase, then transfer to from Coinbase to the wallet and then pay me just like another work, is there a way you can actually add support for fiat systems? And so we’ve added credit card payments already on, and then we basically kept trading by adding more and more stuff in 2020, added multiple networks. One of the thing that we realized, actually 2021, one of the thing that we realized is if your main net will never be cheaper again, might be marginally cheaper at some point and more expensive at others. But I said, this is the Fort Knox.

(00:48:32):

It’s basically the highest security environment that you can be, which means that it’s going to be very expensive and it’s security is good when you’re, I mean, high security is good when you’re transacting tens of thousands of dollars or even hundreds or millions, but when you’re buying $1 membership, it doesn’t make sense to pay the highest security thing in the world for something that is not as valuable anyway. We start to look at stuff like other chains. And so we launched on XDI, which now is called Gnosis Chain. And so that’s when we started to explore the multi chain environment. And since then we’ve now are available on nine EVM networks. We’ve added a DAO, which from the beginning we had the vision that the portfolio needed to be decentralized. It couldn’t be owned by me or our team, it had to be owned by our collective DAO. We introduced the DAO, we introduced the governor circuit to make the DAO work. It’s been basically iterating on that idea and then pushing it further and further and further into the adoption curve.

Nick (00:49:23):

For listeners who want to learn more about unlock and get involved in the community, what’s the best way to get started?

Julien Genestoux (00:49:28):

I’d say the website, unlockprotocol.com. Go there, be a ton of links. Maybe the one thing that I would refer people is join our Discord. What’s interesting, it’s like a lot of other places you can ask question discord, but we actually have our own committee token, a free one actually on Polygon, so you might not even have to pay even gas. We subsidize gas to this. You claim that membership token is valid for a month and then you can join the Discord and then other discord you can ask all the questions in the world that you want. We really put that step because we think it’s critical to have the so-called dog footing to show people this is how it works, so that you can actually understand more than just asking question. We get out of people’s like, oh, can I do this, this and this?

(00:50:07):

Just use the thing. You’ll understand how to do things a lot more by using it than just by asking me a question. There is, somebody said this, but words are actually very low fidelity and you might ask me all of the questions in the world and never get a good idea what something is until you actually see it, until you actually touch it, play with it, right? I mean I can describe the FFL Tower as much as I want until you see it. Maybe a picture, it’s going to be really hard for you to make sense of this. It’s metal tower that goes very high with stairs.

(00:50:38):

It’s like, okay, that’s kind of had an idea of this, but when you see it now you understand what it is and when you visit it now you get a sense, I can describe eating a burger, but until you actually do this, it’s going to be really hard for you to actually make a good sense of it. I think it’s the same with a lot of the product that we use in crypto. I can explain to you what it is. I can explain to you what paying to access a website is, but until you actually do, this is going to be really hard for each other. A good idea of what it actually enables and what it does.

Nick (00:51:05):

Well, I’ll put links to all of the things you mentioned there in the show notes, so I want to encourage any listeners that want to learn more about Unlock and get involved in that community to visit the show notes. There’ll be plenty of links, Julien, as some of the listeners have already picked up on. Part of the reason we’re talking today is because you were recently announced as one of the new council members joining The Graph Council and I wanted to get to know you and introduce your story more to the community. If we go back in time and think about the first time you became aware of The Graph, when was that and what do you recall thinking about the protocol at that time?

Julien Genestoux (00:51:38):

It was September 2019, so I think very early on for The Graph as a project, we were already building a bunch of infrastructure that I realized really quickly was going to be obsolete because it was painful to build. Basically simple thing when you send transaction on train, you have to wait for that transition to be buying before you can actually retrieve results from there. And if you lost the hash of the transaction, then it’s really hard later on to actually go back and see what the transaction did. And so we built this infrastructure to store transaction hashes and they pulled them and then where they were mined kind of extract information about okay, this is the smart contract that was deployed, this took was minted all of that.

(00:52:20):

And it was like one of my team member Akeem at the time was like, “Hey look, there’s this thing called The Graph that just goes out that allows us to not have to worry about that infrastructure.” They actually build the mechanisms to handle changes on train and kind of build a data store from these changes that we can then query and we don’t have to worry about that. And so that’s at the time Akeem built the first subgraph to use a lark and then we started to play with this and realized, okay, this is much better than our own thing and it’s also much better not just for us, but as an infrastructure, it’s much better to have a protocol to retrieve data from chains that would be standard in a way that doesn’t require us to make a billion RPC calls and would be kind of always up to date, but also even compatible with the fancier way to do data stores which GraphQL, at this point, realize like, okay, there is something really powerful around these shared protocol because The Graph is a protocol that allow people to build application by abstracting away some of the complexities around querying blockchain notes.

Nick (00:53:25):

You developed some early conviction for The Graph and the solution it provides long before any contemplation of joining the council or getting involved in the community?

Julien Genestoux (00:53:34):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean I don’t think there was a council at the time, so I realized that, okay, this is valuable infrastructure for the web3 but for the web down the line. And I do think that eventually, I mean I know there is a bunch of efforts around IPFS indexing graph. I do think at some point you can imagine The Graph being something that indexes content from all kinds of data sources, whether they’re blockchains or not. I’ve been playing a lot with Blue Sky, the new Twitter clone, and I was like, “Okay, maybe there’s actually some way of building subgraphs for blue Sky that would allow me to query for specific things.” And as long as you have ways to ensure that the data is correct, then building subgraphs that are queryable but are indexed by multiple players is a good way of building these kind of infrastructure.

(00:54:22):

One of the most popular companies in the web is Google and their only job has been to index the web, only job. It’s a pretty significant job but index the web and kind of serve results fast. I do think that things like The Graph would allow us to build similar kind of search engines for data that is being published on chain but also on other data sources. And then have this as a building block that any kind of website could integrate easily to again do the crane and the retrieval retrieval of data from multiple data sources.

Nick (00:54:53):

Julien, you’ve mentioned a couple of times already, and it’s very apparent in your own story, you’re a busy person. You’ve got a family, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re always building and it sounds like tinkering with ideas and you’ve got a lot of time constraints and yet you accepted the opportunity to join The Graph Council. Talk us through that decision and why you decided to go to work on The Graph Council.

Julien Genestoux (00:55:14):

Yeah, remember what I said about dog fooding a couple of minutes ago. The need for us to use our things more, I do think lots of very smart people work in the crypto space in the web3 space, specifically, but there’s not enough cross pollination. We don’t actually do enough stuff together. I feel like there is the people that do amazing things and the next that as they do amazing things, the combination of these two things maybe is more powerful. At Unlock, we do amazing things. We actually use The Graph. And I was like, “Okay, we use The Graph. We have subgraphs as well. If I can get the opportunity to join this, I should definitely get this.”

(00:55:52):

Because first I can improve, modestly, what The Graph does, participate in the governance. Because it’s something that I use and rely on and I want to make sure that it’s available for this. But also I can modestly share a little bit of the experience that I’ve acquired as a user, but also as somebody who was building a web3 space and maybe even bigger in the open web space. For me it was more like a … I mean, I see this as an opportunity for me more than …

(00:56:15):

I mean, I’m sure it’s an opportunity for The Graph, but an opportunity for me to shape the web to be more like what I want rather than just two years, three years, five years from now, complain about the state of things. And I see this, as a builder, as somebody in that space, it’s our responsibility to be the change we’ve already seen in the world kind of thing. And that was an opportunity to do that. And so I jumped on that.

Nick (00:56:41):

You’ve gone from a user of The Graph to council member involved with the community. What have you learned about The Graph in this new role? I know it’s relatively new, but you must have made some early observations about The Graph community ecosystem and what the protocol is doing.

Julien Genestoux (00:56:57):

First before joining the council, I didn’t know about the structure around The Graph’s gardens. And for me, that was kind of an interesting thing, realizing there’s all of these ecosystem players from the Indexers to the core developers and see how these people work together. For me, that was one of the first realization, okay, this governance system is kind of an interesting one because it has multiple kinds of player. If you think about Unlock, we do have two kinds of player, but the governance, we abstract away the complexity. If you are one client, if you have tokens, you can govern. If you don’t have tokens, cannot govern.

(00:57:30):

I don’t care why you have token or how you earn these tokens, but if you have token you need to govern. I like the idea of The Graph has this kind of almost like the Senate in the US being representation of the states versus the house being representation of people. I like that kind of difference of different roles having different representations instead of [inaudible 00:57:50]. That was one of the first thing.

(00:57:52):

Definitely being excited by the work I’ve been following with the team at Stream Pass has been doing. Actually I’ve known that team before they joined The Graph as well. I met them in Waterloo, it was in November 2019, and really been excited about that. The work that they’re building around streams and being able to extract data faster to index it faster. For me that was kind of interesting thing. Dove a bit deeper on the technical infrastructure of how things are built. Obviously excited about the move away from the hosted infrastructure to the decentralized network, which I think is really powerful. At the same time really want to see that being something that becomes a default for all of the EVM networks.

(00:58:32):

And I know it’s kind of an ongoing work to kind of support all of the networks there. Despite some challenges on the council, we just recently voted to have Polygon and FTO be pushed to the decentralized network and realize, okay, there’s complexities around how these blockchains are built, specifically Polygon. Because it’s so high velocity, I’d say that it creates challenges around indexing and making sure that the data that you index is up-to-date and never tracks too far from the state up to chain. Yeah, this has been a very interesting journey. I think it’s been a month and a half at this point, so fairly early, but really excited part of this. And again, learning more that I contribute still, but I do hope that my contribution will eventually be more than what I’ve done so far.

Nick (00:59:19):

What makes you optimistic about web3? The future of web3?

Julien Genestoux (00:59:22):

I do think that it’s a better way to build technology all together. It’s one way where we build technologies with its users, with its stakeholders. Again, don’t want to say web2, but one thing that I think is very wrong with a architecture of the web is that client/server model. I think in the end it’s actually not only a bad name, but it gives way more control to the server than what we should have. I think web3, even though it’s not always peer to peer in the system, is a way to rebalance this, to have a model that is a lot more balanced between the users. Because in the end, these users can actually be co-owners of the infrastructure show that they use.

(01:00:03):

And so creating a much healthier design for how things work on the web. The current server model goes as far as Facebook changes the look of the wall, and then nobody has a choice. But in a world where Facebook is collectively owned by its users, maybe users can actually influence or change how things are being done. And so for me that’s the promise of web3 is trying to build a tech infrastructure that serves everyone’s interests, not just the interests of a single company or a small number of companies, and then maybe their shareholders all together.

Nick (01:00:41):

What makes you optimistic about the future of The Graph?

Julien Genestoux (01:00:44):

Yes. I do think that as more and more content is being produced, we need that content to be indexed more and more. And when I say produced, obviously on chain, but even off-chain in that world, we need to be indexed more and more. And I do think there is a true need for that kind of data availability layer to be trusted, to be replicated, to be indexed by anyone, and anyone can contribute new models and new subgraphs to that. There is no way we’re going to go to world where there’s less data that needs to be less indexed. And so for me, that’s the opportunity that The Graph is going after.

Nick (01:01:21):

So Julien, now we’ve reached a point in the podcast where I’m going to ask you the GRTiQ 10. These are 10 questions I ask each week to every guest that joins me. And I do it to help listeners learn something new, try something different, or achieve more in their own life. Are you ready for the GRTiQ 10?

Julien Genestoux (01:01:36):

I’m ready. Let’s do it.

Speaker 3 (01:01:37):

The GRTiQ 10. This is the way. 10 questions for astronauts floating in space. This is the way. Roger that. This is the way.

Nick (01:01:48):

What book or articles had the most impact on your life?

Julien Genestoux (01:01:51):

Article? I would definitely say something … I read Kevin Kelly, editor of Wire, they wrote something called 1000 True Fans where basically the point it was making is that big village that we’re building with internet would allow any kind of creator of any kind to monetize their work because there’s always a thousand true fans around the web for their specific kind of work. Might still very niche kind of music or kind of picnic or kind of art, but with the scale of the web, there’s always going to be someone and a thousand someone’s that are going to be fans of this. That’s definitely kind of a tool that actually inspired a little bit by thinking around how to monetize work on the internet.

Nick (01:02:28):

Is there a movie or a TV show that you think everybody should watch?

Julien Genestoux (01:02:32):

Actually, I don’t watch movies and I don’t watch TV much, so it’s hard. I mean, I think, and again, this is going to be lame, and I’m going to show all, but I enjoy the Matrix. When I saw that many years ago, I do think that a lot of the web today feels like you choose the kind of, on one side, the don’t have to think about what’s happening and being … I don’t think manipulated, but being fed without actually worrying about what is being fed to you or trying to see how the sausage is made and change the sausage factory to make healthier sausages.

Nick (01:03:03):

And how about this one? If you could only listen to one music album for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?

Julien Genestoux (01:03:09):

It’s a good question. I actually don’t have a good answer for that one. Not a big music listener, but let’s pick something like Daft Punk. I enjoy Daft Punk.

Nick (01:03:20):

What’s the best advice someone’s ever given to you?

Julien Genestoux (01:03:24):

One that I think a lot about is, if you can change something, don’t complain about it, change it. It’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about and I think it’s a big motivator for me as an entrepreneur. We can’t do everything in a night, but I do think that compared to people that live 2,200 years ago, there’s a lot of things that we can do. And so it’s really up to us to oftentimes do these things rather than just complain about these things.

Nick (01:03:51):

What’s one thing you’ve learned in your life that you don’t think most other people have learned or know quite yet?

Julien Genestoux (01:03:57):

I don’t know. I actually don’t have a good answer for that one either. It’s interesting because I don’t … Actually, don’t think I’ve learned that. I mean, I’m sure I’ve learned a lot of things, but I don’t know that it’s not obvious things that other people haven’t learned.

Nick (01:04:07):

What’s the best life hack you’ve discovered for yourself?

Julien Genestoux (01:04:10):

Sleeping. I suffer from migraines a lot and I know if I don’t get a good seven and a half to eight hours a night, I’m going to get a migraine, I’m going to get tired, I’m going to get depressed. Everything is going to be harder. Sleeping is definitely, in my mind, the number one life hack.

Nick (01:04:23):

And Julien, based on your own life experiences and observations, what is the one habit or characteristic that you think best explains how people find success in their life?

Julien Genestoux (01:04:33):

Expectations. I think one of the big challenges … I mean, my wife is studying psychology, and we had a discussion the other day where she told me most people that are depressed are actually depressed because they have a mismatch between the expectation of life and what they’re actually doing. And sometimes we tend to have too high expectation.

(01:04:52):

And I think especially in this attention driven economy where we’re being pulled to look at shiny objects all the time, this creates this kind of stress on us because this gives us a higher expectation that what we should want and these expectations in the end are unhealthy. And we’re consigning this with the reality means that maybe having expectations that are more achievable makes us happier.

Nick (01:05:15):

And then Julien, the final three questions are complete the sentence type questions. The first one is, the thing that most excites me about web3 is …

Julien Genestoux (01:05:23):

Permissionless innovation.

Nick (01:05:24):

And how about this one? If you’re on Twitter, then you should be following …

Julien Genestoux (01:05:27):

Me.

Nick (01:05:29):

And lastly, I’m happiest when …

Julien Genestoux (01:05:32):

When I build things.

Speaker 3 (01:05:35):

The GRTiQ 10. Podcast over.

Nick (01:05:42):

Julien, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today and to introduce yourself to The Graph community and share your story. And there’s a lot of nuggets of wisdom in your story and the things you shared today. If listeners want to follow you, stay in touch with the things you’re working on, what’s the best way to keep in touch?

Julien Genestoux (01:05:59):

I mean, I’m sorry, what I said about Twitter, I was going to say this is a good place. Twitter.com/julien51. J-U-L-I-E-N-5-1. I’d say my blog’s actually another place where I would invite support to go. It’s OuvreBoite, O-U-V-R-E dash B-O-I-T-E.com. You can find the link on my Twitter. Generally, if you put my name, first name, last name in Google, you’ll find you know me wherever I am. Do say hello wherever you are. I mean, I try to be on every platform because I do think they all bring something different.

(01:06:30):

I’m not the kind of people who say, “Oh, I don’t want to go there because it sucks.” It’s like everything is different. If your jam is GitHub, ping me on GitHub. If your jam is Instagram, ping me on Instagram. I’m happy to have conversation with anyone, everywhere.