Fork the Product

Latest Episodes:

009 – Katy Jeremko – Twos Complement Jun 16, 2019

Show notes

In this episode, we speak with Katy Jeremko. Katy is a designer who has built and launched successful products for the last decade. She is known for her work with NASA’s open government initiative, and as a co-founder of re:3D, the manufacturer of the Gigabot 3D Printer. Katy is also a partner at Two’s Complement a Colorado technology studio that harnesses the power of complimentary design and development for high-caliber teams.

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008 – Doug Petkanics – Livepeer Feb 26, 2019

Show notes

In this episode, we speak with Doug Petkanics, co-founder and CEO of Livepeer. Livepeer is developing open source video infrastructure services on top of the Ethereum blockchain. For those interested in learning about how a project tackles the huge challenge of designing token economic systems to properly align incentives of different groups in a network, this episode is for you.

Doug describes what it was like in the early days when he and his co-founder were trying to prove to themselves that it was possible to solve this problem. He shares how they spent time developing unrelated projects on Ethereum to learn what it was like and to understand the limitations of the technology. We also delve into the lessons they learned around things like fundraising from their previous experiences as startup founders.

One of the most interesting topics we discussed was how they are using staking and slashing in their protocol. Overall, it was a fascinating discussion.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

[0:31] Show intro
[0:48] Quick overview of Livepeer and Doug’s background.
[2:35] When Doug and his co-founder Eric realized they wanted to build for the decentralized web.
[4:27] The frustrating web2.0 experience that inspired them to make the jump to web3.
[8:22] The problem Livepeer is aiming to solve and how.
[13:19] How they identified the problem and why they felt it was the right one to solve with decentralization.
[16:08] What their 6-9 month research phase was like for them.
[19:42] How Doug and Eric’s long history of working together enabled them to move quickly through assessing feasibility of Livepeer.
[24:45] When they took on pre-seed funding, why and how that was informed by past lessons learned.
[26:42] Overview of Livepeer’s token economics and their process for designing the incentives.
[31:17] Why they chose a target participation rate of 50% in the protocol.
[34:19] How staking and delegated proof of stake are used Livepeer.
[38:05] The importance of balancing participating nodes and delegating nodes.
[41:54] The business model for the Livepeer team.
[44:16] Who the different user groups of Livepeer and how the team thinks about designing for the different user experience for each.
[49:23] Lessons learned designing for users early on.
[52:09] Overview of Livepeer team.
[55:07] The value of forking from Doug’s perspective.

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007 – Annie Brown – Lips Feb 06, 2019

Show notes

In this episode, we speak with Annie Brown, founder of Lips. What started out as an assignment for an Introduction to Women’s Studies class has evolved into something much bigger over the course of ten years. Their aim is to carve out a space for open and honest expression of sexuality through stories, poetry, and artwork. We had a fantastic conversation with Annie exploring how Lips sits at the intersection of sexuality, feminism, technology and community. The Lips team is doing really important and beautiful work to support and empower vulnerable populations, and we can all learn a lot from Annie and her team.

Unlike other projects today, the Lips team is planning to build on a private blockchain. Given many people they are building for are vulnerable to attack, this is a very important decision for them. It was great to hear how Annie and the team are thinking through that decision, and we suspect other projects may learn something from that as well.

Lips is a project that is a bit atypical in comparison to most projects in the blockchain space, but a critically important one. We really appreciated Annie sharing her experience building Lips with us. We learned a lot and hope you will as well.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

[0:31] Show intro
[1:05] Annie’s background and crypto origin story
[7:31] Story behind the founding of Lips and the problems it aims to solve
[13:19] Interesting use case for using cryptography to publicly broadcast an encrypted claim and reveal it at a later date.
[15:54] Current state of Lips product and team, and where it’s headed next.
[22:14] Digging in on their approach to technical roadmap and considerations they’re taking into account.
[29:07] How the team is approaching validating assumptions around business model and value propositions.
[35:12] Given Annie’s experience of going through Y Combinator twice, how has their guidance been helpful or lacking as she pursues her own startup.
[40:28] The design process for Lips and the inspiration for that.
[47:08] The importance of setting the right tone for your community and culture.
[51:30] Day-to-day experience and team processes of Lips.
[54:42] Current plans for the Lips roadmap.
[58:38] Annie’s perspective on competition and why the community and philosophy they’ve built the project around mitigates risk of being forked.

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006 – Anne Griffin – OpenLaw Jan 15, 2019

Show notes

In this episode, we speak with Anne Griffin, Lead Product Manager at OpenLaw. OpenLaw is a ConsenSys spoke that is building next generation smart legal agreements. We cover a lot of great topics in this discussion such as how the OpenLaw team is trying to build a Wikipedia-like community to drive contract law forward, what their business model is, how they overcome being such a geographically distributed and remote-first team, and much more.

Like in many industries, the legal community still uses incredibly outdated technologies such as Microsoft Word and track changes to work through long and complex legal agreements. Anne walks us through how she and her team are trying to push against that inertia and bring law into the 21st century. She also gives us her perspective on why OpenLaw will supplement rather than automate law and replace lawyers.

Particularly interesting is hearing how incredibly distributed the OpenLaw team is with employees in Thailand, India, the US and Europe, and how they overcome the obvious challenges that presents. Some of their tools and tactics they use to mitigate those challenges are really interesting and well worth considering if your team is struggling with being remote-first and highly distributed.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

[0:31] Show intro.
[1:02] Anne’s background and path to crypto.
[8:51] Description of OpenLaw and the project’s history.
[16:09] If OpenLaw is GitHub-ifying contract law, how do courts view enforceability of smart contracts?
[18:29] How blockchain technology may or may not affect the job of lawyers.
[19:50] The origin story of OpenLaw and background on the founders.
[23:41] How the OpenLaw team validates assumptions around solving customer problems, target market, users, etc.
[32:50] Current state of OpenLaw products and the business model.
[34:50] Where and how OpenLaw connects to the Ethereum blockchain.
[36:13] Verbal walkthrough of OpenLaw user experience.
[40:11] Areas of friction within the OpenLaw user experience and how they’re trying to overcome that.
[42:22] Division of responsibilities for design across the OpenLaw team and process for getting design work done.
[46:03] Where do ideas for the roadmap come from?
[46:54] OpenLaw’s use of personas to support user research.
[49:15] How does OpenLaw quality control contract templates that make it onto the platform?
[51:30] Team dynamics, composition, geographic distribution and culture around coordination across the team.
[55:09] Tools and tactics OpenLaw used to support remote-first team.
[57:01] How the team captures knowledge to be shared internally.
[1:01:08] Ways to overcome the tight market for hiring blockchain engineers.
[1:03:13] Measuring success at OpenLaw.
[1:06:43] What is and is not open source within OpenLaw and how they defend their business given what is open source.
[1:08:26] Personal tidbit about Anne.

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005 – Bobby Dresser – MetaMask Jan 01, 2019

Show notes

In this episode, we get deep and philosophical with Bobby Dresser, Technical Project Manager for MetaMask. For the uninitiated, MetaMask is the gateway to Web3 enabling you to run Ethereum dApps right in your browser. We had a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation with Bobby discussing the dynamics of working on a remote-first team, the fuzziness of competition and collaboration, and so much more.

One of the most interesting aspects of our discussion with Bobby was hearing his perspective on his title at MetaMask. During his career, Bobby went from working as an engineer to a product manager to, now, a Technical Project Manager at MetaMask. His thoughts around the meaning of his current role are important and instructive for those in the crypto world, particularly those working on open source projects.

Another incredibly interesting aspect of Bobby’s experience is that prior to joining MetaMask he worked on the Uport team, another project under ConsenSys. We discussed how those projects may intersect in the future, as well as how MetaMask views potentially competitive projects like Status. If you’re like us, you’ll find the answers to those questions fascinating and you’ll see how they may apply to the other projects in the space. We highly recommend you check out this episode.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

[0:57] Bobby’s background and path to crypto.
[2:50] What MetaMask is and what it enables.
[7:37] History of MetaMask, how it has evolved and exciting projects in development.
[11:45] Bobby’s role and how it is different from previous roles he’s been in.
[15:30] The most important aspects of Bobby’s job and a peak into what it’s like working on an open source project.
[17:52] Favorite tools and tactics the team uses.
[23:06] Example of how the team validates assumptions around what problems to solve.
[26:37] How the team is thinking about business model.
[29:13] Competitors, or partners, in realizing the crypto vision?
[32:33] Are different projects like MetaMask, Uport, Status, etc. converging on the same problem and solution spaces?
[38:16] MetaMask’s user research and experience process today and where it’s headed in the future.
[40:25] Current focus of user research and a good example of the UX challenges of the crypto space today.
[44:13] User research and testing approaches, as well as data they can and can’t use to inform product development.
[49:28] Biggest differences between developing products in crypto versus traditional products.
[51:23] Breakdown of MetaMask team and process.
[56:35] How the team determines the roadmap and the challenges of remote teams.
[1:00:35] As the gateway to Web3, how do you take into account what dapps MetaMask may be the gateway to?
[1:05:15] How the team communicates progress to the community and within ConsenSys.
[1:07:46] What is success for MetaMask and how are they or will they be measuring progress towards it?
[1:11:58] The dynamics created by people forking MetaMask’s code.
[1:14:01] Interesting tidbit about Bobby.
[1:16:05] Plug for open positions at MetaMask.

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004 – Amy Ngai – Cryptokitties Dec 15, 2018

Show notes

In this episode, we sit down with Amy Ngai, Product Designer at CryptoKitties. If you’re living under a rock and don’t know CryptoKitties, it’s one of the first Ethereum-based decentralized apps to gain some degree of mainstream adoption. It’s a game developed by Axiom Zen centered around breedable, collectible and adorable cats that are one-of-a-kind and 100% owned by you. In our conversation, we get an inside look at how the team behind this early success is tackling the challenges of designing intuitive experiences on top of blockchains, and get a peak at what is coming in the future.

Amy has been at Axiom Zen since before CryptoKitties was born, so it was great hearing what other things they work on at the company. It provides some good insight into what ingredients are good for fostering the type of environment where a project like this can come to fruition. We also really enjoyed getting a chance to hear what it’s like behind the scenes of a project like CryptoKitties and how the team has grown and evolved over time.

Hearing from user experience and design folks like Amy is critical at this stage of the crypto community’s development. We learned a lot from Amy about how the team thinks about user experience and design, as well as the approaches they are taking to overcome the notorious challenges of working with this technology. Check out this great discussion with Amy.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

[1:07] Amy’s background at Axiom Zen and how that led to crypto.
[2:36] Overview of Axiom Zen and origins of CryptoKitties.
[5:27] What is CryptoKitties and what inspired it?
[9:03] How Amy’s view of blockchain and design for blockchain has evolved as CryptoKitties has grown.
[12:18] Big opportunities and challenges from a design perspective in crypto.
[14:28] UX patterns and best practices Amy’s observed thus far.
[18:03] User research and testing at CryptoKitties.
[22:31] Challenges with requiring users to interact with third parties like Coinbase and Metamask to use CryptoKitties.
[24:17] Recruiting and running user tests given range of regulatory environments and technical aptitude.
[26:20] Areas that CryptoKitties is looking to expand into in the future.
[30:53] How CryptoKitties thinks about competition as well as community.
[33:36] Team process and how it’s evolved as team has grown.
[36:57] Amy’s day-to-day.
[39:44] Size, composition and responsibilities of pods.
[42:42] The role of community managers for dapps.
[46:00] Tools used internally and externally.
[46:48] How the team thinks about the regulatory environments.
[52:03] Roadmap planning.
[54:37] User tracking and metrics used by the CryptoKitties team.
[57:09] Dynamics of open sourcing the CryptoKitties codebase and debating what is “decentralized enough”.
[1:00:08] Interesting tidbit about Amy.

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003 – Vishakh – Cryptonomic Nov 15, 2018

Show notes

In this episode, we dig in with Vishakh, the co-founder of Cryptonomic. Cryptonomic is NYC-based startup building developer tools to enable decentralization and digital sovereignty in a multi-chain future. Vishakh gives us the inside scoop on how his team has grown and evolved, why he believes in a multi-chain future and how Cryptonomic is helping build towards that starting with the first Tezos wallet.

While working at J.P. Morgan for several years, Vishakh found himself spending more and more of his time outside of work exploring the crypto world. The ethos of the community and the opportunity to help shape the future reminded him of the early days of the internet. Seeing how difficult it is to develop anything useful due to the lack of infrastructure and tooling drew Vishakh and his co-founders to leave their jobs and start Cryptonomic.

The open source-first mentality of the Cryptonomic team and their involvement in the early days of the Tezos community led to them receiving a grant from the Tezos Foundation to develop the first Tezos wallet. It was really interesting hearing about that, as well as how they’re navigating the design and user experience challenges of the crypto space. We had a great discussion with Vishakh and can’t wait to check back in with him in the future.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

[0:54] Vishakh’s background and path to crypto.
[6:38] Origins of Cryptonomic.
[9:18] Problems Cryptonomic is aiming to solve.
[11:22] Team overview and how it’s grown and evolved over time.
[16:45] Current work on Tezos and rationale behind chain agnostic philosophy.
[19:05] Thoughts and approaches for picking blockchains to develop on.
[25:49] How Cryptonomic decides what to build.
[31:47] Story behind Cryptonomic’s involvement in the Tezos community and how it led to them receiving a grant from the Tezos foundation to build a Tezos wallet.
[34:26] Cryptonomic’s design-first approach and lessons learned.
[36:499] Backgrounds of original designers at Cryptonomic and what their first 30 days looked like.
[40:54] Advice for putting together teams for crypto projects.
[46:27] How Cryptonomic has run user testing and challenges of doing it in the crypto space.
[53:03] Team composition, skill sets, process, and the challenges of distributed teams.
[59:33] Dynamics of open source development and Cryptonomic’s business model.
[1:06:02] Plans for release of Tezos wallet and measuring success.
[1:11:29] Interesting tidbit about Vishakh.

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002 – Justin Hunter – Graphite Nov 15, 2018

Show notes

In this episode, we sit down with Justin Hunter, founder of Graphite. Built on Blockstack, Graphite is an open source, decentralized and encrypted replacement for Google G-Suite and Microsoft Office. We explore Justin’s interesting path to blockchain, what problems Graphite is solving, why he chose to build Graphite on Blockstack and much more.

Justin has a somewhat atypical background and path to crypto compared to others in the space. Up until a year and a half ago, Justin had only dabbled with HTML and CSS. After several unsuccessful attempts over the years to learn how to code, he mixed up his approach to learning and it finally stuck. That led him down the path of developing a token portfolio app called Coinicle and now Graphite – both on Blockstack. His passion for solving real problems is evident and refreshing.

Despite keeping the team very lean and working on this outside of his full-time job, Justin has developed Graphite into one of the few truly usable and functional decentralized apps out there. Hearing about his experience developing on Blockstack and interacting with the Blockstack community is incredibly interesting and exciting.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

Intro and path to crypto [0:53]
The origin story of Graphite [6:39]
Why put this on a blockchain? [8:01]
Development timeline for Graphite [9:49]
Biggest hurdles throughout the development process [11:27]
Why Justin chose Blockstack versus other blockchains [13:40]
Validating assumptions around target market and business model [18:05]
Justin’s process for understanding user pain points [23:03]
How Justin prioritizes his time and what features to build [25:56]
Tactics for measuring adoption of features and getting user feedback [29:55]
Key challenges building on top of blockchain [34:21]
Benefits of engaging with the Blockstack team and community [39:47]
Evolution and future of Graphite team and roadmap [42:01]
Team planning and development process [46:35]
Funding and upcoming launch [49:31]
How future Blockstack token launch may affect Graphite and its ambitions [51:19]
Measuring success in the world of blockchain [54:15]
What gets committed to the blockchain when using Graphite and why [59:31]
Personal tidbit about Justin [1:03:35]

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001 – Evin McMullen – Stow Protocol Nov 15, 2018

Show notes

In this episode, we speak with Evin McMullen, CEO and Spoke Lead at Stow Protocol (formerly Linnia). Stow Protocol is a web3.0 backend-in-a-box that helps developers build decentralized applications without knowledge of cryptography or solidity, and gives end-users control of their data. We cover a lot of big topics in this discussion such as how the Stow Protocol team uses design thinking for building a backend protocol, how they are thinking about business models, their approach for roadmap planning, and much more.

Evin and the Stow Protocol team have taken a really interesting approach to prototyping and validating assumptions. With an emphasis on building enough to host hackathons, they are planning to use those events as a way to get concentrated user feedback. For those trying to understand the challenges of developing more infrastructural and backend products like Stow Protocol, this will be a particularly interesting deep dive into that world.

We also spend a lot of time hearing from Evin about how the team has confronted and pushed through tough decisions about strategy. Having worked at companies trying to make the most of user data, we really had a great time exploring how Stow Protocol is trying to make a more equitable web by giving users control over their data and better, more secure access to developers.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

[0:31] Episode intro
[1:24] Evin’s background and path to crypto.
[4:35] How Evin’s experiences growing up ultimately drew her to the philosophical aspects of crypto.
[11:25] Overview of Linnia protocol, history of the project and what problems they’re aiming to solve.
[18:52] Where the name Linnia came from.
[19:24] The team’s perspective on tokens and the potential for a Linnia token in the future.
[21:47] Evolution of the problems and solution space Linnia is focused on.
[26:00] Who was involved in honing the problems to focus on, what we’re their roles and what did the process look like?
[27:57] How does the team handle conflict and pivots in strategy like how much decentralization is ideal?
[30:50] The team’s approach for validating who their ideal users are and market sizes for each.
35:18] Thoughts on evaluating the competitive landscape and the fuzzy line between competition and collaboration.
[39:27] Perspective on business models in the crypto space.
[44:39] Approach to validating assumptions.
[48:15] Linnia’s application of user experience and design thinking process.
[55:24] Prototyping tactics.
[57:55] Challenges that are unique to blockchain from Linnia’s perspective.
[1:05:44] Team size, composition and responsibilities.
[1:09:02] Stakeholders in the Linnia ecosystem.
[1:14:05] The Linnia product roadmap and process for putting it together.
[1:17:27] Interesting tidbit about Evin.

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000 – Genesis – Introducing Fork the Product Nov 01, 2018

Show notes

This is our genesis episode. Rather than interview a guest, your co-hosts Nick and Zach introduce themselves and interview each other. Since typical episodes will mostly cover the people we interview and their projects, we felt it was important to share a bit about ourselves and the reason we started Fork the Product.

We also get into what we hope to get out of this project, what we hope the crypto community gets out of it, why we chose to do a podcast, and how we want our listeners to engage with us. We hope that you enjoy this and that it inspires you to listen to more episodes and help us form a community around Fork the Product!

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