‘’You have to make sure that you take care of your people’’, Alberto Martin on how it feels to be a leader.

Gen Z in leadership positions has been growing as time goes by, fortunately allowing us, kids, to take action and flourish the world. The most important; is allowing us to be seen and receive support from different communities and organizations. DreamDAO comes intending to help GenZs to grow and get funded to build in web3 and use it as a tool to change our world for the better. Together with Celo, in the last months, I can speak for myself that I was one of the impacted people in the space by this amazing partnership. During summer, I interned at Celo’s Climate Collective as a ReFi Analyst and I am soon to meet DreamDAO folks in Bogotá, during DevCon, thanks to the Celo grant that’s funding many of our builders to attend different conferences throughout the year (we had ETH Mexico, Web3Conf India in GOA and much more!).

In this series of interviews with Celo leaders, by DreamDAO, we will meet our first guest, Alberto Martin, from cLabs, in which he shares his experience, pathway, and learnings in a 20-year-old career in the tech industry, and his vision of web3 as manager. Buckle up, because we are about to take a knowledge journey and get mind blown!

In 2017, Celo Org was launched with the purpose of removing the barriers that don't allow crypto as one of the main options of payment in our day-to-day lives. A carbon-negative blockchain, a mobile-first wallet, and stable cryptocurrencies pegged to fiat was all it took for Celo to dominate ReFi. ‘’Prosperity for all’’ is the ecosystem’s motto.

Since the launch of the mainnet, Celo has been leading the power of DeFi to smartphones from many places around the globe and empowering ReFi builders to start projects that flourish our Earth in different ways, through the Celo Foundation’s Grants Program. In the background of this powerful organization, there’s cLabs, which started Celo from the ground and is now one of the many contributors to the ecosystem. In the words of Alberto Martin, the Head of Product at the company: ‘’cLabs’ main function is to provide public goods to the rest of the community. Provide the blockchain, make sure that it is up and running nodes, and provide tools and applications for developers while they connect’’.

Martin, a Spanish citizen, studied economics at college, and during his spare time, he began learning computer science. In 2002, after moving to Silicon Valley, worked for a couple of years at .com, ‘’It was an eye-opening experience, from fundraising money to growing the company from 3-4 people to 20 plus people to then deciding if we should sell the company or trying to go to the next level and continue to fundraise, especially during the times that it was either the boom or the crash of .com’’. Later, he joined the initial Google team as a contractor, working until he got a full-time position. Over the 18 years at the company, Alberto was part of the team who built video chat for Google, later on, he worked with Chromebooks, and then Payments. After being contacted by Celo, a year and a half ago, he became the Head of Product at cLabs, responsible for overseeing the design and development of products.

Q: How is your typical day of work as head of product? What do you mostly do?

Alberto: As part of my core job, I always try to research what is the latest that is happening in the industry, in Celo, and climate. I allocate time every day to do those things. Then the next thing that happens is meeting with one or two product managers of my team. I have two to three different meetings every day, those range from product reviews to program reviews.

The last part of my day, which is the one that I enjoy the most, is thinking about product design, which in my opinion, is pretty broken in web3. We question how we can design products that the user needs. Crypto has become more mainstream and many people hold crypto, however, the average user has barely touched it and has a really hard time coming into cryptocurrency or coming into web3. We try to interview people, talk to them, even neighbors, people on Twitter, engage with them on social media, and see what they're thinking.

That's my job.

Q: Many people in web3 came from Google and that's amazing, but what's it like when you get into web3 after working so closely in web2? Did you have some kind of eye-opening experience in web2 that made you move towards decentralization?

Alberto: I think that what happens to most of the people that I talk to and work on web2 for a long time, —  by the way, I consider myself a web1 native — is that people who are passionate about technology are curious about new technologies and they want to learn it. Some want to work in robotics, or self-driven cars, or on the web, and the web is open, has a lower barrier to entry and it's free for everybody, you just need a phone or a computer. That's what attracts a lot of people to web3; to learn how it works.

Q: Something you enjoy about Celo?

Alberto: Probably 12 months ago, I said: ‘’Hey, I think we need to create a high yield web3 application based on our stablecoins’’. I got a lot of pushback from the economics team telling me they did not understand the value and asking where the value accrued from this product was. In the end, I got a lot of pushback because it was not a real yield application and it was unsustainable.

I love that from Celo. I love the fact that they say no if it's not real, they say ‘’we don't wanna build something that doesn't have real value to the user’’. I thought that was really powerful.

Q: What’s something you hope to see in cLabs, and web3 in general, in the future? What do you think ReFi needs to improve/have?

Alberto: Trust and transparency. Once those are established, creating community-driven small economies that do not exist today.

If you think about it, there are lots of things that if you are saying; ‘’I'm gonna account for a forest that has already been preserved for a hundred years, let's monetize it’’. This should be monetized, but today processes are quite broken. The forest will probably be there for the next 200 years, but it has some costs. Today those are paid by taxpayers and donations, not by their impact on preserving the earth, I would argue that has some value in the global economies we have today. But if you think of something that will change the state today; you give me an incentive. For example, in my house, if I use solar energy, from solar panels, you will give me tokens for that, instead of having to pay a high fee to transfer those to others because the electricity company said so. Or you tell me: hey, if you continue to preserve the 20-30 trees that you have in your house, you will get a benefit from that every day, — and it could be a very small thing. But imagine at the end of the month, I can pay for one coffee because of that, for maintaining my trees or saving energy. Those are small economies that are hard to create in the current financial system and blockchain could help with that.

Q: I’m curious as to how often you and cLabs’ employees use Celo’s applications. When building it, do you and the rest of your team have that ‘’what would I need as a customer? What would I want?’’ kinds of thoughts? Or is it only about your target audience?

Alberto: I spent 18 years at Google and one of the things that I learned the most is that if you do not use your products, your user will never use your products. Every day I open Valora, I use Celo tokens to do something on the ecosystem. I go into an exchange or I go into Mobius and buy a coin or sell a stablecoin. There are multiple tasks that I do with the tools we have and then I often provide feedback to the team saying, ‘’Hey, today this is broken’’ or ‘’I was trying this and I have to do it in three clicks, I wish I could do it in only one click’’.

I consider this part of my core job. The same for my team, they use Celo tools every day.

Q: When you create/build a product, as the leader, you are the most responsible for making sure that the product represents and is aligned with the company’s purpose, values, and integrity. How is the process of aligning yourself with cLabs?

Alberto: cLabs’ main goal is to provide public goods to the rest of the ecosystem. That means talking to founders, talking to developers, and understanding what they need is a key part of my job. I try to do as much as I can, especially I try to do that in discord and then see what they're missing.

For example, one of the things we hear loud and clear is that people are missing a multi-sig, a way to have multiple wallets together to sign a transaction or sign something. That's, for example, one thing that we heard and I heard on discord, and I have so many founders that need it. So how can I represent cLabs itself and make sure that we deploy those tools?

Q: Do you believe that there is a top 1 skill for leadership, today? What’s the most important feature of a good leader for you?

Alberto: People. You always have to invest in people. You can have the best technology in the world. If the people in that technology don’t get it or they disagree, you will always lose, therefore as a leader, you have to make sure that you take care of your people, and doesn't mean that you pay them the most. There are other things that you can do that are not monetary valuable things that people appreciate. If someone tells you, ‘’Hey, I know we're really busy launching this thing, but I wanna go to this conference because I think I will personally benefit from learning’’, you often say or always have to say yes to make sure that they keep growing.

And the last thing is that sometimes I put my team before my own interest. I always try to advise them based on their best interest. I had many incredible product managers that I worked with and I said, ‘’I think the best thing for you is actually to do this other thing that is not with me anymore’’, even though it was not the best for me because I would be losing the best people I had.

Q: Why do you believe in crypto as an asset for prosperity? How would you explain blockchain and web3’s power to someone that is not much into it?

Alberto: What I try to explain about web3 or crypto, first of all, is that cryptography is a pretty cool technology regardless of blockchain. Cryptography itself has a lot of value. For example, when you go to your bank account, you wanna make sure that you have a safe and secure account when you are transacting, this is done through cryptography.

Then the second thing is that blockchain is a database, but it has more attributes than a database does; it has a state and it has a network. So imagine you have your own database where you created an excel spreadsheet. You cannot go back in time and see how your database was two years ago. You could go back, for example, to where you stored it and you can say ‘’Hey, Microsoft, I want access to this old data that is really valuable to me’’, you have to reach out to that company. In web three, what happens is that information is stored in a public way, which is; that databases are stored in a blockchain and the blockchains are public, and they're not maintained by an entity like Google. They are rather maintained by the people who are part of that network. And the third thing is that they figured out a way to have everybody profiting or likely to be able to find a common ground to benefit from using web3.

This conversation, as a web3 Gen Z builder, made me realize the power this space has to bring people together for prosperity, and how there’s space for all of us to build from the ground and get benefit from it. As leaders, we need to look for each other and make sure we are all growing with our actions and projects. Web3 is not about getting stuck in the ground while an organization and its executives grow, it is about bringing up everyone, together, so we can all experience what ReFi has as the best for us. Of course, we still have so much to learn, improve, and work on; just like Alberto, I believe we can bring trust and transparency in the future, so we can take the best of it, and improve ReFi as we walk towards prosperity; financially, as communities, and as a lifestyle.

If you enjoyed this interview stay tuned with @DreamDAO_ and @CeloOrg on Twitter for more of our interview series with Celo leaders! Thank you :)