Gitcoin is a platform where coders and developers can get paid to work on open-source software in a wide variety of programming languages. Users can also submit their own project ideas to the Gitcoin platform in order to crowdsource funding from contributing donors.

Our guest: Morten Pedersen, Program Lead for Hackathons & Bounties at Gitcoin.

tr3butor: What’s your personal story? How did you become a Web3 boss? How did you get here?

Morten: I was the product manager of a team in a large tech company doing emergent technologies. But we never got any anchoring for the products we made. That's when I got more and more interested in working with the people that actually build shit that gets anchoring.

I started working with Raid Guild. I was in Season 1 there and I did strategy work and business development on different projects.

That was my first taste of fully remote decentralized work and working in a DAO. And that was kind of the origin story of how this all started. If you want me to continue, this was my path into GitCoin as well. I don't know if you saw the shitposter/memelord job description that Gitcoin put out last spring. They actually put out the job ad saying, we are looking for a shitposter/memelord at Gitcoin. The annual salary was 80K-200K or something like that.

It blew up on Twitter because when you grew up, you'd never think that there was going to be a job opening for shitposter/memelord for 100K a year.

But that is happening right now. So I reached out to Gitcoin. I sent Scott [Scott Moore, Gitcoin co-founder] some emails with some good memes and my backstory and stuff. But with my background in the more technical aspects of business and emerging technologies and blockchain, I was needed more in another position. That was my entrance to Gitcoin. I had some good calls with the team and they liked me, so they hired me.

tr3butor: Right, right. Could you tell us more about your current role and what you're responsible for? What is challenging? What do you love to do? What do you have to do?

Morten: My role is the lead for virtual events. Basically Gitcoin consists of two products. We have the grant side and we have the event side. Now, we’re splitting more into a DAO and a holdings company. I'm still with the holding company working on virtual events.

So I do hackathons and bounties at Gitcoin. Bounties is a product where anyone can come and tool their GitHub issue. Now we are deploying a new feature where you don't need to pull, we're not that connected to GitHub anymore - but you could put up bounties on Gitcoin and people can work on these bounties and receive the prize in crypto if they are the winning submission for the bounty, just like how you’d expect bounties work.

tr3butor: Could you explain a bit about Gitcoin? What’s the reason or inspiration behind the creation of Gitcoin?

Morten: The reason this all started was because open source software sees around $500 billion of value flow through it each year. The developers behind that software that made this in their spare time on the weekends, but they never see the money, right?

They did this because they saw a need in the market and they were helpful enough and skilled enough to make it. We want those developers to get paid as well.

Because open-source software is a public good. It's a digital public good, something everyone can use to spin up a new startup or a new website. That's what we're trying to do on our bounties product.

tr3butor: How do you work with Web3 organizations? Why would they want to engage with Gitcoin? What’s an example of how they can get involved?

Morten: We want open source projects to come with their problems and their required feature improvements and offer them to their community to build it for them, and they pay them out.

On top of that, we have hackathons. We bring in sponsors that actually get this set time period of a hackathon. It can be an exclusive hackathon or an open hackathon. Open hackathon is when the events team sets the topic for the hackathon and partner projects can jump into a sponsor position. Right now we have the L2 Rollathon going on. So we picked a topic that we felt fit the narrative right now in the market. Well, we have L2 2022, right, the meme?

We want L2s to flourish and our ecosystem partners in the space are well within our mission, vision and values. Then we brought on sponsors that felt the same way to put out the bounties and the prizes in that hackathon. For exclusive hackathons, we often have “larger” sponsors or customers coming to us saying, "Hey, we know Gitcoin has a good community of developers. You have a wide reach and you're a well-known brand. So we would like to have our hackathon hosted on your platform because we need that reach.”

It's a win-win situation for them because first of all, they get their bounty solved.

They get new ideas, they get problems fixed, they get new features, but also Gitcoin enables them to funnel Web3 native developers into their social channels, into their Discord, into their developer programs.

So that's kind of what we do with the hackathons and events that I'm leading.

tr3butor: Is Gitcoin using its own model to get more work done for Gitcoin? We found this one volunteer about Greenfield book translation, but why are you not massively using volunteers, grants and hackathons to build Gitcoin in itself?

Morten: That's a good question, and we are starting to do that more and more. The reason we haven't used it that much before is because, to be honest this platform or the events product was made back in 2017 by Kevin Owocki in his basement and after that, it's just been like quilted on top of it so the code base is very messy. It's hard to have people come in and work on it without having our engineering team watchdogging and helping them and supporting them and giving them the correct documents. But right now, in the Rollathon, we are having a joint bounty with Polygon to implement Polygon as the payout option on the event side on the bounties. So that's like, that's a super good way of dogfooding our own product.

tr3butor: We agree that L2's are the next thing in the market, and L2 wars are inevitable in the future. So what else besides L2's do you consider as promising niches in Web3 or not promising but hyped ones? Where would you recommend to go for someone coming to Web3 to work for the next, let's say two years?

Morten:

I really think UX is a very underworked part of Web3. There are so many people wanting to get into this and expectedly they don't understand much when they first try out a dApp or even get their MetaMask set up. A large part of Web3 is pretty janky.

That and - I'm just gonna tag along with Vitalik on this one - social recovery wallets is a huge one. And that's also UX I feel, because having your seed phrase remembered or put away in a bank box or whatever, is not viable long-term if you are going to be your own bank. So that's like my two top things.

Another thing that I noticed is like right now we have like this art, it's kinda ending or like ebbing out at least, like the NFT craze. This is part of what traders like to call the super cycles and it kind of correlates to that. So we had the ICO era back in 2017. Some of those projects still exist and are awesome. Take for example Aragon, orOcean Protocol, still building cool products. But some of them were just fads, or most of them to be honest. And I feel the same way about where we're at right now with NFTs. We have all these fads.

So like the 10K PFP projects. Yes, that's a very good start and we have to start utilizing these token standards somehow. So I don't want people criticizing them because that's also how DeFi started, like what is this magic? We can't revolutionize finance through magic internet money, but we could and we are.

It will be the same with NFTs, we will find the correct use cases for them in the future.

Just think long term and don't fall into that mentality of a get-rich-quick NFT 10,000 PFP kinda thinking. That would be my tips to new people in crypto.

tr3butor: Okay. So the opposite question, what would you NOT recommend to get into besides 10K PFP projects?

Morten: Do your own research, basically. Try everything, but do your own research. You learn mostly by trying at least. So do invest in an NFT project or do buy an NFT or do - this is not financial advice - but do experiment with DeFi. Just to see how it works. You learn so much by doing it, going that way.

So me and a group of friends - I don't know if you've heard about Rainbow Rolls - but we actually were kinda mesmerized and were like “they can't keep doing these 10,000 PFP projects, it can't be sustainable that everybody's doing this right now”. Ironically; “we could do this, but for the public good”, we said to ourselves. So we started this project called Rainbow Rolls, which is a 10,000 PFP project. But before we minted it, we agreed to donate the funds that we raised to Giveth, Gitcoin and RIP Medical Debt. Through that project, we have donated $100K to Giveth and Gitcoin and $100K to RIP Medical Debt. RIP Medical Debt is a very special project because they buy Medical Debt in bulk and they pay down medical debt for families.

By minting our PFP for a good cost, they get this awesome, cool toilet paper PFP that’s satirical, because it's a toilet paper themed NFT. We have toilet paper NFTs and through minting that families medical debt get paid down. I think it was 5,200 families' medical debts in the US. All of those 5,200 families got a personal letter from RIP Medical Debt saying that Rainbow Rolls on the Ethereum blockchain helped you pay down this debt. So basically that is probably 5,200 families that got like, life saving help from Ethereum and crypto that they probably never heard about, and now they're like, what the hell is this Ethereum? Well, this is amazing, right?

NFTs can be used as a way to fund public goods and do stuff like that as well. You can bake in cool mechanisms, royalties, everything.

tr3butor: So, work life balance. Crypto is where people come just for the chance to be a part of the ecosystem. But many of us are working too much, and are either alone or lonely. Is that true for you and others working in Web3? How can we make Web3 workers feel more special and satisfied and have a high morale?

Morten: I really feel some of the points you mentioned there. So first of all, coming from a tech background in a corporate company where you have like so many people and crowded offices and cubicles and canteens with lunch together and stuff like that, it is kind of hard to actually get alone time and deep work.

Basically it's such a shift in how you work. But first of all, you get used to it, but you also have to be the kind of person that is not super needy for attention all the time.

For example, in our DAO at least, we have a lot of social sessions during the week. We have the Gitcoin demo hour, where anyone can come and do a demo of whatever. It could be a new feature they made or some art or showing how to do a kickflip, like anything. You can request them to have a demo day. And we have this every Thursday, and there's tons of these kinds of small meetings that people gather in and just talk and chat and stuff like that, which helps a bunch on that feeling of being alone at work.

Another part of this is, I know we have met at events, right?

Going to events is a huge part of Web3, and it's very recommended.

I urge every person, especially the ones that work remotely alone, perhaps with no other crypto people in their city, to go to these events and just network and have fun. Like, where I live I don't have any friends that work in crypto or Web3. So basically my time to meet people in the same space is at these events. Or otherwise I have to meet them on calls and stuff like that. Luckily it all depends. This is not a requirement towards new people wanting to work in Web3.

If you're looking for full-time work and not doing freelance work, then find an organization that values that. Find an organization that actually pays for their employees to go to these events to meet up in person and not just stay home, because as you said, the work hours are crazy.

tr3butor: So now that you’re sitting in the middle of it, do you have a better view of the crypto markets? Does it make you a better investor?

Morten: When I started working full-time in crypto, I thought, this is amazing. Now I can combine my work with what I'm interested in. I can follow the market and I can do my work, but I've never been less updated on how the market is because I'm working with the actual Web3 projects all the time, their products, their teams, their mission and their vision, not their crypto valuations. The market just goes, I don't have time to look at that anymore.

But the good part about it is - when you're in it, first of all, you start to really believe in the people, technology and the whole “revolution”. You don't get nervous by these downturns anymore. In the early days I stayed up at night looking at the charts and shit. I never look at the charts anymore because this is the future dude. There's no way around it. So that's the good part about it.

tr3butor: Do you see any trends in the non-tech opportunity space? You mentioned that UX is a big thing and things like social recovery wallet, but what about people who come from a non-technical background? Like what should they be looking at for Web3? Or what can they even do?

Morten: There's been a lot of rage on Twitter with all these “oh, we need community managers”. Community managers right now are super valuable, but they’re going to be even more valuable. A community manager has mainly one dude or dudette in Discord following up on all the chats and handling the roles and all of tht.

But a community manager could do so much more of the strategy work around it, stuff that is super important.

How can we make a better onboarding process? How can we educate outbound with our project? So marketing people are needed.

Partner success is also super important and very dependent on what kind of product you have. So for my team, we just hired two new partner success managers, and they are doing brilliantly despite having no experience in Web3.

What we did is, I had blockchain one-on-one sessions with them, and I educated them on things like, what are these partners we have - the customers and our sponsors in hackathons that have recurring hackathons with us. What do they do? What is their product? What do they need? What do they want? Stuff like that. And the partner success managers that we hired, they have become experts in our customers. So it's very similar to Web2 like being an account manager, but also like you get all these technical, like facets around it, which is super intriguing. And then it makes you dive into the crypto rabbit hole as well.

Every non-business or non-tech role or experience can find their place in Web3 - it's just about adapting. It's about being open to learning a bit about the technology behind.

Because right now at this stage with the "bad UX", you have to have some kind of technical understanding of what happens in the background to be proficient in a business role as well. So be open to learning some technicals, even though you are a business guy or girl.

tr3butor: So non-technical people should pick up some basic technicals in order to onboard Web3 better.

Morten: Yeah. If you're in a role where one of your tasks is to onboard people, yes. If you're in a role where your task is to support customers or partners or strengthen partnerships - yes. You also need to learn technicals because you need to understand those partners' projects and those projects are mostly technical. If you're in a role where your task is to support customers or support partners or create partnerships, yes. You have to touch on it, so that will be my tip.

Just be open to lean into the more technical aspects of blockchain and Web3, even though you are in a business role and you have a business background.

tr3butor: I think that in Web3, in crypto, we live on this intersection of finance, ideology and technology. If you start as a technical guy, you need to learn finance and game theory and society and all this basic stuff, to be able to code like blockchain systems. Same with non-tech people, to market blockchain products, you need to understand that technically.

tr3butor: One last question - every potential new business is about Web 3. Even a coffee machine is Web3. But it’s all kind of confusing, it’s abstract. What is Web3 for you? What projects come to mind that you think represent the real Web3?

Morten: I don't want to toot our own horn so I'm not going to talk about Gitcoin and how we are transforming funding of public goods. But to me, the real Web3 or what could show Web3 in a cool way is, for finance people, DeFi, and for artsy creative people, it's NFTs. Just going a bit behind the scenes on how that stuff works is like magic. For a finance person used to traditional banking and the bureaucracy and the middlemen, if they see DeFi and they can see that you can have custody of your own assets if you can show them that you can set up this wallet.

You can put them into yield strategies. You can magically transform them into other tokens or fractions of tokens, or fractions of art. And you can lend and borrow and all of that with a single click.

That is enough to kind of show the power of Web3 to these people. And that's how I normally do it as well. So resources like rabbithole.gg are super valuable in just showing off the potential of the Web3 future we're looking at. I don't want to mention specific projects, but yeah, DeFi as a whole is just like magic internet money. It's Web3 101, I guess.

tr3butor: Cool. Thank you. It was super interesting. Super fun. Super valuable for us. Thank you very much.

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