# From #BUIDLathon to Bufficorn Ventures | Russell Castagnaro - Bufficorn Ventures

- Channel: [Ethereum Denver](https://streameth.org/ethereum-denver)
- Date: 2024-10-09
- Duration: 20:20
- Topics: blockchain, web3, ethereum, Entertainment
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-PwltmKyX5Y4
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwltmKyX5Y4

## Description

APPLICATIONS FOR ETHDenver 2024: #YearOfTheSpork ARE OPEN


APPLY NOW
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## Transcript

[Music] my name is Russell castigo I am the uh Venture Steward for buffer corn Ventures I'm also the chief of staff for eth Denver and sporal so um so thank you for coming to eth Denver um I really appreciate it Saturday is normally our big busiest busiest day and as most of you know um in the past we've had hackers is working their little fingers off up until midnight on Saturday to get their submissions in in time to be evaluated this year we tried to open things up to have everything due on 10 o'clock on Saturday morning so that we have the whole day available um as uh for for them so they can get some more out of the content um and uh and so that when we see them tomorrow in the judging they're not all totally eyes eyes red you know and they're freaking out because they're so stressed out they actually have had maybe some sleep or at least they're not as stressed out so for those of you that are um in fact hackers or Founders or whatever congratulations I'm glad this Saturday is for you and uh and thanks for coming and thanks for coming in hacking so early um I don't have a whole lot of uh of slides to show you and the first part you know the thing I want to talk about is um because we are we we started seven years ago as primarily a hackathon and of course most of you probably already know this but we don't call our hackers hackers we call them bidders because um why build when you can Biddle uh if you get it you get it if you don't you don't that's all I can say but the the idea is that we have all these teams and and even part of the buff aorn Ventures thesis which I can get into at length but I'm I'm not here to just talk about that is that these hacking teams that come together here are great sources for future teams that will be the next unicorns that we have in our industry and across the industries um now that doesn't mean that a team that's working on you know on matter labs's uh you know Bounty is going to get funded to implement that Bounty right that doesn't make any sense it's already been done but what it does mean is as a hacker you can show that you can meet a team that you can deliver and that you can provide value uh and you can also show your flare in the projects so the most important aspect I think of if you're looking at this more than just an informational sort of thing in other words you're not just learning a new tool which a lot of people are and that's awesome and I I talk to people all the time who have maybe they've gone to Camp Biddle and then they come and they participate in the hackathon and they're bidding and they now have a new career and so that is an amazing thing and I don't want to U minimize that at all because it's probably the most important thing that happens here at eth Denver however many of the the bidders that are here are really interested in getting into a startup in being a Founder in finding their Niche and there's plenty of stories about that right so how you know how can you best do that um I think the number one thing that you're going to find that sort of delineates the uh the new folks from a really successful bidler team that might be a good candidate for a Founder team is that they express empathy for who they've recognized as their users right so the easiest way to do this is if you solve a problem that you've had to deal with yourself right and is if you're a developer you know that if you've gone through the pain the hours of pain doing something and you find a way to do it better well you have that empathy because you're you're writing this for yourself and for people like you and that's really great however you only get one or two shots at something like this right and if you want to really deliver something that's going to be broadly used and really interesting you really have to understand who are my users who are they going to be and it doesn't mean you're going to be right so when you come up with a team you know um when you're in a team you're hacking this is what your Bounty is you can go talk to the uh talk to the judges or you can go talk to the teams have a booth you can find out what they want the closer you come to doing those things the more likely you're going to be to win the less like you are to do those things and just throw things in and try and farm bounties the Le the less successful you're going to be it's the same way when you move into okay we've actually found something that we want to develop you find who those users are let's take a great example of of something that is so screwed up that all of us experience it who totally dug the registration process for getting to eth Ember this year the application process who thought that was the smoothest most amazing experience ever okay no one is raising their hands because it sucked okay it was a great example of really really crappy user experience and we say oh the ux of of web 3 sucks and yes it does but the ux sucks and that's a symptom that that's not the cause the ux sucks because we're not applying empathy towards our users now to be fair we have some more complicated problems with eth Denver we have uh you know we have at least half the people are pretty much newbies maybe they've never had their own wallet and the other ones may have been in it since they OG bitcoiners or OG ethereum so we get a lot of people but what we did is we listened to um little things and not the big things so we made it impossible for anyone to use right instead of useful for at least half of the population to use I will tell you don't do this in your projects don't do this as a bidler and don't do this as a Founder talk to as many different people identify oh these are our groups right this is who we want to um want to work with and then solve the problems for them don't have them have to jump through a hood any of you who are doing web3 projects that involve a web3 wallet what is your does anybody who's whose favorite wallet is uh metamask whose favorite wallet is coinbase the wallet not the not the exchange so there's a whole bunch of them and you may have a different reason but I bet nobody's happy with their wallet are you like isn't it harder than it should be right now why is that a hard problem to solve it's a hard problem to solved because there's no money that we figured out in being in a wallet the only way you can make money when you have a wallet is either selling subscriptions or in selling crypto to people letting them use an exchange and then marketing it up right which is what you have to do in most of the things so there's not a case for money and so it's really hard to find a good wallet that can be out there browsers have the same problem early on right with Netscape and Internet Explorer and all these kinds of things that came out I use Brave most people use Chrome or oper or something like that as a Founder it's really important that you find what your audience is going to be who it is that your target is and get empathy with them talk to them do interviews put together mockups and say would you do this if you're already a builder we know you can Implement a software you can use something like AI right a AI will build 90% of your software nowadays is as long as you have the smarts to know where to deploy it how to test it out and how to get all that stuff going but the very first thing you need to do before you talk about innovating before you talk about it is find that population of people that is going to be interested in this at all so this first all I just want to make it really clear have I said how important empathy is for your users and identifying who your potential users are yes I see some some heads shaking and I appreciate hey zafy could you give me a favor in my bag there's a water bottle can you give it to this gentleman right here in the light sweatshirt or sweater or whatever um because he's been the most engaging person in this entire area so okay thank you see I I give gifts too um so okay so I want to make sure everybody understands the idea of empathy then we can start talking about actual um transformative Technologies so this is where it gets fun right you've identified who you're going to be now what kind of a transformative transformative solution do you want to have and uh if you can guess this is about music it's really cool to follow music throughout the history and the cycle of music you started out where composers um would write their music out and they would um work with musicians to maybe have an orchestra and um and you'd go and listen to that maybe there was a king or a really wealthy person that would U pay for their guests to come listen right it was a very small Market as the printing press came around and you could make printed music that more people could play what you had was you had the composers that were out there and they were the heroes there were people who could play music and they were these drones that they played the music exactly as it was was made and um and so now it was expanded to a larger population of people who could enjoy music the way way that they wanted to so then you take it a little further so we go from printing music now you've got recordings you got records you've got first it was on wax then you've got um records and the industry that was around printing music had a real problem with the recording industry right because you didn't need somebody to play you had you were displacing two different groups of people right or two different types of companies the printed music and you were displacing performers because now as long as you had a record player or a photograph or whatever they were called back then you could play that music it was accessible to you accessible to many more people right then we had things like um like cassette tapes and then we had the the uh the Walkman right and then you had zoon and all these things to where it got more and more personal the record companies weren't happy about it not only that but now you had cassettes so people could record off the radio and make make mixtapes we did mixtapes a lot back when I was young and you could share those kinds of things this was threatening to the recording industry and so the recording industry got in and started suing people in the same way and I didn't mention this but in the the printed material printed music they were suing the people who were trying to record music and then you bring it all the way forward to streaming right streaming media is a is an inherent threat to recorded music I don't know when the last time I actually bought an album for any reason but I wanted just buy the album just to have and never really open right I listen to the streaming music everywhere what was the um what was the song Happy that came out and uh the the the um the songwriter was like yeah I make a quarter of a scent every time that's played on Spotify who's not very happy but a lot more people listen to his music he's not happy the recording industry isn't happy but these are all innovations that are happening and as a a founder and as a hacker and as a bidler you need to think about what those are going to be so I this is a sort of the same view of that where you have the performers and how they're getting displaced and now we're all all on our cell phones using really junky earbuds to listen to music that we could have heard in really rich sounds but at least we can do it in our own rooms now the problem with tech tech disruption and we see this in crypto a lot right is that um there are these Moes that created there are these blockers and um and really what kind of disruption is do you want to do as a hacker as a founder and the the really interesting thing here is there's genuine disruption and then there's pseudo disruption and so any if anybody here has taken Lyft or Uber as all of you probably have in the old days you had to call up a taxi and they would come pick you up you had to go hail a taxi or have somebody hail a taxi Uber and Lyft did not change the market significantly other than disrupting it in a in a pseudo way it's still about somebody in a car doing it the difference is now they don't have to pay $100,000 for a licensing coin in New York to drive people around right now anybody with a car who could pass you know certain rules could then be a driver do you want to be that kind of disruptor with your solution um or do you want to do something that's more genuine Wikipedia is a great example of this dictionary I mean not dictionaries but encyclopedias Encyclopedia Britannica it used to be a huge business you'd get an update you'd order all of them and then you get a new update every year to to be for the changes however um Nobody Does it anymore because it's all online and Wikipedia is what really led the way you look at Radio um the same thing newspapers they didn't go away but they lost maybe 90% of their market share to radio television did the same sort of thing so where does crypto fall into this well we certainly have regulatory issues around crypto and so when you're thinking about your tokens and you're thinking about all these kinds of things think about do you want to fight the fight of reg of Regulation and if you come out with a security or something like that that is the fight that you're choosing to fight or do you want to use the technology in a different way to do something like ticketing or to do like what iyk is doing where this is like a chipped this is a chipped shirt right a chipped um piece of a chipped garment that has a way of tracking there's not a financial aspect to this chip and to this identity that it ties to online but it gives you a new functionality a new way of using something that is already there when you're thinking about your startup you're thinking about what you're going to do determine whether you want to do genuine or pseudo um disruption not that one is any better than the other but know what you're doing know what you're getting into and then we've got like big Tech and government falls into this too for regulation you got these Moes that are built and uh there's certain things that the big big companies can do and whether it's Google or it was Microsoft or it's the government what have you they help steer Trends they Define what everyone is talking talking about like if you are a mac daddy you love Apple then you're talking about the new 3D display that they're coming out with and you're not thinking about anything else that might disrupt them right you're thinking about their new product because that's where the hype is that's the cool new thing you're not thinking about the things they don't want you to be talking about which are ways to get underneath Apple's business model um there's regulatory manipulation we all know how this works banking does anybody bank with Wells Fargo not anymore no um like literally they're going through and notifying all of their retail people and this is what's new if they can tie you at all to blockchain or web 3 they're telling you they don't want your business anymore even if you've been there for 20 years this is a a moat that they're building against Innovation because the payment technology around blockchain is already there predatory choirs and stifling uh anybody like mint anybody use mint so mint was one of the coolest you and I should Vibe can you give him a water bottle to ZF um so so mint was this great software that came out that would go and sync up with all your accounts and give you everything that you that you want um information wise about all of your about all of your accounts and two it bought it I think it bought it for like $100 million it was like a two-person company amazing stuff and whated didn't to it do slowly they let like Let's ignore this let's let this go they tried something where oh would you would you like to pay $2 or $5 a month to support mint which of course I did because I'm a good guy and uh they sunsetted mints just recently um it was so good nobody else wanted to do a software solution like that so now people like me are stuck using crappy old banking software if they want to do conventional Banking and credit card management and those kinds of things and then everyone's heard of acquires that's where you require someone to hire their team and eventually bury their technology it happens all the time in new new firms and when you're a uh when you're a Founder that's actually something you want to think about do I just want to be acquired that's that's got an H in it it's not just acquired um AC Acquired and hired um and that will probably eventually bury your technology and your solution still a way to make some money so um these are the kinds of things I'm not going to talk about this I don't have that much time to talk about the government side of how we can sort of stop these Moes but it's really thinking and by the way I try to use um Innovation to like an innovation new thing all the slides that you're seeing are uh are AI generated right by Dolly so you'll think see things like misspelling and stuff like that that because Dolly can't add or spell I think that's like desrin that's uh some discrimination anyway cool stuff so one more slide here I want to want to go in is really think about how you want to disrupt as a Founder if you've already gone down this road do you want to do something that's genuine or pseudo you really really change things up do you want to go fast or Go Slow is this a long-term change or is this like quick you're in and you want to get the uh Instagram sort of buyout billion dollars seven people I mean who doesn't want that but uh do you think you can get it I don't know um are you doing this to progress all of us the world in a sort of a more regen thing or are you just doing it for money not that there no judgment both are good reasons to do it and then um do you want to be part of a community and have the entity that you're making contribute to part of that community and of course you're here so the odds are pretty decent that community means something to you eth Denver means something to you spor down means something to you and so the last thing I'll say is that the whole thesis behind BV buff ofor ADV Ventures is that we make it so everybody that attends here gets Spork right if you join the the Dow thank you Mitch if you join the da you stake your Spork and you are now a member of a co-op that gets profits based on the companies that BV invests in so we're trying to bring the community let you all know that when you're members you're actually owners of these founding of these companies of which you may be one so um I want to thank you very much for coming out I hope this was like remotely interesting and that the images weren't too ugly I thought they were kind of cool and if you have any questions I'm Russell e denver.com thanks so much and have a great rest of eth [Applause] Denver