John Mcaffee opening the conference
For two days, Bucharest, the city where I'm currently living, hosted the 6th edition of d10e, a consistent conference about decentralization. I had the honor of being invited as a speaker and gladly took this opportunity to introduce my blockchain project, Hubcoin.
What follows is a my overall impression about the conference and few takeaways.
First of all, I was quite disappointed to find out that @ned cancelled his presence there, I was really looking forward to talk to him and also, maybe, I could have squeeze in time for an interview. I know many people here on Steemit are eager to know what's happening at the founders level. Anyway, although I was disappointed for a while, I'm happy to report that I mitigated this with the presence of @furion, with whom I hang out like half of the conference. In all honesty, I have to confess that I still don't know the real name of @furion, it wasn't on his badge and I didn't ask. But just his Steemit nickname was enough, we had a good time together, lots of technical and strategical conversations.
I also had a chat with @hipster, form Golos, one of the most energetic people I ever met and an incredible blockchain enthusiast. Just by getting to know him, I can predict good days ahead for Golos.
But probably the most spectacular presence at the conference was John Mcafee, the legendary tech-security advocate and former American president candidate. It was by far the most candid, open and clever intervention I ever saw at any conference. To come into a room full of entrepreneurs and to have the audacity to admit that money is not the solution to everything, and that you can't feill your void with money, well, that says a lot about the human behind the name John Mcafee. I'm very happy that I had the chance to spend a few minutes with him. Not to mention his bodyguard too. :)
Back to the presentations.
The lineup included David Orban (Network Society Ventures), Broke Pierce (Blockchain Capital), Bruce Pon (Bigchain db), Yanislah Malahov (Aeternity, former Ethereum), Jae Kwon (Tendermint) and I'm omitting quite a few. I had the chance to exchange at least few words with all of them. I was particularly impressed by Tendermint and BigchainDB in terms of innovation, and in terms of venture vision, by Brock and David.
In the second day, the conference split into two tracks which means I lost half of the presentations, including the one about Gnosis, but I had to stay in the track where I was presenting too.
The main takeaways (some of them coming form conversations with other people):
- if you're raising money for a blockchain project DO NOT make money with the project, but show a lot of potential. If the project is already making money, you will be evaluated with that metric, which will bring down the valuation. If you're just showing some blurry potential, then your chances for raising more money are significantly higher. I know, it's counterintuitive.
- we're in a blockchain bubble. Brock from Blockchain Capital said he is investing 500k every two weeks. I personally think this is incredibly high, but I don't know much about venture capitalists either. I do remember, however, the dot com bubble, 25 years ago.
- some of these technologies are really amazing. I saw a use case of Bitcoin in Africa, where farmers got access to capital by a Bitcoin-proxy NGO.
- very proud of the Romanian part of the event team (and also about the entrepreneurs on stage, I didn't mention them because they may not be relevant for the Steemit audience, but all are very good peeps, and I know that because I'm quite close with a few of them)
- Hubcoin was received surprisingly well, I got two proposals for team members (supporting development) and I have at least two leads for beta-testing the product in a few very large networks of coworking spaces. We'll see how it all plays out.
With that being said, I would summarize that the last two days were extremely well spent.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses