GRTiQ Podcast: 131 Marek Olszewski

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Marek Olszewski:

I mean, I think really The Graph deserves a lot of credit, I would say. Taking a piece of infrastructure that could have had a business model as a centralized offering, but really taking a step further and saying, “No, let’s really turn this into a decentralized protocol.”

Nick:

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Marek Olszewski, CTO at cLabs, President at Valora, and one of the founders at Celo. As you already know, Celo is one of the most well-known blockchains in all of web3, with the inspiring mission to create the conditions for prosperity for everyone.

As you’re about to hear, Marek is truly a brilliant person. During this engaging interview, we talk about his personal and educational background, why he left MIT in the fifth year of his PhD work to pursue his first entrepreneurial venture, Locu, which was later acquired by GoDaddy.

We also talk a lot about the origin story and the original ideas behind the launch of Celo. Along the way, Marek shares his perspective and ideas on a lot of topics, including things like entrepreneurship, web3, the long standing collaboration between The Graph and Celo, and the recent news surrounding the proposal for Celo to become an L2. We started the discussion talking about Marek’s background.

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, so I guess, perhaps, somewhat interesting story. So my parents are Polish. Back in the ’80s, they fled communism and fled Poland to come to Singapore, and so I was actually born and raised in Singapore, so I consider myself Polish, but oddly I’ve never really lived full-time in Poland. Basically grew up on a university campus surrounded by jungle, running around barefoot as one does growing up, encountering snakes and other scary critters. And then on weekends I’d go biking in the jungle next door with my dad, and that was my upbringing.

Nick:

You’re the second guest I’ve had the opportunity to have on the podcast whose parents escaped communism and they come from this really incredible background of immigration. Do you think that storyline has impacted your life when you look back on where you came from and the roots of your parents, has that affected your worldview?

Marek Olszewski:

Certainly. I think anybody growing up with the immigrant parents, I think have a very unique childhood that I think is one maybe fraught with certainly unique in different circumstances than I think maybe others. I think growing up in Singapore, I felt really, really fortunate. Singapore is just an incredible city and country, and I think it was… We were really fortunate, I think compared to Poland in the ’80s and ’90s. It was just an incredible place to both grow up and go through those formative years as a teenager. And so I feel just really, really fortunate.

Nick:

And you mentioned you grew up on a college campus, so I take it that one or both of your parents were professors?

Marek Olszewski:

Yes. My dad is a civil engineer. He’s a professor now in Poland, he moved back. But back in those days he was a lecturer and then later a professor at NTU University.

Nick:

So what were you like as a kid? Were you inclined to study and enjoyed school? Were you more like being outdoors? What were you like?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, and the school was fine. I think definitely enjoyed later on as a teenager, physics and math and a lot of those classes. But yeah, growing up I was definitely spent a lot of time outdoors. Definitely remember climbing anything and everything in my neighborhood, which was a lot of fun. And then later getting into more water activities. Yeah, Singapore was really lovely. You could go outside all year round, the weather was great. It was really humid, and it’s only when I moved to North America when I was 19 did I realize I didn’t have to shower three times a day, because growing up that was just the norm and I thought that’s how everyone lived.

Nick:

So if you think back then to your childhood and growing up, do you remember when you caught the technology bug, when this became something that fascinated or interested you?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, my dad was really great in that regard. I think he really nurtured my interest in computers. Before we had a computer at home, I would go to his office where he was plugged into the university intranet and internet. And so I would spend time browsing the Web, the very, very early Web back in those days. And then eventually we got a computer at home with a 2.8 kilobit modem, one of the slowest modems I think they’ve ever made.

And I just remember just my eyes just staring in amazement at everything that came through super slowly on that telephone connection. And then my dad ended up teaching me BASIC, which is my first introduction to computer programming. And later on I learned Pascal and Delphi and eventually was making Shareware software that I was putting up on the internet before going to college. So I think that definitely was the beginnings of my interests in computer science more formally, and I definitely owe a lot to my dad for helping just unlock that interest.

Nick:

Well, that’s another very common storyline when I talk to founders and builders in web3, this parent bringing in technology into the home and it changes their interest and they get it very excited about the technology. If you had to describe as best you can, what it was that just drew your attention, drew your interest about the technology or working on the computer, how would you describe it?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, it’s a really great question. I mean, I think for anyone who likes to make things either with their hands or on computers, I think there’s certain beauty and elegance to being able to create new things. And I think the incredible thing about computer science and just generally programming is that you’re not constrained by the laws of physics, you’re constrained by the mathematics behind computation.

And certainly that means that there are things that are possible and others that are say undecidable or impossible in a way. But those constraints are much lower in computer science than in the physical world. And I think that makes computer science in my mind really fascinating because it’s for anybody who has a tendency to want to create things, to want to build things, it just is so liberating and freeing that you can do so with much more speed and ease than you would be able to otherwise.

Nick:

As you were telling your story, you were talking about doing some things at home and learning to code in different languages. Did it go beyond that in those early years where maybe you joined some clubs or maybe you did some early ventures, some entrepreneurial type of things with this new interest in working on the webinar on computers?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, I think only those Shareware projects. I was on IRC a lot early on and met random people throughout the internet who had Web servers and who lent me some service space to bring up PHP sites. And so I worked on some fun little projects where I was again, selling the Shareware stuff. That was the extent of it. My school had some general computing classes and courses, but nothing I would say at that time, it changed a lot since then, but at that time, that went deep enough for me to really go in depth with my interest at school.

Nick:

And would you say at this point in your life you made a determination that this is what you wanted to do professionally? You knew that you had found your career?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, it’s a funny story despite the fact that I just sat in front of a computer a lot and really enjoyed it. I had this misguided belief I think at the time that I would be maybe healthier and happier if I went into robotics where I wouldn’t just be staring at a screen all day, I guess I don’t know if it was misguided, but it was just a belief that led me to go into mechanical engineering for my first year of university. But that ended up being something that I realized that I was less interested in ultimately than just pure computer science. And so after my first year of undergrad, I transitioned into computer engineering formally.

Nick:

So let’s talk a little bit about your educational background. What can you tell us about your time in university, the things that you studied, and then eventually you went on and got a PhD from MIT, which is incredibly impressive as well. But tell us about your education.

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, and maybe just to quickly correct the record, I almost got my PhD from MIT. I ended up dropping out in my fifth year to start a company, but I did my undergrad at the University of Toronto in the computer engineering department, and then I did my master’s there as well. And then I went to MIT for my PhD in computer science. And so as we talked about, I started initially thinking about a career in robotics, but over time, the more time I spent on software engineering and taking summers, for example, working at Microsoft and later Google, the more I realized that I really wanted to have a career just in software engineering and moved away from robotics and mechatronics as I was thinking about at the beginning.

Then quickly I realized that I was interested in research. I spent some time even as an undergrad doing research projects with some professors on campus, which led to some publications, which I think really got me interested in going and doing my master’s and later my PhD,

Nick:

Marek, I always like to ask guests that studied computer science, computer engineering at university and explored these types of things if they ever came across anything during their studies that kind of hinted towards web3, crypto, blockchain, anything like that, do you remember encountering anything?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, absolutely. So I think just by virtue of my interests throughout my master’s in my PhD, I spent a lot of time thinking about parallel systems, distributed systems first in the form of transactional memory and later in the form of a new area of computer science that we coined called Deterministic Multithreading. And certainly there’s many parallels and just overlap with some of the research and interests that I was working on back then with running and creating scalable decentralized platforms.

And so I think that was definitely very serendipitous, but probably the most fun reference that maybe I can make for your audience is actually the path that took me on starting a company was one of doing my minor in entrepreneurship and I ended up taking a class called Link Data Ventures, taught by Tim Berners-Lee. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, sorry, is the father of the Web, the inventor of the Web.

And back then he was really interested in doing to data what he had done to documents, namely take them out of silos, make them accessible publicly on the internet and make the data interconnected across the internet. And he dubbed that effort web3 back in the day, this was 2009, 2010 timeframe. And so it’s pretty interesting to see that ultimately crypto co-opted the web3 name and in a way there’s many similarities. I think that effort was all about decentralizing data and making data open and accessible to everyone and having publicly and permissionless ledgers which act in some ways like a public database just has just so many similarities to taking that vision that Tim Berners-Lee was working towards.

Nick:

What incredible moment in time where you’re starting to pursue education in entrepreneurship and you have the opportunity to study under Sir Tim Burners Lee, do you look back at that as something serendipitous that set you in motion for the path you’re on today?

Marek Olszewski:

Absolutely. I mean, he’s just such an incredible person and academic and teacher. I mean, it was quite the opportunity.

Nick:

Let’s talk a little bit about your time at MIT. All of my listeners will know that MIT is a world renowned institution, certainly at the forefront of education and matters of technology, but I also think they’ve been doing some incredible things as it relates to entrepreneurship as well. What was your experience like there?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah. It was absolutely incredible. I think as many people do when they first join MIT, I think the first thing that comes to mind is imposter’s complex. I can’t believe that I’m here, they made a mistake, look at all these people around me, they’re so incredible. I mean, just to give one reference, one person in my academic research group published tens of papers, 20 papers or so during the course of his PhD, which is just a very large amount for our field, went on to get professorship opportunities from Berkeley, Stanford and many other great universities, and gave it all up and moved to India instead to work for MSR India, eventually got a MacArthur Genius Award.

These were the kinds of people that I was sitting in these research groups with really just in awe. So I think the caliber of people there is just unbelievable. The quality of the education and the mentorship is just absolutely amazing. But after the first half year, you start to realize as you’re doing the research, as you’re taking the classes that actually you belong, that you’re able to do new and interesting things there. And I think that was definitely also confidence building as well.

Nick:

You mentioned that during your PhD you shifted from computer engineering to computer science. I’m not technical, I do not have the background that you have. How would you explain to somebody like myself that change there and what that represents from a educational perspective and the things that you learned?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, I think formally computer engineering is generally considered a little more closer to hardware maybe than computer science, but there’s a lot of overlap and ultimately it sometimes can be just a semantic distinction. Different universities have different departments with slightly different names, but certainly for my undergrad, my master’s, I was doing work closer to the actual underlying hardware of computers. So I had an advisor that was a computer architect that was designing computer processors. And even though I was doing software research on, I still had this viewpoint that was very, very close to the underlying hardware that was doing the research on. And then as I went into MIT, I certainly transitioned and started moving up the stack a lot, spending much more time thinking about more theoretical computer science topics as well.

Nick:

At this time in your life, in your mind, what is your vision for what you’re going to do with these degrees? What was the career path that you thought you would take?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, it’s a really great question. So early on, I think it probably isn’t too much of a surprise having an academic parent going into a PhD program. I certainly was excited about having a career in academia, and I had spent some time in the summers working, as I mentioned before, at Microsoft and Google and I got a good insight into what working in industry was.

The interesting thing about industry is moves quickly, you get to work on really big and impactful pieces of software that really can impact a lot of people, and that’s really, I think, rewarding. But the work that you end up doing is much more incremental. You work in a much bigger team, and so the individual impact that you have sometimes feels smaller. And one thing that drove me to academia was this idea of being able to work on these big and exciting topics that allowed you to also really push the state-of-the-art forward, which definitely was pretty exciting.

And what’s interesting is while at MIT, I also came to realize that a true academic is really pushing the state of the art on a horizon, on a timescale that was beyond what I was expecting. So one of my early learnings, thanks to my advisor there, was that to be successful as an academic, you have to think about research that’s on the order of 10 years out. If you’re targeting anything that could become practical in less than 10 years, you’re probably going to be competing with industry. And industry has more resources and will likely be able to out compete. So it’s better to think on this really long horizon.

And the interesting thing there is if you’re one who likes to iterate and have this feedback loop where you do something and then you see how it worked out and then you iterate based on that feedback loop, then to be a successful academic, you have to make a few really calculated bets in your career because you only have so many opportunities to course correct and take that back into account. You’re doing 10-year cycles. That’s crazy how long you have to wait to see if your research is actually useful.

And for me, that felt just too long. And so I had this theory that if industry has really tight feedback loops, but less exciting work and academia has really long feedback loops, but really exciting work, maybe startups are where you get the best of both worlds. And so ultimately that kind of hypothesis is what took me down this idea of doing first a minor in entrepreneurship and then later actually dropping out and starting a company.

Nick:

I love the way you frame that, that’s incredibly insightful and it explains so much of how you approach that decision in your life. And I’m sure listeners will find it very informative as they might consider similar type of things. If we talk about what you did after university and you hinted to it there a little bit, can you just explain to us and walk us through what you did?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah. So in my fifth year of my PhD, I had a difficult conversation with my advisor. I mentioned that I had met a co-founder taking this link theater ventures class, and that our class project was well received. I think we won each competition at the end of the class. And my future co-founder who is also my co-founder at Celo, Rene Reinsberg, was able to take that idea and also generate some interest from investors to start a company around it.

And so I talked to my advisor and said, “Hey, this is an opportunity, we can start a company around this, would it be okay if I put my PhD on pause and gave it a try?” And to his credit, he was very supportive. He had started his own company during his sabbatical that I think he sold to VMware. And so he very graciously allowed me to do that. And yeah, and it was a wonderful experience.

We ended up starting a company called Locu, which was a machine learning company, and that company did well. It got acquired a few years later, and it was just really a crash course in how to start a company, how to manage an engineering team, how to do a lot of things that at that point I had really no experience with because I had been spending most of my time in academia.

Nick:

So Marek, that’s an incredibly important decision you made there in the fifth year in pursuit of a PhD. And I’m sure you’re getting a lot of different advice or thinking through this, and I imagine your father who’s in academia probably had an opinion on this. Were you getting a ton of support or were people cautioning you?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, I think my family was certainly quite supportive, especially given that I phrased it as just putting my PhD on hold. But nevertheless, I mean even for myself, this was a terrifying decision. Certainly also as an immigrant in the US, we had to think about applying for visas and all of the work that went into that, and the uncertainty of starting a new company felt definitely nerve wracking. I mean, this is definitely one of those times in my life where I took a leap of faith that in hindsight, it was the obvious choice, but so many things could have gone wrong. It could have been a very different outcome. And so it was definitely a stressful time for sure.

Nick:

I’ve spoken to other entrepreneurs and they’ve described this process of starting their vision and going to work on it as staring into the dark abyss. What was that first entrepreneurial experience like for you?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, I mean for us it was full of excitement and maybe this was our naiveness. We just went full of steam ahead, only learning over time just how wrong our initial business model was and our initial plans were, but at the time, we were just, I think naively plowing ahead. So for us it was… I remember a time when my fingers hurt a lot because I was typing a lot, encoding a lot, but certainly a time of a lot of excitement.

Nick:

So you’re moving out of academia with a strong background in studying entrepreneurship when the boots hit the ground and you’re now actually out there, what are some of the key lessons or the things that you immediately learn about entrepreneurship that kind of struck you as like, “Oh boy, I wish I would’ve encountered this maybe in school and been prepared for this,” if any?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, so I used to think that there was a lot of competition in academia. There’s always other university research groups that you hear rumors or thinking about similar ideas and similar research topics, and you’re always working really hard to hit that next publication deadline to make that next journal or conference because that research may not be novel anymore if these other folks publish before you.

But what I hadn’t realized is the real world outside of academia is way more competitive. I mean, just within the first few months of us starting this company, we just learned 20 different competitors that were doing things that were exceedingly similar and they seemed quite ahead of us. So I think that was certainly eyeopening and made me, I think, appreciate the enormousness of the task ahead a little bit more after we saw that.

Nick:

Before I ask you a little bit more about Locu and what eventually happened there, I want to ask you this question about entrepreneurship and longtime listeners of the podcast know this question is already coming here, but when you think about what makes an entrepreneur, and there’s a lot of different theories about this, and I’ve always thought entrepreneurs are the people who are not afraid to fail because it seems like to me entrepreneurship is just a cycle of failure and it’s the people that continue and push through. Entrepreneurs are just the ones that keep going when generally people just give up. How do you think about what makes a solid entrepreneur and in addition to that, are you afraid of failure?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, it’s a great question. So I think maybe there’s some survivor bias here, but I’ve had the fortune of being able to angel invest in a lot of companies over the last seven years now. And also I’ve gotten to know a whole bunch of VCs and learned how they think. And I think the thing that frequently investors really look for are, I would say three traits in a company and a founder.

The first trait is the idea big enough. I think an investor, the way that the math works out, they don’t need every one of their investments to be a slam dunk, they just need a handful to return their funds, so to speak. So they’re looking for big and ambitious new ideas that can really have a huge impact, which ultimately can mean that it can be a really great investment for them.

The second thing I think a lot of folks think about is just defensibility. We talked about how competitive industry is. And so if you build something that’s a great idea. If you can’t defend against others, once it’s known that this is a great business, then I think it’s much harder to turn that into a successful business.

And then the third one is one that you touched upon, which is this authentic connection to the problem such that one, you have this irrational belief and work ethic around it that I think makes you just have some advantages over others tackling the same problem, but two, that also translates generally into this tenacity that you alluded to, which is important.

Starting a company is not easy. Things will get difficult, and as an investor, you want to invest in companies and people that will keep going and won’t just give up easily. And so I don’t know if these three qualities are the only qualities that make a great startup or founder, but I do know that, and this is coming back to that survivor bias piece, these tend to be the types of founders and companies I successfully raise, and that certainly makes it easier for them to go on and have a really great outcome.

And so I think those are certainly things that I learned along the way as just being incredibly important.

Nick:

Well, as you might imagine, a lot of my entrepreneurs that have joined the podcast, not all of them have had success stories and they’ve had to kind of move on to the next idea and keep going until they eventually found their spot. But in the case of Locu, you had an incredible exit and sold to GoDaddy, and I’ve had a prior entrepreneur come on here that was able to sell to a larger web2 type company, their first idea. What was that experience like for you going through building something, I imagine putting a lot of blood, sweat and tears into your idea and then having that type of an exit event?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, it was, I think both incredibly rewarding and humbling at the same time. I think it came with also a big change in my day to day and the kind of work that I was doing. I became an executive at a company that had just been acquired by two private equity firms, and we were part of almost turning the company into a real tech company, which was both really difficult but also an interesting and unique challenge, but also was rewarding as we were making progress. It was pretty incredible to be able to hire, for example, MIT grads, including PhDs in GoDaddy, even shortly after we had joined.

And so that was really fun. And then we worked really hard to adapt the product that we built. We were a machine learning company, but we realized that selling data was quite difficult, and so we ended up trading our data for the ability to update things like Yelp and OpenTable Foursquare being eventually Google Maps in real time. And by being able to update all of those different sources in real time, we had an opportunity to then build a SaaS product for small businesses. And that SaaS product is what GoDaddy was interested in. A lot of their customers are small businesses and brick and mortar businesses. And so we took that product, we skimmed it and relaunched it half a year later, and the product did really well, and it was quite a great experience

Nick:

That move from your own boss entrepreneur to acquired by a large company and going to work as an executive, you were VP of engineering at GoDaddy. Is that a hard transition for you to make moving from entrepreneur back to kind of that employee slash executive role at a larger firm?

Marek Olszewski:

I mean, I don’t think it was hard to have a real boss. I think I was still young and I think that felt pretty normal, but certainly it was a new role that I did have to work hard to grow into, and I felt really humbled and happy to have the opportunity. Yeah, it was, I think an incredible role that I think also set me up for success later on in my career.

Nick:

So let’s talk about then where you’re at in your life. Your first enterprise was just acquired by GoDaddy. You’re working there in an executive role working on some really cool stuff, and at some point I imagine this idea or the seed of the idea of Celo comes to mind. Can you take us back in time and just describe when this was and what was happening at the time that you think fostered this?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, so I think three years after the acquisition, I put my notice in and a couple of months later ended up leaving GoDaddy. I was pretty burnt out. It was a pretty intense experience landing an acquisition and then making sure that the acquisition was a big success within the company. And so took some time off, which was really great at recharging me.

And then I teamed up with Rene, who we co-founded Locu together, and I like to joke that now we’ve been working together for over a decade, we kind of like a decade plus duo. We teamed up and started thinking about what’s next. And we had also been chatting and spending a lot of time with Sep Kamvar, an MIT professor at the time who was just planning to leave MIT to be closer to family. He was an early advisor in Locu and later a board member. And so we had gotten to know him really well and he was just an incredible, both academic but also prior entrepreneur. He started a personalized search company in 2002 that Google acquired. He ended up playing a really important role in Google during the early days there.

And so the three of us started talking about what we wanted to do next, and we knew we wanted to do something big. We knew we wanted to do something really mission-driven, something that we could really just devote the rest of our careers to, but we weren’t in a rush, we weren’t in a hurry. And so oftentimes entrepreneurs have this tendency to fall in love with their first idea, and I think that’s exciting. Sometimes your first idea is a great one, and it’s just really nice to get going and start building and learning and iterating. And I think that can sometimes lead to a great outcome and it’s certainly how we started our first company, but this time around we wanted to be a little more, I think thoughtful and just diligent.

And so we ended up actually forcing ourselves to create a list of a hundred different ideas and really just no bad idea, just pure brainstorming, pure ideation, just go nuts, we had a lot of wacky ideas up there. And then we worked on narrowing down some of these ideas and sure enough, some of our first ideas that we each kind of fell in love with, it’s interesting, sometimes each founder also falls in love with a different idea. We started to cross them off one by one, and we built a bunch of different prototypes and we started crossing things off more.

And about half a year later, we really started narrowing down things to a very, very short list. And then ultimately, the more that we looked at crypto, the more that we looked at the opportunity to help advance financial inclusion, to innovate on money and do interesting and new things that we’d been reading about in a book called Sacred Economics, the more we realized that this was what we wanted to focus on and we jumped in head over heels.

And what’s interesting is at the time, this was also a lot easier, perhaps, because I had been following crypto for a while. I actually just sent an email thanking Brian Armstrong for really introducing me to crypto 10 years ago now. I just realized this week that this weekend was the anniversary for when Brian sent me some Bitcoin using a very early version of Coinbase.

We had met at a music festival outside Lands that just played this weekend in San Francisco again, exactly 10 years ago. And yeah, I’ve been kind of following the space ever since really closely, definitely very grateful to Brian for that moment because I think it really helped almost be a turning point that eventually certainly led to Celo’s creation.

Nick:

I want to ask you about your first impressions of crypto. You mentioned Brian Armstrong introduced it to you and got you thinking about it. You have this incredible pedigree. You’re clearly a very brilliant guy. You can build tech, you know how to work in tech, you can do software, you’ve already succeeded as an entrepreneur. What do you see, what’s the aha moment of when someone introduces you to crypto that you say, “This is something novel or this is something innovative that I should pay attention to,” whereas it seems like so many people certainly at that point in time might’ve thought, “This isn’t something serious I should pay any attention to.”

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, I mean certainly from a distributed systems perspective, I think proof of work was just a totally new paradigm, game changing mechanism for doing consensus that allowed you to do so in this kind of permissionless manner. I think that alone from an academic perspective was interesting. But I think over time, Sep, my co-founder, has this interesting analogy that I think is a good one. I think probably many people in crypto inherently just feel, but he really articulates it well.

I think before we had the internet, we had all of these siloed intranets that had network managers. Basically if you wanted to join a network, you had to get the permission of one of these network managers and networks can be stood up in this way and you could have really interesting network applications built and people had Usenet and lists and everything, and it was I think certainly a really great place for communication innovation.

But when the internet was formed, when this idea that you can create a network that anybody can join without necessarily requiring any permission from any one party, suddenly there was this paradigm shift where sure, you could build things for these siloed networks or you could build things for these open networks. And sure enough, everyone chose to build things for open networks. And the same is true with web3. You can think of a blockchain as a permissionless database that you can write to without anyone’s permission. You don’t need to go to a database manager to add a new table or a new column to an existing table. You can just write whatever you want.

And when you can do that, suddenly you can build interesting and unique applications that require a database and you can choose to build them in a way where you’re using a centralized database where you need someone’s permission or you can just use a public open database. And just like with Web1 being invented, all of this excitement and energy that went into that, we’re seeing the same thing happening now with web3. And I think that that metaphor analogy is just a really good one, and I think it really helps me think about this feeling that I have about web3 that I think until I heard that, I wasn’t able to articulate as well as he was.

Nick:

I appreciate you going through that. So let’s go back and take us, if you don’t mind, into the room, and maybe you guys were meeting virtually or some other way, but you’ve got this list of a hundred ideas, you said over the course of about a half of a year, you’re kind of whittling this thing down, eventually the one thing left on the list presumably is Celo. Take us in the room there, how did you get down to this final idea and what did this idea represent that attracted all of you to pursue it?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, so the idea initially was to build a global Venmo wallet or a global Cash app or Revolut, whatever you use in your home country, but basically a wallet that could used by anyone without needing someone’s permission, the way that you and I use Venmo. And so that was the initial idea and we actually started by building a wallet on top of Ethereum, and we were excited about this idea because it’s ultimately, if you look at the opportunity to move the needle, so to speak, when it comes to financial inclusion, we couldn’t think of a more compelling and important thing to focus on.

But sadly, Ethereum back then arguably even today, isn’t the right platform for you to build a mass consumer wallet that targets mobile devices that lets you or anyone even without a lot of crypto savviness could use. And so ultimately that took us down the path of forking Ethereum and building an EVM Layer 1 that could target these use cases, really could be a platform where you could build really easy to use mobile applications.

And that ended up being Celo. And a lot of the design thinking that went into the platform, a lot of the features that we worked so hard to create around having a scalable purpose state consensus protocol around being able to pay for gas with stable coins and this ability to send value to phone numbers, not just to publicly derived addresses. All of that came out of this initial wallet that we were building at the same time. And so those were the early days and ultimately in a few years later, the code was written.

We had this incredible platform and the community stood it up, which was really exciting to see. Neither did the Celo Foundation or cLabs ever ran any of the validators on the network. And it was just really nice to see it finally live and producing blocks. And that’s when we felt that the real work began. That’s when we’re like, “Okay, now we can finally launch this wallet that we were working so hard to do.” And so that was one of the next steps.

Nick:

So anybody familiar with your work and what Celo has accomplished, knows that there was this mobile first strategy? And you’ve hit on that a couple of times during the conversation. This idea of financial inclusion though for me stands outside of business strategy or strategic decisions. This is driven by something far deeper. What’s the intellectual history, so to speak, of why you have such conviction for financial inclusion?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, I think it just comes back to what we were looking to accomplish with this next venture. I think we wanted to work on something not like a three-year startup that we could move on from after a while, but we were really looking for something that we could really devote the rest of our lives to. And I think if that’s your goal, then I think the types of things that you prioritize, types of things that you want to have impact on start to change. And so I think ultimately that’s the origin for that.

Nick:

If we put your experience of launching Locu side by side with this new experience of launching Celo, clearly there is a difference in the sense that Locu launched in a web2 environment and Celo is launching in web3. As an entrepreneur, how were those two experiences different starting something in web2 and starting something in web3?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, I mean day and night difference. I think starting any sort of web2 company, it’s frequently… You are building and iterating extremely quickly, deploying new changes multiple times a week and moving at a pace that certainly makes most web3 companies jealous I would say. The fact that there’s been a history of so many bugs and hacks in web3, certainly means that you have to be significantly more diligent and thoughtful as you’re developing your code.

You have to go through many rounds of iteration and ultimately audits and reviews, and in some cases formal verification, the timeline is just completely different. From when we started working on Celo, it took two years before the platform was ready for the community to launch, and then even more time before we could release that user facing wallet that we were so excited about. If that was a web2 offering, we probably could have launched something to the public in half a year or less.

And so I think the timelines are just absolutely different. The other thing that I think is just extremely different is just community. I think for many web2 companies, you have the concept of your customers and you think of them as customers. You might have some additional stakeholders here and there, but generally the story is pretty uncomplicated. With crypto number of stakeholders is massive. And the importance of community, the importance of really creating a movement, so to speak, is completely just different from any web2 company that I’ve ever seen.

And that is certainly very exciting. I think it’s one thing that’s very rewarding for us, just seeing the amount of people who have now gotten really excited about Celo’s mission, who have started building on top of it and started joining the ecosystem and the overall community. It’s just, it’s totally incredible, but it’s hundred percent different from any web2 company ever seen before.

Nick:

I think it was the great management thinker, Clayton Christensen, who did some research on the fact that, as you articulated earlier, the founder’s idea evolves over time. It starts as X and it ends up becoming Y. In the case of Celo, you talked a little bit about that original idea. Talk us through where Celo is today and how it’s evolved. And you’ve mentioned the community many times, for listeners that aren’t familiar with that Celo community, what can you tell us about them?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, it’s a really great question. So I think Celo started off as a platform to build really easy to use mobile web3 applications, one of which is this global Venmo, which now exists in the form of a wallet called Valora. If you haven’t heard of Valora, I would definitely check the wallet out. You can find it at valora.xyz.

Since then, I think first and foremost, Celo became a real platform. I think in the early days we were thinking about Celo as this full stack effort where the same team was working on the platform while also working on the mobile wallet. And I would say there were some advantages to that early on. It allowed us to make some platform decisions that I think ultimately have resulted in being possible to build these really delightful user experiences on top of it. But it also was very almost antithetical to the way that web3 communities work.

And so after the community launched the network, we realized that we had to quickly change this, and so we ended up spinning out Valora out of cLabs and then spending a lot more time really turning Celo into just this incredible platform for anyone to build on. And so there’s been just a number of really great community members now that have entered the ecosystems, folks who have created community currencies, folks who have created universal basic income projects and micro lending projects, others who have created new stable coins, including ones that are backed by national capital. A lot of really, I think mission aligned projects that we’ve even somewhat talked about in the initial Celo white paper, but were two big ideas for us to tackle alone. And so it’s just so wonderful to see a whole ecosystem of folks coming together and tackling them one by one.

But the other thing that happened that I think is really cool is someone created a governance proposal to make Celo the first chain to offset all of its carbon, and it ended up being actually the first governance proposal that the community voted on and the proposal passed, and for over three years now, the network has been programmatically buying carbon offset credits and retiring them using block rewards.

And so Celo ended up being the first chain to become what we call carbon negative. It actually retires more CO2 credits than estimated CO2 that it produces. And that was really nice because one, I think we could show the world that blockchains can actually be good for the environment, not just contributing to climate change. And we saw many other chains follow suit, which was really, I think exciting from RV point, but two, it also made Celo an interesting place for anybody doing anything in the refi ecosystem.

And so a lot of refi builders came to Celo. Sometimes people say that Celo is now the home of refi, and that’s been really, really exciting and rewarding as well. And then all of this was happening in the context of Ethereum migrating to proof of stake, and then ultimately rolling out and that its scalability roadmap that’s based on roll-ups.

And that got us really, really excited as well because our origins were building on top of Ethereum. Many of our builders build on Celo, but also on other EVM chains, and we’re just so aligned with the broader Ethereum ecosystem and have always really considered ourselves being part of it, but it just felt incredibly natural for us to start a conversation about turning Celo into an L2. And so that conversation started recently and it’s definitely an exciting development in the Celo ecosystem.

Nick:

I want to ask you a lot of questions about this move to L2. I’m incredibly intrigued by it, and as you know, I’m not technical, so I’m going to ask some very base level questions to try to understand it. But before I ask you that, I want to ask you a personal question about going to work on Celo. So here you are, you’re a successful entrepreneur, you launched a venture, you had success, it was acquired, it was draining, you took some time away.

And here you are launching Celo and you start seeing a community support it. You start to see traction. What are you thinking? I mean, what is that experience like for you? It’s got to be incredible because so many startups fell and here you are on your second one and people are very excited about what’s going on. Talk us about that, what was that like?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, I mean it’s certainly humbling. I think whenever you’re in the thick of it, you’re always thinking about what could you do better and how can we hit the next milestone sooner? And so there’s definitely a lot of those types of thoughts, but at the same time, especially when you go out and you go to a conference somewhere and you meet folks that you’re building with online, in person, and certainly after the pandemic to be able to do that in some cases for the first time, those moments are just absolutely incredible and there are ones to cherish and the ones that make web3 probably one of the best, certainly in my mind, the best places to be right now as anybody doing startups or anybody doing any sort of development, it’s just just absolutely incredible.

Nick:

I want to talk to you about this move to L2, and as you said, it was recently proposed that Celo moved to an L2 on Ethereum. Has this been done before? I mean do L1s or have L1s in the past made a move like this and what’s kind of the underlying rationale? What are the pros and cons to doing something like this?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, it’s a great question. So I’m not aware of any L1 that has completed this transition since we made the proposal, which was picked up a lot on Twitter and in the press. We’ve seen others like Fantom alluding to maybe also one day going down this path, although they did so in a way that was very murky. And then of course, Polygon has also been talking about this as well.

Certainly it’s I think an exciting time for the broader Ethereum ecosystem. I think it’s becoming clearer and clearer that rollup based sharding strategy is the right technical choice and certainly for scaling Ethereum, but I think the evidence is also now starting to point to the fact that it’s also a really great technical choice for scaling any public blockchain. So it’s exciting to be part of that. I think that’s really amazing. It was also really great to see both what the broader seller ecosystem and the broader Ethereum ecosystem thought about the proposal.

I think everyone was very supportive. We were a little nervous because this is not something that you can just go out there and propose and then if for whatever reason people don’t like it or they can ridicule you for it’s hard to put back in the bag, so to speak. And so we weren’t really sure how everyone would react, and we were just absolutely just very pleasantly I think, surprised that really all of the reactions were exceedingly positive. And so that definitely confirmed our suspicion that this was just the right move for the seller ecosystem and we’ve been working hard now making it happen, and I’m really looking forward to the day when Celo will become an L2.

Nick:

For all the Celo community members listening to this, and maybe they’re trying to understand more and more some of the benefits of something like this. How would you just characterize that this is beneficial to the community, this is beneficial to Celo? For what reasons?

Marek Olszewski:

I think first and foremost, Celo is an EVM chain, it’s very firmly in the broader Ethereum ecosystem. To not be aligned with the Ethereum scalability roadmap as a player with this role, I think is just doesn’t really make sense in the long term. So I think first and foremost, just alignment with Ethereum is the number one benefit. L2 has come with trustless bridges and some people point to trustless bridges as being really great for liquidity and for the ability for these networks to interoperate with each other and for people to send messages.

I think all those things are true, and ultimately this trustless bridge will be a really great compliment to the, I don’t know, six or seven bridges that Patela has today. And then finally, ultimately being able to inherit Ethereum security. That’s a big one. I think for many use cases, Celo security is really, really great.

I think we have a very novel [inaudible] stake consensus protocol. It has a lot of scalability. It’s very decentralized, it has a lot of stake behind it securing the network, but certainly Ethereum has really prioritized this over other things like one block finality and short block times and other things that ultimately for our use cases were required for us to prioritize.

And so I think we’re becoming an L2 to be able to inherit that extra security while still providing this really amazing UX to end users, this ability to send transactions finalized within one block so they can’t be rolled back. This ability also to pay for gas with tokens so that you can send a stable coin and pay for that transaction fee in that stable coin natively. All of these features you get to have while still inheriting Ethereum security. That’s a big one for sure.

Nick:

There is an ongoing debate within crypto about the future of L1 and L2s and how many there will be and how they will all relate to one another. In the case of Celo, can we extrapolate that maybe there is a future where there is consolidation of L1s and there is a proliferation of L2s?

Marek Olszewski:

I mean, I can’t speak for the broader crypto ecosystem, but certainly I think in Ethereum, I think for sure anything EBM compatible that’s going to be interesting in the future is going to be either Ethereum or an L2 Ethereum. I think there’s no… I don’t see a future outside of that. If you want to build an L1 today, it has to be very different from Ethereum for it to, I think stand a chance because otherwise why wouldn’t you use an L2?

Nick:

Well, Marek, this has been incredible to hear the history of Celo and all the different things that has been happening within that community. And to learn the backstory not only of you, but of that incredible community. As you know, a lot of listeners of this podcast are enthusiastic about The Graph, and part of the reason I wanted to speak with you was to get your opinion and perspective on some of the announcements related to The Graph and Celo. So for the sake of just context, do you remember when you first became aware of The Graph and what some of those first impressions were of the problem it was trying to solve?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, I mean I think it must’ve been 2020 when I think I first became aware of The Graph. Certainly, I think we started talking with Edge node around that time when the network was stood up. I think people started to think about building on top of it, and I think developer tooling was just really, really important to deliver on so that people could build really great applications. And so I think that my memory is a little hazy, but I seem to remember that was a time when the conversations started

Nick:

As a builder in web3, but also as a platform on which people build. Can you contextualize why something like The Graph is so important?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah. Absolutely. So I think blockchains do a really incredible job of storing data in a permissionless manner, but storing data doesn’t necessarily mean that that data is easily consumable either for end users or for developers. And so this idea of having a almost de-normalized view of some of the data that’s been indexed, this is an idea that exists in web2 workloads as well.

And it’s a really important idea for just enabling builders to be able to surface the things that their users really care about and need to see in a particular application. And so The Graph does an incredible job, I would say, transforming and indexing arbitrary blockchain data in ways that enable developers to surface anything and everything about their dapp to their end users.

Nick:

Well, as you said, Celo has been working with The Graph for a while, but recently as part of the MIPS program, it was announced that Celo was one of the new chains added to the decentralized network. This question about developers being able to build with decentralized infrastructure like The Graph, do you have a sense for how important that is to devs building in web3?

Marek Olszewski:

I think it’s really important to devs. I think this is why we’re all here. I mean, I think really The Graph deserves a lot of credit, I would say. Taking a piece of infrastructure that could have had a business model as a centralized offering, but really taking a step further and saying, “No, let’s really turn this into a decentralized protocol.”

I think that’s incredibly, I think both exciting. But also at the time when this first was announced, that was a bold move, I would say. And it’s one that also the broader ecosystem, graph ecosystem executed really well on. It was so nice to see the seller support transition from decentralized offering to the decentralized offering.

And I like to say that most end users probably don’t care too much about decentralization, but the developers serving them typically care a lot. And so it just makes sense that developers building Web apps when thinking about what kind of indexing solutions do they need would gravitate towards decentralized offerings. So yeah, absolutely. I think it’s really important.

Nick:

So Marek, I only have one final question for you before I ask the GRTiQ Podcast to end, and again, a lot of longtime listeners of the podcast will anticipate, this is a question I’m going to ask someone like you, and I’m really interested to hear your answer. And it’s this question about web3, is it a revolution against what I’ve called the sins of web2? Is it just an evolutionary step in the sequence of how we as humans build and develop technology? How do you see it?

Marek Olszewski:

I think it’s an evolution. I think it certainly helps with some of the sins of web2, but I think the fact that it’s possible to build these permissionless systems now, whereas before nobody knew how to do them, I think makes me more in the Evolution camp. And frequently I get asked, “Where does it go from here? Is it inevitable that everything becomes a web3 app?” And certainly I’m definitely in the inevitable camp. I think we’re going to see everything just turn into web3 over the years.

It’s hard to know what kind of timeframe this will happen. I think we probably all wish for it to happen a lot sooner than it’s taking, but it’s fine. It might take a while, but I think it will eventually happen. I think we’ll see more and more this infrastructure inversion, as some people call it. Similar to how once the idea of doing voice over IP seemed ludicrous and phone lines were these really robust networks for transmitting voice and the internet was this slow network that required these super expensive devices on the ends to use.

At one point people were arguing that voice would never be over the internet. And here we are, we’re recording this podcast over the internet. And I think most people now are very comfortable having voice and video calls, really taking up the majority of the types of calls that they make. At least personally, I don’t really feel like I use the regular phone network anymore.

And even when I do this infrastructure inversion happened where on the backend, these telcos are actually using the internet to transmit the data between their servers on different sides of the world. And so that same infrastructure inversion is already starting to happen a little bit with payments, but I think that will only accelerate, and I think one by one really every vertical that web3 can touch will probably go through the same exact experience. And I think ultimately everything will just run on web3 Rails.

Nick:

An incredible vision, and I appreciate you sharing that. Now, we’ve reached a point in the podcast where I’m going to ask you the GRTiQ 10, and these are 10 questions I ask each guest of the podcast every week, and they become a lot of fun. It’s just a way for listeners to get to know the guests a little bit better, but also to learn something new or maybe try something different or achieve more in their own life. So Marek, are you ready for the GRTiQ 10?

Marek Olszewski:

I am. Let’s do it.

Nick:

What book or article has had the most impact on your life?

Marek Olszewski:

I think by virtue of starting Celo and many of the ideas behind it, I think I would have to go with Sacred Economics.

Nick:

Is there a movie or a TV show that you would recommend everybody should watch?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, maybe this is a boring answer, but I just love Shawshank Redemption. I think it’s just certainly a must see movie.

Nick:

If you could only listen to one music album for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?

Marek Olszewski:

I think the first LCD sound system album titled, LCD Sound System, I would pick that one. It’s good for working out, it’s good for if you have a night out you want to dance, it’s good for singing along too. I feel like it’s pretty versatile, could be a good album for the rest of your life.

Nick:

What’s the best advice someone’s ever given to you?

Marek Olszewski:

So I don’t think this is quite advice, but I had this very unique experience where I got really laughed at to my face for choosing to go to university, just to undergrad, which I didn’t think was that controversial of a decision back when I made it, but at least for this one person was quite surprising move. And I think that…

And it’s true that I was giving up something in order to go down that path that would’ve been worthwhile in its own right. But still, I think it still felt like a pretty safe decision for me at the time. And I think that has really stuck with me. I think it’s had this just profound effect for how I approached the rest of my education and I think ultimately the rest of my life.

Nick:

What’s one thing you’ve learned in your life that you don’t think most other people have learned or know quite yet?

Marek Olszewski:

I think in college, just taking economics, just learning about the time value of money, I think was pretty eyeopening. I think I definitely noticed a change afterwards in how I approached my early years in my life. I think there’s value in really enjoying your twenties and thirties, but there’s also a lot of value in working hard during that time and preparing for the future. And I think really this notion of time value of money really helped me understand that well.

Nick:

What’s the best life hack you’ve discovered for yourself?

Marek Olszewski:

So I’m a Vim user, so I’m all about Vim bindings. I’m also one that I had RSI issues early on, so I also transitioned to the Dvorak as my main keyboard layout. But I think out of all of these things, probably the thing that just maybe might be, it’s not really a life hack, more of a computer hack, but just learning the Emacs keep key bindings as a Vim user just to be able to navigate macOS really, really well, without having to constantly move your hand to use the mouse or even the cursor arrows. I think that’s a pretty nice thing just to be able to use Emacs bindings in every macOS application.

Nick:

Based on your life experience and observations, what’s the one habit or characteristic that you think best explains how or why people find success in life?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I think success means so many different things to so many different people. So I think it’s hard to answer this question universally, but certainly when I dropped out of my PhD to start that first company, that kind of leap of faith, that kind of almost risk that I took there certainly changed the course of my life. And so when talking to some people, just encouraging them to take that same leap of faith, sometimes people are really resistant to early on, but eventually when they do take that leap of faith, it’s pretty amazing to see what’s on the other side.

Nick:

Well, Marek, the final three questions are complete, the sentence type questions. The first one is, the thing that most excites me about web3 is?

Marek Olszewski:

Making it easier for everyone to use.

Nick:

And how about this one? If you’re on formerly Twitter, I guess now X, then you should be following?

Marek Olszewski:

My co-founder @RegenRene.

Nick:

And the last one, I’m happiest when?

Marek Olszewski:

When It’s the weekend and I’m on my couch with my wife and dog watching some silly ’80s movie.

Nick:

Marek, thank you so much for joining me on the GRTiQ Podcast. Your story is incredible to hear, and it’s been a real joy for me to get to know you and to hear about the early story of Celo and what that community has gone on to do. If listeners want to stay in touch with you, follow the things you’re working on or even plug into the Celo community, what’s the best way to do it?

Marek Olszewski:

Yeah, certainly Twitter is a good way, dms are open. You can find me @Marek_, I would love to hear from you. Certainly also, check out the Celo Twitter account celoorg, and also the Valora account, which is just Valora, V-A-L-O-R-A. And then if you’re interested in digging into docs and stuff, certainly docs.celo.org is also a great resource.