GRTiQ Podcast: 181 Danny Zuckerman

The following podcast is for informational purposes only. The contents of this podcast do not constitute tax, legal or investment advice. Take responsibility for your own decisions. Consult with the proper professionals and do your own research.

Danny Zuckerman (00:00:18):

But the way I’ve always thought about it is The Graph is building the best place to access the decentralized web to query it, to read it, and to pull in all of that information in one place, which is incredibly important. We need that collective read side. Ceramic has really been focused on writing data.

Nick (00:01:08):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today, I’m speaking with Danny Zuckerman, co-founder at 3Box Labs, a web3 studio dedicated to advancing a more open, safe and composable web3. As many of you may already know, 3Box Labs is also the team behind Ceramic Network, a decentralized data network for web3 applications.

(00:01:30):

During our interview, Danny shares his journey into web3, which was fueled by his fascination with how people connect and organize. We also discuss his experiences from university, his time at bank consulting, what he learned from his role at an education startup called Zearn, his experience co-authoring an award-winning book with his mom, and the founding and origins of both 3Box Labs and Ceramic Network. 

(00:01:55):

As you’ll see, Danny has an amazing depth of mind and he intelligently sheds light not only on business and entrepreneurship, but we also get to hear his perspective on web3 data, the future of the industry, and also his views on The Graph and how it fits into the web3 story. To start the conversation, I asked Danny about some recent comments he made where he said he thinks about web3 like a startup, and that as a startup, that needs to start focusing on the right things.

Danny Zuckerman (00:02:23):

I think mostly about solving real needs that some customers have, and we as web3 have a huge vision, a huge desire to make a huge impact on the world. We’ve built some incredible technology. We have incredible people, but there are still relatively few use cases that we can point to and say these have made the dent we hoped that depending on when you start measuring 10 plus years in, we would want to see. That’s not forever. For a startup, that’s a decent amount of time. 

(00:02:54):

So in terms of focus, I think the general technology and capabilities we have in web3 are new ways to manage data with trust and transparency that was not possible before. So what are the sectors and segments and use cases out there on the internet that desperately need more trust and more transparency. We have the ability to coordinate a Y group of actors in ways that were not possible before crypto rails. What are the sectors and segments having real challenges around coordinating a group of actors and can we just point our efforts towards those and really solve those problems full stack? 

(00:03:30):

We have the ability to have portable, composable, shareable liquid data, whether that’s assets or other kinds, and there’s huge businesses built on the web today around amassing data, but also lots of people left out in the cold because they don’t have that huge amounts of data. Can we point some of our efforts towards solving that problem for the startups and innovators out there who demand more data? And instead of going super broad with new L1 technology and new technical primitives, can we align our efforts more as an ecosystem to solve very concrete problems that really draw on these superpowers of web3? That’s where I’d love to see us generally focus more.

Nick (00:04:09):

I don’t want to oversimplify a brilliant answer, by the way, to that question, but after every major Eth global event, the chatter on crypto, Twitter and everywhere else is we’ve got the infrared, it’s now time to change and look at more consumer gaps. In some ways, I hear basically that argument what you’re saying, but it’s also a step further on getting much more specific and narrow on use cases and really targeted. I mean, is that sort of the argument there?

Danny Zuckerman (00:04:35):

I think so, yeah. By the way, I understand where this comes from to some degree. 3Box started really trying to build pretty high level developer tools. We built a 3Box SDK that wrapped IPFS and some Ethereum identity work we had done and a few other primitives, and we built pretty opinionated profiles and chat and storage products. So we were trying to operate at that level and enable real use cases and we had lots of traction. This is back in 2018, but we hit scaling limits, we hit performance limits with the existing tech.

(00:05:07):

So that’s actually what brought us down to that infrastructure level is a lot of infrastructure has needed to be built. So it’s not to knock those who are doing it, but now we’ve got this kind of zero sum competition of more L1s and L2s that maybe are a little bit better than each other in some ways, but really, they’re competing to just be the place where this happens. I think if we took all that effort and focused it on a whole stack, we could go much further much faster together.

Nick (00:05:33):

What do you make of the ongoing debate about decentralization? I mean, it’s sort of early days. The infra exists. Some of it’s decentralized, some of it’s not. Maybe the stack full top to bottom needs to be decentralized, maybe some of it doesn’t. Where do you come in on that debate?

Danny Zuckerman (00:05:50):

I think what is decentralization for is a hand wavy answer, but an important first answer because different people will have different responses to that. I think in a lot of cases, it’s about credible neutrality. So I think this is where Farcaster’s sufficient decentralization and progressive decentralization is really important because what they’re really promising is credible neutrality and that you’re not completely locked into one company’s platform and application, and they can get away with that without maximal decentralization off the bat. 

(00:06:19):

There’s other situations in which decentralization is there for distributed ConsenSys on an asset ledger, and it’s much more than about credible neutrality. You’re actually protecting against double spend and other financial attacks. In other cases, decentralization is a route to sharing of data in a much more flexible way, composability. So this is, again, going from the technical architecture of decentralization to what value is it providing for a use case or customer, and I think that really answers how important is it. 

(00:06:49):

I do tend to think that in a lot of cases, we prioritize too much decentralization too fast when we really need credible neutrality, but I think you look at the amount of value on the Ethereum blockchain right now, of course, they need really significant decentralization because they need to be resistant to censorship and attacks at a much higher limit than more nascent projects do.

Nick (00:07:13):

So if we go back then to this idea that web3 is a lot like a startup and we should think of it in that way, when you think then of web3, is it in your mind sort of an experiment where we’re trying to determine if there is product market fit in the world for something like web3 in the tech or do you think it’s more of an evolutionary step, like this is just kind of what naturally happens as tech evolves, web2 sort of becomes web3?

Danny Zuckerman (00:07:39):

I think that, naturally, the web is going to evolve to adopt a whole bunch of the things that web3 is working on. Whether that happens by the current web3 ecosystem and players succeeding and growing or whether it follows a different path, I think that still remains to be seen. There’s not so much success within the web3 ecosystem that we can claim that is inevitable yet, but I have very few doubts that the web’s going to evolve to have basically cryptographic signatures on every piece of content. 

(00:08:09):

We are moving to a world where you’re not going to be able to trust data if you can’t verify it or if someone can’t verify it on your behalf, and that’s a core premise of web3 and what we’re building around, and that just seems inevitable given what we’re seeing online. I think that web3 is really premised on coordination around data and networks and being able to share it and do more at a broader collective scale. I think if you look at what’s happening on the internet today is there’s massive demand for more data, whether that’s to train AI models or to get use out of AI agents or to power super data-hungry applications, social or otherwise.

(00:08:47):

Only a very, very few companies in the world have as much data as they would like, have sufficient data to power all of those things. Most people need more data. So again, we look at the things that web3 is really great for of the ability to share data with more trust and more liquidity and more dynamism, that seems inevitable because there’s so much demand for it there. So the path is not determined, but I think the evolution of the web towards some of the things that we hold very important web3 is extremely assured.

Nick (00:09:16):

And if we assume that the argument you made earlier, which I happen to agree with, is that web3 gets a little more specific and target on use cases and seeks adoption in channels where there’s a real demand for the web3 tech, if we take that to its fullest extent, in situations then where web3 may not necessarily derive value, does that create an instance where web2 and web3 coexist into the future or how do you resolve that tension?

Danny Zuckerman (00:09:45):

I don’t think that web3 will compete with web2. I do think that they’ll just start to merge a lot more. I think that there’s going to be successful elements of web3 that penetrate what we think of as web2, more traditional applications and enterprises, and there’s going to be elements of traditional applications and enterprises, especially startups that just start to adopt new infrastructure that happens to draw on web3 technology. So I think that just like there wasn’t this separate cloud internet and on-prem internet, really just more of the internet adopted to use cloud functionality and then get all the convenience and other benefits of it, I think it’s pretty similar here. It’s not all or nothing and it’s not directly competitive, it’s just what’s the underlying foundations of the applications and agents and experiences we’re all using every day.

Nick (00:10:32):

So Danny, in prep for this interview, I went back and looked at your background, of course, and it was kind of fun to see the early days of your professional development and maybe some of your early interests. But for listeners that don’t know, you had some internships and some positions that were really related to athletics and sports. So you had an internship at the Major League baseball and then you held some sports media positions at the University of [inaudible 00:10:55] in Stanford. Was your early interest or early vision for your career to do something in sports?

Danny Zuckerman (00:10:59):

100%. I was completely convinced I would work in sports. My life was basically sports until I was at least 16. People who knew me when I was 14 would not recognize me today. So I’m a huge proponent of, yes, people can pretty foundationally change. But yeah, I think that my first six or eight jobs were all in and around sports in some way. I spent every day on message boards, went to probably 40 Giants games in the Bay Area every year. So I thought that was predetermined, and it was not till probably the latter half of college where I realized sports are really incredible business because everybody loves them and they kind of run themselves. So there’s not huge challenges in the business of sports. That’s not truly true, but they do run themselves a little bit. And probably more importantly, I started to get much more interested in the world beyond sports and that pulled me in different directions.

Nick (00:11:53):

I’m sure you still follow it. Are you confident enough to share who your teams are and the people you’re following at all?

Danny Zuckerman (00:11:58):

So my teams are all still the Bay Area teams, the Warriors, the 49ers, the Giants, but I, again, was diehard on all of them through high school. Living on the East Coast now, games start a little bit late, things are busy. Running a company’s not super easy and I can’t remember the last time I watched a regular season Giants game. My 14-year-old Self would be very ashamed. So I follow whichever of those few Bay Area teams are really good. I’ll make a point to follow that year, but I don’t have time or the energy anymore, I guess, to follow them all like I once did.

Nick (00:12:31):

Well, this is far from a sports podcast, but there’s been some great stories over the years in the Bay Area for people like you to kind of follow and be enthusiastic about. If we think back then to your university days and you said you started turning your attention to other places, was there a moment or a mentor or an experience that was sort of the catalyst for how you reprioritized what you were going to do with your career and some of your interests?

Danny Zuckerman (00:12:54):

It wasn’t quite a pivot moment like that. I actually look at the big changes in my life, including coming into the web3 space in that rabbit hole. It’s usually not a single moment, it’s usually a collection of experience that starts to shift. In college, I experimented with a whole bunch of different things, went pretty broad, but I ended up studying political philosophy. And it wasn’t until later that I realized that my interest there was really about how do humans coordinate generally, and in political philosophy, it’s how should humans coordinate on the biggest of scales, how do you design a society to be just and free and effective and efficient and represent different values and coexist together. 

(00:13:39):

I studied comparative democracies and see how it worked in real life, but what really got me interested was thinking from first principles about political design. I used to say that I thought there’d be nothing cooler in a career or a life than to write the constitution for a new country. I didn’t think I’d have that chance, but in a lot of ways when you start a decentralized network, you kind of are doing that. You’re writing the constitution for how you want an ecosystem to coordinate. 

(00:14:05):

So it was definitely not a straight line, but I think in college that’s what really grabbed me was just the thinking at the biggest picture about how do you get a society to operate effectively and fairly. I think that took me down a whole bunch of different roads indirectly, but that captured my attention. I also was a huge West Wing fan, so I think that had something to do with it.

Nick (00:14:24):

I want to ask you this followup because when I have the opportunity to speak with folks like yourself who think deeply about the topics and issues in web3, this idea of coordination comes up a lot, and I don’t think a lot of normies, a lot of people that are nontechnical don’t have founder-like experiences think about web3 from the lens of it does something in relationship to human coordination. Do you mind just double clicking on that in the sense of, at a high level, how is that part of this narrative of what people are working on?

Danny Zuckerman (00:14:57):

So what first hooked me about blockchains, this is in 2016 when I had heard about them for years and had kind of stiff armed them because I thought it was just the latest Bay Area buzz, but finally dug in. And again, it wasn’t one thing, but a lot of reading. The way that it just crystallized in my mind is these incentivized networks that blockchains let you create give anybody in the world the ability to spin up a network of people incentivized to pursue a common goal. And to do that not perfectly, we cannot solve everything with tech, and that is actually what got me into the space is I think the danger path of a purely techno approach that thinks you can solve everything with the technical. 

(00:15:43):

So I don’t believe that, but if you actually look at what blockchains do, they give us a more transparent, more scaled, more efficient to deploy system technology to coordinate a basically undefined number of people towards some predefined goal. And all those pieces are really important because the predefined goal that can’t be changed or at least how it’s going to change is what gives you trust that if you contribute and you play by the rules, you will get some reward back, which is the same basic mechanism that has made strong rule of law essential to capital markets, which has been essential to driving societies across the world.

(00:16:24):

I’m forgetting the name of it, but Hernando de Soto has landmark work around that. And so that being able to crystallize what are the rewards and rights upfront that people are coordinated by, and then having the ability for someone who just wants to spin up a community of interested folks or someone who’s trying to create a global compute network or anything in between be able to just in software really efficiently deploy this, and then if it’s a value, let people, whoever they are, come contribute. It gives you the legibility and transparency to go at huge scales, but also the lightweightness and efficiency to do it from anywhere and anyone, you don’t need huge capital upfront. 

(00:17:07):

So that’s a rambling answer to why it’s such a different technology, but why it’s so rooted in coordination is, again, how we work together as people is that’s what separates us from other animals. We build civilizations, we build companies, we build these things that only come together because we can cooperate in ways that other animals can’t. So any technology that boosts our ability to do that is so high leverage and important, and that’s really what I see the foundation of blockchain as is this coordination technology that boosts that coordination ability.

Nick (00:17:42):

It’s not a rambling answer, it was a great answer, and I appreciate you taking a minute there and answering that. So I want to return to your personal story and talk a little bit about your career again. It seems to me like your first sort of professional or maybe corporate job was getting started at Bain and Company. And for listeners that don’t know, I mean, that’s one of the world leaders in consulting. What can you tell us about your time at Bain and what you did there?

Danny Zuckerman (00:18:05):

You want the forward-looking answer or the backward-looking answer?

Nick (00:18:09):

All the above.

Danny Zuckerman (00:18:10):

So the backward-looking answer is I had gotten super fascinated with how people coordinate studying political philosophy, and working at Bain was a chance to go see how people coordinate, not at societal level, but at the company level. A lot of what Bain does is working with big companies on strategic questions, and a huge portion of that is org design and governance and how are you designing the company to go pursue with strategic goals from the macro down to the highway specific. I got to work on a bunch of IT strategy because I was in the Bay Area, and so tech was at the forefront. I got to work on a whole bunch of org design.

(00:18:48):

So I got to experiment with some of these ideas not from the philosophical but from the let’s help companies be more effective in how they organize themselves. So it did continue that thread. The reality is I had no idea what I wanted to do with my career when I was graduating, and Bain was a really great opportunity to go get exposure to a whole bunch of things and learn a ton of skills and really great coaching on basically how to be a professional. It’s a great choice for those who are looking to avoid making a choice. So that’s what it was for me at the time in reality. 

Nick (00:20:19):

Bain, as I said, is a world leader in strategic and management type consulting work. I wonder what your opinion is on conventional approaches to strategy and to business management and this industry of web3. I mean, sometimes you’ll see on Twitter people post that there’s not enough management or management leaders working in web3 or there’s not enough strategic thought or orientation on web3. Do you find that’s true? I mean, do those conventional paradigms apply even in an industry like web3? 

Danny Zuckerman (00:20:53):

I think some yes and a lot of no, but I actually think it’s probably less about web3 and more about what stage are you at and what are you trying to do. So my job right after Bain, not to jump ahead, was to go work for Zearn, which is at the time I think 11-person non-profit startup building digital education technology and products. I was really excited to get into a higher impact space education to join a tech startup. It was non-profit, just to align its incentives with the schools that it was supporting, but it really was a startup, and to build product. I very quickly learned how the skills and the way that I thought that companies operated from the seat at Bain was completely different than when you’re a 10-person startup trying to figure out what’s going to help a six-year-old in their math class get better at multiplication.

(00:21:48):

The way that we operated internally at the startup and the things that we needed to do were just completely divorced from the more macro strategic thinking that I had done at Bain. So that’s not to say that there aren’t skills in that strategic thinking, but at a startup, it’s about focus and clarity and iteration and not really holding too dear what you think you know because your users will tell you something else. I feel like that’s the first lesson of most people when they get into product is throw your good ideas out the window as soon as users tell them they’re the wrong things because, otherwise, you’re never going to learn and iterate. 

(00:22:23):

So it took me six or eight months to really unlearn some of my habits from Bain. I think web3 is not much different than other startups. We need to be iterating fast, we need to be letting the market tell us what it wants as opposed to trying to use too many top-down frameworks to answer where to go. The things that I think do really apply are using data. So what actually is needed in the market is really good to have a broad understanding to bring evidence to bear instead of just opinions, and Bain and strategy really teaches you that. 

(00:22:59):

The other thing is good strategy is hugely about just extreme focus and clarity of thought, and I think we desperately need more of that, and it’s so hard. I struggle with this nearly every day because there’s always more things that you want to do than you can. I think a master of this in web3 is Dan Romero in Farcaster. Every time they share and write, they just have so much clarity of, “Here’s what matters and here’s what doesn’t,” and a huge list of things on the what doesn’t would be things that most other founders and startups would think, “These are must have things. These are critical,” but they are really good at focusing, and I think that’s the core strategy is focusing on the things that really matter.

Nick (00:23:40):

I’ve often heard it said one of the telltale signs that you have strategies, you’re saying no to certain things more frequently than not. When you made the move to Zearn, you started working on, as you said, education platforms, these types of things. What did your experience there teach you about networks and building a startup?

Danny Zuckerman (00:24:02):

I think that the biggest learning from Zearn was at the end of the day, it’s people and all the good designs on the slide, all the good designs in a code base on an architecture diagram or an incentive design go out the window pretty quickly when you’re working with people because people are complex, they are contradictory, they have their own interests that are not necessarily exactly what you put on paper. And that’s what makes it really fun to work in a startup because you get these unpredictable things, but it’s also what makes it really hard to coordinate a group of people, what we’ve been talking about this whole time, because people aren’t simple. They don’t just respond to very simple incentives. 

(00:24:47):

So the ways I said that at Zearn was both in the company and with our customers. In the company, I thought it was fascinating to build a product team of a designer and an educator and engineers and nine people on the team with seven different functional backgrounds and everybody spoke a slightly different language, everybody wanted slightly different priorities, and that’s hard, it’s also a blast. So figuring out how to make this diverse team operate as one and ship really great things was the most fun I’d ever had up to that point, and completely different than doing strategy docs at Bain. 

(00:25:24):

And then on the customer side, we create these great prototypes of what we thought were awesome products and we take them into the classroom to test them out, and the kids would just look at them like, “I don’t know what the hell to do here.” Our simple product was completely way too complex for them. So again, once you’re dealing with real people, you learn really quickly that your assumptions about what people respond to will go out the window. So just being able to confront that and face that and deal with the human element and everything, I think was the biggest learning for me, and what I’ve really taken into thinking about ecosystems and networks is it is people at the end of the day, not nodes.

Nick (00:25:59):

So what’s the back story then for how you end up at ConsenSys working on strategy and operations?

Danny Zuckerman (00:26:05):

So I decided that education was not the domain for me. At Zearn, I loved that. I loved the impact we were seeing, but you work in the education space and a lot of the people are just so deeply passionate about education, and I respected that and they wanted to travel to every conference and go deeper and deeper on the pedagogy and the content, and that just wasn’t my passion. It probably wasn’t going to become. So I decided to take a break, decided not to go to business school, which I had thought would be on the table, and instead spent almost nine months traveling and reading, basically, trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. 

(00:26:41):

I was going to start a company, but the travel and start a company turned into travel and read a lot. While I was doing that, I put on the list of things to read about this blockchain thing like, “Let’s get a handle on what this is that people keep talking about.” It was dozens of articles and probably a book or two at that point and watching YouTube videos of people talking about it. Finally, it clicked for me that it was the best coordination technology we’ve ever had. 

(00:27:11):

After that, I got intellectually interested in it and started poking around. I wasn’t back to a new job yet, but I didn’t think I was going to join the space. It was so early and so technical and I’m not an engineer by background. So I thought I’d get involved but not work in it, but two things happened when I started to just go to happy hours and meet some of the people working in the space and explore some of the leading companies, including ConsenSys is first is I met just the most incredible people who were so wide-rangingly curious and interested not just in technology but in game theory and political science and global development and all of these very wide-ranging disciplines compared to I was exploring AI stuff and I went to these AI companies and happy hours and they just cared about the machine vision technology that we’re building.

(00:27:58):

So I was fascinated by the people, but amongst those people, I also felt this undercurrent of like we can solve everything with tech and code, and I thought that was a really dangerous perspective. I saw this incredible new technology and this ecosystem budding around it, but I also saw potential dystopian atmosphere where all of that was applied to this like humans are rational actors theoretical framework where everything was about token design and code and we would assume that would just solve everything. 

(00:28:30):

So I thought bringing that human perspective and element was potentially really useful and started exploring the most interesting spaces and identity which you port at ConsenSys was working on at the time was something I cared a lot about for other reasons, and so in those conversations just ended up being a great fit.

Nick (00:28:48):

Inevitably there’s listeners to this podcast who are also either out traveling or have the vision of one day being able to go out and travel for a bit. Is there a place or a thing everybody should see based on that part of your life and the things you did?

Danny Zuckerman (00:29:01):

Oh, man, so many. I spent about five months in Southeast Asia and loved Hanoi and had some of the best meals of my life there. So from a pure enjoyment perspective, could not recommend that enough. I spent a few months in mostly Southeast Africa, which I really enjoyed. Rwanda is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. I spent almost a full month in South Africa, and the history there, very recent history and the text scene and the art scene and just how at the surface some of the cultural tensions are incredibly interesting. I was lucky I had lots of connections from the education world when I was traveling, so I had this lens of visiting schools as I went, which one thing I highly recommend is travel with a lens that lets you probe into these places in a different way.

(00:29:51):

And I went for the first time to India, and that was probably the most just teaching moment because it is just so different and so crowded and so loud and so its own culture that it hits you over the head with it. So I enjoyed the whole time. There was not a day I was bored while I was traveling. I also just found it was a privilege, but so helpful to step away from school and work for the first time in my life and figure out what I was actually drawn to while I was in these different cultures.

Nick (00:30:18):

What do you learn about the world when you have an experience like that? I mean, clearly you go to different cities, different regions, and you learn specific things about maybe those parts, but on a more humanity scale or something that relates to all people, are there insights or things you derive from experiences like this?

Danny Zuckerman (00:30:35):

I think probably the thing that stands out most, and it might be because the lens that I had was coming from a tech startup, but everybody’s got the same macro problems and the same macro things they’re trying to do, make sure they have food in a home and raise a family and community and social life, but the environment they’re in is so different. So the solutions to those problems or the way that they organize for meals is so different. The idea that you set the table and sit down for dinner is like how you do dinner, at least in my corner of America where we grew up, and that’s just not the case in a huge part of the world.

(00:31:15):

The way that you get around is not necessarily a car or a public transit. It’s Tuk Tuks and it’s these bus systems or it’s you run. So I think just seeing the huge similarity in what people are trying to do and how shared it is, but then the huge difference in how that has taken shape in different cultures is maybe the thing that stands out most.

Nick (00:31:39):

Well, what if I turn that question then to your time at ConsenSys? If traveling offered you some viewpoints into those types of insights about humanity, what did your time at ConsenSys introduced you to in terms of web3, the industry, and some of those types of perspectives?

Danny Zuckerman (00:31:58):

Chaos of the best kind. I really do mean in that way. I think I joined as employee 3 or 400, and I think a couple months later there were a thousand, and that was probably representative of the space’s growth at the time as well. It was during a full run, but everybody at ConsenSys was mission-driven and everybody had huge ideas and there was space to just go explore. ConsenSys, at the time, we operated on these spokes internally, I think they were called, and people would have an idea and just start working on it. If it was exciting, other people would join them and push it forward. There’s obviously challenges to that and it means things drop and don’t scale and are chaotic, but also so many innovations happened and so many experiments happened. Again, if web3’s still a startup, it definitely was at the time, and often the earliest stage of startups is throw as many experiments against the wall as you can, as early as you can and learn as fast as you can. 

(00:33:01):

ConsenSys was, whether by design or not, organized to do that, and it was, again, just so many people who were thinking about not just tech, but token design and mechanism design and incentive design and what we can do in different parts of the world with this technology to improve people’s lives in so many different ways, whether community or otherwise. So I think it was just like drinking from a fire hose of a thousand incredibly talented, thoughtful people trying to push forward a thousand different ideas.

Nick (00:33:36):

Well, another thing about you, Danny, that I learned in doing research was that with everything that’s going on and all the work that you were doing professionally, you also co-authored a book with Debra Meyerson, an award-winning book called Identity Theft. Talk to us about what you were working on there and how you got involved in that.

Danny Zuckerman (00:33:56):

So it was published when I was at ConsenSys, but most of the work happened in that period when I was traveling, reading and, I guess, writing. But probably the most important fact is Debra Meyerson’s, my mom. I became her co-author on a book that was really hers and she needed a partner to write it. The reason is she had been a professor, she studied among other things identity, and she had a series of strokes my senior year of college in 2010. The strokes robbed her a lot of her abilities and a lot of her speech. After a few years of rehab, it became clear she wasn’t going to be able to go back to her professorship and that was devastating for her. It was a huge part of her identity. 

(00:34:37):

She decided ultimately to take some of her learnings and her journeys and teach with it, create just educational resource, continue that journey in a different way. What she had found in her journey is tons of resources, thankfully, in the physical recovery from strokes and from other brain injuries and traumas, but the medical system, but also just the culture generally was not set up for the other parts of a recovery from something like that, the emotional recovery and really redefining for her identity because so much of how she defined herself before had been taken away. 

(00:35:13):

So she didn’t want it to be her story, but her story is, of course, a huge part of it and is kind of the anchor for the book, but she and an initial support author interviewed a couple dozen other stroke survivors and their caregivers to understand their experiences, again, taking a very academic approach to it, but then also dove super deep into the academic literature around identity and emotional recovery from trauma. I eventually stepped in to be the because my mom could not fully write by herself because of the strokes. So we together crafted this book really around that rediscovery of identity, the rebuilding of identity and that journey. 

(00:35:58):

One of the things that that experience taught me, well, it taught me how hard it is to write a book, first of all. Identity is this concept that very difficult to define even though everybody thinks they kind of get it, but the intuition we have about it is actually really, really misleading or even just wrong. We have this narrative around identity that it’s singular, that we have this one true identity within us that’s static and that it’s individual. And you look at identity and it comes up in the literature in psychology, in sociology, and business and across neurology, every discipline touches on identity in some way and they all define it differently, but there’s basically agreement that it’s not individual, it’s plural.

(00:36:42):

We all have many different identities that show up in different ways and overlap and frankly even contradict each other. It’s not static, it’s dynamic, it’s constantly changing, and it’s not even individual, it’s really social. We derive a huge part of our identity from our relationships. So that was incredibly interesting work to me, generally. If you kind of think about what I was interested in about how humans coordinate together, identity is pretty essential to that, but it also set the stage for how I entered the space eventually because uPort, where I first worked was really focused on identity, and still some of the work that we’re doing at 3Box Labs and Ceramic touches on identity pretty deeply. 

(00:37:20):

I think that misconception around identity is actually mirrored online today in how we see ourselves in our profiles and identities online, and this idea that there’s this static singular individual identity is how the internet’s architected in a lot of ways, and that’s just not how it should be because not what’s true in our day-to-day life and experience as people.

Nick (00:37:43):

It’s a remarkable insight, and I’ll put a link in the show notes for anybody that wants to dive a little deeper and check out the book. Appreciate you sharing that story. What a remarkable chapter in your life. If you think back then to 2018, it’s right at the beginning of launching 3Box Labs. Can you talk to us about what you were thinking about at the time and tell us the early seeds of the ideas that led to launching 3Box?

Danny Zuckerman (00:38:09):

So I had met Michael and Joel, my co-founders at 3Box Labs, working together on uPort at ConsenSys. uPort had a ton of success experimenting in different ways we could use some of this new tech, Ethereum, IPFS, DIDs, decentralized identifiers to reinvent how identities are managed digitally online and otherwise. Had done some technical development and research, but also proofs of concept with the governments in Dubai and Zug Switzerland and some enterprises. 

(00:38:47):

What was happening at the time was there was the first wave of decentralized applications. dapps was the new term at the time. What they really were were very thin interfaces on top of an Ethereum smart contract, and that was kind of it. So it was this intersection of, okay, we’ve done some proofs of concept and built some primitives and tech and specs. The ID spec was hardened or more hardened at that point, so it was more reliable, and now there’s this emerging market of people trying to build these applications on top of Ethereum, really was the only place at the time. 

(00:39:23):

But what about all the other stuff that makes up an application, like all the data that populates any application you sign into? Because at the time when you used a dapp, it was all hex addresses was the identifier. So we basically created 3Box labs, solve that very specific problem. Let’s use the crypto native tools that we have to populate these dapps with data starting with profiles. Let’s replace these hex addresses that don’t mean anything with usernames. The username is like a piece of text. It’s a name that has to be stored somewhere like, well, you may be stored in IPFS, but then how do we keep track of where that IPFS hash actually is and make sure we point to it at the right time in the application?

(00:40:03):

So you need to be able to know, okay, the mapping between this user’s key, that hex address and that hash that is their username. And that’s just a very simple first example, but tech to do that didn’t exist at the time. So we said, “Okay. We’re going to go build developer tools, just basic infrastructure that lets developers start to add these pieces of data that are essential to real applications to their interface in addition to and to sit next to the smart contracts that they’re building.” 

So the initial products from 3Box were that, profiles the more system for chat. We thought that social interactions would be critical to make these tick off. And then a really basic key value storage. It was kind of approximated very early decentralized firebase that developers could use that worked with their users’ existing wallets. MetaMask at the time was basically it and sat right alongside their smart contract as their data infrastructure. So it was that intersection of we have the tech to do it and they’re starting to be a market of developers who need more than exist today.

Nick (00:41:06):

And the name 3Box Labs, how did you determine that?

Danny Zuckerman (00:41:09):

I think we were at a workshop very early days and we were explaining to a few user research facilitators we were working with what the hell we were doing. And to try to describe it, my co-founder, Michael, drew on a whiteboard a big box that looked like the box logo. They do storage in a different way, but storage. And then he drew a person on top of the box and then used his finger to draw three in the shaded box. So he had a person standing on this box with a three on it, and the description was like box storage or web3 where users actually control their data, so they’re standing on top of it. Now, it was just a description and we just refer to it as 3Box for the time and it just kind of stuck and stayed with us for quite a while.

Nick (00:42:01):

I appreciate you sharing the backstory. That’s kind of fun, and I’m sure a lot of listeners will find that super interesting. So if 3Box then launched with some of these tools that you mentioned there about profiles, key values in chat, how has it evolved over time to what it is today?

Danny Zuckerman (00:42:18):

So that initial product got used by MetaMask and Zerion and Livepeer, a bunch of other great applications and linchpins of the space, but about a year in as we scaled, we just hit some hard scaling limits of the tech that we had built around, and partly our own architecture, but partly we were essentially doing dynamic data. So profile names change over time. You want to edit it, key value stores, you keep adding to it. You had these very dynamic data objects and stores, but we were building on top of a mutable of storage solutions, in particular IPFS. And the way that we were doing our mappings was still centralized. We hadn’t found a work around for that yet or existing tech for that. 

(00:43:04):

So we were faced with a pretty tough decision. 3Box was continuing to grow, but we were hitting pretty hard limits in the products foundations, and we were a small team. It was a bear market and we thought we saw this opportunity to solve some of the problems we were having in a way that would also solve more scalable dynamic data, but the space, generally. So it wasn’t a one-time decision. It evolved over time to a full pivot, but we started building what became Ceramic to solve those problems, to have a hyper scalable solution for really high throughput mutable data with the properties that we’re all used to in web3 from blockchain, so cryptographic signatures on every transaction.

(00:43:49):

So you have transparency and verifiability. You have timestamps by anchoring all of this into a blockchain. We’ve been doing it into the Ethereum blockchain. So you have that, again, strict sense of time, the ability to discover and compose on data from many different applications, the way that we have default logos, have data logos. We wanted all that. We wanted it at many orders of magnitude greater than you could get from a blockchain, and we needed that. We couldn’t scale 3Box without it, so we started building that protocol and that’s what became Ceramic.

(00:44:21):

It took us longer than we thought it was going to. I think the first prototype was done in three weeks. It’s very fast, but then Test Net was a year, Main Net was another year after that, and that’s really been our sole focus. We’ve had to just dedicate all of our efforts to Ceramic instead of trying to parallel path, that and 3Box. And there’s been several steps since then, but it’s a continuation of the same mission. How can we give developers … It’s very clear to us that developers of the target market, we think they’re the ones who are going to make these technologies take off by finding new uses and new superpowers with them and give them the ability to make use of those crypto superpowers we talked about at the top, trust and transparency and composability and censorship resistance and no platform risk, but for all the other data, not just assets. And Ceramic is a hugely forward for that, and that’s what we’ve been pushing forward the last couple of years now and working with our customers and community to support their needs around that. A whole lot more coming in the very near future, but that’s how we’ve evolved since 2018 when I think we officially got started.

Nick (00:45:30):

Danny, as I know you’ve picked up on and long time listeners of the podcast know I’m not technical, and so this might be a little bit of a strange question, but I do want to ask it. So you’re obviously a very thoughtful, smart guy, know business, know how to launch startups, understand market dynamics and all these things. You’re working on 3Box and you decide you’ve got to launch Ceramic to meet a need and to carve out this vision or vision of the future that you have. Why not just try leaning into an existing solution? Why in a space where you’ve got a market incumbent like Ethereum, not find a way to just make that fit. How do you explain that?

Danny Zuckerman (00:46:08):

We tried is the very short answer. We did not set out to go build a protocol. We set out to sit on top of as many protocols as we could and make them really usable for developers. So that’s what we did. So we wrapped IPFS, we wrapped at the time a database called OrbitDB and a few other things too. We were using the OpenSea API and a lot of the other best-in-class tech, not trying to build it all ourselves, but the specific challenge that nothing out there could solve for us was we had a huge number of, compared to what blockchains handle at least, huge numbers of these data transactions of objects being stored or edits being made. We had to maintain the mapping between where those were stored on IPFS or in OrbitDB and these Ethereum addresses for the users who they were related to. 

(00:47:06):

We needed to store those relationships somewhere that was censorship-resistant, verifiable and decentralized and persistent. We looked at using blockchains and L2s and scaling solutions and none of them would’ve been appropriate for it. There wasn’t actually a layer that did what Ceramic did that we could use for it. So it was really by necessity. This was a key part of our stack. How do you route from the user to their information was basically the question. And you have a user table in a database would be the answer in web2. There didn’t exist an answer for that in web3 at the time. So that’s what we set out to build. It kind of took a life of its own once we did go set out to build that because there’s so many other use cases for that same technology, but we built it out of necessity because what we were doing required it.

Nick (00:47:54):

It’s an amazing backstory. So I’ve had the opportunity to interview other builders within web3 who because of their early work launched a top level topic or issue that people started talking about. So I’m thinking about IOTX and DePIN and some of the work that Rolland did there. Here, you are working on Ceramic, and composability becomes one of these top level themes that drives a lot of narratives in the industry, but at the same time, just like DePIN gets sabotaged and people start borrowing it for marketing, I think that probably happens with composability. How do you think about that? I mean, composability was a critical component of what you were targeting, and yet it became a buzzword within the industry that everybody took advantage of. Do you think about that?

Danny Zuckerman (00:48:42):

I do, and man, we have changed our branding and our narrative way too many times because I don’t think we found the right way to really talk about the value we provide to developers and the problems that we’re solving, which is partly a failure on our part, and partly, it’s really hard because the industry changes really fast and we’re doing things that have really different paradigm than what people are used to, really, really different when users control their data and bring it from application to application. The benefits are very different. The developer patterns are very different, and the challenges are very different. 

(00:49:14):

So I think we’re still looking for exactly the right language. I do think composability has become a little bit more of a buzzword than a useful word. The challenging thing about composability is it becomes much more useful when there’s tons of related data on the network, and it works very easily and well for DeFi because assets are composable and assets are very well-defined. They’re pretty simple. They’re strict. They’re standards for what the assets are, and you mostly buy, sell, trade them, where you could loan them or do a few other things, but the way that you use them and the access patterns is pretty finite

(00:49:48):

When you’re talking about data, it’s not infinite, but it’s way more diverse than for assets. So composability is just as big a value proposition potentially, but it takes a little bit longer for that to really develop. So I don’t think that’s the only thing that Ceramic and the products that Ceramic is collaborating with pretty closely to create this full decentralized data platform, not just about composability. I think the first thing that these products provide is trusted and transparent, very effective data storage and management. We talked at the top of the podcast about what are the superpowers that make something like web3 inevitable, and we’re moving to a world where every piece of content, all data is going to need to be at least in some way verifiable because there’s just too much abuse of data, too much fake data, fake news, too much just doubt about the veracity of data or to be used across contexts, which is where it really gets value.

(00:50:51):

So the ability to have cryptographically verifiable, secure data storage that is as high throughput and scalable and cost-effective as what you get in traditional system, that’s like the first really huge thing that Ceramic provides. So you can build with that trust from day one, and then on top of that, you can source other data on Ceramic and pull it in right next to the data that was created in your application and make use of it, and that’s a value of composability. And on top of that, you can open up the data that you’re putting in Ceramic to other users and untap that composability and have rules for who can access it when, maybe monetize it.

(00:51:29):

That’s the real power of … Composability comes second after you have this trusted data and trusted ways to manage it. So I think if any listeners have the right way to define that much more simply than I just did the right memes, please shout them at me because that’s not been our strength to date. I think we are looking to make that much clearer for the users and developers building around Ceramic and, again, some of the other great partner companies that we work with to really unify this into a full data stack, and The Graph would be included in that.

Nick (00:52:01):

Well, Danny, I think the first time I became formally acquainted with Ceramic was during Episode 53 when I interviewed Baptiste Greve who launched Orbis, and he was talking a lot about the decision of launching on Ceramic and some of his work there. I’ve often thought I got to get Baptiste on because I think he’s been successful in some of his work there, and it’s been fun to watch him as a prior guest continue to grow and work on what he’s building. What’s your long-term vision for Orbis and Ceramic and how are you sort of thinking about the future here?

Danny Zuckerman (00:52:33):

So I don’t want to put words in Baptiste’s mouth about Orbis, but I’ll just sing their praises and his praises first. They’ve built, first, Orbis as a social protocol and SDK to make it really easy to build decentralized social applications. Again, we talked about what’s decentralization for. In this case, it was this composable social like have a single chat that follows you across applications was really exciting. He made a really, really great interface and toolset for that to make it real easy. They’ve since improved that to become OrbisDB, which is a more generalized database with some pretty amazing functionality, this plugin functionality where you can basically just import different interfaces and tools into your database depending on what you’re trying to do. We had built ComposeDB, a database on top of Ceramic, we being 3Box Labs, as just the reference database on top of Ceramic to make it easy to work with, and Orbis built a way better one. 

(00:53:29):

So we’re pointing people to Orbis instead of ComposeDB because it’s just better in almost every way. Their team is awesome. They understand the promise of decentralized data. they understand the tech even when we don’t always make it easy on them, and they’ve built what we think is best-in-class database out there for web3 developers. I think their vision is to continue to … It’s pretty similar, frankly, to what we set out to do with 3Box, make these technologies and tools really powerful and easy for developers so it’s a no-brainer to use them instead of a web2 alternative. It doesn’t give you that trust and transparency and composability. That’s Orbis. 

(00:54:05):

On Ceramic and the vision there for, again, Ceramic and Orbis and the other tooling built around it and the broader ecosystem that we want to play with, I think our vision is more people, especially more startups and innovators and entrepreneurs who have really creative ideas can get more value out of data more often. What we really mean by that is data is powering our web, but it’s tripled right now because it’s trapped in silos and it’s not embedded with the things that would make it trustworthy in many contexts or even just the open standards or access patterns that make it usable in other contexts. 

(00:54:45):

So what we really want to do by changing the dynamics of how data’s stored and who gets to control access to it and what formats and signatures and economics around data is just untap the potential of data to make it more useful in more context. And we envision a world where data is just flowing into this collaborative cloud that exists that users are contributing to and managing data on, and applications are contributing to managing data on, and they can keep it private if they want to, but they still have this trusted, transparent, verifiable proofs of what data happened when and from where. 

(00:55:22):

But there’s going to be good reason to make that data more open to others who have use for that data and are willing to pay for it or new AI companies who want to train new models and can now source tons of data on this collaborative cloud really easily and they’re willing to pay for it or similar applications who maybe are doing similar things in different parts of the world or in slightly different spaces and would hugely benefit from pooling their data and sharing it together and make it really easy to do that because it’s all in similar formats, similar place, trusted because it’s all signed and there’s economics that make it really profitable or at least really appealing to share this data. 

(00:56:03):

So that’s our vision and that’s kind of what we’re building towards. We’re not going to get there all at once, but the first step is working with people building great applications and services to make the infrastructure and make this burgeoning post-cloud infrastructure work really well for them.

Nick (00:56:19):

Well, Danny, I only have a few more questions for you before I ask you the GRTiQ 10, and those are 10 questions I ask each guest in the podcast every week. They’re a lot of fun, give us a chance to learn more about you and to also learn from you. So the first question is, and you mentioned The Graph just a moment ago and, of course, we’ve been talking a lot about data and a lot of the value prop associated with Ceramic and the things you’re working on is related to data. How should listeners of this podcast who are very enthusiastic about The Graph and the problem it’s working on, how should they sort of place The Graph in the story and sort of the vision you’ve talked to us about here today?

Danny Zuckerman (00:56:54):

I think that it’s super complimentary, and I think as The Graph’s scope and vision have expanded, maybe it’s not exactly this anymore, but the way I’ve always thought about it is The Graph is building the best place to access the decentralized web to query it, to read it and to pull in all of that information in one place, which is incredibly important. We need that collective read side. 

(00:57:19):

Ceramic has really been focused on writing data and being able to do it at high volumes and high throughput and extreme scale so that more data that would traditionally go into a database on AWS because it just was so much bigger scale than what a blockchain could handle, instead goes on Ceramic, and now there’s a far more rich dataset in the open decentralized web that The Graph can among other service. 

(00:57:52):

So it’s not quite as simple as The Graph is read and Ceramic is write, but really in terms of what they come from and what they’re optimized for, I think Ceramic is data storage that sits alongside of blockchain, but instead of being for assets, it’s for all this high throughput data like user data, like application data, like agent data and sensor data that just is generated on the edges by all these interactions happening in web3.

Nick (00:58:18):

The other question I wanted to ask you is about entrepreneurship. So I don’t know if you consider yourself a serial entrepreneur or not. From my perspective, listening to you talk and the experiences you’ve had, you clearly are something closer to a serial entrepreneur than not, but what would be your opinion on the two or three characteristics that anybody who wants to be an entrepreneur should possess?

Danny Zuckerman (00:58:43):

So the first is grit and perseverance and choose your word for it, but it’s hard. There are a lot of lows, there are a lot of stressors, and there have been several near-death experiences. We’ve been through several bear markets and raises in those scenarios, and there’s just a lot of hard times, and at those times, it’s more important than ever to be high-spirited because the team might also be low and they need motivation. So it can be a lonely job and it can be a really hard job. I think that it’s hard to encourage a lot of people to sign up for that, and it’s hard to explain just how frequently that can be the case until you’ve done it. So I think the first is just you have to be ready for that. 

(00:59:33):

The second is I think just being obsessed with a problem. I think this is a cliche thing that be obsessed with the problem, not the solution, but it’s so true. I mentioned the first rule or the first lesson I learned coming into product, and I think this is mirrored by a lot of people is you got to be willing to throw out your own ideas and realize how wrong you are and listen to customers and users because the solution very often is misdirected.

(00:59:56):

I’m not sure I’ve ever talked to another founder who’s built exactly what they envisioned when they first got started. Almost everybody pivots some. It’s that sweet spot of being willing to pivot your solution, but being completely obsessed with a problem that keeps you going and keeps you working through those failures and those disappointments when your solution isn’t quite right. Those are the first two that come to mind. 

(01:00:19):

And then probably the next would be find great people to work with that compliment you. So talked about it earlier, I’m not an engineer and I’m doing a super technical startup. That obviously would not be possible without my co-founders. So we’ve worked super closely together for years and that also has its own challenges, of course, but having those trusted people with different skills but that you can really go to battle with, but also go to battle together to really hash things out and debate and still walk away with complete trust and conviction in each other is whether it’s co-founders or early hires, the other people around and knowing how you want to work with them is the third thing I’d say.

Nick (01:01:00):

The final question before I ask you the GRTiQ 10 goes back to the very first question, which is if web3 is a startup then and we still got a lot of work to do, what then makes you optimistic about the future of the startup of web3?

Danny Zuckerman (01:01:16):

I think we are seeing more product builders and product experiments and product thinking penetrate web3 and saturate web3 compared to any time that I’ve been part of the space, which probably means ever. I think it’s not an accident. We have way better infrastructure now. We probably still have too many people building too many competing infrastructures compared to applications, but it does mean the infrastructure is way better because it’s competitive.

(01:01:41):

So you can get started building an app with really great authentication and good data storage and lots of support from an L2 like base or an L1, and you can get going really quickly with a lot of support. And that means you can just experiment faster and you can try to go win users and try to solve problems. So if startups are about fast experimentation, it was really hard to experiment fast three years ago when it took so long to just build a complete application. Now that that’s not the case, we’re seeing more people who have ideas come in and iterate fast, and that gives me a lot of optimism. We’re going to find our way to really exciting user problems that we’re solving before too long.

Nick (01:02:25):

Well, Danny, as I said, now is time I’m going to ask you the GRTiQ 10. These are 10 questions I ask each guest every week, and I do it because I hope listeners will learn something new, try something different or achieve more in their own life by virtue of the answer you provide for these 10 questions. So Danny, are you ready for the GRTiQ 10?

Danny Zuckerman (01:02:43):

Let’s do it.

Nick (01:02:54):

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

Danny Zuckerman (01:02:58):

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. I did not believe in the idea of a life-changing book until I read that book, and I have probably given it to 50 people and pitched it at 5x that. That was actually at the very beginning of that period that I talked about before traveling, and it completely changed my perspective on seeing other cultures on my own political mentality, on how I disagreed with people or interacted with people who I fundamentally disagreed with. I still reread it basically every year and still pitch it nonstop, I don’t know, 15 years later after it was written, and so by far the most impactful book I’ve read.

Nick (01:03:41):

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

Danny Zuckerman (01:03:45):

Even further back than that, probably 30 plus years now at this point, I still think the West Wing is the best show ever made. Completely understand that there’s some folks who don’t love Aaron Sorkin and I kind of get why, but I’ve probably seen it eight or 10 times and I still watch that every few years again too.

Nick (01:04:03):

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

Danny Zuckerman (01:04:07):

Probably it’d be more curious and less defensive. I’ve heard that in a lot of ways from a lot of people and a lot of books, but it’s the thing that when I remember to do it at the beginning of the day makes the biggest impact on how I go about that day to just see everything as an opportunity to be curious and learn and not to be right.

Nick (01:04:29):

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

Danny Zuckerman (01:04:36):

I think I’ve learned very recently to think about life a little bit more in phases and not be holding on so much to who I was or what I was doing or what I was prioritizing in the last phase. And that’s really helped me both in the founder journey, but also in relationships and just thinking about what I want to do next.

Nick (01:04:59):

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

Danny Zuckerman (01:05:02):

Looking every morning at a very short page I’ve got for myself, reminding me of things like be curious, not right, but a few other more macro goals I have and how I just want to approach today. And when I am holding to my routine, journaling off of that makes a huge difference, but I always look at the page and that makes a huge difference. Most days, I forget to or let myself off the hook on journaling.

Nick (01:05:30):

And then based on your own life experiences and observations, what’s the one habit or characteristic that you think best explains why people find success in life?

Danny Zuckerman (01:05:39):

Curiosity. I think whether success is defined as traditional career success or just happiness, I think interested people who really find the world engaging and pursue that seem to be the least bored, the least passive, the most happy, the most active, and just have the most wonder. So I aim to emulate that. I’ve got a lot of people around me who have that in far greater spades than I do and find that very inspiring.

Nick (01:06:09):

And then Danny, the final three questions are complete the sentence type questions. The first one is, “The thing that most excites me about web3 is …”

Danny Zuckerman (01:06:16):

We get to try to reinvent our digital society on the internet, which I said I didn’t think there was anything more exciting than writing the Constitution of a country, but the internet’s bigger than any one country, and so trying to reshape that is pretty exciting.

Nick (01:06:33):

And how about this one? If you’re on X, I still call it Twitter, then you should be following … 

Danny Zuckerman (01:06:40):

My co-founder, Joel Joel Thorstensson.

Nick (01:06:44):

And then the final question, Danny, “I’m happiest when …”

Danny Zuckerman (01:06:48):

I am in the sun with my wife and friends and have managed to give my brain a little bit of a break from running on the dozens of things that it constantly is turning over.

Nick (01:07:10):

Well, Danny, thank you so much for joining the GRTiQ Podcast. What a thrill to meet you and hear some of your ideas and the projects that you’re working on. It’s always a really fun experience for me to meet a founder who thinks deeply about super important things as I know you are. So thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and ideas today. If listeners want to stay in touch on the things you’re working on and with you, what’s the best way for them to do it?

Danny Zuckerman (01:07:33):

Twitter, D-A-Z-U-C-K, DaZuck. I am not immediately responsive, but I definitely will see messages there if folks send them over, and you can also find me in the Ceramic Discord every day if you hop in there.