This post is based on a conversation between Graeme Boy and Aryan Bhasin as part of the show web3 for gen z.

Graeme is the co-founder and CTO at Mirror.xyz, a web3 publishing platform that lets writers publish posts as NFTs, crowdfund projects, etc.

We cover the importance of communication in your career, advice for interviewing better, Mirror’s incentive models, and why “liking” was bad for the Internet. Graeme shares the story behind crowdfunding on Mirror. We also talk about “collecting” and how it fixes problems with content on the Internet.

Just as a reminder, Graeme is not giving financial, legal, investment, or tax advice. Please do your own research.

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You wrote an article six years ago called “Your career is a startup: What every recent grad needs to know.” The big piece of advice was to communicate better and build a personal brand, and that the trajectory of your career depends on the quality of your communication.

What were some habits or tactics that you used to improve the quality of your communication, whether verbal or written?

The article is a bit of a CliffsNotes for a longer book by Reid Hoffman called “The Startup of You” that I was reading at the time.

I was asked by a computer science professor at my college to give a talk to the students there about their careers. They were third years or something and working really hard. They were really tired and all checked out. I was like, “your career is a startup and you have to think about the marketing of it. You have to think about the talent that you are building inside of this startup and how you communicate that to the world and how you frame it to people.”

Online social media has given a platform for people to communicate their skill sets. All of the connections in web3 happen on Twitter. People reach out on DMs and that's how they get jobs. That's how I met Denis. That's how we co-founded Mirror and that's probably how I got in touch with the Dharma people early on.

A lot of stuff happens on Twitter and it's also just where you demonstrate a lot of your knowledge. Just being able to communicate technical concepts on Twitter is incredibly important and valuable, because a lot of people are watching. Even if they don't follow you, they get to see it because somebody likes it or it's just relevant to their feed.

People get to see it, and they read it and it's just advertising for your personal brand. And I think that would be really good advice still for people who are entering the job market just to continue to use these social media platforms to build up marketing for your skill set and also network with others.

How would you recommend people to improve communication on Twitter?

The caveat would be that I only know Twitter, cause I'm a little bit older. It does seem that Twitter is where a lot of the more serious people are. People in the VC space that you might want funding from one day, or founders and CEOs, those people do tend to be on Twitter and I think the content is a little bit more thoughtful.

So that's still probably where I would target and then I wouldn't worry about being cringy with the tweets or something. I think it's just more important to develop the skills.

It's just practice, right? You're just getting in these repetitions, where you're trying to communicate technical concepts to a broader audience and some of them will hit and some of them won't, and that's how you'll learn what you're doing well and where you're probably being either too technical or not being clear enough.

I think that just doing that is valuable because you'll have to learn a lot of concepts in order to communicate in that way, which will help you when you're doing technical interviews. The interviewer will ask you, "okay, explain how this front-end framework works", and maybe you'll have written about it. You'll just be good at explaining concepts. That will definitely set you apart from other people who are also interviewing who just haven't had that practice or don't get that exposure.

I think I remember that one of the first jobs that you had landed…communication played a part there because you had already written about a topic that the company was either brainstorming or thinking about.

Writing is the chance to get it right. Whereas, like in an interview sometimes, somebody will ask you a question and you might not word it perfectly. They might ask you some technical concepts, and it really helps if you've taken the time to write it out or something beforehand and think through it.

In that particular case, I believe it was something like this. All of the startups at the time were trying to think about moving to microservices from a monolith architecture or something like that. There were a couple of books written about it, and I had gone and read a couple of those books and I had thought through the topic and expressed an opinion. Maybe it was a contrarian opinion, like "No, you shouldn't take your monolith app and break it down into microservices unless you were at a certain scale."

Then, when the company interviewed me, they read that and they said, "this is something we were actually thinking about doing and what you're saying makes a lot of sense. And that's how we know you could be a senior engineer because you can think through these architectural topics."

Those sorts of things are amazing because if somebody stumbles upon them they can really get a sense of the way that you think about things and they can see how you fit into the company. Just by doing that, you have a head start on your competition.

When you were working at RaiseMe, you interviewed hundreds of candidates. For people who might be interviewing for companies in the future, what advice would you give to set themselves apart from others?

When you're actually interviewing, in the moment, there's a lot of performance pressure. There's a lot of preparation that you can do beforehand. It's just like when you're going to school and you're doing the SATs and stuff. You just wanna do as much preparation as you can before.

Some obvious things to do would be to interview at a lot of places and get experience interviewing. When you're doing those practice interviews, ask for feedback and say, "what could I have done better?" Don't worry about getting rejected; just try to interview at a lot of different places, try and understand their team and how their team works and try and see how you might fit into their team.

You always have to have the frame that you're also interviewing the company. It's not just one way. I think that that will go a long way because it shows a real sort of interest in the company. Companies tend to like that. And people sometimes miss that when they're interviewing. They don't really express a lot of interest in the company itself.

An example would be actually using the product that you're interviewing for. So, if you come and interview at Mirror and if you haven't set up a Mirror blog, it just shows that maybe you didn't take it that seriously as a potential company.

Especially for web3, I think it's pretty important to make sure you've used the product before you're actually interviewing at the company.

I think that that goes hand in hand with taking yourself seriously as a candidate. So if you really consider yourself and your skill set to be very valuable and you go into an interview and you think that you might have a shot at joining the company, I would hope at that point that you really care about the product and you think it's something that you'd like to spend two years working on…two of the most energetic years of your early twenties.

I think the problem that I've noticed from people in their early twenties when they're interviewing is it almost feels like a second job. So you have to strike a fine balance where you're applying to many places, but you're also applying to places with products you understand and with people that you would enjoy working with.

Everybody's different. I applied early decision for college and then got accepted and went. Then I applied only to around three companies when I was doing my first job out of school. I've also always been on the founding team of companies.

My particular way of thinking about something is quite radically in line with just high conviction. I want to understand the company really well and then start building relationships with the people there and then join. So I don't take the approach of interviewing at a lot of places, but I do think that is still good advice if you want to be good at interviewing.

If you're looking at applying to, let's say, only a few companies, how would you actually select them?

The most important thing, I think, early in somebody's career is to know what skills the person wants to develop and find a place where they can really work on those specific skills and then combine that hopefully with a place where the people that they're going to work with are people that they want to become more like.

You're going to be spending a lot, many and many hours, every single day with the people at the company that you are joining. Hopefully, those will end up being lifelong friends as well. So you want to pick companies that have people that you really respect and admire.

First is your skills: find a place where you can get the best skill sets. And then, second, people that you want to be around. So those are the things that I would optimize for first and foremost.

I think another aspect would be the sector or the industry. I think that is important too. But I would say that that is more important later in somebody's career. Not necessarily in the beginning, because at the beginning, you're forming your skill sets and your personality in the workplace. You want to model that on people who you already respect, and you want to maximize your skill acquisition.

I wouldn't worry too much about the sector, if that makes sense, as long as you can get the skills that you want to. So if you want to learn machine learning, for example, you don't necessarily have to optimize for being in the machine learning industry, as long as you can do it somewhere that is reasonably good. Build up your skill set, and get some good recommendations. And then, from there you can shift to wherever you want to.

One philosophy that I've heard that's pretty similar to what you're saying is when you're looking at your companies and picking between the two, just look up the people who are in senior positions at each of those companies and see which of those people would you rather be more like. Because that's a reflection of who you're going to be in a few years from now.

It's an empirical question. I would say it's probably very important because even if you join a small company, the leaders will hire people who are like them. If you're going to be in a place for two years and around a specific culture, that will shape your personality, shape what you think about, the kind of media that you probably consume through the Slack channels, and all that stuff. And then, the way that you express yourself will become modeled on the leadership in the company and the way that they present themselves in all hands, things like that.

Could you explain the differences between “web1”, “web2”, and “web3”?

The internet has had three phases so far: web1, web2, and now web3. Each phase was started because a new technology was introduced. web1 was blogs and static content like Wikipedia. A blog is just a list of posts ordered by date. They link to each other with HTML, so HTML was really the technology that powered that version of the web. That's what kick-started web1.

web2 was the social web. It included interactive gestures, such as retweeting and poking, and liking content. This was powered by a technology called AJAX which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. And that lets you have a more complicated interaction with a webpage.

These interactions were usually social, so this phase is known as the social web and then the data from all of these interactions would feed into AI algorithms that order newsfeeds and timelines. So web2 is really signified by the feed and the timeline, which is, again, ordered by the social interactions that people are having with the content. To monetize, platforms inserted some ads into the timeline and this birthed a massive industry of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and they basically just let people join the network for free. Then they took the data and used that to power advertising.

What about web3? What makes that different? The technology that birthed web3 is obviously the blockchain and blockchain introduces scarcity to the internet. This allows you to mint and own limited edition digital items. So those can be coins like Bitcoin and Ether or collectibles like NFTs.

So if web2 was really about social interactions, maybe web3 is about ownership. So instead of liking content, now you can actually collect it. Artists can mint their digital work directly like music and art and writing, and then fans can go and collect those items in their digital wallets.

Collectables have obviously existed for a long time, from ancient precious stones to baseball or Pokemon cards. But now we have digital collectibles, which promise stronger ties to creators. This also promises a stronger concept of membership in an online community. So the whole mechanism is similar to collecting art in the offline world because it's made up of creators and collectors and curators.

But, collecting digital items has massive advantages over private art collecting. Just as a comparison, when you collect an artwork privately, it sits in your house and only a few people see it. But if you collect an NFT, it's still free to view online. And millions of people can see that you own it on your social profiles. So it can sit on Twitter or Instagram and be verified as an NFT that you own, and that can be proof of fandom. Even if the creator becomes very famous, you'll always have that proof of fandom.

For example, I worked with a digital artist on an NFT in November 2020, and we minted it for collection. That artist – @pplpleasr – actually went on to become very famous a year later. She designed the cover of a fortune magazine, “Crypto vs wall street”, and basically sold over a million dollars in NFTs. If I had just liked pplpleasr’s work, I wouldn't have had anything to show for that early belief in her talent.

The token infrastructure gives a way for us to prove early fandom and then also for the artist to bootstrap a membership network over time. So the artist could go and airdrop new tokens to early collectors and send them messages on these emerging web3 social apps, et cetera. The same thing extends to music. So you can own an album of an Indie musician that you like, and if they become famous, you'll always be this verifiable early fan. You'll be able to trade that just like an early collectible on a marketplace.

The publishing industry has all sorts of incentive models that incentivize writers to write. For example, the New York times is paying journalists and Medium uses an algorithm to give out a portion of its revenue to writers, and Substack lets you create your own base of subscriptions.

Comparing these different models, how would you explain Mirror's incentive model to people and why it might be better than other ones?

At the moment, Mirror is experimenting or working on a concept called writing NFTs. So writing NFTs, as you can imagine from the name, is a way to mint an NFT from a piece of writing.

So, for example, if you go to my blog, g.mirror.xyz, my latest article is called "Write to Learn". Now, you can mint an NFT of that or you can purchase an NFT of that article, which sort of makes you a collector of a piece of writing.

Collection is this sort of new social gesture in web3. I think of it as being a progression from the web2 model of liking and resharing things. Resharing is like retweeting. And liking is like feeding the algorithm with some data while saying "I enjoyed this piece of writing", or "I enjoyed this tweet or photo".

Collection has this economic aspect to it. It's got a new dimension to it. It entails ownership. So when you go into Foundation and you see an artwork that you like, instead of clicking a like button or a heart button, you can actually “collect” it. It's almost like being an art collector in the private art collecting world. But instead of there being some sort of like gallery or dealer that you're working with, you're just buying it directly from the creator.

There's this very tight relationship between the creator and the collector that is being expressed through web3. We tend to think that this is very interesting for communities and for what you might think of as fandom. We’ve had this influencer culture in social media where people are dependent on platforms like Instagram or something to build a big audience. Then they put adverts and that sort of thing to monetize. Now, there's this direct relationship between the collector and the creator, like the fan and the creator. It's much easier to get started because you can just mint these things on blockchains and all you need is an Ethereum address.

We see something interesting happening there. That model has yet to play out fully. We've had one cycle of NFTs, and it had a bubble, but it wasn't fully expressed because the blockchains didn't scale properly and only a couple of people were already doing it and they were doing it in very specific and contrived ways (making profile picture photos and that sort of thing).

But I think for the next cycle, we'll see many more expressions of artworks, whether they're music, writing, photos, or digital images that get expressed as NFTs. And people will collect them. That will create this interesting relationship between the collector and the creator. Maybe that's just the new form of a social experience.

How does that compare to the traditional writing model? I think it allows you not to have gated content, for one. Typically the model would be that you need to subscribe and pay a subscription fee of $5 to $15 a month or something, and then you get access to content. Then, the creators are like on this treadmill where they have to just produce content every week because they have this subscriber base that they need to cater to.

NFTs work differently because you're just selling an artifact of something that somebody really likes and they want to collect – they want to own it. If it's a beautiful photo, they say, “I would want to own that and put it in my house”. And maybe they pay $10,000 for an image or something that they would typically just put in their house and it's private and only 10 people would ever come to their house and see it.

But now, they get to own it and put it on their social media profile and it's all verified. Then millions of people can see that you're the owner. Maybe you have a lot of pride in that. You get to present yourself on the internet as an identity. It's just a whole kind of new world that people can be part of, and it doesn't require gating the content. I think it makes content more open but people can still pay for the content.

There's a quote from an article that you wrote: "web3 moves beyond the like and share primitives of social to include a third and more powerful gesture: collect". I think it's really interesting how the economics of liking and sharing are different from those of collecting.

Yeah, definitely. Then you also get this interesting market dynamic where you get to price it a little bit differently. So if you sell something at 0.1 ETH and then it ends up selling for 3 ETH on the secondary market, that will give you feedback on like how to price your work in the future, where maybe you don't get that on subscription models.

It's almost like an instant piece of feedback that lets different pieces of content have variable levels of value. If you were using Substack, let's say, each piece of content would be treated unanimously because you're charging five bucks a month. For everything that you create, it's almost like a standardized price.

I just think that is a really interesting question, because in traditional literature if you have the first edition of something, it's worth quite a lot. What you're saying is that in traditional online media everything is super commoditized. The best article is worth the same as the cheapest article in some ways. But that wasn't true before the internet.

I think the underlying problem seems to be the incentive model itself. Platforms like Substack, by encouraging subscription models, are commoditizing your content at a uniform level.

I think what Mirror opens up is…you get to create a different market for each article that you're writing and some markets might be more valuable, some markets might be less valuable, but that way you get to play around and get feedback on what people actually want. That is a bit more difficult in traditional companies.

For sure. And people don't actually have to price everything. I think that's something where there's been a little bit of confusion with our launch because we set this default at 0.01 ETH or something per article. But I think, especially when L2s become even cheaper, once sharding is implemented on L1s and et cetera, it should be almost free to mint something. I think it's going to be very cheap and the writers don't need to set a price. It can be free.

In that world, collecting looks very similar to the "like" of traditional web2 platforms. You're just saying, “Oh it's really cool, I like this article and I wish I had some stronger bond with this person or I wish that people could see that I like this.” Those are the reasons why you would like something. I don't think people are explicitly thinking, “I really want to like this so that I can teach the AI algorithm how to sort my feed.” In most cases, people are just liking something because they want to experience a connection with the creator.

I think that collecting NFTs will be similar where it can potentially be free or priced at a small amount. That's like this micro-tipping idea that people wanted to have in the early internet.

We can start with simple things like writing. I always want to start with really simple examples. When I started in DeFi, I just wanted to do a lending and borrowing protocol. And now in the NFT space, I think just collecting pieces of writing is a really good place to start. Let’s just see how it works and what this relationship looks like with collectors and creators and how that modulates the economics of the Internet in a positive direction because it's quite bad right now.

When people are collecting, I'm sure there's some inherent need or desire they have to show the pieces of writing that they're collecting. How does Mirror replicate that intrinsic need?

One of the important things about NFTs is that they are available outside of the platform where you collect them. So, if you collect something on Foundation, you can display it in your Rainbow wallet, or you can display it on gallery.so, or wherever you have your address.

It doesn't have to be the place where you store your private key. It can just be any gallery. So the onus is not necessarily on Mirror to show the collection, although we will have that. We'll build all nice tools, something like Pinterest does where you can group things and show people your collections and your playlists and all of that stuff. But ultimately what's really cool about NFTs is that people can build these as separate spaces, online and in VR as well. I think that will be very cool to see.

What you're thinking of Mirror, then, is more as a marketplace for now. Its focus right now is on matching people who want to collect good pieces of writing to people who produce good pieces of writing.

At the moment, it's very much focused on the creation process. There's an editor where you can go and type things into a text box and then you can sign it with your private key and then mint it as an NFT. It's very much that early part of the cycle where somebody's creating something, they're minting it, and then people are finding it and then collecting it.

That's what we're practicing at the moment. Can we get product-market fit? Can we get this new behavior working in the market where people come to use this product to create things and mint them and collect them? Beyond that, we'll continue to build things and we'll support people in terms of how they want to display their collections on Mirror through a profile. We'll explore all of those things and try to figure it out in the next couple of months.

Given finite bandwidth, I'm sure you often have to choose between features that writers want versus features that readers want. So how do you prioritize between the needs of the two sides and has this prioritization changed in the past year and a half?

In Mirror's history, we did a lot of other things. One thing we experimented was with minting an essay as an NFT, but actually crowdfunding the production of the essay before. There was this essay that John Palmer wrote called "Scissor Labels". And he minted that as an NFT with the ticker $ESSAY, but before writing it he actually did a crowdfund on Mirror for funding the production of that essay.

So investors would come and they heard the story of what he wanted to write. And then they pulled money into the smart contract – that was the Mirror crowdfunding contract. Then, he was able to take those funds and use them to fund writing the essay. And then he sold the essay as an NFT for a couple of ETH and the ETH went back into the crowdfund. That allowed the original investors to redeem the underlying ETH in the crowdfund by basically exchanging this token that they had received for backing the crowdfund. Then they could get their funds back with some profit.

So that was crowdfunding on Mirror. We started with this idea of being able to fund writing with crowdfunds and then have them sell as NFTs and then investors could get their money back. And then we decided that the crowdfunding contract was actually quite valuable and people had not already done crowdfunding well in web3 yet.

So, we had this idea of doing embeddable crowd funds and there've actually been quite a lot of projects that have started as Mirror crowdfunds. For example, there are documentaries by Ethereum that have raised about $3.5m. A DAO wanted to buy a basketball team and they raised a couple of million dollars, I think, through Mirror crowdfund.

For a long time, we were actually iterating on this concept of crowdfunding for various cases and having crowdfunds be embedded into blog posts. So there's actually been a competing prioritization between these web3 blocks that you can embed into mirror posts – and you can think of those as plugins – with a core writer experience.

That's something that we've resolved this year where we really want to focus on the writing experience. We've deprioritized these plugins, like crowd funds and additions and these other things that you might have seen in the plugins tab of the dashboard.

If people are able to crowdfund entire documentaries on Mirror, to me it almost seems like there is a huge demand for an entire ecosystem or tool by itself just for financing creative projects through web3. Have you ever thought about launching a spinoff from this plugin?

Yes. We thought about that quite a lot because it's quite an independent battle to build a product like that. There are a lot of regulatory requirements that you would need to pull something like that off unless it's fully decentralized. There are projects like SyndicateDAO that are doing that, and then there are more decentralized ones like Juicebox.

Mirror had a very good crowdfunding contract and people were using it and it worked pretty well. It was safe to use, which is quite a lot to say. In the space, if you have something that works and it's safe to use, that's usually quite a good sign. But I think it's not something that we want to focus on as a company. We just are more passionate about the writing use case. A lot of the people in the company come from places that have done writing projects. That's just where a lot of our passion and energy wants to go.

Where do you see Mirror going in terms of this prioritization? Are you still going to be focusing on writing experience as much?

Now that we're focusing more on the writing experience, we really want to polish things up. A lot of the prioritization is just to make things more robust and make things more scalable. We want to make that really robust so that writers can just feel like this is something that is a viable alternative to a platform like Substack.

If you're in the web3 space and you want to use an Ethereum address to sign your posts, it needs to be a credible alternative to Medium or Substack or something. It can't be the web3 jank version – it has to be high quality. We want to make it polished and make it a really pleasant experience, so all of our attention is going into that.

There is a quote from an article you wrote a while back that says, "liking is definitely not as cool as commenting. And I think liking might actually have been bad for the internet in general because it perpetuates status anxiety. I think vanity metrics are overrated."

How would you approach any kind of interaction on the Internet without creating vanity metrics?

The problem with web2 – liking in particular – is that there was no monetization model for it. So you just had everyone online, posting things to get likes. It didn’t breed a lot of quality. In a lot of cases, it just bred things that made people outraged or sparked emotions. That's like the resharing in particular.

There's this great article by Jonathan Haidt in the Atlantic, called ‘Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid’. He talks about the reason that people retweet things and reshare them. The reason why is because they're generally outraged about a topic and it's created negative emotion, or it's just fake information. Fake information spreads way faster than truth on the internet. So that's where a lot of liking and resharing comes from; it comes from mistruths or things that are emotional. It's not necessarily things that people feel like they would want to own.

Collecting might be different in that sense. It has a sort of different feel to it that we're going to see play out on incident. I'm not sure what it is yet, but I think that it's probably something where the quality of the content is higher.

So, people don't have to be these content machines for advertising because they're actually monetizing the content itself. The content is the economic good. That's not true of tweets, for example, or of Facebook posts or something. I think that's a dynamic that will be different in web3 and I’m looking forward to seeing how it plays out.

Are you worried that the pricing of any art on web3 might in itself create a vanity metric, where people are using its value as a status signal?

It seems quite likely that that will happen. It's very early to have an opinion on whether that is good or bad. There might be some early indications of the over-financialization of media. I think we just need to be thoughtful and then hopefully we're writing and talking about it in public discussions. But it does seem that some of that is gonna happen for sure.

If you had to give any piece of advice or share any kind of resource with Gen Z'ers interested in web3, what would it be?

a16z has this YouTube channel from about a year or two ago, called the Crypto Startup School. I think that would be a really good place to start. They interviewed all of the “OG” people in that course.

I also think that this is a space in particular where people are very receptive to conversations. So reaching out to people that you want to talk to, and just having a conversation with them, I think, is very easy to do in this space.

The whole time that I've been part of it, I've always been able to reach out to people on Twitter and just have a conversation, get their feedback on things that I've been thinking about, or set a call. I think it's still true today. So I would encourage anyone to just to reach out to people that they find interesting or want to learn more from.