Category:

HOW WE GOT HERE

KEVIN

Growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia in the late 1990s, I always liked programming. I tried a handful of experiments, from running AllAdvantage ads to starting a web-hosting company in high school. But as the industry matured, I started down what looked like a more conventional path—I got a computer science degree from the University of Delaware in 2006 and entered the corporate world, working for a mutual fund company.

 

I soon discovered that the corporate world wasn't for me, and I decided that I wanted to enter the start-up world. Then I picked up a copy of Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek. Ferriss's book was the lightbulb moment I was looking for, the permission slip I needed to try something new and unconventional. After a string of failures learning experiences, I struck gold. I started building Facebook applications on the social network's newly launched developer platform; one of them, a Flash version of beer pong, went viral. After this experience, I was sure I wanted to try something less conventional. And I knew I wanted to do it while I was young. I applied for a job as chief technology officer with a start-up called Ignighter, and when I received an offer, I had found my golden ticket. At the age of twenty-four, I was able to quit my job. I broke the lease on my apartment and moved to the mountains to become a start-up entrepreneur.

Over the coming years, I gained my entrepreneurial starter kit as well as valuable engineering leadership experience. I also became very active in the local technology community in Boulder, Colorado, where I picked up an ethos called #GiveFirst. In the start-up world, #GiveFirst means simply trying to help anyone, especially entrepreneurs, without any expectation of getting anything back. By 2017, this #GiveFirst ethos had come to shape my digital-community organizing and engineering work, and I began to wonder whether there was a way to build a platform using open-source software for people to find open-source software developers.

The result was Gitcoin—a double-sided marketplace where engineers could find work and "get coin." If I was lucky (and good enough), maybe Gitcoin could eventually become important to thousands of digital professionals. We could cut out the recruiter middlemen. We'd take what I'd been doing in the Boulder community—creating space for people to build relationships, learn, and get new opportunities—and start to do it widely across the internet.

I built Gitcoin on the Ethereum network—an open-source, decentralized software platform that operates a bit like a digital marketplace, offering hosting services and app deployment without any control from a central authority. It also has its own cryptocurrency, known as Ether. In the old financial system, money for IT would go to some back office on Wall Street. In Ethereum, we could route it through Gitcoin, and it was fertile ground for experimentation.

At first, Gitcoin's core product was known as "bounties." If a developer writes x, she will get y amount of coins. Then, during the 2019-2020 crypto bear market, we pivoted to a hackathon-centered model. But all the while, I was thinking further ahead: How could we truly change the way things are done? One of the products that seemed to have promise was Gitcoin Grants: a Web3 crowdfunding tool that was kind of like a crypto-enabled version of Kickstarter. Instead of saying "if you do x, I will give you y" as the core mechanic behind the bounty's product, Gitcoin Grants essentially enabled those who were already doing 'y' to raise 'x' money for it. It was a little less transactional, a lot more community driven, and, it would turn out, massively more successful.