Building a belief-fueled ecosystem - 2 years of Talent Protocol

On May 1st we celebrate Talent Protocol’s anniversary! 🥳

While most countries celebrate International Workers’ Day on May 1st, we also celebrate it as our anniversary. An amazing coincidence, we’d say, since Talent Protocol is aiming to drive the change towards a more talent-centric world, where people are much more than just labor force.

It’s already been two years since three hopeful founders - Pedro Oliveira, Filipe Macedo and Andreas Vilela - kicked off a venture that would become the place where web3 builders go to take their careers to the next level. From their standpoint, the time to change the way we perceive work and value had come.

A lot has happened since then, from product pivots to new team members, amazing launches and partnerships as well as some of the most challenging conditions we could ever think of.

Last year we did a quick recap of our first year (you can check it here) and this year is no different. Come with us for a little time travel and to celebrate all the great things we’ve accomplished as a community. 🫂🥂

From economy to community

By May of 2021, Talent Protocol’s focus was to create a space where high-potential talent could go to find the motivation they needed to thrive. Around this time, our understanding of “motivation” was tightly associated with how many people supported you on the platform and how many of each talent’s tokens were bought.

External events within the web3 ecosystem that happened around that time forced us to put a few things in perspective. And we are so glad we did it.

The “wen token” mentality that kind of ruled us and our interaction with all community members shifted to a “let’s build” one. All eyes were now on achieving product-market fit, tangible benefits for our users and on creating a talent ecosystem that could provide to all of those involved the resources they needed to thrive.

Step by step, it became clearer that we would want to be the place of belief capital.

This shift made us look deeper into our community of more than 150.000 builders and try to better understand how we could help them take their web3 careers to the next level. Under that light, we started decentralizing more and more, granting community members the opportunity to build with us. We also welcomed highly talented folks as core contributors, partnered with organizations who helped us broaden our scope and strengthen our product and doubled-down our relationships with treasured advisors who kept us on our toes throughout this entire year. The power of community, indeed.

Fortune favors the bold

The FUD that characterized the web3 space and the overall world economy in the last year made us realize that, this year, surviving is thriving.

We made a couple of more conservative moves in order to protect our treasury and the faith that our community members, investors, advisors, family and friends have shown us since the first day. But there was also space for bolder moves… because we all know what happens to a sitting duck. 😵

• Talent House: What started as an experiment, became one of our most precious ventures. Contrary to the overall sentiment, we continued to see web3 as a space of high potential and a place where builders could thrive. That is why we focused so much on granting high-potential builders the opportunity to enter the web3 space and strengthen their networking and skills by taking them to their first web3 conference. Last year, we hosted multiple Talent Houses  across the globe with the amazing support of Celo ✨ and, by the beginning of 2023, we were able to secure 10 more editions thanks to the support of Protocol Labs.
• Agora Labs acquisition: In October 2022 we announced that we had acquired Agora Labs, a social token and NFT infrastructure platform for creators to build and scale their communities. This was our way of showing faith and belief in the builders of tomorrow.
• New features: While we continue to find our place in this ecosystem, we never stopped shipping new products and features in the app 🚢 that served as tests and experimentations and some even proved to be very successful among our audience. In the last months we successfully deployed new support models, user-owned domains, a NFT collection, a public API and new ways to search for talent in the Talent Protocol platform, among many, many other releases.
• Internal moves: While growth continues to be crucial for us, building continues to be our north star. And that is why we are now led, on the product front, by two amazing brains: Filipe and Francisco’s, who are now co-leading Product and Tech together (by the way, Francisco has also officially become a co-founder somewhere along last year!). A bold move, indeed, but that is already showing great results 🌱 (a great new launch is coming, btw! Subscribe here to be the first to know).
  

Belief capital to succeed

While we kept on building, we also never took our minds off maturing our mission. Many iterations, steps forward and back, wins and misses took us to a clearer place: we are the belief capital app.

The place where builders go to build the confidence, network and resources to thrive with the support of the community. 💫

It’s not so much about absolute numbers of supporters, tokens or any other indicators but about the quality of all of those. And that is why all features and initiatives we are taking on are so focused on what they can do for all of those high-potential builders who are part of our community.

2nd Anniversary Celebrations 🎈

Now that we are over with our retro, here’s what we have in store for our anniversary month 👇

👷Celebrating the top 100 Talented Builders

The Talent Protocol team curated a list of 100 high-potential and talented builders within our platform to help you get started on your journey of supporting talent worldwide! Find them here and discover if you’re one of them.

🥐Attend EthCC in Paris with a little help from us

Next July, we will host Talent House Paris! Aside from the usual networking and learning experience, we were actually able to secure tickets to EthCC, one of the most exclusive web3 conferences, for all Talent House scholars! Apply here for a chance to go.

☀️Lisbon is waiting for you

In a few weeks we will kick off Talent House, Lisbon edition! While applications to become a scholar are closed, there a still plenty of opportunities to discover the city’s web3 ecosystem:

• Talent Brunch with EthGlobal, Poolside and Startup Lisbon - May 12th - Register here to attend an epic Talent Brunch co-hosted by some of Lisbon’s most incredible web3 organizations.
• Builders Week - June 5th to 9th - A whole week dedicated to web3 building. If you’re a builder, expect access to working stations, workshops and networking moments and an opportunity to earn $2,500 in prizes for your prototype. More info here.

🏎️Referral Race - May 1st to 31st - Grab a chance to win increased prizes in our Anniversary Referral Race! Top 3 users who invite more friends to our platform get a total of 5,000 TAL (1st place: 2,500 TAL; 2nd: 1,500 TAL; 3rd: 1,000 TAL)! Ready, get set… GO!

🗳️First community vote - We need our community’s help to choose the next blockchains to launch Talent Protocol in. If you’re a holder of a Talent Mate NFT, help us by participating in Talent Protocol’s first ever on-chain community vote! (Date TBA)

👛Major product release - And what better way to celebrate two years of intense building than one of our biggest product launches ever? TAL virtual wallet is coming soon! Subscribe our newsletter to be the first to know and you can also attend our celebratory Community Call next week for a little sneak peek 👀