All right, I don't know working now or not working now.
We're trying to connect for about three minutes here. Oh cool, we got some sounds that means we are sort of working. Alright, hopefully we're working.
Alright, so it's supposed to have up.
All kinds of it is bugging hard. Yes, it is. In the back.
I'm on a different Wi-Fi now. Maybe that works. Maybe it doesn't.
Okay, Carl, can you invite Yavis C or make me a co-host up there or start learning to come up looks like Sterling might be connected down, Sterling, you hear?
Sterling, I can't hear you. It's gonna be an interesting AMA exposure. If we can't get the people up here, this is old wild.
See what we can do. All right, I'll just give a little background cool and by need a cause. Yep, I'm gonna say accept that.
(sniffing) (sniffing) (sniffing) (sniffing)
I guess I'm talking from the AlphaGrid account now and we're going to have a couple try to get try this again. No, don't end the M-A-M-A. We'll just
kind of like co-run it and see if we can get the hobby if you can basically add alpha growth and then I'll DM you that seems to work better.
It's really unfortunate that this is like the main platform and you know this for crypto and crypto getting information out there and now we are having so much trouble. We might have to cancel this and try again at a different date.
We'll try one more time. We'll do...
Oh, technology. All right, cool. So I'll do like a prayer, we might have to do this at another time. It doesn't look like we're able to invite anybody up to to come and speak or and I think what we will do.
is end this unfortunately and it is just not working. It's refusing to work. Havi, if you can try it one more time, exit the space, go to your DM and click on it from the DM, sometimes that works.
we could see if we could try it that way.
Alright so Brian, Collagen from Alpha Growth, today we're supposed to go over the Duke University's Web 3 conference. It's coming up. They got the hackathon and conference is an amazing way to get involved with Duke University and the Fu Fu Qua School of Business.
business. It's one of the top business schools in America and they're starting to really expand on this Web 3 and crypto kind of vertical. Historically a lot of people went into banking and FinTech coming out of that Duke University and all over the
place. But effectively, you know, this is one of the new things that's going on in the space is that we're starting to attract younger and younger and more and more talent to the space and kind of going through that process and getting connected to these schools and universities is something that's like super important.
So they have a pitch competition going on. They have, it's basically like open enrollment and what you can do is you can pitch and there's multiple formats and multiple threads and we're going to go into all of that different type of things with their, with their
on their pitch competition there's in-person events as well as really connecting with lots of different of the the top crypto sproids. There's from coin telegraph to Hedera Hedera's you know got one of the largest
hackathon bounties if you will ripple a stop of the domains lots and lots of different really good sponsors and unfortunately I can't bring a single person up here to oh wait a second. Havi yo hello
Magic it only took 10 minutes to bring you up here. Yeah, I guess I have to join from my phone. I didn't know that was a requirement. Oh Yeah, man. All right, let me let me break your like break your cherry on the crypto side If you want to join and play in crypto spaces, you have to do on your phone. There's no desktop
That is fantastic for adoption. We're going to start over. We'll restart from this point on the recording. We'll just basically start here and we'll talk about the Duke Web 3 conference. Brian from Alpha Growth. We help.
projects get grants, we investment this year is coming up and then we're going to be having a RFP platform. So anybody, developers and projects and individuals in the in the crypto space want to jam and really, really push forward and get started. We're a great place to start. Another great place to start who are kind of speaking with today.
is Havi from... alright this is... I'm gonna ask for two declarifications here. In your name and the School of Business. So my name is Havi, Havi Gisato and I am from the Fuqua School of Business. Yeah, Fuqua. Took me a while to get it through.
I've seen it so many times and it's an awesome business school. I just never ever actually set it out loud. Yeah, we get that a lot. Yeah, because you can get all kinds of different pronunciations on that name. Oh yeah, it gets fun. Awesome. Why don't you give us a little bit of background on what
you're doing there over at Fuqua and in the conference that you have going on? Absolutely. So I am going to be the blockchain president next year this year. I am head of events and currently we are neck deep in conference planning but our goal as an organization really goes beyond
the conference while the goals mirror each other, we're really organized around increasing adoption, increasing adoption via education. We are focused on hyper accessibility where we break down what are some potential language barriers so to speak between the crypto
and those wanting to learn for the first time. So we raise awareness, we disrupt blockchain technology, we provide pitch competitions, we provide mentorship for startups, and we are really growing our runway to establish the research triangle as the Duke Cali
capital as the blockchain capital because of our fully fledged system that goes from project initial idea through our innovation department as well as its engineering through our engineering department and then finally we also have our investments and career office which is where
We finalize our journey and start to develop individuals to improve our community. That's massive. All right, so let's start at the beginning. Can anybody in, is it global? Is it local? Anybody that wants to get involved? Do they have to be within your area or is this virtual as well?
So our blockchain club is currently limited to people in the area. The conference, however, is open to anyone who can make it, of course. In terms of what we're planning to do with growth, we have a blue double Dow that will be launching here soon.
And we're planning on increasing engagement within our Duke students and establishing a central point to connect with other universities as well. We've been speaking to Georgia Tech and their 404 Dow as well as the universities in British Columbia, Tennessee, Stanford, MIT. So really looking forward to starting to establish
the university presence and the university communities not just within the respective universities but as a nation and global as a whole. Got it. So what's so there's a sounds like there's a couple different colleges and universities that you're coordinating with and what would be the mission of your doubt?
The mission of our DAO is going to be to bring together Duke students who are involved with pitch competitions, hackathons, investments, really as I was saying the entire journey of the process. We plan on rewarding students, recognizing them, resetting it every year so people are able to
establish themselves as true Duke of the synatos in terms of the web 3 and innovation space and really get recognized for that on the long term. We plan to also have imagine cross-chain relationships with similar dows from other universities. Got it. So the dows
that with the other universities, you're really taking people through the whole gamut of the whole entire process, right? So do you start with like ideation, do you start with like mentors, things like that? And problems that crypto and blockchain can solve? So we start before all of that, we start with education. So we
We are working on establishing some courses, official courses in the school. Currently all our courses are like after school or club oriented, but we are building our education through adoption through education, whereas we also have an educational podcast that's been going out every week that sort of covers what we believe to be
the foundations of blockchain and Web 3 and that is starting with what is blockchain and of itself developing through what different layers are, how NFTs interact, how we also have zero knowledge proof to help with scale ups and really build and break down and use common analogies to try to make people understand.
Like at the end of the day, a D app is the same as an app except it's run on a decentralized server rather than a centralized one. It's these simple concepts that we're hoping to get more people involved as they realize, "Oh, this is just more of the technology, more of its established protocols."
Your business school, the university, are these like one-on-one courses or these like technical development courses like what are you thinking? So these courses are going to be offer via the Companies themselves. So for example, we are having an event tomorrow with fidelity. Fidelity is growing their digital assets team and
And they'll be coming on campus to speak more about that and some of the opportunities that we may be able to coincide as well as treks and potential career events at their local office to really get a feel for what fidelity in the digital assets team is doing and how we can drive value in our respective organizations.
It's cool. And then so you get the events, the education you guys have an accelerator as well. Yeah, so even as part of Duke University, they have the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center, which offers three classes that are similar to an
and incubator pipeline. So the first is product discovery, the second is product development, and the third is product delivery. So students who once they've learned everything they need to learn about blockchain, they've interacted with some of our events. We have office hours that are also kind of like happy hours
people come hang out and ask anything they want about blockchain, get their questions answered. And once they are able to do that, in fact, I'll use a real example, a buddy of mine, an investment banker by trade, came up to me after learning more about stablecoins and how Dexas work and he said, "Hey, I'm very familiar with Dexas and
stable points are their opportunities here and or rather the Web 2 version he was telling me and I said yeah man it's now that you know it's same technologies we got him involved with one of our Web 3 career groups as well as the Duke and Blockchain group that's growing every day we're pushing 200 members and yeah it's been it's been a fun ride and we're hoping
to establish this for the long run. How long you guys been around? 200s, a lot of members. Yeah, so we're approaching five years of existence. We had a hiatus during COVID. However, we've been around for a little bit.
That's cool. And then so you got you got an accelerator, you got like happy hours educating individuals and really kind of like pushing the needle and pushing the bar, getting more and more people involved. And so it would be good to talk about investment. You talked about
We talked a little bit about this conference coming up which direction would you like to go. Yeah, I would just like to tee off as well the the whole notion of events and educational events with the ultimate goal of getting careers in the space and creating impact in the space and that's where I guess our conferences do.
is teeing off on that. We're also having a golf tournament there as well. So it's a huge landmark event. We're establishing, like I said, the runway for next year. And we're going to build off of the education created here and the career connections created here to establish our longevity for next year as well.
got it. And is this the first time you've had this conference or have you had it before? This is going to be the first time we have the conference to this magnitude. So last conference was one day single track auditorium. We had fantastic speakers. Don't get me wrong. The content was amazing.
We're trying to really blow the door open a little bit more this time around because we want that massive adoption not just from crypto enthusiasts but also from consultants bankers tech product managers the whole the whole operational nine yards as well Got it
And the bankers, what do you want to do with the bankers? I'm curious. Yeah, basically get them to understand that their role is limited and to find new roles, which at least is the approach that I've been seeing for the most part. So they're focused on the
liquidity and liquidity matching. So I'm really interested in the idea of using zero knowledge proof to analyze and confirm and keep maintain banks in good standing. But these are just the stuff again that we talk about at our office hours, etc. And really excited for what ideas we get
from all sorts of individuals once they really learn what the technology is and the value that it brings. Yeah, a little bit of a little bit of history. I'd be curious to understand kind of like how you got involved with that all of this. How I got involved with blockchain? Yeah, yeah.
So my dad first told me about Bitcoin back in 2014 and at the time I didn't really pay too much attention to it because I already had my digital assets. In fact I say I've been trading digital assets for over 10 years as I am a master manager of RuneScape Gold. And when I heard about Bitcoin it seemed very akin to
to these online games. And it wasn't until the NFTs and the web through gaming started exploding that I truly found what was calling to me the most, which again was these digital assets, these entertainment related digital assets. And that's when I started pivoting away from my sales role, looking to go into business
and start to actually develop a video game that was rewarded with real-world assets, etc. So that's been the long journey. In the meantime, I've been doing research with one of the professors from Fuqua, Dr. Harvey. In fact, we're very lucky to have multiple blockchain experienced professors at the university, many of whom
offer research positions and serve on advisory boards of some of our startups, etc. And I've been doing research ever since working with all our professors, got involved with the blockchain club before I even got the campus. And really I've been driving this adoption through education ever since. It's crazy how once you explain to some
someone what's going on, how interested they are. I was explaining a theoretical, decentralized emergency records for hospitals at one of my communications class and people who have to raise their hand, I was like, wow, I never really knew what blockchain was, why doesn't this already exist? So it's really cool to see how people
getting excited once they know what's going on. Yeah, I think there's a pretty hefty learning curve to really start to get in and adopted, but once you get over that initial learning curve, I was about to say it's easier, but actually it doesn't. The rabbit hole just goes down and down and down and
down the rabbit hole because like there's always there's always another layer like okay you're talking like LSDs, liquid-staking derivatives and D5 and D5 permatives and just things that have like NMEV like never something that stuff that's never existed before outside in trade 5 so I think it's like super interesting like the different angles
like, you know, how deep do you want to go down the rabbit hole? Super cool. All right, let's talk more about this conference, this event. What are you have going on? What can you offer? We can get this in front of like a couple hundred developers on our platform and I'm really like, let's hone in on what you guys are offering and what you're looking for.
Great, so we are offering, as you can guess, kind of the full pipeline educational events ahead of time, but really for our builders and developers, we have hackathon that is going to launching very soon, kind of like a build up towards the event in the event itself.
We will also be having a pitch competition. So this was culminated from pitches we had last term. We re-invited our winners as well as open doors for really any Web 3 project with less than 5 million funding to put their hat in the ring. We have a vigorous screening process at the beginning.
We're going to now we're down to the top 100 and then invite 10 to visit us on campus for this pitch competition. We're going to have exposure to all of the Duke VCs. It's a growing network. They're looking for projects to get involved in with digital assets and we're going to be having a grand prize.
from Jump Crypto as well. Oh nice, Jump Guys are great. Push of Warm Hall? Yeah, we're going to have Jump Crypto, we've got sponsors from Hedera as well as Ripple and I would be remiss not to name them all but it's going to be a fun time.
Yeah, I hear you. All right, so you got Hedera, you got Jump, got a whole bunch of other brands on here. Is this by tracks or is this by like campaigns? Because a lot of times they do like tracks or campaigns or challenges. Yeah, so you're probably
also taking a look at the twep, about 18 different sponsors that we have currently, and they are sort of track related. So Haderra is really focused on the hackathon. In fact, we're offering bonus points for people who build on Haderra, and we're also having individuals
from the CES more of general sponsors. So depending on the extent of which people get involved, the sort of the tracks that they're looking at. We're going to be having as well a lot of exhibitions from PWC that will take people into the metaverse and try to explore with some of that augmented reality and virtual
reality is like at least these days with the latest technologies looking like. So it's a ton of stuff man. It's going to be a great time. And it looks like a three day event or is it two day event? Yeah, so three day event the first day is more of like a welcome meet and greet hang out at the bar, no real speakers and then
then we're going to have two full days Saturday and Sunday. We'll have a full event of speakers as well as we've recently established and secured a mining museum. So there's a local North Carolina blockchains committee that has some of the latest
mining tools as well as some of the historical first machines that ever bind Bitcoin etc. So that's there the Bitcoin mining museum. We have well-coing talk, unsolvable domains. We're also going to have an NFT drop from choice. In fact, I'm sporting one of them now as a profile picture, the Blue Devil
Doge and it's going to be available in Air Drops to web conference participants. That's amazing, dude. How many people are on your team to put this together? This is a massive event. Yes, so we are really leveraging our alumni network and
That's something I do encourage to aspiring blockchain clubs, universities, graduate schools, undergraduates. Leverage that alumni network because they live, especially those who go into Web 3, they start living the community and they really do breathe and they have the connections to help you build out the team.
team of 28 people are working together with us. I'm taking a look at our main telegram group and don't get me wrong. We have all ranges of participation from someone who brings us one speaker and has that great relationship and maintains that to as well as our marketing director.
who's been pumping and creating all sorts of content. It's amazing. You guys are crushing it. It's a pretty hefty team as well. Cool. So if you want people to participate, now for the pitch, do you have to be on site? Because we do have a global audience here on the Alpha Growth platform.
We will be on site for our pitch competitions. Anyone can participate globally. And if you're unable to travel, we will set you up with a projector screen so you can pitch to your audience remotely.
I'm thinking about pitching just for funsies see like we fit the cataclysmon yeah, right? It's admitted pitch alpha growth and see what happens get some get some exposure But like like we said before I mean like no one of the main things that we're trying to do is like everybody who's able to
put a contract and a lot of contract on chain that has any sort of value. I think that the Alpha Growth platform after the fact would be amazing to get a lot of these pitches and a lot of these hackathon individuals into the float and see if we can get some of them some grants.
Perfect. We'll definitely add that to the docket. That's right. What are you most excited about the scene for the event?
I'm most excited to see really the legacy that we build. I think this is going to be a springboard for our community as a whole, not only at Duke but in North Carolina in general and really this middle, southeastern region that has been a little quiet but I think it's primed and ready to take off. We're going to
have some amazing speakers at the conference, some amazing participants. And I think off of this we'll be able to build long lasting relationships not only with other clubs but with community members such as Alfa Growth, etc. Getting those relationships long-term and really building events for the future is what makes these really special.
Yeah, it's amazing, dude. I put up some links to your conference. We're going to throw it out to a community of blasted and email. We just got over 5,000 users. So that email is going to be going on to 5,000 people. And then, you know, click and register or pitch us, do you think?
It would be the best typeform. There's a typeform for Pitch Us. Is that where the place where they can register and kind of pitch the company? Yes, so they all all the typeforms will be funneled into our database of pitch competitions and it's just to support both full mold
users as well as desktops, which even Twitter can't seem to do with their spaces. So yeah, man, they just copypasta clubhouse and they just like wanted to do that. So like if I wanted to get involved right now, I can just go click on Pitch Us on the web3conference.com
and then you guys will evaluate it and set us back information on whether or not we're accepted. Correct. You pitch, you fill out the form, you upload your pitch information and then we're going to analyze and notify you as soon as you qualify for the top 100 and then
furthermore if you're invited to pitch at the final competition. So you can get started now, sign up, submit your pitch and bring your best foot forward. We're taking anyone with less than $5 million funding. So get creative. What are the terror spaces? Terror spaces I see you in this space right now, dude.
This is like exactly a pitch competition for you and what you do. I don't know if you know this guy, Harvey, but Terra Spaces goes around and records and analyzes all of these Twitter spaces throughout the entire ecosystem of Cosmos and then helps archive and make really good
Um, really good content so that people want to follow up because this space will hang around for a couple days, but then it goes away after like a week or two. So these guys are really good at that and really being able to like push a lot of content around crypto and blockchain industry. So I think that, you know, if they're listening to this, they should they should apply as well.
Yes, either if you're listening now or listening to the recording everyone should apply Terra spaces that project sounds super cool I mean a tokenization or some sort of Dow between all of the spaces is just going to improve that adoption through education
100% all right, I know we got a little bit of a late jump, but like I'm glad we got this going question to you. Is there anything that we should have covered that I didn't ask you yet or haven't covered yet?
I think we got it all, Brian. Definitely looking forward to maintaining our relationship with our clubs and alpha growth going forward. Should be a great conference. Can't wait to see you there. Yeah, definitely. I'm going to throw it in the ring and apply, be doing some business for
for almost two years now doing this crypto grant stuff. So let's see, I'm gonna put on my hat, throw it in the ring, and pitch you guys and see what comes out of it. - Perfect. Looking forward to it and looking forward to all of the community building that we do with the Alpha Growth Network as well.
Well, it should be a great time. Awesome, Bobby. I thank you. I really appreciate it. We will appreciate your time today. Thank you, Brian. And until next time, man. All right, cool. Later. Thank you, everybody else. This has been Brian from Alpha Growth, the best place to get grants. And later on this year, investments are a piece in crypto.
You heard it here, we got the Duke University Web 3 conference, they have investors, they have an accelerator that's the research triangle in North Carolina between Charlotte and Duke University and Raleigh Durham and all that good stuff. So lots of good education.
and adoption and really grinding and helping move the needle within the blockchain industry. Harvey, thank you so much for your time, man. Yeah, April 21st. Don't miss it. Hope to see you all there. Thank you so much. And follow Harvey and follow the Thucua Blockchain Club. They were in here earlier. Follow these guys.
throughout the next couple weeks and excited to get involved with you guys.
Thanks so much. I'll figure out the number one. Thanks man. I take care later.