a16z Podcast - How a16z's Crypto Startup School Went Remote

Episode Date: March 14, 2020

On February 21, Andreessen Horowitz kicked off its very first Crypto Startup School, with 45 students from around the U.S. and three countries gathering to learn how to build crypto projects. But just two weeks into the seven-week course, community spread of the novel coronavirus meant the school had to go remote — not just for the health and safety of everyone involved, but for others too, given the recommendations around social distancing and the importance of “flattening the curve”.Marketing partner Kim Milosevich and Jesse Walden, former founder of Mediachain who’s helping lead our Crypto Startup School, chat with a16z crypto editor Zoran Basich — in this hallway-style episode of the a16z Podcast — about virtual learning and collaboration in a new, uncharted world.

Hi everyone. I'm Zoran Bassich, our crypto editor. On February 21st, our team kicked off its very first crypto startup school. We invited dozens of instructors and mentors and 45 students who applied and were selected from around the U.S. in three countries for a seven-week course to learn how to build crypto projects. But just two weeks in, community spread of the coronavirus in our area started happening. And as much as we loved having everyone gathered together in one place, we decided to go remote, not just for the health and safety of everyone involved, but for others, too. given the recommendations around social distancing and the importance of flattening the curve. So I did a short hallway-style chat, though in this case the hallways are all remote since A16C has gone remote with crypto marketing partner Kim Milosevic and Jesse Walden, former founder of Media Chain,

who's helping lead our crypto startup school effort. We begin with Kim sharing her thoughts since so many others are going through this for their own events. So the idea of moving a remote wasn't something I was excited about at first because the first week, you know, it was clear that the excitement in the room, like, everybody was just so thrilled to be there. And you could feel the energy. You know, we kicked off the program and everybody was applauding. You know, everybody was just so excited to be there with each other. We had put a lot of emphasis on having these 45 students here in person for the benefit of really learning from each other and being part of something. And to then learn that this whole thing is going to go virtual. my first thought was just how do we continue to have that sort of feeling and create that kind of atmosphere for people. And then it just really became, it's very complicated, right? We work through it. It took a lot of us coming together, many phone calls and figuring out all of our

resources. It's really just the minutia of the audio, the video, how do we make that kind of a seamless experience and then also make sure these students feel like they still have a voice and that they can still jump in and feel like they're part of something. So it went from like, oh, no, we put this emphasis on being in person and creating a community with these students to all of a sudden the minutiae of all the complicated logistics that goes into pulling off a virtual experience. And, you know, we just don't want to lose people and make them feel like they're just on a conference call. Yeah, and that was the big thing, right?

Because the energy was so good. We wanted to somehow preserve this sort of live feel as best we could. So, you know, we took the videographers that we had who were going to be capturing everything we were going to be doing in person and tried to set up as much of a kind of live in-person experience, even though it was remote. So we had, like you said, a mini-studio of sorts where we had the videographers capturing high-quality video of the people that we had in person while also, you know, trying to capture as much high quality content of folks that were remote. So in the case of last week, for example,

we actually had a video crew in New York for our speaker, Sam Williams, from Arweave, who was there in New York and wasn't able to fly out here. And then in some cases, we were not able to have a videographer on site, for example, the case with Bology. So we had to create as much of a high-quality zoom-in experience as we could. I do want to go back to the students. What was their reaction to, you know, going remote and all the different things that they're going to have to navigate as you were talking to them through this?

Well, I think actually a lot of them were relieved because they themselves were concerned about the virus. Others were, I guess, you know, disappointed that they were going to be missing out on some of the in-person get-togethers that we had planned. And so they took it upon themselves to, you know, plan get-togethers for those that were comfortable continuing in person. And so we had a group watching the live stream from one of the students' apartment. I think it was a group of like

six or seven or so. And so that's great. I think like there's, you know, there's people with varying levels of comfort and remote just gives everyone flexibility and options, which is nice. You touched on sort of almost the team feeling among all the students. And we noticed that just in the first two weeks, right? They really came together. It was a very boisterous, fun, engaged environment during the in-session in-person classes? Yeah, well, so as I mentioned earlier, we were doing Q&A with the speakers, and that portion of the session was very engaged, or there was a lot of engagement from students, and I think one thing we didn't quite account for is how to sort of wind down the session, and so what

ended up happening is a student reached out on Slack saying, hey, be really nice if we could all somehow cool off from the session. And I think what we ended up doing on, on Slack is, you know, asking people to sort of express how they're feeling about the session through emojis, which, you know, is lower bandwidth than an in-person discussion, but I think still carries a lot of information with it. And so going forward to address that better, we created a channel with a bot that pairs students one-on-one so that they can sort of talk with one another after the session or, you know, between sessions so that they still feel like they're getting a lot of, you know, FaceTime with with others in the program, because that's, that's clearly

important. Where were your interactions like with the students as this was being announced and was actually happening? I think some of them actually prefer the sort of asynchronous nature of the communication that they're having now on Slack because it allows for sort of everyone to participate in the conversation as opposed to, you know, having breakout groups or, you know, limited time for folks to interact with one another. So talk a bit about. that just the way you set up communications and, you know, the Slack channel and other collaborative tools you have to use to keep people engaged. Right. So with Zoom, we're specifically using a feature called breakouts that allows the whole group to come together, but then also

break out into smaller groups to discuss what they're learning, give feedback to one another in a more personal setting. In addition, we've been supplementing that with Slack to do Q&A with instructors so that we could, you know, moderate a sort of useful discussion after presentations as opposed to having sort of a cockafone of folks on a video chat trying to talk over each one another. And the benefit of having questions come in on Slack is we can get to every single one. Instructors can follow up with as much detail as they'd like. Students can chime in, ask follow-up questions. And so it's actually turned out to be sort of a much richer experience. And then on the actual sort of logistics of setting up the video stuff, for me, that was sort of fun because it reminded me of experience that I had back in 2012 or so where I was running this thing called Boilerm, where we would broadcast live music performances on the internet.

And so similarly, we'd have basically a portable TV station that we'd bring to some warehouse and film DJs or musicians performing live to an online audience. and, you know, try to, there was tons of online engagement through a chat box there. So kind of a similar set up many years later in a different industry, but I guess that was good preparation. Well, this is kind of the bigger picture, right? Because so many events have been canceled in recent weeks, you know, right around the time that we went remote, like South by Southwest was canceled, you know, a huge event. And more and more companies are having employees work from home.

It seems like this could be almost like an inflection point where this becomes more of a thing that people want to do and see that it should be done in terms of different kinds of virtual conferences, even though the appeal of a conference is supposedly you go and you network and you meet people that you don't know? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that the coronavirus certainly is what prompted us to move this whole thing virtual. But, you know, I think it has been, it's something that we actually were really excited to experiment with. And, you know, it's so coronavirus is the forcing function, but it's a really good sort of muscle to build for us to learn how to do this and how we can scale it and what works, what doesn't

work. And, you know, as Jesse pointed out, one of the things that we're now thinking about moving forward is, you know, how do we make sure that we continue to have as much interaction as possible, right? The sort of one to many broadcast is important for the content and you want that to be a good experience for the people that are participating. But then, again, we have these students and part of the goal of this whole crypto startup school is for them to interact and learn from each other. So how do we, you know, make that possible, you know, as much as we can moving forward when we don't have specifically a workshop element, for example.

So we're now trying to think of creative ways to have people still break out in groups, still interact with one another. How do we prompt people for questions? How do we get really clever with how we use flack? You know, how do we keep people engage there and prompt questions there? And so they're still like, we're still experimenting with a lot of different things here. but hopefully we can figure out some smart ways to use it and other ways, too, other than Crypto Startup School. So in the midst of all this, two or three days after our first remote session, A16Z itself went remote, meaning employees weren't going to the office, like many companies around the Bay Area and around the country.

We were encouraged to work from home. So that added sort of another layer of complexity because here we are trying to figure out all these logistical issues and experiment in all these new ways with, a remote conference and we're all working remotely as well. Yeah, I think we're all sort of figuring this out what this new world is like and we're trying tools like tandem where they have these water cooler functions where you can sort of be in a room with folks and just kind of chat with each other spontaneously. We're all, I think, all trying to figure out making sure we have time to eat. I know myself included and others are saying like I didn't actually eat lunch until three o'clock or, you know, when do you, you know, it just completely changes your whole daily

schedule. So just trying to figure that out. But then also trying to create some guidelines, because there's not really these clear start and end times like you have going in and out of an office. And while I think in tech, we all kind of work 24-7, I found it, I don't know what you guys have experience is, but even that much more difficult of, you know, having sort of as much of a beginning and an end to your workday as you can. Yeah, it's so easy for work to bleed into life and vice versa, even more than usual. And one thing people kept bringing up was sort of like, I need to remind myself to get out of the house and take a short walk

because otherwise you're head down all day and you realize I haven't been outside. Yeah, in some ways, it's funny. As I think, like, you're worried that you're not going to be in touch with each other as much. But in reality, I think I'm actually talking to people more. I think I'm on phone calls all day long, whereas in the office you might run into people or you have a moment, but you also have, you have, you know, maybe a block of time where you can just kind of be at your desk and get some stuff done whereas, you know, it feels like I'm, I've been on the phone constantly.

Yeah, I myself found that I hadn't been outside for, I guess, like 30 hours or something like that. So I was starting to get a little stir-christian had to go for a walk. You know, I think it's interesting because I've had some experience with remote work before it. At my startup, we ran sort of a remote process. And so it's not surprising to me that this sort of changes. I think I'm familiar with them. But it is interesting to see it happening on the scale and within Andrews and Horowitz where remote culture was not sort of a primary reflex.

So I think we're developing a muscle for it. And yet, it'll be interesting to see how that muscle, if that muscle sticks around. I think it is a culture question. I've heard of startups who, have a really pro-remote culture, including one that I worked at in which they really took pains to include everyone who was remote and make sure that they were not sort of second-class citizens to people who worked in the office. And that included things like, you know, when people in the office got swag, you made sure to send it to the people remote and just little things like that

or having virtual happy hours. Little things like that, I think, go a long way toward making a team feel unified. So one of the perhaps ironies of this is that crypto itself is very decentralized and we ended up having a decentralized conference. It's a muscle that a lot of our portfolio projects, I think, have already developed to some extent. And of course, like when building a startup going fully remote is a decision that needs to be weighed carefully because there's a lot of tradeoffs that founders and sort of leaders of these projects need to anticipate. But the fact is that crypto is sort of this worldwide movement. These are sort of open networks where anyone can participate.

And as a result, there's a lot more geographic distribution. And so I think, you know, we're learning something that the crypto community has been been learning from the get-go, which is how to how to coordinate a really decentralized group of people towards an outcome that everyone wants. So, you know, obviously it was a bit of disappointment and a bit of a scramble to make it happen, but I think we're pulling it off. Kim and Jesse, thanks so much. Talk to you soon. Thank you. Thanks.