Episode 78: Blockchain and Recruitment: Harnessing the Revolutionary Power of On-Chain Authentication with Seekr's Morgan Stone
THE EPISODE:
Explore the revolutionary intersection of blockchain technology and recruitment with Morgan Stone, CEO of Seekr. This episode unpacks Seekr's groundbreaking approach to talent acquisition and hiring, harnessing 'Proof of Experience' through soulbound tokens for authenticating job credentials and performance evaluations. Discover how Seekr is tackling traditional hiring challenges by offering a transparent and efficient solution for candidates and employers, currently focused on Web3 roles and the gig economy, with plans to expand across all sectors and positions. Interested in the broader impact of blockchain in redefining business practices beyond recruitment? This conversation is set to ignite new ideas around transformative blockchain applications in various industries, signifying a major shift in how we approach verification and trust in the digital age.
THE GUEST:
Morgan Stone, the CEO of Roo Labs & Seekr is at the forefront of blockchain innovation. Roo Labs focuses on NFTs & blockchain-powered tools while Seekr is pioneering a new model of Web3 recruitment, revealing niche talents that don't typically surface on traditional platforms. Through "Proof of Experience," Seekr enables job candidates to transparently present their verified credentials and work history to potential employers. This approach has facilitated hundreds of placements, including roles for esteemed organizations like FC Barcelona. With a deep understanding of the Web3 space and its dynamic hiring trends, Morgan brings critical insights into the present and future of Web3 recruitment.
LINKS + RESOURCES
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*NOTE: Powered by AI (so may not be 100% accurate), and timestamps are related to the start time after the intro.
Ashley Smith (00:00)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to From the Blockchain. I'm your host, Ashley Smith. I'm super excited to be speaking with our guest today, Morgan Stone. Morgan actually was on our show, oh geez, early, early days. And as actually, and I don't know if he knows this, because I'm not sure if I told him, but it is the most downloaded show we've had to date. So very popular, popular guy in the Web3 space,
big community that follows him, but also obviously provided
ton of interesting insights in that first episode. But we are going to be diving much deeper into some of the things he's working on today. I'm going to tell you a bit about Morgan before we dive in. So Morgan Stone is the CEO of Roo Labs and Seekr. He is at the forefront of blockchain innovation.
RooLabs focuses on NFTs and blockchain-powered tools, while Seekr, which we'll be talking about predominantly today, is pioneering a new model of Web3 recruitment, revealing niche talents that don't typically surface on traditional platforms. Through proof of experience, Seekr enables job candidates to transparently present their verified credentials and work history to potential employers. This approach has facilitated hundreds of placements, including roles for esteemed organizations like FC Barcelona.
With a deep understanding of the Web3 space and its dynamic hiring trends, Morgan brings critical insights into the present and future of Web3 recruitment. Welcome to the show, Morgan. Thank you so much for coming back.
Morgan Stone (01:32)
Thanks for having me, Ashley, and that intro was fantastic. I didn't know we were the most downloaded, so when we initially came on, that's super cool to hear.
Ashley Smith (01:40)
I think at the end of the day, this is because we've got folks who are really keenly interested in the types of things that are happening. And you definitely are someone that's been involved in this Web3 ecosystem since early days. You've done some really neat stuff, which people can kind of go back to the other episode to listen to.
But you've stuck around and you've continued to build on your original vision, which was really this, how do we integrate web three technology into the,
the, the job placement ecosystem, but also solving some of the problems that comes with job searching and finding talent and, you know, finding a good fit for your company that might eliminate some of the things like costs and other things associated with bad hires. So,
Before we dive a little bit deeper into that particular issue because I want to dive into that problem that you're solving Why don't you tell me just a little bit more about yourself Morgan?
Morgan Stone (02:32)
Yeah, I'm Morgan. I am a 27 year old American living in New Zealand as of a year and a half ago. Lived here in Auckland. Grew up playing competitive tennis, was a college tennis player for a couple years, then got into the sales and biz dev world, eventually found myself in the NFT and web three
You know, spend most of my time working on Seekr and Rootroop initiatives in my free time. I like to hang out with my girlfriend. I hang out with my dog. I hang out with my best friend who I live here with in Auckland.
just really in a time of my life where I'm trying to put a lot of focus into stuff that can set me up later on. So that's a little bit about me, I guess, but happy to dive in anywhere you see fit.
Ashley Smith (03:21)
Well, I will say that, you know, you're very, I don't know if popular is the right word, but a highly regarded person in this Web3 ecosystem. You've been very front and center from the beginning, at least as far as I've known you in terms of like people know who you are, they can see your face, they know like what your vision is and things that you're wanting to build. And I think you've been highly engaged with those people who supported you along the way.
But I want to dive a bit into sort of the vision of Seekr, where that sort of started and where it's going. And I know you've got some really
exciting things kind of on the go with Seekr right now as well. So why don't you tell me first a little bit about the problem you're looking to solve with Seekr.
Morgan Stone (04:05)
I think first it's important to call out a little bit of context as to where this idea came from, because that's kind of when we uncovered some of those issues and inefficiencies in recruitment and talent acquisition, which is it dates back to around October of 2021, which is when we started community building for our NFT project Roo Troop. And Roo Troop eventually minted in January, early January, and served as a couple things.
Ashley Smith (04:10)
Mm-hmm.
Morgan Stone (04:31)
the initial community building efforts to kind of set us up and position us to launch Seekr later on. So we weren't starting from ground zero, right? That's like the main benefit of launching an NFT project and using kind of web three community in our perspective. It also served as the initial funding round so that we could spend time developing this platform. And also the initial proof of concept that there was a need for something like Seekr in the market. And so what I mean by that,
is this actually started the day we opened up our Discord back in 2021.
Uh, we realized we had a lot of people in our community that were looking for web three jobs, whether they were Solidity developers, community managers, Discord moderators, product managers, you name it. We had a lot of really talented professionals looking for work, but they didn't know where to find that work. Now myself and some of my former and current team who had been in the space for quite some time.
We had been doing project consulting for other founders who were looking to build Web3 projects. And that involved coming in and building out their roadmap, helping them with branding and community building.
know, someone would help them with their smart contract development and smart contract auditing. And what we found on that side was that every single person we worked with needed to hire at least one person again.
It could have been a moderator, it could have been a Solidity Developer. They needed people on their team, but they didn't know where to find them. And so, you know, fast forward a couple of years, there's a lot of great Web3 job boards and a lot of places that are really nice for talent and employers to congregate and find each other. Back then there wasn't that many options and there wasn't any central option that people were using to find each other efficiently.
And so that's where we stepped in. Every opportunity that we were in front of on the employer side, we brought into our Discord server and we were like, hey, here's an opportunity. This is the pay, this is the team you'll be working with. We would field applications from our community. We would narrow those down. We would interview people. We would select someone. And then we'd actually work with them and train them up in the context of working on that project specifically.
So we did that for about 12 or 13 people. And as I'm sure you can imagine, it was very inefficient, right? It was very time consuming.
And so we decided, okay, let's launch this free job board. And that's what the initial proof of concept was, was a job board under the Roo Troop brand. Because Seekr as a name and as a brand wasn't unveiled until the middle of last year, that we've been working on it since the beginning of last year.
So that job board was a great success, free to the community. We saw over a thousand job listings come through, including some from the likes of Time Magazine and DraftKings.
But along that way, we uncovered a lot of inefficiencies in the recruitment process, specifically in Web3 talent acquisition. One being, again, it's just very inefficient, right? Employers were posting jobs, they'd receive 50 applications.
and they'd have to spend time sifting through those. It's just not very targeted to post a job on a site that anybody can apply to. The second is resume dishonesty. Over 50% of applicants admit to lying on their resume in sub capacity, whether it's their years of experience, their length of past employment, or just their downright skills and capabilities. And then a third big one was people weren't getting paid on the talent side.
All of these problems exist in recruitment in general, but in Web3, where it thrives on anonymity and people's identities are a little bit more shielded, a little bit less known and very international, these problems get exaggerated heavily.
And so we found that talent would come in, they'd work on a job that they said they were gonna get paid for, and then the founder would ghost, they would scam them, they wouldn't pay them, and that was a real issue, right?
And then another one that came out down the line, which is really important one that we're focusing on, is the fact that applicants were just sending application after application after application and not getting any sort of feedback back, right? You know, if you're posting a job listing, you're only hiring one person. And if you're receiving 50 applicants and hiring one person, then you've hired 5% of the people that have applied, right? And so the other 95% of applicants...
They just get ghosted, they get no word, they don't get noticed that they didn't get accepted.
And it's just a very discouraging environment to operate in as a job seeker. And so that's where the idea for Seekr came about, was okay, we've got this job board, now how do we solve these inefficiencies? And so I got with Corey, who is my CTO of Roo Labs and the co-founder and CTO of Seekr. And I said, you know.
Look, these are the issues that I'm running into. I'm getting feedback from both sides. Is there any way we can leverage something on the blockchain side to make this more efficient, similar to how NFTs provide proof of ownership? That's why we can all price them, sell them, trade them however we please and see that digital ledger that is undeniable. And this was right around the time that Vitalik put out his memo about soulbound tokens, SBTs.
Ashley Smith (09:56)
Mm-hmm.
Morgan Stone (09:56)
And Cory had just read that and was like, well, this just came out. It's really interesting tech. We could probably leverage Soulbound tokens to verify work history, job experience, and skills as they are established. And so that's where the idea started.
Development for Seekr began in around April of 2022, and we launched a wait list for it in January of this year.
Now fast forward several months later,
Ashley Smith (10:23)
Mm-hmm.
Morgan Stone (10:25)
we've got about 1600 users on the platform. We just released a whole suite of updates where users can jump in, create their profiles, add roles they're seeking in the market. They can add their job history, but then they can also receive verified credentials for any work they receive through our platform. And we call those proof of hire credentials. So yeah, I mean.
The whole initiative came about very organically. It was a very quick snowball effect, so to speak, where we jumped in, we saw something that we could add value to the community on, and then we just ran with it and uncovered problems and created solutions around it. Now, a year and a half out of the initiative, we've successfully placed around 330 talents in Web3 jobs. Some of those are Web2 jobs, but for the most part, Web3 jobs.
worked with fresh startups in the space, all the way to global brands, like some you've mentioned. So it's been a great journey so far, and nowhere near finished, or the final product of what this is gonna be.
Ashley Smith (11:21)
Mm-hmm.
So I will be asking you in a minute about soulbound tokens. So anyone in our audience wondering what those are, we are gonna dive into that a bit.
before we get there, can you give me an overview of just what
Seekr looks like today? So you've got, people can go to the website, they can sign up for the wait list, they can put in their information as a prospective
Seekr. Is that right so far? And are we...
Morgan Stone (11:51)
Yeah, correct.
Ashley Smith (11:53)
matching people like our employers putting in jobs right now and things that are happening within that ecosystem today.
Morgan Stone (12:00)
Yeah, so it's a little bit more manual than it will be eventually. And, uh, though it still says join the wait list, the waitlist is, uh, kind of outdated when you were in the process of updating the homepage to reflect where we're currently at, that was kind of a previous business model we had planned to let people in slowly.
but you click join the waitlist. You're basically signing up for the platform. There's no waitlist at this stage.
So yeah, basically anybody can go on seeker.io and sign up, create an account for free. You can do this using a blockchain wallet. If you already have one, you can connect with Metamask, Wallet Connect, Coinbase,
you can actually create an account with your email address, with your Twitter account, your Discord account, your Google account, anything on the social side. And we will create a blockchain wallet in the background for you and link it to your account. And the reason that I say this is for two things. One, every account on Seekr needs a blockchain wallet because of the fact that we were built on the blockchain.
and we are utilizing soulbound tokens, which are essentially NFTs that can't be transferred out of a wallet once received. We're using those to verify job experience. So everybody needs a wallet so we can attach those credentials to their profile. But job search persists everywhere, not just in Web3 and not just with the crypto native people who know how to use blockchain wallets.
So we've integrated every blockchain functionality, like creating a wallet, like minting a soulbound token, like sending a soulbound token, like paying in crypto, in a way that you don't have to understand crypto. You don't have to understand blockchain. You don't even have to know you're interacting with a blockchain application.
To the end user, you're just jumping on a job site and you're reaping all the benefits of the blockchain's capabilities without actually having to understand the complexities of it.
So today you can sign up for free as a job seeker. You jump on, you build out your profile. It's kind of LinkedIn-esque profile at this stage. You include a bio about yourself. You include all the skills that you have, any coding languages, for example.
You can add tiles for jobs you're in the market for.
You can add all sorts of parameters to those listings, such as your desired pay, your desired location.
things of that nature, and then you can add all of your job history as well. And so the really cool thing is when we receive a job from a client and we successfully place talent from our pool in that job, you're actually going to receive a proof of hire credential, which is that SBT credential we were talking about, and then that gets highlighted on your seeker profile and it's differentiated from user inputted work history so that
a potential employer and our system can know this is undeniably true. This is verifiable work experience with the start date, the job listing, the title, the company, the project, no personal information because you can remain anonymous on Seekr. Another problem we were looking to solve.
it's a really cool way to highlight your professional credentials in a way that makes it really easy and trustworthy for potential clients, potential employers to pick up on.
and hopefully hire you. And so today, Seekr as a platform is really only useful for job seekers. On the company side, they still have to come to us and we manually sift through our talent pool in the backend.
Employers don't have access to the pool today. In the future, how it will work is an employer will come on, they'll post a job and they will automatically receive a short list of 10 candidates.
that are highly matched to their job description based on everybody who has signed up for Seekr, created a profile, and has specified that they're in the market for that type of role or similar. And we've got a really cool integration with this new AI company called Endorsed AI that we've been working on for the past couple months that basically takes our entire talent pool on Seekr and weighs it against a job instantly and gives you a ranked list about who is perfectly matched and why.
and why or why not. So it really just makes the talent acquisition process so much more efficient than just posting a job to a random site and you as hiring manager, which in the startup space is typically just the CEO who has no hiring experience or no recruitment experience. It makes it so much easier than them having to go on and sift through 50 applications where they may or may not know the best things to look out for. Our system just efficiently does it for you, presents the best candidates.
You click on them, you want to interview them, it sets it up. Then you hire them through the platform and eventually you'll be able to pay them through the platform as well.
Ashley Smith (16:57)
There's a lot there to unpack. I'm really glad you brought up AI. That was something I wanted to ask you about. Just that sort of intersection and integration of this technology because it does seem like a very useful tool that I'm sure will only develop and get better in terms of its
positive impact on something of this nature.
And just in case people missed it, SBT, Soulbound Token.
I love that you brought that up and thank you for explaining it to our audience. I think it also highlights just really how this technology is evolving and how it goes way beyond market speculation of JPEGs. So thank you for that. But I also want to dive a little bit deeper on the structure that you have today. Because what I'm hearing, I think, and you can correct me, is if folks are...
seekers on your platform and they're looking for jobs and they're getting this proof of experience they've been hired through your platform and it's validated and you can see that you know this person even if they're anonymous has accomplished um you know
know done some thing in certain roles and it's there.
it feels like it really lends itself to sort of the gig economy type of work and so maybe you can
tell me a little bit more if I'm right. But I would also assume that there's room for, you know, some of these more full-time permanent type of placements. And then I have more questions after I hear what you have to say.
Morgan Stone (18:28)
You hit the nail on the head, Ashley. Being that initially at least, we will definitely cater more so to the gig economy, to the freelancer economy, right? We see this as high level web three Upwork, right? Where you've got a project, maybe short term that you just need a freelancer to come in and get the work done, pay them, sort it.
what Seekr does for the freelancers is...
Chasing quality references is very tough for freelancers, especially in Web3, where, you know, I think we've moved past the phase of believing in WagMe, right? We're all gonna make it, it's kind of a load of BS. A lot of people are out to extract and just out for themselves, and I've run into this with a lot of freelancers we work with, being that they work with a project, they work with a founder who's seemingly very supportive, very positive.
And as soon as their work completes, even if they got paid and the relationship was all smooth, they never hear from that founder again. Even when they go back to him, they're like, Hey, you know, I'm trying to get this work, could you provide me a quality reference? No word or just kind of a mid tier reference.
Um, so something like Seekr for a freelancer who is continuously completing projects and gaining proof of hire credentials, they no longer have to go out and chase references, uh, potential employer, potential client.
can just go to their profile and see what work they have completed, what type of work, when they did it, who they did it for. Again, all we list in the credential is the company, the project under the company, something like the Yuga Labs being a company, Board Ape Yacht Club being the project under the company, the title of the role they did or the type of work they did, and a job description.
So this makes it really easy for a freelancer to say, hey, here's what I've done.
without necessarily needing to get biased opinions from people they've worked with, or spending copious amount of time just to receive nothing, right? In the future, we see this as being beneficial to everybody. Mind you, now we work with a very solid mix of both short-term projects and full-time roles, though our focus is on full-time roles just because of our key structure right now.
But...
Our vision with Seekr is the long-term goal is to create the deepest, most verifiably qualified pool of talent out of any platform ever.
And so obviously there's a bit of a ramp up period to get there, hence why we would work with freelancers more so on project-based initiatives. But you know, say in five years, once we've got a really big pool of freelancers who have been leveraging Seekr and earning proof of higher credentials, now all of a sudden,
you know, big name companies can come in and hire full-time employees from a pool that has all of these verifiable credentials attached to their profile. So it's kind of multifaceted. We're taking it on a tiered approach, mainly starting with freelancers, eventually opening this up to be for everyone.
Ashley Smith (21:35)
Because I do think that the solution to the problems that you mentioned are obviously,
they don't exclude any sort of job environment, right? Any sort of company that's going out looking for talent, they've run into some of these challenges.
When I'm thinking of the vision, and I haven't talked to you about this, but I think
you know, in the future, you can have references, like actual deep references on chain, perhaps where that particular source is verified, for example, maybe an EO of some company,
soulbound tokens showing certificates of completion of education that's been taken. And the reason I'm saying this out loud is really for the audience, you know, if they're not necessarily looking to hire in Web3, and they don't necessarily need freelancers right now, it's to kind of...
give them the scope of where this can potentially go.
Morgan Stone (22:26)
And look, we position ourselves as a Web3 talent acquisition platform because this is where we got our start, right? Like you said, I've got a decent following on social media. It's predominantly made up of Web3 players.
And so to position ourselves to be able to expand and scale to the best of our ability, we need to cater to the people who we're in front of right now. But like you said, these problems persist outside of Web3. And something that we found is that the transferability between Web2 and Web3 skills going both ways is way more fluid than people realize. You know, we've got...
probably 60% of our talent pool is made up of engineers and developers, right? And just because they're a full stack engineer in the web three space, doesn't mean they can't go code a website for web two firm or work on applications for web two firms, right? A lot of those skills are very transferable from one domain to the other. And so what we anticipate happening eventually is again, just having a pool of verifiably qualified talent.
They don't necessarily have to position themselves as Web 3 talent. They're just talent that has verifiable experiences for employers to pick up on. And something you mentioned is something we absolutely plan to run towards in the future.
Right now, we don't deal with any education credentialing. We don't deal with any course credentialing. It is only work experience credentialing through work that was gained through our platform.
There is no reason why we can't partner with other communities who are working on the education initiative or course initiative. And we have left the door open so that if other companies, other projects are credentialing using soulbound tokens, they can display those on Seekr eventually. So that a profile who may not have work experience could go over to communities like, let's say, surgeons. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them, but really big fans of what they're doing.
They could go to surgeons, upskill themselves, complete a couple of courses, earn soulbound token credentials, jump on a seeker creator profile with the wallet holding those credentials, and all of a sudden, they've got a leg up over the people who have no experience and no course credentials as well. So the idea of credentialing in a way that is undeniably verifiable transcends just work experience and does go into education. It goes into...
Ashley Smith (25:02)
Mm-hmm.
Morgan Stone (25:06)
upskilling, it goes into university diplomas, etc. So the possibilities are really endless. We're starting with a very small scope, but leaving the door open to integrate on a wider scale.
Ashley Smith (25:11)
Mm-hmm.
I can certainly see a future
this idea continues to grow and where institutions perhaps, as an example, begin to put universities even their course completions and grades or who knows what, whatever other metric you want to use on chain.
I am just going to pause and take a minute as an example for our audience. I come from the real estate sector. I have...
a variety of reasons why I think the real estate profession is going to evolve over the next five years.
I think the experience for the consumer with their professional is going to change. But you know, up until now, people might niche, they might showcase that they provide certain type of specialty service or specialty value education, whatever. But it's kind of like, you've got a bunch of random course offerings as an example.
And who knows, how would the consumer know what's real, what's not real, what's maybe of deeper value versus superficial value, or even experience in terms of like what a professional has accomplished and things they've actually done to showcase expertise. And so I think this idea goes, it stems and it's gonna grow out of this concept that you have and that you're building on, but I think there's just so many layers that can be added on top to benefit.
you know, job seekers, employers, and even potentially the public when they're looking to deal with professionals in any capacity, which I think is really interesting.
let's move forward. I'd love to know, maybe you can give my audience a little bit of a better understanding of just the basics, but the tech side. So this is all on chain. You're building this on polygon. Is that correct? Yeah.
Morgan Stone (27:02)
Correct, Polygon and Ethereum. Polygon is the default chain we send you to just because it'll be cheaper for us and quicker transactions all around, but also Ethereum is an option.
Ashley Smith (27:13)
so maybe for folks where this is still fairly new, can you explain, I think we use the term transactions quite loosely. And I think to me, what it feels like is interactions with the blockchain for a variety of reasons. So Polygon, what are the benefits, just generally speaking, and obviously there's going to be other alternative options, but why did you choose Polygon?
Morgan Stone (27:39)
Yeah, we chose Polygon for a whole slew of reasons. And I won't go as deep into the tech as my co-founder Corey might, just in fear of botching it slightly. But the main one is the scalability, right? As I said in the beginning, we want Seekr to be utilized by the masses, not just blockchain experts. So with that, we've wrapped every single blockchain interaction so that...
You don't actually have to transact. You don't actually know you're using a blockchain service. But in the backend, there's still transactions going on, which we are covering as a company. So things like account creation, things like payments will eventually be in crypto in the backend. Things like minting and sending out soulbound tokens as credentials.
Those all involve transactions being sent to the blockchain, which cost money.
And if you're familiar with Ethereum, transacting on Ethereum, it's unsustainable. It costs an arm and a leg. If gas spikes, you're gonna be paying a ridiculous amount for small things. Whereas Polygon, you're paying a fraction of a penny for pretty much every transaction you send through. And given that we're fronting it as a startup and eventually hoping to be a large company,
We wanted to position ourselves to be able to scale in a way that wasn't going to break the bank and run us out of business. The second is that the speed of Polygon and the security of Polygon, we're building on Ethereum as well, so we get to leverage that security with the Polygon speed and efficiency.
Ashley Smith (29:10)
Mm-hmm.
Morgan Stone (29:22)
Another big reason is relevant to what's going on today that we talked about before this chat. The Polygon team...
is so collaborative and so helpful. And I'm not talking just about like random biz dev reps that they hired who have no say in the company. I'm talking about the fact that we got in touch with Polygon and we've got a telegram chat with 12 people in it, including several higher-ups and executives. And so this is massively different than a lot of chains, specifically Ethereum, where unless you're developing an open-sourced application,
Ethereum doesn't really give a shit about you. Polygon, on the other hand, has developed an ecosystem where they support builders, they support developers, and they do everything they can to help amplify your initiatives, whether it be funding, marketing support, development support, they're there, and they're there very quickly. So there's been countless occasions where we've run into a little snafu on the tech side, we want to do some co-marketing, we want to raise some funds.
And we've hit them up and they've been so helpful. And aside from that, they're really tapped into their own community of developers. And so if we need to leverage some sort of service, we hit them up and they're like, oh, here's 12 founders who are building products that you could utilize. And you're probably going to get a discount because you're also building on Polygon. So as a startup, having that community of other startups
Having them in the network that we can get in touch with efficiently is so helpful.
We see huge brands coming into the space every day leveraging Polygon, and that just affirms our decision to use Polygon. Right? Starbucks is on Polygon. FC Barcelona is on Polygon.
So many different initiatives are leveraging that chain because of the reasons that I described.
Ashley Smith (31:09)
Speaking of Polygon, I saw that today at the time of this recording, you are actually in the process of applying for a Polygon grant. And I think it is one where the community can come out and support that application. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Morgan Stone (31:24)
Yeah, I would love to. Thanks, Ashley. So really cool initiative that Polygon's got going on right now. They've got a couple grants that are live. And so we were one of, we as in Seekr, were one of the accepted submissions to be able to move into the next round of this grant process. And so voting opened up last night. 100 winners will be selected to move on to actually start receiving funding.
And as of a minute before we started this podcast, Seekr is in the number one spot. So things are looking really, really solid right now. If you're listening and want to get involved, just shoot me a DM on Twitter. You're going to see a blasted all over my page anyway. But if you guys would be willing to support us and throw us a vote, we'd really appreciate it. Basically, what happens is a hundred winners are going to get selected from this round.
and we move on to be eligible to receive funding.
the way I understand it right now is if we move into this next round, each team is eligible to receive up to 170,000 Matic as a matched donation from Polygon, as a matched grant from Polygon.
So I believe there will be a bit of crowdfunding going on if we move into this next round in about four and a half days And then any amount we receive up to a hundred and seventy thousand Matic will be matched by the polygon labs team So super cool, which is you know, it would be massively beneficial to us. We are a very lean team Like I said, we minted the Roo Troop project at the beginning of last year
We minted for about half the price as other projects in the space. We minted at 0.042 ETH. And we gave out a fifth of our supply for free to the community, just to, you know, provide some value back. So reason I say that is we didn't bring in that much funding and we have essentially bootstrapped this with the amount that we brought in almost two years ago. So this grant would propel us forward in a way that we honestly need and
would bring us to the market way quicker than we are currently able to get there. So yeah, a little bit about the grant. If you guys are able to vote, check your eligibility, vote for Seekr, I will be massively appreciative. Might even send you a root for doing so.
Ashley Smith (33:47)
Well, I wish you good luck and all the best in all of your building initiatives moving forward. But that being said, in terms of bootstrapping it and initiatives, it is interesting to see A, someone like yourself continuing to build, especially in, right now, your focus really leans into the Web3 community generally in terms of talent and skill set. And then of course, Polygon doing something like this where they have an initiative.
really looking to help support companies and projects that are building in the blockchain space. And so I'd be remiss if I didn't ask, like, you know, clearly the last couple of years, we've seen a lot of ups and downs. We do see that like, you know, cryptos feeling a little more positive, generally speaking, and a lot of that tends to tie into the narrative around Web3 and NFTs and blockchain technology. But I'd love to see that.
to know your insight and your thoughts on just like where we're at. And again, I'm not asking you on your thoughts on the crypto market, more on the technology and it being an important piece to business and infrastructure and how things are done, kind of moving ahead, let's say over the next five years or so.
Morgan Stone (35:06)
Yeah, I think things are looking really good from that perspective, which is the opposite of my view on the market. Right. I think when people talk about the crypto market, the NFT market, Web3 market, they're talking about the speculative asset side, right? The degenerate gambling side of the market. But we've had a pretty unique perspective on the space over the last two years, being that we work with
Builders, right? Companies come to us to hire talent because they're building applications on the blockchain. And these are applications that for the most part have not even launched yet. So we've got, we've got a really cool perspective being that we get to kind of see what's going on in the ecosystem beneath all of the noise and hype and speculative trading and whatnot that's going on. So from where we sit,
things are looking really positive.
It takes time to build applications that are of use and can actually be useful and provide value to the community. And these things don't happen overnight, like NFT mints or meme coin mints. And that's why you don't necessarily see them at the forefront of the news and all the headlines because they're still being built.
I think over the next couple of years, we're going to start seeing a lot of these DApps come out. And when I say DApp, I mean decentralized application.
We're gonna start seeing them come out and visions come to fruition and these builders that may or may not have platforms who have been silently building in the background for years they're gonna start to get some of the spotlight and Industries are gonna start to shift like you said, you know, we're working in the job sphere But you coming from the real estate the real estate realm, you know, there's big use case for NFTs, soulbound tokens there as well
so I'm really
bullish, I hate saying bullish, but like I'm very optimistic rather on the future of the space. And I think a big part of that is people are maturing too. We've gotten out of that euphoric gambling stage and people took big hits, they made a lot of money. But you know, for the most part, a lot of people have matured and they have gained a lot of knowledge over the last couple of years. So I'm also optimistic that these people who have been building real products that provide tangible value.
Ashley Smith (36:57)
Mm-hmm.
Morgan Stone (37:22)
will start to get the support that they might not have gotten over the last few years. They might have gotten brushed to the side for the 17th shiny thing of the week. Whereas I think the builders, the people who are building stuff, are actually going to receive that support and spotlight very soon.
Ashley Smith (37:39)
love to know if I was a fly on the wall in your office, Morgan, would I be hearing conversations with mainly Web3 native companies and startups or would there be a fair mix of more traditional companies looking to integrate Web3 technologies into what they do?
Morgan Stone (37:57)
If you're sitting in my office, you would definitely hear more Web 3 conversations. If you're reading my emails and coming to in-person meetings with me, then you would be seeing a good mix of Web 2 traditional businesses looking to understand how they can leverage Web 3 tech as well, which I think is a funny nuance, right? A lot of us in the Web 3 sector, we operate off Zoom and, you know, Google meets all day every day.
Ashley Smith (38:14)
Mm-hmm.
Morgan Stone (38:24)
Whereas people in the traditional world who have these huge corporations, they say, all right, you know, come to our office this time, this day, this is the address, parking's here, get it validated, yada, yada. It's very traditional, right?
Ashley Smith (38:37)
And so maybe just in case there's lingering questions from the audience, some that come to mind might be if they're hiring freelancers through your platform and they're anonymous, this would basically be like contracted work. Like, I guess my question is around what are their liabilities or responsibilities related to, you know, tax? And obviously, things would depend on where they are in the world. But they might be wondering a bit about.
working with people who are not, do they remain anonymous to that employer after they're hired?
Morgan Stone (39:10)
Out of our hands, it is up to the employer what they want to require. If they want to stay following legal regulatory practices, legal kind of compliance practices, then we highly recommend that they require their freelancer to dox and reveal their identity so that they can understand where they are, what the tax implications are, things of that nature. But it's not what we do.
Right. We are the platform to connect you past that it is in the employer's hands. Now in the future, we will probably be integrating systems that shine some light, give some education, give some kind of steps to take for employers to make sure they are staying compliant and, you know, doing everything kosher, so to speak.
Um, for now we're just the matching service. Right. Um, that said, like.
definitely recommend NDA-ing anybody you work with, get them under a contract. And the NDA goes both ways so that they can be confident that you're not going to share their personal information and who they are and they can remain anonymous on the platform.
That's a big reason for Seekr as well, right? Is anonymity plays a big role in web three, whether we like it or not, you know, everybody's got an opinion on it.
There's a lot of really talented professionals who decide to stay anonymous for good reason, right? They could have a lot of assets. They could live in an area that doesn't necessarily like what they're doing It could be a whole slew of reasons
But what we wanted to do was allow these people to shine without having to necessarily dox themselves publicly That's where the proof of higher credentials come into play because now these people who are picking up work They don't have to chase reference checks
Ashley Smith (40:49)
Mm-hmm.
Morgan Stone (40:57)
They just have a credential on their profile that says, yes, they worked for this company during this time and they did this work and they gained these skills from that work. Right.
again, like whether they doxx privately to the employer or not, that's another story. But publicly, they can remain anonymous and still be confident that they are considered for.
Ashley Smith (41:17)
Right. And I do see this as kind of an alternative as an example to, maybe it's a slightly different
context on something like LinkedIn, but you're probably not going to interact with a LinkedIn profile that is clearly an anonymous one. It just, it doesn't make sense in that context.
Morgan Stone (41:36)
you can jump on LinkedIn today and say you are the CEO of Twitter or X, you know, and they can't remove you for several weeks. You can do that on your own accord. And all of a sudden you can be out in the job market, shopping your profile as CEO of X or product manager for Google when you don't necessarily have any of those credentials.
Ashley Smith (41:58)
I do want to ask before we go again, and I'm sorry, I'm not trying to push back, but I just know that these are the types of things people might be wondering about. So let's say there's a match on your platform, someone gains the credential, like they have the proof of experience, but what if they're terrible? Like what if they were just awful? And there's maybe now this association between that awful prospective employee or...
person who's going to contract with the company and the previous company. It almost, it feels like they're giving them a thumbs up and what if they don't want to?
Morgan Stone (42:35)
Yeah, great question. And this is something that we didn't talk about yet. So good timing as well.
We didn't mention the fact that there are actually two pieces that we're using soulbound tokens for. And the second piece is not yet live. The proof of higher credentials is just being wrapped up this week, actually. The second piece is to combat what you said. So there'll be a review system after the work is completed.
And the review system will be based on the skills that were shopped in the initial job description. So it's not gonna be a free form review system where an employer can come in and say, Ashley is the worst person ever because she went to the bathroom 17 times a day.
But they will be able to say, okay, we initially hired you for community manager role. The skills that we called out were marketing, sales, business development, ability to use Discord, Twitter, speak on spaces, speak on podcasts. And they'll be able to go and rank from one to five how well that person actually did. In this review will be a soulbound token attached to that proof of higher credential as well. So you will be able to see, OK.
you know, Ashley worked for this company, but it's not just that she worked for the company. You can drill in and see how well she did at the company too. So really implementing a kind of soulbound review system, so to speak.
Ashley Smith (43:52)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm, really interesting. And I imagine that as you move forward, as you get more funding and as there's more adoption, you'll continue to grow and build on this ecosystem that you're putting together here, which is super cool. I'd love to know, is there anything you'd like to leave our audience with about what you're doing or what you're excited about that we haven't discussed already?
Morgan Stone (44:21)
Yeah, a couple of initiatives to call out. One, the Polygon grant, again, go find my Twitter, it's Morgan Stone with three Es or go to seeker underscore IO. You'll see it blasted all over there. Really appreciate a vote if you are eligible. Two, we are wrapping up a new UI for our proof of hire credentialing this week. So any company out there who would like to get your team onboarded and give them some proof of hire credentials, you know, up.
the reputation of your company, of your team. Hit me up, would love to work with you guys. We're doing that for free for the initial batch.
On the platform eventually, it'll all be free. People will just get hired and then they'll receive a proof of hire credential in the same transaction, yada yada.
For now, hit me up, it's a manual process.
We can get your team onboarded very quickly.
We'll be starting that probably in the next week or two.
Third and fourth thing, if you are a job seeker looking for work, join the Seekr Talent Pool. Go to seeker.io, sign up. It takes five minutes to build out a profile. Literally just copy paste everything from your LinkedIn profile if you have one. If not, do it from your resume.
And basically build out your Seekr profile to be your resume. Let us know what roles you're in the market for so that our system can match you with opportunities and we'll hit you up as soon as we have an opportunity that aligns with your profile.
Everything on the Seekr side.
Totally free. You won't pay anything, any funds that you receive for work you do, 100% yours. We don't take a cut of your fee.
And then the last and final thing on the talent scouter side, the hiring manager side, if you're looking for talent, hit me up. It's a bit manual right now, but if you just shoot me an email, if you shoot me a DM, I'll give you all the information you need and we can get you a short list of banger candidates within two or three days.
We also charge very...
competitive placement fee right now. It's only 7.5% on successfully placed talent for their first year salary.
Whereas traditional recruiters are gonna charge you between 15 and 30%. So we drastically undercut all competition. We're doing it just so we can get our positioning that we want. It won't last forever. So if you're in the market for talent, come to me now. We can get you some talent for cheap.
Ashley Smith (46:29)
Very cool. I am going to ask where people can find you and Seekr. But first I want to ask, if someone wants to stay in touch with what you're doing with Seekr and they're not necessarily deep in the sort of web three ecosystem, like maybe they think this is something I could see myself or our company wanting to get involved in maybe a year from now, or we want to see where this goes.
And they're not the type that's going to be on.
X. They're not the type that's going to be in that kind of more crypto native arena. What's the best way for that type of individual or organization to keep in touch with what you're doing?
Morgan Stone (47:09)
Yep. Um, so two ways. One, if you're on LinkedIn, um, find me on LinkedIn. It's just Morgan Stone, my real name. You'll see my face on there. Um, and you'll see Seekr blasted all over the page. Um, shoot me a connection request. Say you saw this podcast, want to connect for future opportunities.
and then the second is hit me up via email. Um, I feel like I'm kind of the odd one out in web three where I prefer email over all else. Um, also, you know, weird for my age, I guess I've been told.
But I love email, so stone at seeker.io. It's S-T-O-N-E at S-E-E-K-R.io.
Shoot me an email with who you are, what you're looking for, and yeah, we'll get it going from there.
Ashley Smith (47:50)
Very cool. Well, I'll make sure all of those are linked in the show notes. And for the rest of the people who are like super into web three, they're dialed in where, where should they, where's their number one or two places they should be following you and or seeker.
Morgan Stone (48:02)
Yeah, I would say follow my personal Twitter account. That's where we're the most active.
And then you can find Seekr, S-E-E-K-R, underscore I-O. We post all major updates on there. We also post them in our Discord server.
if you're also tapped in with the Roo Troop community,
we blast everything across all of our channels whenever there's major updates. Um,
again, you know, feel free to email me, feel free to connect on LinkedIn. Um, happy to add you to an email list for all updates. Uh, just find me first, tell me what you want and, uh, we'll, we'll throw you in the appropriate channels.
Ashley Smith (48:35)
Well, this has been great, Morgan. I've really, really appreciated our second conversation on this podcast. Lots of evolution, lots of things that you've done since our last talk, but I will say there's just so much in way of consistency since our last talk as well. So it's clear that you've had an idea and you've been moving towards it and building, which I really admire. So kudos to you. And I do think it's going to be neat to look back at sort of the early days, 21, 22, and seeing what...
you know, really important companies are born from that time. And it's very likely that Seekr may very well be one of those. So anyways, congrats and good luck with the Polygon grant. I hope we chat again, perhaps in another year.
Morgan Stone (49:18)
Yeah, thanks so much, Ashley. I really appreciate you hit me up for this round two. It's been a pleasure and you run a tight ship. So yeah, looking forward to seeing the success of this podcast as well. And I'm sure we'll stay in touch.
Ashley Smith (49:30)
Cool. Thanks so much, Morgan. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll talk to you again soon. And I don't know if it'll be next week because it's like Christmas. So stay tuned. You'll know. You'll know if it's there, if not very soon.
Have a great day, everybody.
