[Transcript of my talk at Atlas Cafe on Tuesday, April 19th, 2022. If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE7PKRjrid4

Good evening everyone, (my name is Li Jiang from the Harmony core team)

By a show of hand, how many of you currently work in Web3?

Okay that’s good. For the rest of you, what are you doing with your lives?

By the end of tonight, we hope that all of you can raise your hand to that question.

Like NEO, all of us here have our dream. Be it an American Dream, Chinese Dream, or perhaps a Web3 Dream—whatever version, I’m sure most of you here would be able to articulate it. So what is your Web3 dream?

My entry into Web3 was a happy accident.

Five years ago, I met a few friends by chance in the Bay Area. And I was lucky to be invited to join their weekly gatherings. Every week, this group would get together for four hours or more at a street corner in Sunnyvale over cheap beer and ramen noddles. We shared our dreams and asked each other for help. At the time, I was a young venture capitalist and I was there mostly just to see what cool new things people were working on.

In the beginning, the group was actually focused on machine learning. It wasn’t until one day, ONE of the members first started telling everyone that “blockchain was for real”. That was when many of us started studying what was possible in crypto—for the record, I was the slowest learner. And it really took at least a year of exploration before Harmony became a fully formed project.

Like most startups, we had our share of struggles in the early years during crypto winters and Covid waves.

Today, Harmony is an “overnight” billion-dollar network and a success story by some accounts, after more than five years of hard work.