Talking about Cryptocurrencies and Remittances in UPLB

Bloom at VISIV’s “DoDecrypt”

An organization in the “University of the Philippines (Los Banos)” named VISIV reached out to Bloom to get us to sponsor an event called DoDecrypt that would happen on March 26, 2018. It was a blockchain forum and symposium. We participated as a sponsor and was given a speaking slot.

The entire team encouraged me to go and take this slot. I gave a yes without knowing what to talk about, and how to go on preparing for this in the midst of Q1 2018 ending. To be honest, I was nervous. Despite the nerves getting onto me, I knew that this was something I wanted to work on, so I took this chance. As Michael Jordan said: You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

I want to mark this year as the year I start improving my communication skills and help get the Bloom brand out there in the process.

What to talk about

The first thing that came into my mind was: what blockchain topic should I talk about? I figured I wanted to talk about what I learned from being with Bloom for the past year: cryptocurrencies and remittances.

Whenever we interview engineers I always end up explaining the remittance workflow when I see that they’re getting lost in the codebase. That explanation also gets carried over to dinner conversations whenever I have to explain why Bloom does what it does. A big part of why I also wanted to talk about this is because it’s something I learned after joining Bloom. It blew my mind how straightforward (and unnervingly brittle) every bank in the world handles the global flow of money.

Preparing the materials

To summarize, here are the steps I took:

1. Who are my audience? ‘Students’ were the audience, and they want to learn more about blockchain and cryptocurrencies. The topic I had in mind was about the use cryptocurrencies for remittances (as a settlement mechanism), so I need to make remittances as simple as I can.
2. What type of talk should I give? There are 3 types: Informative talks, Persuasive talks, Entertainment talk. Informative talks are usually filled with data, concepts and diagrams, the goal is to explain an abstract concept and uncover what you’ve learned. Persuasive talks are used to get your audience to answer a call-to-action, it’s aim is to influence and change opinions. The tone is softer and subjective compared to an Informative talk. Entertainment talks are used for special events, the content is commemorative and leaning towards honoring the person/organization of interest.
3. Drafting. This is probably the lengthiest part of the process. I started writing a number of paragraphs in an informal tone to cover the abstract topic, similar to how people talk about things over coffee. I hand-drew diagrams. Let’s just call this document, “cliff notes”.
4. Making the slides. Chopped the “cliff notes” into slides and pasted them into the speaker notes section. I refused to add too much text in the slides because 1.) it’ll make me tempted to just read things off the slide, 2.) and they’re here to listen to someone talking, not someone reading a slide. Took the branding colors that we use and built the slides. Special thanks to Flaticons for the icons and Unsplash for the photos.
5. Feedback. I gave the talk to my wife and parents while timing myself. I’m only given 20-minutes, and my audience are students, short and sweet was the goal. This part of the process was extremely helpful. I figured out if there were parts that I droned through too much prose just to power through the concept. I ended up culling out 30% of my slides, based on feedback, it was too heavy for a 20-minute topic.

How it all went

My wife and kid came along. Elain wanted a road trip and was excited to support me on this. Surprisingly, my parents dropped by too!

Recently discovered toddler hack: Bring a pillow, some toys, books and snack books. Never did we pull out our phones to entertain him, Navi liked the road trip because of the pillow. Elain liked the pillow because when Navi sleeps she puts him down and she can relax with her hands free. AJ, a fellow engineer at Bloom, accompanied me for support.

Arrived at UPLB after 1 1/2 hours of driving. Stopped by a coffee shop inside the campus called Ginhawa Craft Studio.

Last minute preparation in the speakers table before going up the stage. Instead of bringing my laptop for notes, I placed my cliff notes on my phone and had more freedom to walk around the stage.

Closing the event, we got a certificate of recognition, a cake, and of course the attention and interest of students. {cryptonight} gave me his stack of Cryptop cards to give to the students, and it was a big hit!

Lessons Learned

1. If you learn about something that blows your mind, share it with others. To the general populace, “Correspondent Banking System” is probably the most boring string of words you could put together, but it just blew my mind how this system held together the global flow of money. It gave me a clearer picture of why things are the way they are just because I regular skim the surface of the underlying infrastructure.
2. Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback. Generally speaking, unless it’s something really top-secret, the more you hide what you’re working on, the lesser you’ll learn and make it better.
3. Progress is better than perfect. My initial slides sucked, it took me an entire day to make a 20 minute talk, I took 23 minutes instead of finishing in 20 minutes, I made a lot of ‘uhms’ and ‘ahs’, stuttering and getting lost in thought. The perfectionist in me would’ve liked to spend a week to make amazing slides and rehearsed this over and over; and I wouldn’t have been able to actually go and speak about a topic. Everyone starts somewhere and I’ve got a long way to go. As long as I keep putting myself out there, I’ll master the process of writing about a complicated topic and giving a clear talk about it. This can help me in so many ways, from programming to business development.
4. Be human. When it was time to introduce myself, it was so tempting to read a company profile, some product description and get on with the topic. I’ll probably flash some diagram with a bunch of text under some icons and move forward. It’s easy and comfortable, but it sounds too robotic.

There are many other lessons learned, and I’ll learn more as I keep on doing this. On the other side, I do hope the attendees got to learn something new about cryptocurrencies and remittances.

Thanks to UPLB and VISIV for inviting Bloom to participate in your event!