Blockchain Life: inside a start-up on speed
Sam Baldwin, Eventum Growth Manager, reflects on life on the blockchain, inside team Eventum in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
I’m no stranger to start-up life.
A decade ago I was employee number nine for the then unheard of flight site: Skyscanner. Work life moved fast. Nothing stayed the same for long as we expanded our user base, staff numbers, and global presence at a rapid rate.
In under a decade, Skyscanner went from obscure Scottish start-up, to full-blown ‘unicorn’ with almost 1000 employees, offices across the world, and a valuation of over 1 billion dollars.
At Skyscanner I experienced nine years of hyper-growth but compared to life in the blockchain world, the pace was relatively relaxed. Indeed one of my Eventum colleagues recently asked me what it had been like to work for an ‘old’ company!
It was a realization for me; tech moves faster than a Lambo on jetfuel and while start-ups are inherently agile environments, blockchain start-ups are like normal start-ups on industrial-strength growth-hormones.
It’s a ride even more rapid and with greater turbulence than your average new business. New things are happening almost hourly in the blockchain world: new legislation, new companies, new tokens, new opinions, new laws, new rules, new regulations and new ideas. It’s still uncharted earth; no one quite knows what’s next. Which is precisely what makes it so appealing.
There are dozens of blockchain conferences each week around the world, and Eventum has been invited to speak at several of them, often at short notice. Martin Mikeln, Eventum co-founder, along with Peter Jamnik and Matic Konjar, has been traveling from conference to conference, spreading the good word of Eventum far and wide. One day Budapest, the next day Zurich, the next San Francisco. New York, Tokyo, Singapore, and Seoul too have all been stops on Eventum’s global tour.
In the meantime, co-founder Luka Perović and the other developers have been holding the fort back at base in Ljubljana, Slovenia, running new Eventum alpha tests and building on the core code of the Eventum platform.
Today, it’s a sunny 26C outside, yet from our office in the north of the city, we can see the spiky peaks of the Kamnik-Savinja Alps, still snow-capped. Here at Eventum HQ, we’re in the midst of doing all the things a new business must do: setting up legal compliance and financial requirements, interviewing and hiring new staff, marketing and PR, meeting potential clients, forming new partnerships, and building on the immense community we have already created from scratch.
Being based in beautiful Ljubljana, Slovenia — a blockchain capital in its own right — we are surrounded by many other successful and up-and-coming crypto companies, which only increases the blockchain fervor more. Ljubljana is a small city, and everybody learns fast from others in the space.
If you don’t like change, I advise you not to work in the blockchain world. But if you enjoy learning fast, moving fast and doing fast, then the blockchain sphere could be for you. When your company is building something that is at the forefront of a new technology, you have to be ready to change tack fast because each day brings a whole set of changes that didn’t exist yesterday, and there are new opportunities that appear almost every week.
It’s a highly exciting place to be right now. Here at Eventum we are building a truly powerful, open source platform which we believe will make a positive impact on the world, using blockchain and the wisdom of crowds to the benefit of all.
It’s been an unexpectedly fast ride so far, and Eventum has only just begun. The plans for the next 12 months are very, very exciting and the team is buzzing for what lies ahead.
If you want to be part of something truly significant, sign up for Eventum alpha to participate in events and earn ether and EVT tokens, get in touch to talk about a partnership, or come and work for us in Slovenia, the world’s most beautiful country, (which also happens to be a blockchain super-hub) — we’re hiring.
