Unlocking Web3 Potential: Konstantin Tkachuk‘s Journey from Ural to Web3 Startup Advisory.
Konstantin Tkachuk — Startup Advisor, ex-Protocol Labs Startup Operator.
- What drew you to the crypto space initially?
Since a very young age, I have been very passionate about distributed systems. At that time, I was using torrents quite a lot for electronic music writing, and they were the only source of rare vinyl music samples. The problem at that time was that preserving and sharing those rare recordings to the networks was usually done out of goodwill and no monetary incentive. Furthermore, if something happened to the initial seed’s servers or storage, the content could have been lost permanently, and no existing replication was available anywhere else. Fast forwarding to 2020, I was a founding team member of a construction AI startup. The industry moved and felt so slow that I wanted to move to a more active and inspiring community. Web3 appeared to be a perfect combination of what I was looking for. Incredible feelings of innovation, like-minded people building things, and solving problems that never existed before, together with core values of transparency and security, created an environment I wanted to be part of. I participated in multiple hackathons, including HackFS and NFT Vision Hack, winning the latter and started interviewing with Protocol Labs. Apparently, they were able to solve the problem I was thinking about early on about preserving and incentivizing storing humanity’s most important knowledge, so it was a natural match for me to join them as a Startup Operator and Developer Advocate. Since then, I have only been getting deeper into the Web3 rabbit hole and never regretted that decision.
2. Could you share three personal facts unrelated to Web3?
- I was representing my country at the 8th Model ASEM during the ASEM FMM13 foreign ministers meeting in Myanmar organized by the Asia Europe Foundation
- I won a SpaceX Hyperloop competition in 2019 as a part of the TUM Hyperloop team
- I received the Schwarzman Scholarship to take part in a one-year, fully-funded master’s program at Tsinghua University in Beijing, designed to build a global community of future leaders
3. Can you walk us through the initial phase of your Web3 career?
Starting as a builder myself in the industry, participating in hackathons, and then transitioning to a Startup Operator position at Protocol Labs, it was very natural for me to understand the engineering complexity and needs of the community that works with IPFS and Filecoin. Paired with previous entrepreneurial experiences, I focused on helping startups from the hackathon stage to Series D. I led collaborations across the whole technology stack, providing support from deep-tech system engineering to high-level marketing and business development, resulting in 50+ collaborations achieved in a year. Starting in 2022, I also started building my personal advisory network. Being exposed to a vast number of fascinating startups, I wanted to help the most interesting ones to succeed with whatever I could. The best framework appeared to be private consulting, focusing on business and tech advisory, where I now advise multiple early-stage startups in different capacities.
4. Why did you decide to become an advisor for FileMarket? What intrigued you about the project?
Filemarket first caught my attention when a founder Ilya was referred to when he was looking for ways to tap into the Protocol Labs ecosystem. We immediately found the connection and realized that we were coming from the same city in the middle of nowhere in Siberia. Moreover, we have similar professional views and both are excited about what opportunities decentralization could bring to our daily lives. Then I started looking into what FileMarket is working on.
The ambition to merge inherently public decentralized blockchain design with privacy on-chain is a very interesting and useful goal. With further industry adoption of Web3 solutions, you will more and more face the need to distribute private content with limited access across the networks. While there are some ways to do that on the user side, like encrypting content before uploading, but the true opportunities and use cases will appear only once you are able to handle that natively. FileMarket addresses exactly this challenge and sees its early adoption from content creator communities and token-gated access to various benefits on the chain. I find it exciting to support the team that tackles such fundamental technological solutions and see great potential for various use cases once the project is ready.
5. I understand you hail from Ekaterinburg in the Ural region. How has that influenced your life and professional ambitions?
Yeah, the middle of nowhere is called Yekaterinburg. It is located in the middle of Russia, with a beautiful and harsh environment around it. When half of your year is winter, people tend to become very cold from the outside. However, once you get to know them better they become extremely warm and welcoming, ready to share everything they have with a friend in need. Coming from those areas, made me realize that you always have to dig beyond the surface image that a person or company shows to others Only when you start to see the true nature, their goals and interests, that’s when you are able to make a decision whether your values and paths align. I look for strong self-esteem and society-oriented values in people I work closely with and I see great potential in the team behind FileMarket.
6. When advising startups, what challenges do you typically encounter across their growth stages?
Having worked with startups across different growth stages, the biggest challenge I see is finding the right incentive model for the users and a sustainable revenue model as a result. Especially, in the Web3 space with much turbulence in recent years only the teams that were building on values and economic model that was fair to their user base and did not rely on endless growth cycles were able to survive. Many collapses that we saw were dependent on the expectation of continuous crypto growth, while the crypto winter reality froze a lot of unsustainable projects for the good of the whole ecosystem. Designing the right incentive business model, therefore becomes the crucial step for any startup. When you align your goals well with your users, investors and larger community goals, that’s when success becomes inevitable.
7. Which innovations in both Web2 and Web3 do you see as game-changers in the near future?
Personally, I see a lot of potential in smart contract automation on top of information or content. Whether it is an automated insurance system that executes payment instantly from oracle information or content access management based on token ownership, it all will change the way things operate in the world right now. Removing middlemen from many operations we have to execute daily will reduce the costs and friction, allowing us to focus on what really matters. It feels that we have unveiled only 1% of all opportunities that Web3 brings to us and there are still so many low-hanging fruits beyond just financial applications that wait to be disrupted. FVM today allows more solutions to be built on top of content. Merging smart logic with content in the same place will disrupt the world where everything is only possible in a centralized system. Now you are able to preserve your own rights, content and information, while still utilizing them for any global interaction. It is the time to build the future together!
Konstantin Tkachuk social links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tkachukk/
Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/Tkachuk_science
