EthCC Recap: The Gelato Team Meets For the First Time in Paris
This time last week, EthCC was opening its doors for Day 1 with hackers and builders converging from all over the world to meet up in Paris to discuss Ethereum and especially the ‘Future of France.’ The conference was filled with interesting talks, thoughtful discussion, and plenty of events outside the main affair to attend. For the Gelato team, it was the first time that the majority of members were able to meet each other IRL which made the occasion particularly special.
For me personally, EthCC was 5 months in the making. I originally joined Gelato back in February and outside of meeting our G-UNI wizard Ari in June, I have only interacted with the team online through messages and video calls. Meeting everyone in Paris allowed me to attach a person to an online identity, it made everything feel a lot more “real.” Something that really struck me about the Gelato team was the chemistry. Everyone was already in sync while remote and the comradery only increased as we spent more time with each other.
It’s funny how EthCC came together for the whole Gelato team. There originally was no plan for anyone but Hilmar, one of the co-founders of Gelato, to head to the conference to speak. Yet, being the person that I am, I aped into a flight a few weeks before and had faith that things would figure themselves out. Once I shared the news with the Gelato team that I was intending to go, then the rest of the dominos fell from there, and eventually, everyone that could make it to Paris, did.
As the Growth Lead, I have always viewed it as my job to be the ambassador for Gelato while our devs can focus on building. From the start, I made it my mission to talk to as many people as possible. Walking in the streets of Paris on the day I landed, I ran into Joseph Delong and Gasper from Sushi randomly and we ended up going to the top of the Eiffel Tower. During the week, I connected with people with who I have previously only had online interactions as well as met a bunch of new faces. These included Mariano from Maker, Marc from Aave, Mounir from Paraswap, Kain from Synthetix, and Julien from Stake DAO among others. I enjoyed all of our conversations and look forward to seeing everyone again at events in the future.
While I was networking, the rest of the team was back at the Gelato flat which served as our temporary HQ hacking away. One thing that was evident was that almost everyone that I had conversations with during the week at the conference and at events knew what Gelato was or have seen Gelato before. It was fulfilling seeing months of collective hard work both building much-needed automation use cases and preaching the Gelato gospel far and wide was finally bearing fruit.
Make no mistake, I unequivocally believe that Gelato is well on its way to becoming one of the titans of DeFi and I find myself humbled every day to be working aside people that truly know their stuff. It is obvious that automation is one part of the middleware infrastructure that is lacking in crypto, and Gelato has built a powerful and sustainable system to bring reliable automation at a mass scale. What will drive Gelato’s success is not just that we are tackling a need in the market, but everyone on the team that is making it all possible.
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