Metadata
Transcript: Gary Sheng and Robert Aron Zawiasa (Raz)
Date: 2025-05-05
Participants
- Gary Sheng (GS)
- Robert Aron Zawiasa (Raz / RAZ)
Context
Discussion about potential collaboration between Raz and Alpha Schools / The Alpha Bet, focusing on Raz potentially leading the development of a new, bespoke identity and gamified movement infrastructure platform for the Alpha ecosystem, leveraging his experience building Guild.xyz.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] for the last five years, almost as a singular thing, and I'm not very not that like a very interested in just doing that, like I want to open up to you opportunities. I want to achieve way more than just what I'm doing with Gild now. So I wanted to talk about this opportunities and I'm potentially uh willing to even like uh leave killed as a project for a period of time because it's sort of like on autopilot already, uh and I have more and more people around me inudabas who are looking for new opportunities to, like, basically our team is uh, I'd like even our team is like hiring constantly, but even like independent from my current team, I have more and more people just the happy accidents when I meet more and more people that I I would be I would love to work with and like form a team with them. so yeah, I in short, I just feel like there is opportunity to do more. And if I do more, I'm very excited to explore that video.
[Gary Sheng] Cool, how much do you?
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] Uh, so. I would probably get into this, uh as a team and uh it depends on the size of the team, probably. And basically the way I would approach this is uh I would probably just calculate all my costs and everything and then I'll add like a 40 to 60 percent margin, uh and then basically that that's what I would uh bill like that's what I would charge, basically.
[Gary Sheng] It's a little way it would work is, um, every person that you bring aut will be brought on to the HR system. and so they would get paid they would get paid,
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] but because I'm an entrepreneur, like I have entities, uh already a little over the word, like, I can I can just work as a contractor
[Gary Sheng] but you bring in as an HR too.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] Like, I prefer to work as an entrepreneur continuous
[Gary Sheng] the two could be a contractor to, but I see what you mean. You you could just say everything could flow through you.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] Yeah, so basically what I'm thinking is like, let's say like if I bring you like a a a theme of like 10 developers, which I lead, uh I would chart something like 360 per month and then basically we would make a contract for like three months ahead or or like a two months ahead or something like that, like a short period of time. and then basically we would work like mad, like crazy, like deliver everything in a short period of time. And then if you're satisfied them, we would make longer contracts.
[Gary Sheng] This identity system is really interesting and um I think he would pay a lot of money for that. Um so I think we should so part of why I wanted to record was like, how how I've been making the design documents and proposals is literally just taking a transcript of a brainstorm about different things. So let me give you some more context, because stuff has changed in the last week. Well, Okay, so without permission, I gathered basically 120 powerful people. and bought exactlyvised ranch for like, um, you know, I can do that kind of thing pretty easily. I summoned like 120 people, including the person that discovered Kanye.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] Yeah.
[Gary Sheng] and Virgil Ablo, you know what that is? Virgil Ablo?
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] No.
[Gary Sheng] off white, you know, you know, the anyways, he he was a Louis Vittan's creative director for a bit, too.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] Oh, that's. That's cool. Oh, virtual yeah, sorry, I just, uh I need to re check the transcript and then I I realized I know virt just, for for sure.
[Gary Sheng] So that was just one of like a bunch of people that were there, right? And including like, I don't rappers, people that um manage rappers and people that are very close and their family's own NBA teams is like stuff like that.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] Okay.
[Gary Sheng] and I didn't ask for permission to do it because I knew I wouldn't get approval.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] Oh, like like if I got approval, it would be like, oh, give yourself three months to do it.
[Gary Sheng] I gave myself I gave myself one week.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] Okay.
[Gary Sheng] I give myself one week. I had the idea by calling Zach, hey, I'm I moved to Austin. He's like, oh, I have I don't live here anymore, but because I moved to Ventura so that I could raise a new baby. But I come to I go to Austin and my ranch, you know, every so often. And I'm actually going to be there next week on the week of the 20th, like the on the 23r, 24th, I think that was like, oh, Joan do an event on the 23rd? And I was like, sure. And I started off with like a 15 person dinner idea and when people found out about it and became 30, then it became 40 and then it could be 60, and then it became 80, it became 90 became 100, became 120 And the and the like show up rate was like 90 plus percent, which is kind crazy, you know, like for an event that I didn't charge for because I just wanted there to be no barriers.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] So that would be how it is connected. I'm I'm not following you, sorry.
[Gary Sheng] Like you you get her together a bunch of people, which you didn' before the background yes, I wasn't just hired to be an engineer. But I was I've been part of this like I got added to this engineering like organization just to bring me on faster because that's how that's where I was discovered. Oops that far um and I wanted to basically lead the movement. So I decided to just start doing that without asking for permission and I just used my own money to pay for the event. And there was a lot of impact. There's so much so what what Joe wants is to start a lot of elite schools. and so I created a bunch of inbound to be able to do that, elite schools. Um, all in like one event. Um, and so over the past week, I think we chatted like early last week for the past week, we I have been creating a a proposal for a new department, let's basically gonna movement building experimental department. And that includes a like HR where I like hired pretty like brilliant people like you. um and just to fill gaps, right? It's not about building an organization under me. Like if you came on, you would just I would just want you to report I don't care about the power structure.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] I'm I mean, I don't zero percent of I zero, no, me too.
[Gary Sheng] I'm just saying that the way would work. that I would prefer is CM Joe here, dictator. I'm like super HR. K kind of like I'm a conclia, but like anyways, this directory reporting. and I want to find people that can be that can directly report to him that are capable of being that are being full owners of an outcome, right?
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] Um Yeah, I like good setup. to be frank, like what I like to do is to get delegated on super difficult problems, engineering software problems, and then solve them in a short period oflect that's what I'm interested in and like in exchange, making a sheet ton of money. Like that's what I'm interested in. Do extremely difficult development wise and doing something that like really helps the word move forward.
[Gary Sheng] Yeah. in a way, I'm basically saying you should get paid to white label guild.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] That's that's a possibility to like, I'm willing to like hijack the the entire guild team to do something like this. uh, that would probably require another discussion because I would need to like, uh get Bruno involved.
[Gary Sheng] I mean, I I just trust that you'll figure out how to make something happen, like, whether it's existing guild team members or or not. But what I'm saying is like, well, you basically built with guild was an identity system anyways, that that is much more usefulset of crypto ironically, right?
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] Yeah, but because of my experience, what I'm suggesting is that basically I can rebuild you a better guild, like custom Taylor to your in a short period of time, because I already know what I'm doing. I already know what TV to choose how to work with that, how to structure the data. Like I can rebuild everything and you don't have to write label anything. Like guilt can exist independently continuously and I can just rebuild all the parts that you need in your project.
[Gary Sheng] Okay, great. So one thing that Um
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] well prefer this, like actually I would prefer starting from scratch in super custom tailored. just project and then it can grow bigger, it can become its own thing on the long term, but that's not my focus. This is my focus is to like really something incredible that helps your project and, like, Jill move forward with this entire thing.
[Gary Sheng] Cool, so what what's gonna need to happen very soon is a not even as one like a bunch of metrics that get tracked as like everyone's the main character, right? And everyone, I think I think what I love about a lot of tech that's clearly needed is that it forces the conversation what even is good engagement. Like what what does it mean to be a useful member of the movement? right? So let's talk out loud about that. What and like what should you get paid for? Because ultimately, okay. What would this identity infrastructure ultimately be for or ongoingly before? It would be for um a constant leaderboard or leader boards that show who is doing the most in different categories, but also overall. um, it should lead that these point totals and and money flowing should be made so there are more extremely high quality schools that get started. Um
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] and I basically do all of that based on uh a deep analytical uh method where basically it with AI, we analyze all the activities of the of the students in all fields. And like just to record a bunch like an incredible amount of data from all the all sorts of different sources and just analyze that and then create the leader.
[Gary Sheng] I think that's the core idea to have that to like be able to measure And so for
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] yeah, for student, there's like, they already have a at least the be beginning of a set of metrics that are like, are you a good student? And so we need to integrate at that. We'll figure out how to do that.
[Gary Sheng] um there has to be uh, like a scientific metodology for that, but what I'm suggesting is to like let's start with the infrastructure, do a bunch of experiments and then gradually bring in the scientists who actually like work uh work out all the details of like how to measure and then uh quantify everything. I think that has to be like a process of years, if not decades to like really find the right measurement techniques. But what we can do in a very short term is just like collect all the data, analyze with AI and then basically create immediately, like these very raw, very uh uh like uh yeah, early experiments for this entire thing.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] Sure.
[Gary Sheng] um look, they have they also have like A zero B one version of what, like data that if they had someone that built out a dashboard. So so okay, one of the things that Joe's dream is to basically let a let a parent log in and see all their kids stats in a beautiful dashboard.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] I mean it's a lot of this is not even hard. It's just
[Gary Sheng] that's the easiest But then like more of um like my joke that's not a joke is that this is a delegated CEO role. Because if you think about what a CEO is strategy plus hiring. And so there's like a there's a lot of actually missing strategy to achieve the giant vision of completely revolutionizing education everywhere. And so, um again, you need to be able to create a movement strategy that like a philosophy a framework an ontology, really, that's like what even is the movement? What what does it mean to be a con usual contributor and to elaborate again like let's say you int you you, okay, for example, I'm doing this Davos like summit in October, right?
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] Yeah.
[Gary Sheng] You should be rewarded even for you not even even for I don't, even for it. For for um creating a warm introduction to theation minister of Dubai, right? How much is that worth? It might be worth like 50K for us, right? Like like if we prop the value relationships, you might as well just get paid 50K. Like that just literally how much Joe Joe under the the awesome thing, Roz, is that Joe really understands the value of relationships. He's just autistic and um, it's just glad I exist because he knows I can reduce the relationship acquisition cost by like ten hundred X compared to compared to what he could because, look, let's be let's be honest.im meeting someone. people are gonna gouge him. because they have no they know that they can get away with it because let's say that you're actually really good at something like um, you' would be like, hmm, how much can I charge this billionaire? Right? So you're basically going to name some stupid price that he might even say yes to because he he's just too lazy to to meet some to to negotiate or find someone else to then have, you know, to to to get multiple proposals. Anyways, um for someone like me, it's not even hard to get to the education minister to buy. But like, I think ultimately it's not about me. It's about creating a game that scales what I can do like unscalably, right? Or like someone like me or anyone like me, all right? Um, on that on the connection part, right? But then it's like, okay. um, there may be other kinds of actions beyond connections like identifying a gap in the technical infrastructure, right? Like how do we design the point system around that or and or money system, where like, for example, if if I help recruit a team that ends up solving the identity gamification issue or maybe there's multiple issues that were identified. And then you built one pro one product that solved all them. I think even the person that found the people that solved it should get a lot of money. Like, I don't know, like, I think they should almost maybe they should get a quarter million dollars, right? Just for finding rods, right? And so so this is the kind of thinking that is not not yet done, but like no one else is going to do it because you know, it's like a level of like thinking and empowerment and also like no one's been empowered to do this, except almost me because Joe's realizing like how my brain works and like how he can just start delegating like CEO Rolton being in a lot of ways.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] That's pretty cool.
[Gary Sheng] Yeah. So yeah, this is basically what I want to see. I want I want to see movement, main character infrastructure, right? Are you going to be focused primarily on engineering grow like training and or like discovering and training uh softer talent or like similar to that? Or or is is that it's not even in myroscope at all, it's not
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] I'm not I'm not training anyone., but with thes, like the education, it could be a football school or it could be or it could be a football school or it could be uh okay, a tennis school at least from my perspective to like uh narrow down the scope of like what the education target. or like, is it like universal?
[Gary Sheng] like the it's the narrowing down ras is a meta process where you start with getting the best possible school leader, like the founder of the school that could include a face of the school, as well as an operator of the school, and then as well as like if it's a golf school, like someone has one, like the US Open of golf, right? Like ten years ago or something, and they're just bored and like to help kids, right? Imagine like a PGA legend literally called, you know, being the golf coach and getting paid multiple millions of dollars a year to do that. Like that's something that Joe would be willing to do. And so there's not the narrowing of like disipline. He wants to dominate every discipline, but it's more so like we start only on five disciplines and five little schools that have five kids each. Right? Something like that, right? And when I say delegated CEO role, no one is even having this conversation. No one's having this conversation. No one,
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] yeah.
[Gary Sheng] So, but like the thing is, Raz, in order to even create a school like that, you have to be like me and like no people that are actually the best in the world at certain things. or like top five or whatever. And um that's me. And so I can literally help bootstrap this whole experimental process. Because right now he basically he has one high school, right? um He has multiple middle schools that are like they're not like specialized. They're more like liberal arts, high school, middle schools, but what he wants to start doing is basically creating the best golf golf best golf middle school in the world for like, you know, and when I say middle school, I mean, like 12, 13, 14 years old, right? And then they eventually age up into high school, but best golf school, best tennis school, best football school, best basketball school, best like um, like plumber school. Best, uh, electrician school, like literally he wants to dominate every possible little discipline that that will make money at least for a little bit before everything's automated before a lot of these things are automated by robots, right? Because even plumbers, right? You're going to have like humanoid Tesla robots or whatever fixing shit, right? But like that'll be oh it'll take a little bit of time have been, but anyways, also whenever there's a new discipline that spins up, he wants to quickly spin up the school and dominate that trading process. So you he basically wants to capture a slice of the future of education GDP, like even, you know, 50% of it, right? He wants to basically control 5% of the global GDP in the next however many years. And in order to do that, you need to bring on Raz to create the game that rewards people for growing the movement,
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] I'm starting to get it. So basically, this is a school management system that you're talking about and it's very important to make it like gamified and like a gamelike experience, uh, but also like appealing to the parents and uh and ultimated in in a lot of ways. So like a modern school management system, basically.
[Gary Sheng] Yeah, so that's actually one thing that he's funding already and that I don't I've I think that already does that like he already has well well, there's there's a team that's like trying to create like aify for schools. But I don't think that they're doing it's not the same thing as the identity system, by the way. But like, I do see it as the identity system will will be the base layer as you know for every derivative application.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] Okay.
[Gary Sheng] Because you can imagine logging in with your alpha ID, your alpha ID, and then it's like, oh, John Doe already has all these points and earn a bunch of bounties from doing all these things and now he wants to start a school. That's great because he already contributed so much to the movement and this showed a clear skin in the game, blah, blah, blah, right? And so I can see your um I can see Joe being really excited about this. because because you know, like doing identity systems requires you to be a genius, to be able to think long term and ultimately, like what you're basically proposing is like uh, what's funny is like,ild. XYZ, uh, was a pioneer and a lot of this, but uh, Gild. XYZ team is a, it has the advantage over Gilot XYZ because we have second advantage like Apple where we can see how Gild. XY, you know, short an organ literally re re-engineer what Gild that XY Z on .0 did, right? But like there's, you know, there's like a million pitfalls for for for creating identity systems, scheified, schemified guilt. Right? Like if you think about it, like each schools a guilt and we want do you know what Joe wants? Joe wants every school to compete with each other. in different ways. So there's a more direct competition if you have like two almost,
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] okay.
[Gary Sheng] So it's it's actually very helpful for me, like different people based on their background and stuff can can understand different parts of the decision. What what um to to whatever extent, let me just talk philosophically, to whatever extent we can create base infrastructure that applies to every school he would love to fund that, to a extent for for example, a golf school or a sports school can can can have based infrastructure he wants that to whatever extent, a golf school can have base infrastructure across all golf schools. But at the end day, like he's he wants lots of experimentation. and not assume that there's any winners on anything, right? Um, but ultimately, like philosophically, he wants a ecosystem of repositories of school templates, essentially, that, you know, where he's not trying to pick winners early on, he, but he's willing to fund everyone, right? That is that makes a case to him, that they're really freaking smart. And, like, in your case, it's like a it's a no-brainer, right? Because of your background and I would just want, you know, you to set me a very detailed bio about like, you know, and even like even like helped the people like coin base It's like, you should speak on behalf of coin base, why they invested in guild. and it should and it should be like, oh, because Raz is blah, blah, blah, blah, and guild team, blah, blah, blah. And like they understand identity, blah, blah, like he he likes to pay experts. prove an experts that other people also want to pay and he wants to outbin them. Right? He basically likes to do that kind of thing. He'll be like cool, I'll double your salary of while you're previously making so he can work full time for me.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] That's that's perfect. Like I have a lot of things to do, like he has to outfit me to be to be honest, like I'm interested in only if uh I mean interested in this only if you really come to a a good price and uh and a good vision for the future. um Okay. I will create a bio uh about me guild and the team overall. uh as you know, like I have two offices here in Hungary or at a huge office spaces uh, forbes just uh obllished us on the front page of their website, like a couple of weeks ago, uh, so basically the Hungary is like buzzing around us. Like we are a hot startup now during in Hungary and uh dozands of developers are trying to like get in the company now. So, like basically we have a bigalent pool, we can hire people, people are excited to work with us.
[Gary Sheng] I get messages about this would not be the top prio, but like, once we are ready to expand more into international schools, he would just fund, you know, he would just help you bootstrap like a Hungarian software engineering school or something, right? Like what whatever whatever whatever you want to creates, you know, we create a
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] I'm just saying this that we have uh the power to grow from here. Like we have a product uh, we have revenue, uh, but we also have the talent puller on us where we like basically if we get more resources, we can grow more bigger.
[Gary Sheng] Yeah, that makes sense. And so all that context is really helpful. So just sending everything over email and then I can add it to a proposal document. So in terms of principles, what I would do is is we should, I mean, why, I really like the identity thing. We should propose stuff that can lead to more stuff. That is all as compounds. What I think what I don't need to really say to you, but I'll just say it for the recording is that when you have people that are not smart enough and don't think long-term enough, then you create a bunch of fragmented tools that have never no hope of integrating with each other. So this like you what I love about you is you've basically what you should be doing is making it so that I combine everything and everything else. I mean you should literally create such a generalized identity tool that all the existing tools could be plugged in in a way I don't understand, but like, I feel like you you spent a lot of time thinking about this. And like, yeah, there really should be something like an alpha ID. He would love that honestly, like sign in with alpha, like I don't know, like I don't make yeah, I'm not trying to put any sort of constraints on what makes sense, but basically he has all these fucking tools that like, it's so annoying because you remember your random password for this random ass tool. But like it should be totally unified, right? And we don't and then like what he'll know is that like we don't we're not we're not saying, oh, every engineering team drop what you're doing to integrate with this thing. It's like, no. We're gonna build the identity layer and then build the first application on top of it, which is a gamified movement platform. Right.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] Makes sense. M a lot of sense, yeah.
[Gary Sheng] So, and then I will always work really closely with you on that. Um, just to define what the movement is and points and stuff. But yeah, dude, like we can literally create dude, everything that you build gill is brilliant, right? What what was just missing is that it needed it needed to be part of an ecosystem that had unlimited capital to flow through the ecosystem. to flow through the movement, right? So like what and that's not the ironic thing right now in 2025, crypto is not that, right? You know, Joe Joe in his in the in the woman that he basically has been funding know hundreds of billionaires, right? And so our vision, like part of the vision is to just have such a superior movement and educational stack, everything and talent pool, where like if you're starting in if you want to like affect educational, you have to use our platform. Otherwise, you're just at a steep disadvantage. And so we want to on board on board. hundreds of billionaires over the next two years to just like be like, oh, I have, you know, I'm willing to spend one billion dollars to create a school of this kind. You literally say, cool. School GPT, uh, based on blah, blah, blah, blah. And the fact that you like Huntsville, Alabama, you know, we've designed a mechanical engineering middle school for you. and like, we already have we already have permits that you we p draft, you know, like whatever it is. and it's like all we could do is send the money here, right? We already know who who we need to hire, right? And we we literally have 10 candidates of school leaders that are willing to move to Huntsville, you know, like that's literally what we wanna do is create such an integrated system that that like, I think part of part of what I realize is that like, you know, there's gonna be linked in um in all these different ecosystems that have the same mission, because linkedIn right now is is basically useless for everyone. It's it's like kind of useful for everyone and it's it's but it's mostly useless and noise for everyone. But like what what what you can build is basically proof of conviction, proof of contribution, proof of relational trust in capital, within an ecosystem, right? And this is literally what we've talked about since day one, right? Since like I discovered Gild, I was like, this is gameified movement infrastructure. literally. And so the craziest cool thing about the alpha ecosystem is that we're not stuck there either, right? Because anytime someone wants to create a movement for anything, you know, where just using it to bootstrap, like and figure out what what tech is useful for Joe's movement. But it's literally the same you just fork it for a different movement, right? Whether that's um lobbying for space mining policy. I don't know, I'll make shit up, but like, um but this is but this also happens to be a movement that's so big that even if all that you did was build infrastructure to help people create schools, you could become a billionaire just from that. Like that's I really believe that. So, like, and I think that like there will be many, many billionaires that get created that are just helping Joe become trilly narrow, right? So yeah, that's the context.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] I will send you an email uh, and then we continue from there.
[Gary Sheng] Sounds good. Yeah, and then just in terms of all the really smart people that I'm recruiting, um basically the master architect of Shenzzen, um, is excited to help me create a really impressive the world's best engineering school. Um, and we're also going to help create Trump City. Yeah, like literally in between Austin and where Yon stuff is, we're gonna create Trump City and like literally create many of the best schools in the world there and the best factories and stuff like that. So um and then we want to have Trump announce the that that the city is that a reality on July 4, 2026.
[Robert Aron Zawiasa] Well, okay.
[Gary Sheng] Yeah. Bullish. Yeah, it doesn't make sense, right? Trump Trump would do anything to have a city. So you's gotta like speak to people's interests, you know. Anyways, I think that's good. Um, I mean, I just just compile basically a deep like imagine if the CIA was compiling a detailed report on what you're capable of, right? Like, give me everything, give me everything. You know what I'm saying? Make make it so I don't have to explain anything. Like basically make the case why you are like one of the most important you're you're basically you are basically a developer ecosystem, right? Like that's what you you what if you bring on RAs, you bring on a developer ecosystem, right? And so I I just need you to explain what that even like why that's the case.