Welcome to Web 3 with A6 and Z, a show about building the next generation of the Internet from the team at A6 and Z crypto.

That includes me, your host sonel choxy.

Following a brief summer hiatus since our last episode,

which was a very popular conversation on competitive forces,

motes for open source and web 3,

and a deep dive on network effects, today's episode also goes into how to think about business

strategy and competition in a world of open source, both in operations and in practice, as it's a conversation with UNISWAP chief operating officer Mary Catherine,

aka MC later. So we also cover organizational structure and collaboration, hiring in web 3, community engagement, how to make decisions on what to innovate on or not, decentralization, Defi, at store policies, and much, much more.

The wide-ranging conversation is based on a live

interview and founder-Q&A that originally took place at our crypto startup school a few months

ago and was edited for podcast form. As a reminder, none of the following should be taken as investment, legal, business, or tax advice.

Please see A6cency.com slash disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.

The conversation begins by asking MC what the biggest surprise for her was in transitioning

from TradFi to crypto, that's traditional finance since before joining Uniswop, she was formerly a FinTech founder

and an investor at Goldman Sachs and spent seven years at Black Rock.

Yeah, so first, it's great to be here. I'm so excited to be part of this. I watched every single episode of the crypto startup school before I joined UNISWOP, so it's cool to be part of the second one. So biggest surprise, I think that as I made the transition everyone sort of said like oh

mental models in crypto are very different and I've been watching and engaged in

crypto for about six years by the time I joined UNASW. So I oversaw Black Rocks Scripton

blockchain activity which was frankly a tiny part of my actual job there, but it

was something I was passionate about and had been committed to since

about 2011 when I first bought Bitcoin, first got into the space. So I thought I kind of knew enough about like,

who the players were, the companies, why certain things hadn't taken off,

...