Hello 👋!
⚡️ TL;DR
- I’m building web3 since 2018 with Berty. And projects since 2008.
- I’m organizing web3 events since 2019 with Paris P2P.
- I’m an introvert and prefer to be reviewed on what I do
(not on the lack of exclamation marks at the end of each line I write). 🙏 - I love the OSS spirit, every kind of collaboration in general, and proud to try co-building the future with web3.
👋 ASL?
Manfred,
French 🥐,
30ish y old 🧔♂️,
Father of 2 👧,
OSS addict 🧑💻,
Musician 🎧 and stupid-things maker 🤦♂️,
🚀 Project Highlights
🐦 Berty — berty.tech
I founded Berty in 2018 as an NGO with a team of ~15.
We are now building a sister-DAO for the NGO to lose control of the project and make it unstoppable.
🚕 Wulo — wulo.fr
I founded Wulo in 2016 as an NGO with a team of ~10.
My goal was to create a non-profit cooperative alternative to Uber.
We launched our solution, but we failed to gain the trust of the drivers and the platform was too small to provide a reliable service (1000 drivers, but not enough connected at the same time).
Closed in 2018, one week before starting Berty 😛
💼 Consulting Services — PMG
I provide consulting services for startups, groups, and investors.
- Tech/org due diligence and audit
- Startup Advisory / Board
- CEO/CTO coaching
📚 Education
- Building Pathwar, a CyberSec training platform.
- Speaker at events and nearly always helping people learn new stuff.
- Used to be teacher or coach students at Epitech School, 42 School, and Holberton School.
⚒️ Maker
I code and do stuff publicly every single day for 7+ years:
I love the open-source philosophy, even outside of pure coding.
I love experimentations, I love collaborations, I love imagining new stuff and PoCing them.
I love building small things every day and creating bigger ones by gluing everything together.
Okay, I admit I’m an OSS addict, but that’s probably the only drug I depend on.
Additionally to coding solo and communicating through issues and PRs with my contributors and users of my projects, I try to create communities and onboard new people on my projects as soon as I can.
🫂 Communities
I create or participate in communities for a long time.
- 2008-2011 → I founded and lead the security laboratory of my school, hired 10 assistants, and took responsibility for everything CyberSec for the whole school during the last 4 years of my scholarship. This experience may look non-significative, but most of my professional projects and most important colleagues right now come directly or indirectly from this first community.
- 2010-2013 → I co-founded various companies with friends and discovered what it is to have a higher responsibility. I also helped managed while42 which was the biggest community of French tech people in the world.
- 2012-2016 → I joined Iliad, a French telco group, and started an internal new project (entrepreneurship) named Scaleway, I hired the 15 first employees, set up all the foundations and now the company is one of the European cloud-provider leaders and has 350+ employees.
- 2016-2018 → Wulo, first solo-founder entrepreneurship project where I learned that I’m very bad at creating communities for people that are not tech :)
- 2018-NOW → Berty, personal revenge against the Wulo failure by coming back to the roots with a tech project for tech people.
- 2019-NOW → Co-Founder of Paris P2P and France P2P → Web3 meetup focused on all the topics that are often on the side due to the Blockchain noisy ecosystem; focus on P2P, Crypto”graphy”, IRL Blockchain Patterns, etc.
- 2010-NOW → providing consulting services for startups, often seen as the one helping to go to the next level, and very happy to have this opportunity to explore 50+ companies and communities from the inside.
🕸 Web3
- 2012-2018 → skin in the game with successes and failures (early mining in 2010, stolen wallet, etc)
- 2018-2021 → building Berty with a focus on NOT depending on any blockchain, but actually doing something very similar in a lot of aspects (P2P, Cryptography). Created Paris P2P meetups.
- 2021-NOW → switching main focus on WEB3 (pro & life)
Advisor of SkillZ, a French blockchain infrastructure company with amazing people <3
Current favorite ecosystem: Cosmos (Juno, Secret Network, Osmosis).
Building a DAO for Berty.
Exploring Web3, crypto, dApps as a maker and ecosystem collaborator (Learn & Share).
Plan to join existing ecosystems, creating ones and opening the one I’m already involved in.
🗺 Plan for the future
- Web3 Focus
- Collaborate on other people’s projects
- Invite others to collaborate on mine
- Join existing ecosystems
- Open more my own ecosystems
- Hackathons
- A lot of experiments
💪 Contributions
Tbh, I’ve too many projects in parallel to be able to engage on specific topics at the genesis of our relationship.
When I’ve free time to think about things, I use it first for my own projects, but I always keep some free space in my mind for the communities and people I interact with; and I’m also very responsive to people asking me stuff directly.
Here is what happens in general:
- I make bridges depending on the context: when working on other stuff, I regularly have triggers that make me think about an active project, and I often bridge some ideas, stuff, people just because they are related.
- I engage in specific tasks: if the DAO needs me on something and someone ping me or if I see the list of needs on the Discord, a newsletter, or any alerting system, I can commit to working on a task.
- I’m here in case of urgency: if someone pings me and need me I always try to help directly or by giving suggestion on how to get rid of the issue.
Less general but still highly probable:
- Knowing the active projects and goals of a community can influence the roadmap of my other projects by trying to bridge the projects, i.e.; if a DAO plan does to something that can be related to Berty, I can plan that the Berty team will work on something and collaborate with the DAO.
🏁 Conclusion
Thank you for reading! 🙏
Please, do not take it personally, but some people are naturally good at expressing emotions with just words, I don’t.
I’m naturally better at making, making, making, and making again; then to presenting what I did :)
All the best ❤️
Manfred, moul.eth
FAQ
Discord Username
manfred#4242
Twitter URL
GitHub URL
Website/Blog
1-line bio
Founder of https://berty.tech, a privacy-first messaging app and an offline-first messaging protocol.
What are your 3 core values?
Try, try again, ok let’s try something else :)
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Physically, where my family is happy
Virtually, with the people, I consider my A-team, on an always-open audio+text chat and with a dashboard of what we're building on a dedicated screen
Tell us about your biggest achievement.
Leaving Scaleway, the company I created, during a growing phase; because I knew that it will be harder to leave with time and that I wanted to stay free to build more things
Tell us about your biggest failure.
My project Wulo, for two reasons: I strongly underestimated the human factor of the project; and because I kept the project secret while building it so I didn't have any feedback.
How, and... letting a wallet.dat file on my Synology NAS, and discovering that I wasn't the unique owner of my BTC wallet anymore.
Give us an example of a time you've helped someone without expecting anything in return.
without "expecting" something in return: this Wednesday, I took a day off to help 50 first-year students learn security, for free. I offered them the platform I developed and play on challenges I created, for free. They played on two servers I rent for the occasion, from my money. Nothing was expected in return. I also profit from the occasion to give them a lot of advice for their carrier.
without "the hope of having" something in return: never. I believe in Karma farming, I help a lot of people (because they directly ask or because I want to help them grow); I never ask something in return directly, but I'm egoist and improve my Karma because I "expect" that all those actions will pay back indirectly in the long-term.
What random, but surprisingly useful or interesting thing, should we know about you?
I code every day since Oct 12, 2014