I first met Sergey in Shanghai, the Fall of 2019. We had started integrating ChainLink as a data-provider for our oracle, and were planning to meet with their marketing and business-development leaders to discuss the next steps.

Sergey unexpectedly asked us to push the meeting back an hour so he could join, and we were happy to accommodate. My sense was the integration had been swimming along technically, so I wondered whether there was some fancy marketing blitz he had in mind. Plus I was curious to meet this brilliant bearded man who had inspired so many crypto memes.

To my surprise, Sergey wasn’t concerned with marketing at all. Instead he wanted to hear what we had to say about their dashboard, how their aggregators were structured — and lastly, he wanted to make sure we were alright with making a small unforeseen adjustment to support their integration.

That was it.

Anything else that appeared to matter, would simply be left in the capable hands of his lieutenants and their community.

No skits, no stunts, no shenanigans.

Walking out of that meeting, my impression was that Sergey was stoic, product-focused, and highly-attuned to our needs and concerns as developers.

I guess you could say, I was surprised by how down-to-earth he was — this is a guy that gets mobbed at conferences after all.

In the months that followed, Sergey continued to support us, taking time to visit our office and offer advice. Surely he cared about oracles, but he cared even more about what developers would one day do with them.

And we had created the world’s first “oraclized money.”

Prelude to an Epic Roadshow

ChainLink was already on pace to hit an incredibly aggressive target of digital community events by the end of the 2020 year — and they had generously invited us to join for as much of the ride as we could handle.

Our teams were collaborating comfortably, having successfully launched an oracle integration in the months prior.

Now, readying myself for way more public speaking than I have previously ever done, I wanted to hear Sergey’s account of how ChainLink kickstarted their earliest community-building efforts.

The AMPL had not been an easy concept for me to explain, but I imagined it must have been equally hard for Sergey to describe the oracle-problem early on — and I was hoping he might offer some advice on how to break through.

“Describe AMPL to me,” he said.

“Okay,” I began — “The AMPL is a countercyclical commodity-money with perfect supply-elasticity. It represents … ”

Sergey stopped me, “I have no idea what you just said. You’re speaking Chinese to me!”

Then he paused, looked directly at me, and started over calmly. “Evan, you have a great problem. You’re smart, your product is good, and you just need to actually communicate what you do.” I started nodding nervously.

“That’s a much better problem than having a bad product, and needing to somehow become smart, so you can fix it.” I was still nodding.

“Your position is that DeFi has a systemic risk, and you have a solution,” he continued.

“Remember 2008? When a bunch of interdependent financial instruments bubbled up a systemic risk that brought the banking system to a halt?”

“Yes,” I responded.

“Good. That’s a simple relatable problem,” he said.

“I want you to do three things,” he continued. “1) Open with a simple relatable problem, 2) Don’t use new words unless you define them first, and 3) Every five minutes, I want you to just look around the room and ask: ‘Does this add up for you?’ ”

Sergey went on to carefully and repeatedly insist this was the “20%” change that would solve “80%” of my problems.

Still nodding at this point, I eventually glanced over to Dan, who appeared to be nearly bursting into laughter — so I asked if these were all things he’d heard before.

“Only about five minutes into every meeting,” Dan chuckled.

“Are we good?” Sergey asked.

I paused for a few seconds, running through his recommendations, and finally said “That adds up for me.”

Sergey laughed, apologized for being brief, and we went our separate ways.