In this episode, we speak with Tarik Bellamine and Kevin Kim, co-founders of Gossamer. Tarik is a full-stack and Ethereum developer who was previously at Capital One and Pace Harmon and passionate about personal finance, DeFi, and building cool things. Kevin is a product manager, designer and front-end developer who was previously at Quartz and Facebook. He has a passion for applying research and user experience to product development.

Kevin and Tarik met and became good friends at the University of Pennsylvania. They are passionate about DeFi, but are tired of it only being accessible to a few thousand people. To change that, they started Gossamer with the mission of making earning interest available to anyone with an internet connection.
We discuss what they feel is inaccessible when it comes to DeFi today and how they are utilizing user research and user experience to solve those issues with Gossamer.
Enjoy!
Notes

[0:32] Polyient sponsorship intro.
[1:12] Episode intro.
[2:16] Overview of Gossamer.
[4:12] How Kevin and Tarik are positioning Gossamer and what macro trends influence that.
[7:41] Origin of the name Gossamer.
[8:40] Background on Kevin and Tarik.
[9:21] The importance of decentralization as part of Gossamer’s value proposition.
[11:46] Approach Kevin and Tarik take to user research and who Gossamer’s target users are.
[16:10] Overview of Kevin’s user research and user experience talk at the last DevCon.
[18:28] The approach they are taking to take Gossamer to market.
[21:05] How Tarik and Kevin think about community development and why they are focusing their efforts elsewhere for the time being.
[23:36] Biggest challenges Tarik and Kevin are tackling right now.
[29:08] What skills they believe are most important to have on a team to be successful in crypto.
[31:57] How Tarik and Kevin carve out space for deep work.
[34:33] Where they stand with regard to funding for Gossamer and their perspective on the evolution of funding in the space.
[36:04] What keeps Kevin and Tarik up at night.
[39:28] If we fast forward five years from today, how is the world different with Gossamer in it.
[40:20] Where listeners can go to find out more about Gossamer.

Links

Tarik’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/tarikbellamine
Kevin’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/kevin0kim
Gossamer Website: https://www.usegossamer.com
Gossamer Twitter: https://twitter.com/UseGossamer
Recording of Kevin’s talk at DevCon about dApp UX: https://slideslive.com/38911919/guerrilla-user-research-for-dapps-step-1-to-mainstream-adoption
Blog post from Kevin about blockchain design principles: https://hackernoon.com/6-principles-for-designing-dapps-for-regular-people-from-a-consensus-18-hackathon-winner-134cdb881cc1