how I talked my way into web3
I didn't study my way into this industry. I talked my way in.
It started with a cocktail. Christmas 2023, I was bartending at an AR event — mixing drinks for four hours, telling people about Blur, the dating app I'd built. A man visiting from Hong Kong ordered a drink, sipped it next to his beautiful wife, and got genuinely curious about my project. On his way out he said: you should come talk to us in HK — your thing might make a great SocialFi. I didn't know what SocialFi was. I smiled politely and, like I had a dozen times before, prepared to let it go.
Then I mentioned it to Wingo — and learned the man was from one of the top investment firms in the whole space, and that my friend Haohao had once worked there. So this time, the P-type, never-finishes-anything me didn't let the sentence slip the way I had ten years earlier. On January 2nd I crossed into Hong Kong and rode three elevators up to a meeting room with a 360° view of the sea.
The meeting itself went nowhere — they didn't understand AI, I didn't understand web3, two people speaking different languages. But the meeting was never the point. Somewhere in that room I made a quiet decision: okay — I'm in. That's the day I actually entered web3. Nobody else was there for it.
Learning web3 felt like falling in love.
One second you're soaring, the next you've hit the floor. I went home for Chinese New Year and disappeared into it — ten-plus hours a day. Memecoins with Alex, cryptography from scratch, every livestream at 2× by day and every lecture by night. It was chaos: each word I didn't understand hid twenty more behind it. Then, about a week in, a term in one of the books Wingo gave me suddenly just… made sense — and the thrill was exactly like the closest moment of a new romance. My mom would wake up to find me hunched over the laptop with cryptography crackling out of it; on our evening walks I'd Feynman-teach her what a meme coin was.
It's the same way I learned everything. As a kid who wanted to go abroad before I was tall enough to reach the desk, I'd wake up and pretend I was a foreign first-grader, introduce myself to the mirror, fall asleep to New Concept English instead of pop songs. Immersion. So I did the same thing here: drop yourself in the water long enough and you come out smelling a little like web3.
Can I have two minutes to introduce myself?
When the holiday ended I needed a test, so I signed up for a hackathon. The trip that changed everything started as something else — a ten-minute interview I was merely curious about, almost a thousand yuan away. I went anyway. Fate rarely arrives through the thing you planned for; it arrives through the thing you can't stop wanting.
The web3 hack house that afternoon told me, kindly, that I had nothing to do with web3 — so I argued, listing every half-formed idea I'd had over the holiday until they let me in. Day one I could barely find the room; everyone already knew everyone, and I knew no one. Day two I paced the sidewalk for half an hour, too intimidated to go up — until Wingo, over text, talked me through the door. When the talks ended, I walked to the front, took the mic, and told a room of brilliant builders the only true thing I had: my English is good, I can tell a story, and I can carry the part most of you dread — saying out loud what you've made. I was a peacock with an empty head and a very bright tail. Two teams took me that night.
That's the whole secret, really. Every door after opened the same way: I said the want out loud. A demo slot at Consensus, won because my English carried a project across a noisy Shenzhen–Shanghai video link. A free developer pass to that same conference — the 3,000-yuan kind — won by an email I sent after registration had already closed. And later, three part-time gigs in South America, one after another, because I'd told everyone exactly what I was looking for.
It turns out I'm not a developer who learned to pitch. I'm a storyteller who learned to build — and the asking was never the weak part. It was the whole engine.
A living page — the story may still grow into chapters: immersion months, Cannes and Dolly, South America, and learning to pitch a business instead of a dream.