Do Kwon: Behind the Scenes of Coinage's Full Terra Interview

I've never played before bro. I've never played before bro. It's gotta walk me through it. I'm gonna embarrass myself.

I feel like it makes sense to be Terran.

Never by Microsoft. You're running Microsoft on a Mac? No, this is a Windows Surface. Oh really? Yeah, dude, my computer is 2014. I was going to bring it, and I just feel like it wouldn't even be able to handle this, even though this is like a very low production quality game. Right, maybe it would be able to handle it.

Listen, I don't mean to on StarCraft. I'm just saying the goal of this game is to win again. It's to kill your enemies.

This is really like a strategy game. Yes, not exactly first person shooter. No, not at all. It kind of reminds me of that wolf game, first person shooter wolf game that was always on Microsoft computers. Wolfenstein? It's like you're a dude going through... I think it was Wolfenstein. It's like a German... I was never too much into FPS. The only thing that I played was Counter-Strike. Yeah, it's pretty classy. And we've basically won by this point because they don't really have defensive units.

Well, so if you play with other people at your level, it's very brain power intensive. And it's not hard per se, but it takes a lot of your time and a lot of effort while playing the game. So for me, it was one of those ways where it was very easy to deal with stress because the way that I like to think about stress is there's just a lot of thoughts going on in your head. And one of the things that I've always tried to tell myself is you should only care about things that matter and something that you can do about. And usually when you're stressed, it's because you're thinking over and over about things that you really can't do anything about. For example, if you got a bad grade, it doesn't matter and you can't do anything about it. So there are a number of things that you could do to sort of quiet the voices in your head. And so for some people, it's sports. Yeah, you talked about not sleeping for eight days during the crash. But after, when you were trying to disconnect, you said you didn't want to read anything. How much did Starcraft help in that?

At what point do you know you've won though?

I feel like if I had more time to train, that would have gone differently. Yeah, I feel the same way. I mean, if you think about it, if this is your way of understanding life, how does this correspond to what happened with Terra? Is there a connection?

And our Starcraft's not a metaphor. I was trying to figure out that one. Oh no, what I mean is when people first start to fall down the rabbit hole of wanting to be an entrepreneur, it's generally for reasons like wanting to become wealthy or things like that. And then the point is, even after you've sort of hit your introductory goals, your motivations kind of change because the responsibilities that you've taken on compel you to want to be successful for different reasons. And I think the common thread of building a strong community, or something about building a strong community, but I think the best communities sort of arise in crypto as a side effect of something else. And I think that comes from not from how exciting the project is or anything of that sort, but it's really about whether the people that are a part of that community want to spend time trying to make others as successful as possible. I could see that. The goals in mind when you say measuring success, I guess change by default because it gets to be bigger. You've got to worry about the communities you're trying to help out. And I guess if it no longer becomes about you achieving success, it becomes about their goals. You become altruistic, and if it grows so big, you basically are no longer serving your best interests or your success, you're serving the communities. Which when that happens, you need to make sure that the growth of it continues. Maybe you start to do things that you wouldn't otherwise. As far as like... I think... Yeah, I mean, there's very few things that you would do when you're just thinking about personal returns or on another level like shareholder returns. All you need to do is make money, that's the only thing you need to care about. But the types of decisions that you need to make when your goals are a little bit more nuanced, that is... Yeah, so there's a lot more to think about. You know, like when it no longer just becomes growing the Terra ecosystem and it's like okay, you can use UST growing in terms of total value locked and Anchor, you can use all those things as measure of success. But if that becomes your yardstick, then you basically can never stop, I guess. Right, right, yeah. Does that lead you to kind of stretch the truth in areas where it's like, well maybe that didn't happen, but you can't not keep the momentum going?

But I guess at what point did that shift? Like when did that become the measuring stick versus just growing?

I mean, I think it's over time. I just realized that I was spending, the way that I was making decisions or doing things was a little bit different than what I saw myself doing when I was in college. So I think it just happened slowly. It would also make me way more stressed, I would think, because it's no longer just my yardstick, it's everyone else who's attached to me's yardstick. Right, well, but once again, I think stress happens when you're trying to strategize about your ideals being not in line with your reality. So even if your goals are to personally make a lot of money, if that number is always trying to make as much as possible, then you're never going to reach that ideal. So I can see that being even more stressful as well. Yeah. On the downside though, when it was collapsing, like we talked about, when you're in that moment and afterwards, it's not just your success and failure. Now it's everyone who quit their Web2 jobs to build in Web3. That weighs heavily. Yeah, yeah. How was it on you?

But how does it weigh on you, yourself? Like, I'm starting a company right now. It's nowhere near as large, nowhere near as many people counting on me. Five and eight's one of them. And it's like, that's way smaller in scale, and even I am stressed to the point of you don't sleep as well, you gain weight, your hair falls out. That stress manifested physically. Right, yes. And that's what I'm dealing with, and that's not even a small tiny fraction of what I imagine eight days of no sleep in a burrito over a week does to a man. Are you asking what my weight is? I'm not asking you what your weight is. But how it impacted you?