Alex Partin's Blog

I have a beef with folks who never worked in fields outside of Blockchain. I call them the tunnel vision folk. Thing is, this place is still full of inflated expectations. It’s one of the most ridiculous niches you can find both in potential awesomeness and financial travesty. And people who had no prior work ethic, discipline or entrepreneurial experience swing our market hard towards that second option. And I’m not […]

I often get people asking to add my face to the nice little carousel on their website. They offer a generous cut of whatever profits they get and ask me to be an “advisor” with an “o”. When I ask “what do you expect from me?”, they say “… to provide business development and publicity, I guess?” No idea how that help could look like and never tell me what they actually want. They […]

“Your project is like that 8 car crash I saw not too long ago…“ I never thought I would say something like this to a fella who wanted to work with me, but here I was. Needless to say, the negotiation stopped dead in its tracks (ba-dum-ts). I actually did see an 8 car crash on the highway not too long ago, while me and my partner were getting to his office. For […]

Before starting with software development my business partner served around 10 years as a ship mechanic. One of his favorite stories is about the way folks would be making fun of the “green” recruits and seeing just how clueless they were. Some of this stuff is out of their hands and comes with experience, some is just general intelligence testing. This story of his falls in the latter category. He was […]

Hype again, eh? After talking about hype-building recently, I got some pretty solid questions about how to handle project development without creating huge expectations around the thing. I received a good comment about this, actually: “I’m curious do you feel that a project should use hype as a momentum boost for its initial release or remain relatively underground until its foundation is solidly built? I’m always conflicted on what marketing approach is […]

So lets talk about something most storytellers and marketing experts are trying to build: HYPE! … I have an odd relationship with it. My career only really started to kick off when my negotiations became less of a neurotic mess. Yes, writing is also a negotiation. I clearly remember getting overly excited, having huge expectations for particular projects. In hindsight, they were all disasters and the emotions never lasted. All these deals had one […]

Enter Socrates. Does this fella even need an introduction? Dude was a badass, never personally recorded a single word yet we keep talking about him to this day. I don’t think there is another person in history who ever affected public discourse and thinking more than he did. Anyway, I’m not here for fanboying about ancient history, go read up on this if need be. Socrates had a particular method of communicating […]

Story time: When I was 11, I had a large moth fly right inside my left ear – it then got stuck deep inside, unable to fly out. In fact, it got so deep that there was no way I could reach there either. I tried jumping on one leg, getting it out with my fingers, pouring water into my ear. Nothing helped – waterboarding the poor thing actually made it […]

This is another one of those that may ruffle a few feathers. I recently decided to ask my Linkedin connections (around 5 thousand) what people who call themselves “Blockchain Evangelists” and “Blockchain Enthusiasts” in their job description and taglines actually do. I think my favorite response was the following:  “The question appears to indicate that some people have self confidence issues and afew followers with same issue. This platform is […]

Let’s go back to ancient history and touch on a meatier subject today, shall we? And I mean that literally. Going back almost exactly one thousand years from this day, there was this dude Basil II who was in charge of the Byzantine Empire at the time. The guy has a lengthy Wikipedia page for a reason, he did a ton of crap over his lifetime. Including a lot of warfare. While he was […]