BluaBaleno, world traveler and entrepreneur from New York City, and now, part of Snbox!

Hi, I'm BluaBaleno, world traveler and entrepreneur from New York City. It is a pleasure to be here with Sndbox!

How BluaBaleno came to be

I started my college career as a Mechanical Engineering undergraduate. I was attracted to the field by its promise of a well-paying job and a chance to build and to create new, useful, and exciting things.

But as I progressed further and further in my studies, I realized that, like most promises, it was fulfilled only for a small portion of those to whom the promise was made.

The job of engineering, I found, to be much less exciting and much more excruciating than the pay can justify.

It was a stagnant field, one that valued tradition and learning about how things are done over innovation and how things ought to be done.
Maintaining old machines or improving the efficiency of current ones took precedent; very little was devoted to designing new systems or creating new processes.

This was a stark contrast to what I discovered in entrepreneurship.

Falling in and dropping out

I joined an entrepreneurship club in my sophomore year of college and quickly rose to become its vice president. The diverse talent of the group enabled us to do things we individually could not accomplish, and it called for a completely different structure than my classes.

In my classes, we spent most of our time in lecture halls. Our professors would spend hours going through old, dense textbooks while we sit there silently.

In entrepreneurship, we had to learn how to deal with new information springing from every direction. We relied on each other to read, interpret, and explain concepts coming from very different fields, often through heated debates and late-night discussions.

In my classes, we learned through assignments. Our professors gave detailed instructions and expected specific, known results.

In entrepreneurship, we conducted experiments and learned from the results. If an idea sounded good enough and could be made relatively quickly, we made it. Our ethos was to move fast and break things, and we were great at it.

It was everything my classes were not. And it was fantastic.

The excitement I experienced in entrepreneurship made the dullness of my engineering lectures unbearable.

Instead of studying, I spent my time working on various ideas. My grades suffered, and in a span of just a few months, I went from honor-roll student to college drop-out.

I have an idea of what I'm doing

Leaving college, I focused all my attention on my first start-up. Bitcoin was just taking off

There were two major problems facing Bitcoin in 2013:

1. How do you make it easier for people to get their hands on bitcoin?
2. Where do you find a customer who has bitcoin, and who wants to buy products with bitcoin?

The solution I came up with was a platform to allow the users to create advertisements for the start-ups.

'Bit' stands for a small data unit, representing the advertisement created by users. 'Ad' as in advertising. Together they mean small advertisements generated by users.

Our slogan was: "Ad + Art. For you, by you."

I have no idea what I’m doing

At the time, there were a lot of things I didn’t know.

I didn’t know how to program, so I had to hire a programmer to build out the site.

I didn't know anything about smart-contracts. So I tasked my programmer to design a system that would hold a company's funds and disperse them to creators according to the success of the advertisements, as measured by the number of upvotes it received.

It was a big project, and the chance of it succeeding, looking back at it now, was small.

I had no resources other than the little money I made from speculating in the bitcoin market and I had no prior start-up experience and no idea how the advertising industry worked. I tried to explain what I was up to, but people didn't really understand. I pitched my idea to my friends, but no one had the slightest interest.

Still, I launched the project with much hope and excitement, and, in half a year, the bitcoin market crashed, my funds ran dry, and the project was put on hold.

Having invested all of my money and my energy into the project, my world was turned upside down. I couldn't deal with the failure; it was my first one and I staked everything I had on the project. It was like having my first heartbreak; I simply couldn't stop thinking about it. I felt like I would never accomplish anything ever again.

A detour into the World

Days, weeks, and then months passed. Slowly, I let BitAd fade into the unconscious and went on to work on my education. My college days were like a haze to me; there was not much that I recall learning in those classes. So going back to college didn't seem like such a good idea.
I didn't really know what I should study or what career path I should pursue. But I knew one thing; I wanted to travel, and I wanted to establish businesses around the world. So I did what I thought was the most logical thing: I decided to study Esperanto.

Esperanto is a constructed language designed to be easy to learn. The promise was, if you have learned the language, you would be able to conversate with anyone else in the world provided that, they, also have learned the language.

This leap in logic seems as strange to me now as it probably does to you. But it was a leap I'm glad I took.

In the course of learning the language, I met with many people in the Esperanto community. They were a fascinating bunch. A diverse collection of people from all over the world with one goal in mind- to build a global community.

Though I never picked up the language, the people I met while attempting to learn about it and the kindness they showed me gave me the confidence to venture out into the world.

And so I went.

Traveling the World

It was the craziest experience of my life. I couchsurfed and hitchhiked, meeting numerous people along the way. Each living a different life than mine. I met everyone from those who were escaping from the Syrian crisis to those who worked to prosecute war criminals in the International Criminal Court.

Landing back in New York City.

Back in New York City, I took up a job as an after-school teacher, then as a private tutor. The flexibility of the job allowed me to continue studying on my own. I studied programming, mathematics, and reading and writing. I also took the opportunity to read widely and continued to work on my social skills.

I came to realize that I couldn't thrive in traditional academia; its routine and structure wore me out. Navigating the system seemed to be the goal of the system. Learning was but an afterthought.

But left alone, studying became my favorite past-time.

Getting back into Bitcoin

One day, in mid-July of 2017, my mother asked me if I knew anything about Bitcoin. She had no idea that I worked on BitAd since I didn't to bother to explain it to her.

But I knew something monumental was happening.

I joined a local crypto-currency Meetup group to get updated on what has changed in the two years I was away.

And what a different world it was! Many new technologies have emerged, and many more new companies created each day.

The more and more I learned about the developments of new blockchain technologies, the more excited I got.

Running across Steem

In the course of doing research on the many different players in the field, one in particular caught my attention. It was a platform that rewarded users by the content they submitted. It sounded a lot like what I was trying to do with BitAd, only much more complex.

Steem, and its defining product, Steemit, is an incentivized content-generating platform with the structure of a public company, whose share is used to create a fractional reserve bank and is governed by a representative democracy.

It is a society-building experiment.

It is also one of the riskiest and at the same time safest of the crypto-currency experiments.

Risky because it combines ideas from many different fields in a way that hasn’t been done before.

Safe because, if the Bitcoin market crashes like it did in 2013, it would be the only crypto-currency that has enough reserve capital to stabilize its share price.

And because the cost of operation is relatively low, and that it has a bigger geographical reach than most of the other currencies, even if the trading price loses 80% of its value, it will still hold enough value for someone, somewhere in the world to continue to maintain, and contribute to, the network.

Finding Sndbox

Many different groups operate on Steem, and one of them is Sndbox. They were based in NYC, like me. And like me, they are creators, what they created varied from person to person. Some are writers, writing about politics or the local farmer’s market. Some are builders, designing buildings or engineering machines. Still others are artists and musicians and dancers, creating art.

The underlying instinct is to create.

And I wanted to create, so I jumped in the Sndbox.

Finding a worthwhile project to impact the world

With the recent announcement of Smart-Media-Tokens by the Steem team, I think the time for BitAd is ripe. This time I am more prepared to take on the challenges than last. The SMT proposal offers all the infrastructure needs for BitAd. What is needed now are start-ups that are just venturing into the crypto-space and have limited resources and that want to leverage a creative community to help them market themselves.

As you read this, I'll be on my way to Ontario, Canada for a hackathon. There will be many people there looking to start their own crypto-currency business, and for me, that means the opportunity to meet other people hoping to leverage technology to change the world.

Then, I’ll be traveling to Lisbon, Portugal for Steemfest2.