Ep. 68 - Pagoda Unplugged w. Eric Winer, CTO & Managing Director @ Pagoda

Wild User Interviews Podcast (Wuipod)

Wide ranging conversation with Eric Winer, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Managing Director at Pagoda.

What makes this podcast special is that it was recorded just a few days after the announcement of several spinouts and the rest of Pagoda sunsetting came out. Which sets the scene for a very honest and insightful Eric. Some of the topics we cover and personal highlights:

- Eric has been very early and led massive growth at Gemini and Nifty Gateway. Common thread: taking familiar user experiences, implementing high standards of delivery and excellence to bring web3 to the masses.
- The ways in which working for a hedge fund are different from building products; money as end goal cf. a real user as end-goal, how this influences team formation (skills and view-point diversity). Finally, we also touched on challenges of Product in an Engineering focused organisation (following up on our previous conversation with Alex Chiocchi, former head of Product at Pagoda.
- Raw, honest assessment of factors that lead to Pagoda dissolution: expensive organisation, on competitiveness and sustainability of NEAR ecosystem of third party providers, founder led organisations and the advantages of smaller, focused teams as startups over larger well funded organisations.
- A breakdown of a lot of Pagoda's services: what they do, importance, challenges going into the future, and opportunities for new providers.

There is A LOT more, including a lot said between the lines. We hope this conversation is well received by all stakeholders involved and that it may be useful in addressing some of the outstanding matters in the best way possible.

Resources
- Blog Post Announcing NEAR One and Chain Abstraction Spinouts
- Future of Pagoda Services Post

- NUFFLE: NEAR DA Spinout
- [Redacted] Hackathon

Follow on Socials
Eric - https://x.com/eric_winer
AVB - https://x.com/AvbNear
Wuipod - https://x.com/wuipod
Pagoda - https://x.com/PagodaPlatform