Ep 53: How Bots Are Being Used for the Greater Good with Breno, CEO of Boto.io

Breno Araujo, a blockchain expert with a degree in Mechatronics Engineering, is creating a bot system called Boto.io that is community driven.

"The SEC or regulators in general understand they must strike a balance, but sometimes they go too far."

Breno Araujo is the founder and CEO of Boto.io, which is a no code platform that allows anyone to build and share automation. Breno has been in the blockchain space since 2016 and has an MBA and a Bachelor's of Science in Mechatronics Engineering from a school in Brazil.

In this episode, you will learn the following:

1. How Breno Araujo got into the blockchain space, and his thoughts on the SEC lawsuit against Ripple

2. What Boto.io is and how it works

3. The importance of community in the blockchain space

This is Breno Araujo's story...

Breno Araujo, founder and CEO of Boto.io, was head of Revenue Intelligence for Ripple before Boto. He has been in the blockchain space since 2016 and coding since he was twelve. He has an MBA and a Bachelor's of Science in Mechatronics Engineering from a school in Brazil. On the show, he talks about how he got into the blockchain space and his work with Ripple. He is now working on Boto.io, a bot system that people can use to create drag and drop bots. He talks about the importance of community and how Boto.io is community driven.

Connect with Breno:

Boto: https://boto.io/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/itsbrenoca

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/boto

Free Download:

The Words of Web3 - A comprehensive glossary of terms used in the space https://mailchi.mp/9d043022b5a0/words-of-web3

Connect with me:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drbrooksheehan

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DrBrookSheehan

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/drbrooksheehan

Transcript

[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Hey, Dr. Brook here with another incredible ride through the wild, wild west of Web3. Before we start this ride, I want to introduce you to my copilot today, Breno. Breno is the founder and CEO of Boto.io, which is a no code platform that allows anyone to build and share Auto Nation. So before Boto, Breno was head of Revenue Intelligence for Ripple, which I do kind of want to talk about a little bit today, and has been in the blockchain space since 2016. He's been coding since he was twelve years old and has an MBA and a Bachelor's of Science in Mechatronics Engineering from a school in Brazil. Welcome to the show, Breno. So excited that you're here with us today.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Thank you, Brook. Thank you for inviting me.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yeah, absolutely. So, first question out the gate that I like to ask all my guests on the show is what their origin story is into this incredible wild world of Web3, Blockchain, all of that. How did you get into this rabbit hole?
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 Yeah, fair enough. I was always passionate about technology, so, as you mentioned, like, satisfying twelve, and literally, I had a computer next to my creep and bad as I was growing up. So my father's computer, they were into technology, and so it was kind of like a rare opportunity. Most of my friends in Brazil didn't have that. So I grew up with a computer next to me, opening computers, assembling my own computers, and started coding and got into the house. I was always fascinated by technology, and then when I heard about Blockchain, I was like, okay, cool. This is very interesting. I understand the concepts because I started Meat and Engineering, I had studied cryptography, so for me was like, okay, cool, great. This is new. I don't want to get into it. I bought my first bitcoin in 2016, and I started looking to help shift my career towards that industry, and I got into repo in 2017. I also was very interested in the idea of using crypto to move money. Before, my NBA had worked in finance, and I was responsible for moving money internationally through exotic currencies like Africa, Brazil, and other places. And it was a nima. I remember one time, like $20 million just disappeared, and we couldn't find out for a whole week. And you tried to reach out to Swift. It's a nightmare. So I was like, okay, I'm bought into the idea of not using Swift for whoever has done that in corporate finance probably knows the pain. So I was like, okay, I know the pain at least can solve great. So, yeah, more or less how it started.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Then you connected with the Ripple company back in so you got in 2016, you got hired on by Ripple in 2017. We're with them, it looks like, until just last year, like a year ago. What's that been like, that whole process.
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 With them that was great. I was working for a lot of startups before. From there I never really liked working for big corporations. So repo at the time I joined It a was little bit less than 200 people. Everyone super talented, some incredible characters from the crypto community there. So it was great to go to San Francisco, meet everyone and I really enjoyed, I really enjoy the culture of the company most people worked with. And so for me it was incredible. I've done quite a few roles while I was there. Very dynamic, like a startup like you would expect.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yeah, very cool. So now that you're not there, I do have to ask the question because some people, whether they are like know about the space they may have heard Ripple XRP, all of it. How do you feel? Do you feel bearish or bullish on the outcome with the SEC lawsuit?
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 Very bullish about the outcome, I think seeing what's going on and I've been following up, of course I have shares on the company, so very much interested in the outcome of the lawsuit. But I'm very bullish. I've seen things and I really be disappointed with not really I'm disappointed because I didn't expect much of it. But SEC has a history with innovation, right? Like I was reading a book from the founder of the MBA school I studied is also known as being the father of the venture capital industry. So he was the first venture capitalist who made loads of money. He was a professor at Harvard and he had a pile apparently after he died and all that, he had a pile of documents in his office. They were all letters to the SEC, well, not sent because of legal advice. And they were all like really? Like because apparently they raided his office and a bunch of stuff. So they were very much trying to shut him down. And imagine without him, most likely we wouldn't have venture capitalists like it is today.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Right?
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 So it's a history that keeps repeating in terms of innovation. And the SEC or regulators in general understand they must strike a balance, but sometimes they go too far.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yeah, they definitely cross the line. So I do agree with you, you have a lot more insider information having worked at the company and the company is still in existence today. SEC lawsuit hopefully will be finished before the end of 22 ends. So it's cool to hear your perspective on where that is. So that was a whole entire separate deal. Having seen on your resume that you had ties to Ripple, I definitely had to ask that question. But more importantly, so let's talk about what you're doing now, which is Boto.io and that is essentially a bot system that people can create like a drag and drop. When I mentioned the intro for you, no code, they drag and drop the pieces that they want. Kind of create the bots that they're looking for. Explain a little bit more. My audience may not understand how bots work necessarily, so maybe just kind of give us an overview of how the company works and what it does.
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 Yeah, the whole idea is to especially during COVID so more people getting into reinvestment and crypto, and a lot of the people getting in were less techy, let's say. And people would ask me for help, hey, can you get the spot to do this or do that? And the barrier for people to automate tasks that they would normally do daily was quite high because you have to know how to code, even though most of the data is available there. So let's say you want to be informed about the market movements, or you want to be informed about something specific that it's important to you. I don't know the price of Bitcoin or whatever the SEC tweets about and all those things. So you want to be notified or you want to automate something based on that. Right. It's very hard today, especially if you have three space. There are not many tools that allow you to do that. So the idea was, how can I build a platform that allows anyone to without the need to code to put their logic there? So let's say, oh, if the price does this and the gas price is that, and I receive a message based on in the news, people are talking about these sell all my coins because I'm worried about a crash. Kind of like a stop loss, if you're familiar with the term. The idea was really how to do that. First use case we had actually was about avoiding to get liquidated with your loans, like if you have a loan on AV or a similar platform. And that's how it all started in a hackathon.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Very cool. So it started as a protection against liquidation and then it's kind of branched into being able to in looking at the website, people are using it to create their Discord communities. And I guess I could see it also being used for different NFT projects or different cryptocurrencies, like you said, even being able to track Twitter, what things are happening. So you guys right now, what are the statistics sitting at in terms of how many? I know it was a large number, like 77 million actions being done with Boto.io right now. And then you're looking to expand that a lot further, obviously.
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 Yeah. In the past month, we have done about 9 million action per month, and those actions are mostly on the Ft space, mostly people building their communities. We are about 6000 or more 6000 Discord servers. So it's either artists or people who manage specific NFD collections who use us, or people who manage alpha channels for traders. And then there are some collectors as well who use us to be informed of what is out there, sometimes for their own. They receive emails that are using Discord, for example. And we've seen most of the users are on NFT, but we've seen quite a few interesting because people can build their own logic and they can share that and we incentivize people to share that. We can see some interesting recipes that people are building and they're like, oh, I didn't think about that. And it's pretty cool, right?
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yeah, there's a lot of innovation and a lot of things that are different verticals that are possible with creating a technology like you've done. I would like to know, well, one, let's go really briefly into you talked about people building communities like this where you use the word community. So why is it important right now to invest in community and what do you see that future looking like?
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 Yeah, it's because for Boto itself, I always saw that as the key ingredient that I found was missing from the other automation platforms. If you're familiar with Zapier or IST in the web to space, you don't have much of a community around. You know, most of the integrations you see, they're built by Zapier, right. So you go to the website and say, oh, I want to get notified from like Google Sheets to Gmail, right? Google Sheets, their main use case. Google Sheets to Twitter. Whatever. And it's kind of like one to one and it's mostly built by them. And I was like, there's no way a company can build the most creative things. And I've been already proven even in our early stage by our users that they can be more creative than us, which is expected. So in the long term, I think the community is key because it's community driven content. And the way I see this is it really is logic. You know, like if you think about this, the internet mostly people were sharing information, right? So Web2 is about allowing so initially web one, the developers were providing information where two people now contributing to the information, right? Social platforms, blogs, and Web3, and automation in general now is still mostly done by the developers, by the companies. So what we're trying to do is, hey, actually we want the logic to be built by everyone. Just like to allow the information to be shared by everyone. We want people to share their logic. So this is really where we see it going and why committee is so important for us. And then we recognize that actually many of our users have their own communities and we share a lot about that as well.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 If I was to create, like, let's say I create a bot on Boto and I have my drag and drop tools and it was something maybe you didn't see in the grand scheme of things when you were building out the initial rendition of the company. And now I build out something, is that something that can also be shared? Like, hey Doctor Brook, did this with her community. Look at what tool she used and it can be shared out with other platform or other customers of Boto.
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 Yeah, so we have some people we call the Boto verse and we love that allows exactly that. And I think we have now over 260 recipes. There 50 of them came from us and then the rest is all from the community. To be honest, a lot of them don't necessarily work like before, just starting, but there are some really cool ones and then we flagged them as community highlights. So we go manually through them. Our head of community doing a great job with that. We do that and in the future we're going to have paid for each creator. So if you are a creator of bot, you're going to have your own page. And in the long term, we want to remunerate the top creators just like YouTube does and all these platforms do with revenue sharing.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 That's awesome. I love that idea. That's great because the one big aspect in talking to a lot of people in Webs Three and being in the space you hear about is the whole community aspect. Like people building together, people investing together, people doing different things that weren't done in a Web2 version where Facebook or Google or whatever, getting all of the revenue for us, sharing our information, web services, turning around and kind of bringing that back to us. So I think that is amazing. One thing though, about bots is people tend to have a very negative connotation about them. I'm in a lot of different discord channels, a lot of different NFT projects that actually even tout their stats on that main bar at the very top, they say how many users they have and how many bots they've banned. Now, I know bots can be negatively looked at because people are trying to cape in, to use some website terminology, they're trying to get into an NFT project and there's only X amount available. And then some people get creative and they build bots on the back end and so they're able to sleep in bed and their bots are collecting their NFTs for them while other people are like up all night trying to get their wallets connected and freaking out. And so I could see why some people can feel so like, I hate bots and I can see why some communities will turn around and block bots. But what would you say? Like, how would you overcome the negative bias? And then also, I don't mean to ask you two questions in one, but how would you overcome the negative bias? And then what do you see as key differences between good quality bots versus the bots that are just there trying to gather up a bunch and turn around and flip?
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yeah, I know there's a lot within that question, right?
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 Yes.
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 We start with from the beginning, I always knew that bot had a negative connotation overall and that's why part of it was the decision to make bot part of the name of the company. So it's like that of us in the room is there why we made a logo that is friendly and the whole website we aim to be more friendly and inviting because we know we can be a little bit overwhelming perhaps the idea of using bots and it has negative quantity so those are some of the reasons also some of the reasons why we do not do any ads since I think most of the ads people see onbots and stuff people connect that to scams. So all our growth has been word of mouth. These are part of how we started especially creating a platform that is open that people could do anything with it. We always knew that people could be bought to be used for bad intention. Right now we don't have the capability yet but maybe at some point but some of the bots you mentioned that I kicked out, I think those are bots that pretend to be users. We don't do that, our bots, people can't do that with our bots. But we have seen for example recently last week a community member flagged the use of our bot in a discord that apparently is connected to a scam and they said look, these guys are using your bots to promote their scam. It could happen right? Because people use our bots to promote their community NFTs and crypto and as we know there are scams in crypto just like there was crimes in the internet in the beginning, internet and every new technology. So how do we deal with them? So we have our plan to deal with those situations and it's important that we listen to the community and that is also kind of like self regulate. We also don't want to be unfair and block people but we always keep in mind if someone uses the bot create a recipe and share that could be considered like an evil bot or no sustainable bot for example because like you said. A bot that automates buying minting for example and then no one can get those minted NFTs because the bots are doing that well to that. What we are doing is leveling the thing because we are letting people who wouldn't be able to do that. No coding by doing that but at the same time we know that's not sustainable because if everyone had the capability of doing that the bot wouldn't really work which might be a good thing if those bonds are not very helpful so yeah. I think this is more or less how I think about so do you.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 See any key differences then between because I could see and it's interesting because as you were sharing the whole bot negative connotation aspect I do see in the very same discord channel that I'm thinking about in my mind as I'm sharing this with you. I do see that when they onboard new people into Discord. There's a bot that makes them go through all of the rules and the check marks. So they have their own as a community, they have their bots that are working on at least creating some sort of structure. Now there's mods that actually come in, community managers that come in and will respond to different things, but they have bots there to onboard or to, hey, you leveled up. You commented so many times in this community. Now you're a level two and you earn like points and things like that, right? So they use bots for good like that. Would you see that? That would be like a big key difference between the negative bots that are going through. People are building bots to just get ten different NFTs on a project so other people can't and then they can flip them for thousands of dollars. And then the good bots being the ones that kind of help structure a sense of community within a community.
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 Yeah, you have good bots in all these cases, and I'll give you some examples. But recently we did an audit of our Discord community and actually the auditor ended up installing a bunch of bots that exactly help to keep this quote healthy. And the same auditor is the big Brook user, and he installed Brook and many other servers that he did audit before. He's been a very good person to work with. Amazing. And then as you said, there are many bots to use for good. I'll give you an example, especially in the Web3 space that people can use botobots for in a good way. Let's say you have an Ft that is being sold. You listed an NFD, right? And the floor price moves constantly. So you need to monitor that. And then suddenly the floor price is going up. Your NFD might be a rare item in that collection. And what's going to happen as the floor price goes up? You might be selling it under the floor price, something that should be sold with a premium, right? And the bot might catch it and flip it, like I said. So we have a bot that you can monitor the floor price. And if the floor price gets close to your NFT, you can release it. It's going to hurt you and it's going to take you through a special page through both, and you can release through us, which makes process a bit faster and easier than through open seats. So it helps people to avoid getting their NFT bots for a low price, too cheap, they can be flipped. And we keep building more bots in that sense, like avoiding liquidation and other things. We haven't built bots. For example. To liquidate other people's loans. Which maybe it's on the other side. You could perceive that as an Evo bot. But at the same time it is important in the ecosystem that you have people liquidating the loans because that's what keeps the liquidity in the market and it keeps it healthy because if there is a bad debt. It should be liquidated. And if there is someone willing to do so. Great. So we haven't built bots for that. I don't necessarily think they're evil, but we focus on the side of let's protect people who don't want to lose by accident, right? Some people just genuinely cannot pay the debt. So in that case, fine, then you get liquidated. But let's first build the ones that protect people and then we can build the ones that liquidate as well because it's important for the market, right? So, yeah, that kind of stuff.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 That's an interesting perspective. I really like what you said there. Right now you're doing almost like the safety net around for people to be safeguarded against liquidation. But if there is somebody who truly can't pay due on that debt, then there does need to be some liquidation because it does provide the necessary flow in the marketplace to allow things to happen the way that they do. So I know I didn't prepare you for this question, but I think it's a really interesting one to ask, especially at this time when we're talking about that. So we're sitting in a time where I know you're in the UK. Correct?
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 Actually Switzerland.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Okay, so Europe, but here in the United States, the United States has now issued like regulation or attempting to issue some sort of verbiage quote, unquote, and I do that, quotes verbiage around not liquidation, around regulations and trying to figure out not make it so volatile. However, this whole Web3 blockchain technology, this goes beyond the country borderlines of the United States or the country borderlines of Sweden or all the other countries, right. It's global. So how do you see regulation either being a good thing or a bad thing in the overall general ecosystem of Web3?
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 Yeah, it's super difficult to regulate on a global scale. Yeah, but definitely regulation overall I think is good in many ways except over regulation. But overall regulation is good because gives people clarity so you can do things without worry. Like, for example, we created NFS for some people. We did very few of them so they could get a lifetime use of both. And then we were like, is this legal or not? And you go through all that. When I raised funds as well, I didn't do to crypto, but I did traditional VC, but we had terms related to potential token issue in the future and I took ages with the lawyers, all the lawyers from all the companies and it's like so all these things would be easier if we're the most clear. Right? So in many ways doing business in crypto would be easier. Today we don't accept crypto for most of our memberships because it is not so easy. It's not just not easy to accept because most of the standard companies don't transact like stripe and all because of regulation, right? And also my reporting, my financial reports become a nightmare and I need to manage them. So definitely regulation helps with all that. We'll help business in general in the web treatment. And even if it's only the US. To be honest, many countries will look up to some of the other countries for that. So if the US comes out with the regulation, most countries will kind of like follow that. Switzerland has quite a bit of regulation around crypto, which is pretty good, but Switzerland is unique and small, not necessarily other countries follow Switzerland. Most of our users are in the US. Over 35%. So definitely clarity would help outside.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yeah. I could see that you mentioned over regulation being a bad thing and where I see regulation as being a good thing or anchoring back to the examples that you had shared with being able to keep the books straight and all these things that are very kind of messy if you start doing cryptocurrency because right now it sounds like boto the plans. People pay in their fiat currency. Whatever country they're in. But not in cryptocurrency. Even though you guys are a Web3 company. And I've interviewed a lot of people on the podcast that are running Web3 companies that accept fiat currency. So the payment mechanisms are almost a Web2 with a Web3. And somebody one of the guests, and I don't remember exactly who, because I've done so many episodes now, but he had mentioned we are decentralizing. So he didn't say we are decentralized company, he said we are decentralizing because he's kind of in that bridge between I am a Web3 company, but we've utilized webs to financial systems to make that happen. So when it comes to those points that, like you mentioned, that makes sense in terms of regulation personally, and of course there's so much out there, but personally, I just feel like sometimes the gray, like we can't say something is black or white. Like we can't say, okay, no regulation right now we have no regulation and we need all the regulation because what happens is then there's too much like, okay, we put the laws of the land in place and then next year there's another little thing and another little thing and another little thing and another little thing. And pretty soon what we've been fighting for as a community in Web3 since the beginning stages of Bitcoin saying we want decentralized for the people, it almost becomes, again, government control, all of it.
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 Yeah, totally. And I think regulation doesn't necessarily mean going to control and that's where it becomes overregulated and extending. Like I said, the whole goal was not to have this control from I think the technology itself is almost impossible for Guardian to fully control. They can kind of outlaw and all that. But it's hard to control and we've seen how useful that is. Especially like some of my friends from Eastern Europe. Ukraine and everything. When the war broke. They were raising funds and they use crypto for most of it and they were journalists buying bulletproof vests and things like that for providing news and they ended up paying people in Bitcoins to get those things out because the whole financial system got blocked and was able to move money around. Especially, I think people don't realize how hard it is for countries that don't have liquid currencies to transact. Most currencies only have liquidity against the dollar, the euros or pounds and Swiss strings. So if you are in Ukraine and you want to transact with another neighboring country, guess what? You actually need to go through New York. And in times where war breaks and things, these things become very difficult. So having something like that is super powerful and for the world in general, for the people, that gives you an option when there is none. So I don't think that any government will be able to fully take that away from people now because it's out there. But definitely having some guidance in terms of hey, if you want to do business using these here in the US, here's how you should go about it. Right. Would make things better.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 I definitely see your point on guidance. The big thing that becomes problematic in my mind is the fact that most of these government officials and most of these regulatory bodies don't understand cryptocurrencies, don't understand tokenomics, don't understand the Web3 ecosystem and then they're creating guidelines to follow. And so that's where it becomes. If we want to truly see the change that we want to make in the world, it's like we need to get those people either a educated, truly in the space to make really good guidelines or bring people into those regulatory bodies. I don't want to do it, but it's a really tough one to kind of for me, wrap my whole mind around the idea of them providing some guidelines. I definitely agree that guidelines need to be provided, but guidelines need to come from an educational standpoint and not from a lack of knowledge, trying to decide whether someone is going to be able to do X or Y.
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 But the biggest fear there is like oh, people controlling us and the lack of regulation doesn't necessarily protect anyone as we see from the lawsuits. Absolutely. So we have people leaving the US and starting the companies abroad. Because of that. I have many friends who are in my cohort building crypto companies and did abroad. My company is in the US. And I decided to make a centralized company in the website. Until there's clarity, I would not be able to fully decentralize crypto.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yeah, so you're in the process, you're decentralizing.
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 Yeah, same idea. And the way I. Look at it. I think people overuse blockchain in many use cases. There are very few use cases. That truly makes sense nowadays. And it's very early stages of technology. It's like, imagine Netflix is trying to stream movies when we had dial up internet, it wouldn't work. And a lot of people are using blockchain for everything when it's not yet possible. And it same happened during the first the internet when Internet came out, all the ideas we have today that we see today came out at the same time. And people tried to do all those things, but I mean, because it was too early for me. It was very clear to me that I saw other automation companies going decentralized and I was like, this doesn't really solve the problem. Doesn't really help right now, but later it will. So I decided to start with a centralized solution for a decentralized problem and maybe one day with the hopes that the technology will catch up and we'll be able to decentralize. Just like Netflix didn't start with streaming and then ended up but always knew they would go there.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Right, well, that's great. It's great to see a I have to applaud your efforts in building what you're building and doing what you're doing and how much traction you've already gotten with Brook and just where you're going because the future is bright, you're doing amazing things and I think that the world needs what you have to offer. So I just have to say thank you for doing what you're doing.
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 Thank you. Thank you for educating people on crypto. It's super important.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Absolutely, of course. Okay. In wrapping up, I do want to ask because I know part of your story is you started your photo, the startup company when you had a new baby, like new baby on the way or new baby born. What was that whole process like? How old is the child now? Where are you at?
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 He's nine months now. And yeah, it's so cute. It was our first child. So, you know, when I started, when I did the hackathon, my wife just got pregnant pretty much at the same time. And a few months later I got the opportunity to join this accelerator. It has always been my dream to have my own company. So I have tried all the business before so the accelerator would give me some enough money to quit my job. My wife wasn't working because she was doing an MBA. So in the middle of all that with my wife have left her job to do an MBA and being pregnant. And we didn't really have much savings. So it's like, okay, this is going to give us a runway until February and the baby is due in December and we could pay rent until February and then we would have to go on credit cards at all and whatever possible. And so it was a tense discussion we had my wife was incredible, very supportive. And then decided to leave Repo to start. So the moment I received the money, the day after I quit, I didn't quit when I was accessible yesterday because I was like, until I have the money, I don't trust.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yeah, of course.
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 The moment the money arrived, which was in Crypto, by the way. Filecoin from Protocol apps. They are one of our investors. Protocol apps and consensus match. We're our first two investors in Accelerator program. That's how it happened. It was very tough. There were three months of Accelerator where I was still working on Repo full time because I had to my notice, I had just started my team, the Revenue Target team, so I was hiring and I was building the team, so I didn't want to leave. Also in a bad shape, so I was working crazy hours. I had a pile of energy drinks here. My wife was pregnant, so it was super difficult for her, was a difficult time for me. I was first pregnancy, we were living in Switzerland, so none of our parents or relatives go through. We were on our own. So the baby came. We have some parents for a few weeks, but then it's all on our own and it was tough. I managed to get the investment. We raised 3.7 million and that came in December 24, the first check.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Oh my God.
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 It was born December 10. It was just Christmas and we received one and a half meeting from Fintech Collective. And I was like, okay, I can breathe. We are fine for some time now. So it was crazy. And I must say I really underestimated how it is to have a baby with our family around. We speak duties. We are in a county that we can't hire someone for. Sports are expensive Switzerland. So I do all the night shifts. I still do them. Right now my wife is with the baby now because he's sleeping. And I was like, okay, if he wakes up, can you handle? Because in general I'm the one doing the nights and she's the one taking care of all the time during the day. Now she's working again. So she just started recently. She graduated from MBA, so it was crazy. But it all worked out and we are super glad we did both.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 It always does work out. And I think the misconception I have an eleven year old daughter. I was going to school full time and working full time while pregnant with her. So listening to your story, I can feel the pressure and know what it can feel like in those situations. But I think the biggest misconception for most people is that they feel like they have to have all their ducks in a row or everything has to be all lined up before they start their family. And sometimes it just happens and you're not ready. But like you said, the way you so beautifully ended that is that it all works out and here you are, babies, nine months old already. Years are going to pass and they're going to get to see dad and mom and be so, so proud of what they're creating and what they're building in the world.
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 Yeah, that's exactly it. In some ways I underestimated the work, but in other ways, I think in general, people do overestimate how complicated it is to have a child and all that. I think you find a way. I have a couple of friends who are entrepreneurs and I spoke with them and they like, you know, you just leave your life, just find a way. You all spied away and we are highly adaptable. So we all spied away and it's definitely worth it.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 That's awesome. I love it. I love it. I'm excited to see how the rest of your journey unfolds and stay connected with you to continue the Web3 adventures as mass adoption does continue to roll out. We're not there yet. We will be there, mark my words. Whether it's in five years or ten years or 15 years or 20, it's definitely going to happen and it's going to be exciting to see where everybody's at. So thank you so much for being on the show. How can people connect with you?
 
 [Breno Araujo]
 Twitter. It's Breno. If you go to Boto.io you'll find pretty much all the information there. And discord. Discord is great as well. If you want to talk with us, we are always there. By the way, we use our discord community server as our internal server as well as team, so we are always there. Everyone very cool.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 I will definitely put all that in the show notes. For people to be able to connect with you easily, they could just click the links and get to where they need to go. So thank you so much, Breno. I really appreciate your time today. And for those of you on this ride with us as we pull into the station, make sure you still keep your hands and feet in the ride at all times until we come to a full stop and exit on your right. We will see you on the next one.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 You made it. Congratulations. That wasn't so bad, was it? I hope you laughed and learned a little bit more about this Web3 universe and how simple and fun it can really be. Would you be so kind as to leave us a review and share it with your friends and family? It would mean so much to get this out to more people as we embark on the greatest transfer of wealth that has ever happened in human history. Can't wait to see you on the next one.