I'm on my way back from Ethlabs's first 5-day offsite, which was also the first time I met my colleagues in person. Wanted to share some impressions of my colleagues, in no particular order: - @fradamt being the most research-y among us, i honestly sort of expected him to be a weakling (sorry), but he turned out to be the most athletic among us, beating me handily in ping pong and carried me in spikeball. he was also surprisingly (why was it surprising?) tuned in on social events, politics, history, things of that nature. really enjoyed chatting with him - @_julianma is the youngest among us at only 24, but it really doesn’t feel that way. his social polish and maturity are just astounding. i have the highest respect of him and would trust him to run any project/org of any size. and he was a genuinely kind person, taking me to kayaking seeing i had missed an earlier kayak session. - @binji_x -- honestly before i met binji my mental model of a comms person is a social media bro who's very good at posting funny jokes on twitter but not much else. while binji is indeed very good at posting funny tweets, he really surprised me with his depth of thoughts on a variety of topics, from the theory of comms to the vision of crypto. even though he's very young, i learned that he's been through a lot in life, which i won't recap here for privacy reasons but it explained why he's so mature for his age. - @adietrichs -- since ansgar has this annoying habit of not using slack, before the offsite i felt like i knew him the least out of everyone at ethlabs, and a part of me was wondering why out of such an amazing group of individuals he was chosen as the ED. but the reason became very apparent after just a few days. in short, ansgar is a natural leader. he's charismatic, opinionated but in a way that doesn't shut out other opinions, and a natural at strategic thinking. he's also a real intellectual that reads very widely and can converse with you in depth about almost any topic. we are lucky to have him as the face of Ethlabs - @barnabemonnot -- barnabe is very soft-spoken, which wasn't very apparent over Zoom but quite striking in person. he's a very calming presence and sometimes you don't really notice him, but whenever he speaks everyone listens carefully because he's always very insightful. He's an economist by training and you can tell by how he attacks every problem by dissecting it into subcomponents and examining their interactions. He also brought me one of the best gifts i've received which is a "Blockchain for Babies" book for my baby. - @casparschwa is very hard to read. i still don't really get him. he's the tallest guy among us but he rarely speaks so you often forget about him. but what's really interesting is that he speaks in such a way that, even though he speaks very slowly, it somehow always silences the room and draws everyone's attention to him. he doesn't really try to lead, but when he does he naturally has the ability to rally the group. in short, for some reason you can't help but take him very seriously. but on the other hand, he's also genuinely very funny. he cracks terrific jokes which are all the more funny with his german accent and slow speaking cadence. anyways, very strange guy; will need to study him more at the next offsite - @joshrudolf came in half way through the offsite so i only spent 2 days with him. he's also a bit of mystery to me because he's super quiet, but somehow he manages all our most important relationships with the top orgs/people in crypto, and he does an amazing job at it. when you watch these people interact with josh, it's clear that they respect him a lot. how such a quiet personality manages to be so good at building relationships is still a mystery to me My favorite part about working at Ethlabs is that it feels like everyone is at least 10x better than me in some critical dimensions. Super happy to have such an amazing group of guys to learn from.