#111 – 20 Minute Playbook: Illia Polosukhin of NEAR Protocol and Unchain Fund

About Illia Polosukhin

“Find a mentor who's a few years ahead of you, like not too far, but like two, three years ahead of you, because those are people who still remember what they were doing in your position. And so they will be able to give you the most useful advice.” – Illia Polosukhin

Illia Polosukhin is Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol. NEAR is a layer-one blockchain that’s incredibly fast, has very low transaction fees, and is climate neutral—in part because of its Proof of Stake model.

It’s traded on crypto exchanges under the ticker symbol NEAR and has a market cap of just under $5B today. From 2020 through 2021, the developers working in NEAR’s ecosystem—building applications on top of their blockchain—quadrupled, making NEAR the 2nd fastest growing chain behind only Solana.

In this episode, Illia shares:

Why he loves running daily and how it helps him remember to just put one foot in front of the other to accomplish anything.
Why he loves the book Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink, and how he applies the principles in it to his life and work.
Why he’s been fascinated with the concept of a Social Graph, how to build it into the NEAR protocol, and why it’s so important for building a better world in web3.
Why he thinks everyone should find mentors that are 2-3 years ahead of them in terms of where they’d like to be.
Why he’d tell his younger self to focus on speed and velocity—shipping quickly in everything that he does.

For more, explore the transcript of this episode.

Chapters

In this 20 Minute Playbook with Illia Polosukhin, we cover:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:01:59 – Designing social graph in Web3
00:04:01 – Why context switching is a necessary skill for founders

00:05:51 – Finding mentors who are just a few years ahead of you in business
00:10:56 – Building a great decentralized ecosystem requires high-level, small, agile teams
00:13:29 – Books Illia recommends
00:16:59 – The nuance of the Russian language in writing

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Castbox, Pocket Casts, Player FM, Podcast Addict, iHeartRadio, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch the interview on YouTube here.

Big Takeaways

Illia notes that while most people hate running, including himself, there’s no denying that it drills home the point that everything should be taken one step at a time. Whether in running or in building a company, though your vision may be huge (running a marathon, building a great company), working step-by-step is important.
Illia recommends the audiobook, Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. He believes that taking ownership of your projects and results is incredibly important in a decentralized environment in order for the whole ecosystem to thrive.
Illia reminds us to think twice before simply labeling things and people without understanding the full context of situations. He uses the example of people being frustrated with developers who are unable to fix a computer… “but you’re a developer!” Using a simple label on someone without thinking through context can be detrimental.