The topic of Zk Av Club Foundry Session 02 is—on a larger scale—the overarching theme of the entire series.
We are builders. The people working on Zcash, across various organizations and adjacent communities, are building what we believe will create a better future. We are constructing the future we want to exist—not just for ourselves, but beyond our individual lifespans.
We’re building different things, and we’re not all building together. Each of us is working on what we know best to create something the world is unfamiliar with. We apply our unique skills and interests, driven by the hope that what we build will improve our lives and the lives of those we care about.
There’s been a lot of discussion in this forum about our collective and individual motivations. What drives your day-to-day commitment to this project? For some, the magic words are financial privacy, decentralization, or number go up. For others, it’s a personal survival strategy or simply the most interesting career path available. In the end, words on a forum are just words—we may never truly know the motives behind the accounts here. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter. We are builders, each contributing to the same larger vision to the best of our abilities.
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Shielded Labs is “building the future of private money.”
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Electric Coin Company is “building a full-stack user experience for Zcash, so you can be free.”
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Zcash Foundation “builds financial privacy infrastructure for the public good.”
Similarly, the people involved with ZecHub, Zcash en Español, Zcash Brazil, and Zero-Knowledge Audiovisual Club (Zk Av Club) are building communities to strengthen the human layer of our network—empowering participants to contribute and grow the ecosystem in their own ways.
While there’s plenty of discussion, excitement, and disagreement about whether the right thing is being built—or if the right people are building it—what I actually want to talk about today is breakage. I want to talk about failure.
All this building inevitably includes failure. Some failure is acceptable. Some is beneficial. And some is detrimental.
Examples of Detrimental Breakage
The engineers working on Zcash—from wallets to consensus—must take extreme care not to introduce bugs that could result in lost user funds or expose sensitive information about a person’s identity or activities. 
Outside of engineering, public figures posting in ways that undermine the authority or quality of their colleagues, collaborators, or collective works can also be a form of breakage. 
The Other Side of Failure
Failure is often cited as beneficial—either for the individual who fails or for the eventual success of what they are building. In a 2019 interview, @zooko shared an example of such a failure that ultimately led to the success of the very project we all hold near and dear. 
I failed at undergraduate university studies. I was disorganized, distracted, depressed, and my grades were barely passing, at best.
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Dropping out of college was one of the best decisions of my life. Not only did it set me on the career path that led directly to my most important successes today, but, more importantly, when I started succeeding at my new job, I gained self-respect.The technology and startup was DigiCash, a predecessor of modern digital money technologies like Bitcoin and Zcash. Joining that startup led directly (over a 20-year path) to Zcash.
Regardless of what we’re building (and sometimes breaking), there is a common thread among the organizations and communities that participate in the Zcash ecosystem. We are all pushing the envelope in our fields in our own ways. We are trying to do something difficult and uncertain. There will be missteps, and there will be breakage.
Let’s stay strong and stand together to ensure that we make the most of our failures. Together, we can turn setbacks into successes along an unknown road paved with challenges.
The Failure of Zk AV Club Foundry, Session 2, Take 1
I like to think of this failure as a landmark on our journey toward success. A lot of effort went into producing this second session—its failure was not due to a lack of preparation. But producing an educational livestream about live translation using state-of-the-art tools in an experimental way is as difficult as it sounds.
We could have released a polished, pre-produced tutorial video along with the accompanying Salon recording, which was already complete. But that’s not what Foundry is.
Our goal in building Zk AV Club Foundry is to support communities in building themselves through educational and interactive livestreams. We practice what we teach, and we do it live. This makes our failures public, but hopefully, they also become part of the educational experience—for us and for our audience, which is also a part of us. We are building this community with a hands-on approach so that the communities watching can learn not just from our lessons but also from our failures.
I hope you enjoyed witnessing the failure and that you’ll join us for Zk AV Club Foundry, Session 2, Take 2 tomorrow at 15:30 UTC. We’ll be discussing the challenges and best practices for building communities, followed by an interactive lab session on cutting-edge live translation techniques that you can try at home!
SOON! Bounties using these skills and community prize pool funds provided by Zcash Community Grants!