Hidden Gems: Meet Watson Lewis-Rodriguez of Pigeon Dao

Today we’d like to introduce you to Watson Lewis-Rodriguez.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Hey VoyageDenver, thank you again for another great opportunity! My name’s Watson, and I’m a beginning developer but mostly an entrepreneur, I was raised in Surrey, an important part of England just near London, for a good half of my life, however, we later moved back to the US, particularly in the middle of nowhere Omaha Nebraska just before Covid. Through time I grew to be more vastly interested in technology and the ability to influence lives through code and development, however, most of the credit is due to TeensInAI, a Hackathon accelerator program that taught my younger sister and me about developing projects, business ideas or practical social movements that have a great influence on improving other peoples lives. They have brought me personal fulfillment, as well as excitement, towards teaching and mentoring other people in learning about how to build and share technology, people attending these hackathons provided genuine advice for people on how to advance themselves, which has greatly motivated me to get to where I am now.

Although I have plenty of stories to share about my life, I think it’s probably most important to talk about my current project which has been a huge part of my life for the last few years, and I think it’s worth focusing on my experience from this journey so far, in which hopefully introduces ideas and motivation for younger developers or readers to get out there and pursue your projects!

Pigeon DAO is the project I am most ambitious and excited to discuss today, Noah Maskens and I have cofounded this project since the start of Covid. Firstly, Noah is a good time friend and partner from Surrey, where we both went to secondary school together, although we didn’t expect it properly at the time, we both shared ideas and concepts with each other after we graduated, which has gradually to develop into a courier network. For a while, neither of us realized it was a project that we could narrow our shared goals and philosophy into to create a shared outcome, that could reflect millions of entrepreneurs around the world, however as we talked openly about this project, we’ve found that developers, VC’s, artists and leading influencers in the Web3 tech world commonly found interest in Pigeon DAO, which has encouraged us to continue developing a greatly viable solution towards solving some of the world largest nightmares in logistics and commerce at the moment, with that, our project is entirely focused on creating a peer to peer progressively decentralized courier network, where any individual can deliver any package based on an open rate, whether the driver or the user chooses. Our decentralized application (dApp) is currently being built and designed for our MVP, but as more people get involved and learn about the project over time, we continue to accelerate our skills and effort in making this a sustainable project for distributing honest opinions about improving our dApp.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Absolutely not a smooth road, but we’re still filling in the potholes! There have been countless struggles and obstacles in this project, I couldn’t lie about that. Previously, a huge issue was communication, as Nat Turner defined it well “Good communication is the bridge between confusion and clarity”, in which we’ve faced a remarkable amount of pain because of different perspectively that would marginally affect the end result of the project, initially it was with Noah and I trying to learn each other’s standpoints or perspectives, then trying to agree on a common ground, which when there were only two voices, it was easier to conform and collaborate, whereas now as more teammates get involved, there is more issuance and sharing the problem with everyone to find the common ground, although now we now are focusing on our end goal, we’ve learned that teammates willingness to share ideas or narratives help change the short-term outlook tremendously. Realistically, we’re doing excellent where we’re at with the project right now, and everyone is understanding the fundamental concepts of our project like the back of their hand!

We’ve also had more intense complications with the technical development of the project as a whole, since Noah and I started this project without a full awareness of the coding required for this project, we’ve both taken the initiative to build the back end systems, however, we’re now getting great help from excellent developers on our team. The assurance we have the right people on the team has also led to building the right systems needed for the project in order to continue making improvements and development, whether for the projects or for ourselves. This project is also helping each of us open new doors and opportunities, which has given us consistent motion to work on the project. Web3 is still like the wild west though, and we need to constantly reach out and seek help from likeminded people, which is also a huge task for each of us, because our project is being built on Ethereum and utilizing smart contracts, Noah, Favour, and Frank are learning the essential JavaScript toolkits we need to utilize for our backend development; in which we’re currently needing to connect live GPS and real-world tracking information into blockchain metadata that can then be viewed in our website, as well as connecting a decentralized messaging protocol (Waku) to our application so communication can be private and encrypted, however, these two factors ultimately determine the use cases available for this project, because if we have the ability to retain package delivery information into a public blockchain, this ensures drivers, users, and enterprises can utilize our service for any form of delivery, whether a small package pickup from a store, to industrial equipment that needs to be delivered over several states overnight, Pigeon’s use cases go far and wide, especially in cryptocurrency, we have a viable use case for ensuring your Ethereum or Bitcoin can be used in a means of exchange and service.

Finally, related to coding again, Wraith, Feeltrig, and I have been pursuing learning JavaScript, but more specifically, React JS & TypeScript – this was a huge curve that we’ve needed to spend time learning and tackling in order to create a functional front-end design system of the application, currently, this has taken several months, learning the functionals of each, DOM manipulation in the website and the essentials needed for ensuring a properly dynamic dApp. Although this is vital for the whole operation of Pigeon, this has tremendously helped Wraith achieve his dreams and find a start to his career in front-end development and game development, which has encouraged me to continue sharing concepts as well as trying to mentor people so they can focus on building their own projects for the future. Although everyone in this team has found several learning curves and obstacles along the way through miscommunication and not being able to attend team calls, we’ve all found that we share the right traits needed for a highly viable project that could help influence the world, and we all think greatly of that, we’re all here to work exceptionally harder than the other one but still appreciate the teamwork and opportunities coming out of it, I don’t know how I could ever repay them for investing so much time and motivation in this project, maybe a really cool pizza party!

We’ve been impressed with Pigeon DAO LLC, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Sure! I’m a CFO of Pigeon DAO, or as Noah would prefer me to call it, a Project Manager, haha. Pigeon DAO is a decentralized package delivery system, where our aim is to create borderless commerce transactions by allowing individuals to deliver goods and service anywhere that it is needed – for instance, if Kyle the business owner of Medium Concrete Repair wants 2-3 yards of wet concrete delivered to his job site in 3-4 hours from now but does not have the extra hands to have the concrete driven here from a team member, he is most likely out of luck if his wife or anyone cannot help. For him, this means potentially postponing a $4,000 sale, when he could hire someone who can fulfill his delivery without the stress of needing to lose an experienced individual on the job site to deliver it for him, all he needs to do is include the concrete payment + driver compensation in the total costs of the delivery, and someone can find this opportunity to earn some extra cryptocurrencies!

We strongly believe we’re set apart fundamentally through our ambitions of using Web3 technology, for instance, we use smart contracts to automate the need of having to regulate transactions, and we use blockchain GPS tracking services like the XYO Network in order to obtain anti-spoofable tracking data, like where the driver is, and we plan on using additional decentralized protocols like Optimism to reduce our transaction fees as a DAO to a small fraction of the costs it would initially be to push this information into Ethereum’s main net, while also using encrypted messaging services like Waku for peer to peer limited messaging! Our value is that we aim to commit as much possible decentralization complying with all grades of government and standards ensuring participants of the DAO are safe. Because we’re following requirements and focused on user safety, nearly all of our updates and progress have been slow and boring – which for us, is the ideal way of creating a sustainable, exciting startup, we’re motivated in making this over the span of 7-8 years to allow for any individual to become a driver, or their own entrepreneur and utilize their cryptocurrencies as a way of paying for commerce and services in the future!

We are proud to have become one of the first few projects who are focused on making this dream a possibility, and we have such immense value for individuals around the globe, so our focus is entirely on making people access to become their own individuals in reigns and countries that it’s not even possible to obtain a legal bank account, we want to help people pave the journey for their financial wellbeing through becoming their own contractors and drivers, and the protocols we’re designing daily are just proving we’re making this opportunity real.

What would you say has been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?
As my gym teacher said to me several years ago, “Suck it up, buttercup”. I wish I could express to you how important this means to me now, but this has been the greatest lesson I’ve learned so far in this project, just being willing to ignore the noise and focus on the volume and value of the work, by quitting the distractions to focus on the bad and ugly of the project to see the smooth sailing eventually. I’ve learned to just shut up and work on this, to stop complaining, and to stop wasting my time overthinking much of this project, I’m building this to try and create opportunities for aspiring developers and individuals wanting to better themselves, finding the brilliantly minded people around the globe while building a cool project that will help many entrepreneurs around the world, I’ve learned to be content with the speed of development and just focus on learning to program and learning how to appreciate the progress we’ve made so far.

Noah has taught me a lot too about my personal mindset, and I thought this project would only be a year or two, however, he’s made it extremely clear through all the events we’ve attended, “This project is my way of life” Noah expressed to me. Realizing that projects like these are being built to just do something good and philanthropic for others is much more underlying fulfilling for me, and I hope that entices you to consider just focusing on that project that you’ve been thinking about, life is way too damn short to be contemplating the project of yours, either you make it or you don’t, but at the end of the day, you will live with your actions, there’s nearly 8 billion of us out here just trying to figure out what this life of ours really means, so why not just focus on the project that makes you happy? Living my life on auto-pilot has been tortuous for me recently but it’s been how I’ve been feeling honestly, but frequent comprehension that this project is now who I am, is massively awarded to Noah for making me commit to this through the thick and thin.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.pigeondao.org
• Discord (Get Involved!): https://discord.gg/e4JQZQKuea
• Other: https://app.pigeondao.org