Radek Sienkiewicz

Hi, I’m Radek!

I’m into reading books, playing basketball, web3 and understanding human nature.

When I’m not doing any of the above, I’m a Developer Relations Lead at WalletConnect and a conversion optimization and growth consultant, running Nextommerce.com.

I have a Master’s Degree in economics and it was my first building block. On top of it, I’ve taught myself web3, conversion optimization, programming, how people make decisions, and I’ll never stop learning new things. They’re just too interesting to ignore.

About this site

I’m interested in many different fields. This poses a dilemma. For example, if I had something interesting to share about conversion optimization or how we make decisions, I could do it on Nextommerce.com. But if I wanted to share anything about web3, or my thoughts about a book I’ve just read, I wouldn’t have a natural place to do that.

Twitter or Facebook could work, and both come with a natural, built-in audience, but it’s fleeting. For 2-3 days, people would see it, but beyond that, it’s as good as dead. I don’t want my writing to die. Also, I practically don’t use Facebook anymore.

VelvetShark is an all-in-one place to share everything helpful or just interesting, be it a book summary, an article, or just a surprising fact. I don’t need to worry if anything fits.

It’s also my playground, where I can harmlessly test new tools and ideas.

Why Velvet Shark?

Story time. I’m fortunate enough to have a group of 10 close friends. We’ve all met each other during our university years and we’ve stayed close ever since, even though many of us live now in different cities or even countries.

Back in the days, when there was no WhatsApp, no Messenger, not even Facebook, we still had the need to communicate and to keep in touch. As I have always been the “techy” one, it was on me to come up with a solution. I ended up self-hosting an email list, where you sent an email to one email address and it would be forwarded to everyone in our group. And I needed a name for this email broadcast list.

At the time, we were all either finishing university or have just graduated and we started entering the job market. More and more of us were ending up in big corporations. Except for me—I was already a freelancer.

A little bit out of jealousy and a little bit out of pride, I came up with the name “Business Sharks”, to friendly mock my corpo-friends. The email ended up being business-sharks@thedomain.com (I don’t even remember the domain name now).

At first, we jokingly started to call ourselves that, and after some time, everyone forgot the etymology, “Business” was dropped but “Sharks” stayed. Ever since, we have always been the Sharks. For years, we even had shark-themed t-shirts when we were going for trips together.

The Sharks, ages ago, just before the start of an epic trip to the seaside.

Now we all have families, all the babies are invariably “baby sharks” and I bet I’m the only one who remembers how the name came to be.

That explains the shark. What about velvet?

In part, it was the only shark-related .com domain name that made any sense. But also, to contrast and soften the sharpness of a shark. A predator, but a soft one. Kinda like a Smooth Criminal, just not a criminal.

Want to get in touch?

Drop me an email at mail@velvetshark.com or DM on Twitter.