Crypto Needs Its iPhone Moment | James Zhang

Transcript

why I mean it's not because Western year is like evil You could argue maybe this is too value extractive they just need to run it through a traditional Financial Rail and that's expensive right verification the T plusa all of that the it's not easy to do you know you really appreciate what crypto's built in decentralized finance and stable coins when you travel when you want to send a wire internationally takes days it's cumbersome it's difficult crypto collapses that and I've always felt that that's like the killer use case of crypto in many ways um like just if even if you just stopped there innovating and you didn't do anything else we can grow much much larger than where we are today we're just trying to be the onchain Apple that's it I think that's the honestly best comparable to

put us at I'm not even going to say 10cent or WeChat because we don't deal in data in that way but with the Apple it's very much from Hardware to software to how we're owning the stack um it's a big part work trying to do all right welcome back everyone to Empire we have a returning guest James co-founder uh CEO of Jambo welcome back James appreciate you Santi appreciate the Empire pod how you doing viewers this is going to be uh a very exciting episode for a couple of reasons um I think crypto is entering mainstream I

think there are few but important companies like Jambo that are really just been laser focused on go to market I've been thinking about this a lot from the inversion side of the house which is it is time to take crypto mainstream there are a lot of the blockers a lot of the reasons why the tech the maturity of that the regulatory landscape is is there and I think you guys have been on a journey over since I invested so many years ago you've survived you've really leaned in uh you know and you're in a position where you've been focused in a market particularly Africa and you know listeners might be saying I've heard this before um you know banking the unbanked crypto's all about that it

hasn't really come to fruition everyone's in crypto it's just a casino it's all about speculation I would challenge that keep that on the back of your mind because the the the vision of Jambo it's great to meet companies that since day one had a very clear vision and have executed and not really detracted from that and have been kind of quietly churning like working in the background and I think it was very surprising to me when I saw your booth at breakpoint last year not only by the way I embarrassed myself because I had to do a bunch of push-ups and I I you know I didn't do them in the correct form but it was just like a very it was probably the most energizing Booth out there and so I really would love to make this discussion about ju

giving listeners first starting with what is Jambo what have you guys been what did you see back then you grew up in Africa so I want you to give your background just to lay that context for people and then there's a lot of exciting stuff happening so we're going to cover you know a lot of that uh particularly the theme is how do you go to market and the opportunity you guys have seen with combining what are you know deep in like mobile services with fintech and those blindes really blurring is something that I am really excited about and you guys are really executing that so all this to say welcome why don't we start with the background and what Jambo is and then we'll go from there awesome appreciate it um first of all I think your form was okay to be honest and you did like 20

something pull-ups now push-ups uh because we had a big pull-up challenge at the booth but I think there was a lot of I didn't know there was so many Fitness influencers in crypto uh that were looking at the form so awesome um I guess let me start my background super quick James uh the co-founder CEO of Jambo I'm ethnically Chinese but grew up in the C in central Africa in the Democratic Republic of Congo uh families third generation from there grew up my entire life um this is a big part why I started jumbo I'm reiterating it and will'll share um ended up in New York study computer science at NYU I ran a fund for four years before in 2021 was like the reasons I got into crypto honestly is still the same as when I went to the Pod three years ago which is

crossb payments remines and banking in bank and all of that in Emerging Markets begins and ends with mobile and connectivity now what I will share with viewers right now to you know because I listen to a lot of podcast especially in crypto and generally the first five minutes you know whether or not you want to listen to it we used our phones as a go to market strategy but we're not purely a phone company to date we've sold about 750,000 phones our app is on the Android store your jumbo app which is your multi-chain wallet that supports 13 chains along with your questing platform tells you what to do in other apps in the phone is currently over 4.5 million wallets created um over 128 countries now these are the three main

points I wanted to stress because this shows a lot of how we think about distribution and how we disperse and use phone as a golden Market strategy in web 3 I'll stop there first no that's a that's a how does that position you in terms of for people that just have context like relative to like other projects in crypto like You' have what is it 4.1 million wallets 128 countries um I mean the other project that I can just think of that doesn't get nearly enough credit that has really evangelized adoption particularly of tether is Tron I mean they just have boots on the ground how have you guys gone to that position like do you just have an army of people that are incentivized to just evangelize and go and acquire customers like what walk me through like how the evolution of getting to that

100% I really appreciate that you bring up Tron you bring up tether um honestly I think Tron tether Jambo whichever obviously they're a lot more baller have done a lot more adoption I think we all solve one issue like why it matters is IT addresses the choke point of crypto adoption on boarding and accessibility now if you think about it if you don't Empower users in Emerging Markets to actually Le frog the digital economy and Bridge the gaps in financial inclusion like through decentralized Tools in education then you really can't onboard them to crypto like even if to tomorrow you air dropped a non-custodial digital wallet to the entire of Africa 1.4

billion people there 60% 50% unbanked you still will not Bridge them to the financial Global Financial ecosystem because they don't have access to credit there are just certain things that lack currently in the Global Financial ecosystem that you can use web 3 crypto and onboarding tools to onboard now you mentioned Tron and tether Tron is probably I'd say from what we're seeing our largest market is Brazil Argentina Mexico followed by Nigeria and Kenya and certain Southeast Asian countries like Thailand Philippines I say that's 85% plus of all stable coins that people just genuinely use they use TRX and the reason is just what you might use it if

it's cheap it's instantaneous it's very easy to understand and obviously a first moover advantage to a lot of marketing on the ground now how Jambo actually attacked all these markets so similar to myself right Third Generation in Africa you've pretty much expl a landscape you know how things work that's the only way you can reach 128 markets for us from Shipping phones Distributing and getting it to locals because it's not purely online if you want to purely online be able to reach these markets that might be plausible but to ship your actual physical Hardware product to these locations to have communities there I give example like in Congo right con by belgians I speak French growing up but it's pretty much useless right now for

me and day-to-day for Jambo because most of our customer basees speaking Spanish and Portuguese right in laam in Brazil Etc um in southeast different languages so you have to use not only their language to create communities and go to market but also in their local channels whereas most of telegram I mean sorry whereas most of web 3 is on telegram um most of these Emerging Markets are on WhatsApp so a lot of what Jambo is actually doing is bridging next we user solving that showpo in crypto but then localizing in the way to do so yeah you're you're messaging is you know you're building the world's largest onchain mobile network and a lot of that is is the jumbo phone so um you know

phones smartphones feature phones have become you know an extension of our body and it has allowed people to just do so many things and and just come online um tell give give us more insight into that like that market that those Dynamics in in Africa because as I understand that that's been like your primary market so um yeah maybe just let's spend a minute on on Jambo phone and and what does it mean to like build this like onchain mobile network awesome um I mean if I was to use one sentence to describe as say it's the largest existing Hardware Network for Network within deepin for crypto like as of today within the Jambo

network of phones uh 38 million gigabytes of storage availability about 650,000 plus compute nodes um at the end of the day what is your foundational infrastructure for any company in this space with Hardware is to handle data storage compute communication um and our low cost basis probably more than anyone else is $69 a unit out the factory right we sell it for 99 because from shipping to 128 countries you got to give distributor cut you got to shipping tax Customs tax solve all of that and we do that within the margin of still selling it for $99 um so I think it's just very important uh when you're building out

this network to think not hey how many phones can I get to this year which is honestly intuitive right for any phone company because that's what your main product is but from what I'm referring to is Jambo if I was to not even say a phone if I was like imagine an all-in-one infrastructure that provides connectivity to users that don't have it that can't send money across border that are in emerging markets that are unbanked right that need stable coins to receive their payment or their salaries to hedge against hyperinflation this user base which is honestly the 1 billion users everyone in crypto talks about on boarding you have to have that infrastructure that encapsulates it

where as a 19yearold in Lagos Nigeria at 10: amm you can buy this product right for a very affordable price and by 10 pm you can be already earning money like our slogan a big part of the phone for randing is the phone that pays you right you have a phone you have a job you spend time we tap in the labor market you earn so that's a lot of uh sort of part of our onboarding process is using the phone and the a lot of the quest and apps that are inside got it so so let's uh walk through that so like so you buy the phone for 99 bucks um that is available in many countries uh access to Internet services you're not providing through like a deepend type of service like helium you are relying on local infrastructure like mobile carriers for

to provide that data plan or mobile plan is that is that correct exactly so a lot of our messaging honestly in the beginning of Jambo was straight up all Africa because that's where I'm from right like even though you look at me like how's this guy from Africa it is um and there's a lot of Chinese there's a lot of Chinese in Africa by the way a huge amount of Chinese not a lot that have been there for three generations but a lot um and a big part I think I mentioned before as well as the Monopoly in Africa on Telos where there's nine guys that just built everything out Safari K Von orange Etc and that's that's why when you call between like vom and vacom it might be 10 cents but if you call between vom and safaricom it might be like $5 and the reason for that

is why is they want to monopolize it and that's why people in Africa you might be surprised they actually have multiple Fones in order to solve a lot of these issues I've definitely seen that yeah and by the way the book I'm ref I read a book called China's second continent and it's all about the Chinese presence in Africa uh and it's it's a fascinating eye openening kind of book um so anyways so so you these folks buy the phone and they're going to have to rely on their you know pay for mobile service have you have you thought about going kind of the extra step of deploying a network like helium in these particular places to structurally like lower the costs um now mo mobile plan costs are like they're all over the

place I've looked at it kind of like for what I'm doing like everywhere uh and and they're cheap but you could run it cheaper if you run a deep in network like helium in a particular country like is is that is that in the road map you thought about that yep first of all I think it's amazing what helium is doing um for that particular set of users right they service the us at the moment so when I live in the US I use helium honestly I don't run a hotspot and all that but I use their data plan so honestly it works like just flat out test it now for Africa for laam for Southeast Asia it's just uh a little bit different and there's might be why helium isn't servicing all these countries because it's very um I say the

data plans the network and the Telos are owned all by sort of the top like say families or say the top people in those countries and the reason why I'm actually really glad you brought this up I wasn't thinking about sharing too much but a big announcement of jumbo that actually has coming out is we're launching our own satellite Network to connect all the jumbo phones that are around the world Pro provide connectivity so they don't need to rely on web2 Tel Cod providers and they can tap into web 3 Network effects so I'll just share that first here then so any any Jambo phone in the world will be able to use a satellite and like just create this network of like connectivity exactly so explicitly is we are launching our own satellite into space it whether it's starlink whether it's

working another company please stay tuned to the announcement wow but it's been a project that we've been developing Jambo started 2021 that's when we did our seed I think we met in series a in like early 22 we've been developing this for more than a year so like it's been a lot of different Partnerships and web2 to string together to make this happen but the writing was on the wall last year we did a bit under like a million phones right this year we're thinking about doing a few million phones whether from the contracts we have directly to businesses to tels that are buying it for their users because everything we did last year was retail every phone sold was retail it was not to direct tell because it takes a lot of time to set those contracts up now this year we're looking at a few Mill and

phones being sold and why not have that huge component what is a phone going to do what like what is your phone going to do for you if it's not connected to the internet right whether you're using an iPhone Samsung or anything or Sal Saga even so you need that connectivity and honestly that's one of the B biggest base cases we're trying to solve wow that's amazing uh well really excited to see that I mean I've been tracking starling's progress for a long time and you know you know I think most recently they kind of announced I'm trying to I'm trying to pull it up like they're um like venturing more into Mobile of course like you know their ability to like would this be I guess like more redundant like you're still going to rely on local Telos but this might just be like you know if a particular user is

traveling or you know offering like a layer on top of that for more redundancy or just cheaper for a particular use case if you're roaming and stuff like that oh I mean for sure I mean even when I travel like these days I use AO right which is a very web to format and now I switch to Rome uh Ava I think does a really great job you know so you can directly tap in using crypto buy airtime credits around the world especially how many conferences we travel to in web 3 with our satellite again literally before hopping on the Pod our legal and our marketing team was like bro please if you say more than this like this is work so I'm not going to share too much but just know if you have a j phone anywhere in the world you can you will

be able to use internet through our like that's amazing um well excited to see that so so back to the thesis of phone like like it's super interesting because Sal did The Saga phone and their whole thing was like the phone canect as your Hardware security module like a cold like a like a you know you could use that for signing right so like nothing really stops you from using an HS like that becoming an HSM like the secure Enclave in the phone acts as like you know pretty robust like security mechanism to sign and all that um not only that but like presumably in your phone I'm looking at you know and we'll we'll probably like maybe um link to this in show notes but like you have some apps loaded in there right where

the user can to your point start earning or start you know get activated in crypto through this dab store can you tell us a little bit more about what that Journey looks like and what you've observed a lot of these users that have bought the phone a how many phones have been sold what is a typical Journey for the user and how does it get activated into into this world of web 3 100% um so off the bat is as a user whether you're in Nigeria our largest market whether you're in Sal Paulo Brazil you buy the phone say at 10: a.m. right you're chilling at home you buy the phone from your local provider distributor arrives you log in there's 20 apps pre-installed in the Jambo phone only one of those apps is the Jambo app which is your multi-chain wallet and your questing

platform now after oh by the way I think it's on share screen yeah yeah no that's what I'm saying yeah so I started sharing this so like here kind of have a glimpse of the phone right like this particular like jumbo jumbo GPT app yeah exactly so you come into the phone so this is actually the jumbo phone 2 some graphics we made just for users to share the jumbo GPT but essentially say Matrix fire is one of the 20 apps pre-installed um web 3 FPS game pre-installed uh it's on bybit it's on okx it's fully liquid token you get to level X on Matrix fire you earn x amount of tokens and you might say s you might say hey James like as a 19-year-old in Legos Nigeria I don't care if I have Max or fire tokens for Matrix fire I need

you know Nigeria like local cash well then we provide you the on-ramp off-ramp in the local um jurisdiction and that is a big part of what Jambo does and why 128 countries when we say ship to these 128 countries we don't we can't say we offer on-ramp offramp and all them because we don't but we do in pretty much more than a 100 at the moment now I want to also address the first salana Saga we're actually huge fans of The salana Saga and the Seeker phone that's coming out I think what toi is doing literally changed his uh on on Twitter to a phone salesman of selling phones is that he's trying to disrupt the App Store like who doesn't want to disrup the App Store anyone that has built anything for Google Play or for

iOS understands how annoying the process is from the 30% 40% or whatever fees you got to pay value extract huge value extract like fortnite got into this uh like they've been trying to it's fortnite especially in gaming against to all this because within gaming it's your own whole e virtual ecosystem and those are your users and especially in crypto we talk about the fat protocol thesis and multiple thesises about how to own the end user so we truly believe in what they are doing and we're trying to do the same thing but you might say James now why is your phone Android system if you're trying to disrupt you know that it's because when we ship to 128 countries billions of phones it's impossible to work with those local Distributors unless your Android or iOS system like you're not even in play to

get to those numbers to work with those guys so that's one but two we also have our dap store where we have a bunch of D apps right now Progressive web apps that are not on Android not on iOS that we've made into accessible format for mobile for our users yeah so I'm looking here like uh for folks that are are viewing this video I highly encourage you to do that like so you have the the phone itself the hardware so that's important by the way it's very competitive at like 99 bucks that's the I actually have a phone that I you guys are so kind of give me one actually two the first one in token2 249 duai and then in in Singapore beautiful phone um and um you have now so you buy that 99 that's fairly

competitive with other you would call this a smartphone not a feature phone it's like a full-on smartphone that is that correct if you if you look at iPhone 11 specs how much RAM they have 12 we have 12 if you look at Storage storage 128 gigs yeah the only thing I'll say don't look at that we really fall behind for any phone you might be holding right now is your the camera but that's honestly just how much money you put into the cameras how much you're gonna get back so we really found it hard to uh make that better but everything else like you can play genin impact FPS games no lag yeah I mean truthfully like just as a a side anecdote like like Mark Zuckerberg in his most recent interview Joe Rogan was

talking about like apple really has not innovated that much for their phones the new the new photo um like app and the calendar there's just like really falling behind it sounds like so I could see the tides turning but I hear you on the camera so so the phone itself is very competitive uh both from a price standpoint feature standpoint uh for a lot of these folks um what about the flow like so once they buy the phone like what have you observed in terms of metrics like you have people seeing here in the video like you have the Jambo app which encompasses Jambo earn um you know you can time as as you coin it turn time into money One Tap at a time gamify quests and start earning immediately I want to learn more about that I also

want to learn more about gambo Jambo play uh you these digital Adventures casual games to immersive experiences Jambo play brings the universe of mobile gaming right on your fingerprints and then the wallet um which allows you to connect transact and manage your digital assets seamlessly in a safe secure and Incredibly userfriendly manner along with the e ecosystem kind of the web 3 or dap store let's just call it an app store I hate the the DAP just drop the D kind of thing um but let's me go through a couple of these but uh back it up with what you've actually observed in real usage interaction yeah let me just throw some numbers out there uh five hours da on the phone not just on our jumbo app so

we can actually track the amount of time that our users use so most of our power users is around five hours um aird draw stuff we'll get to so I won't share too much how we're rewarding our users through uh whether jumbo earn or jumbo play um but end of the day all of the quests that you see on Jambo they're not they're not by Jambo they're by all of our partners they're by say they're by Avalanche they're by salana they're by abos we have multiple L1 partners that have their uh apps pre-installed on the jumbo phone we have multiple games from Call of the Void to Matrix fire Etc multiple different geographies but end of the day we're not going to dilute our brand we're GNA keep 20 apps on the

phone that's pre-installed um and we're going to keep changing them out based on a merit system of what we see of how users are spending time like for example even though I love X company that's pre-installed in the jumbo form but we just see out of the 20 apps well 19 because one of them is a jumbo app will'll never move other than 19 this one is just not doing very well in its category the da is very low we find why we might deinstall it we might put in another app that we think will work very well the last thing we want to do is play like at maker God and say Hey you have to use XYZ that is why we partner with so many l1s because in various regions like you brought up Tron libr Etc is huge but from what we are seeing

and why we actually chose salana to launch our own token and everything that we are doing is because all the kol's all of the local people in jurisdictions that we're talking to is using salana whether that's from buying meme coins on liquidity or whether that's from having Phantom or some some YouTuber that they watch right in Brazil YouTube is huge and not as much Twitter uses it so they're on it so it's not really like Jambo is saying hey well obviously we 100% believe in salana and everything that we're doing but more so we did our due diligence and in over a 100 countries around the world you see local people that are not on crypto

Twitter it's not the people you're looking at every day but they're on salana and they're not on the other Chains It's like okay there might be a reason there we should probably be pushing that's interesting you mentioned that like one the user that comes in through your phone doesn't has has no infrastructure loyalty you know what I mean like they don't care about ethereum all the different flavors of l2s or all the different networks but but you mentioned like is it because of the low fees or why are they or or they just a they learn learn about maybe from their friends or just the internet like hey there's whole meme coin phenomenon happening in salana well they just like go there right they want to and it's not so much they think about salana it's like I want to buy Bonk or you know what

flavor them on token uh and most of that the cycle has been in salana is that the case or is there another reason why maybe from your side where you push salana because it's just easier to integrate it's easier to you know how do you think about like that so to give everyone credit Santi I'm going to say most of the l1s actually have a have done events or some sort of something with someone in the regions that we are in like we've seen it right we've seen certain l1s be in these regions do a lot of things locally but the only one that we've seen caught on where when you go to an event locally with like just everyone trying to pour in is salana and

I'm really not I don't know how to come off objective here because we are launching SPL on salana but MH it's a mix from what you see on crypto Twitter the writing on the wall of meme coins of liquidity of low fees Dex screener plus Phantom plus pump fun plus everything that just happened we all know that the AI trenches have been on salana and base I put it that way but I think it's just I don't know what they''re done they just there like we go to forget Sal Paulo we go to like Rio anywhere like it's just salana being talked about by the influences and everything and I was like okay understood yeah how much activity are you seeing on earn play wallet so from I'll say this from our

tge campaign with our lead exchange that happened because we just announced uh our token launch a few days ago um we've gone more than a million submissions for some of our campaign like one campaign Quest on just one exchange I think that's a and that's countered with a lot of the uh data that we've seen from The Exchange I think it's a lot of like Emerging Market users that have never done a campaign on these exchanges it's sort of a lot of feedback that we're seeing that this is the first time they're coming to these exchanges they're Mak an account and they're adding in the exchange ID and their jumbo ID and they're getting bonuses and that's a big part of their incentive to come in um and this is really not me

trying to show our phone I haven't gone to a token or anything I think this is just showing around the world there are just that many people that are using crypto every day but that's just not connected to the resources that we are connected to and tap in and use every day because they have different use cases and in different regions right how's this you know for a skeptic listening like oh this is great the Fe the phone sounds like it's feature parody particularly for the audience and Market you're going after 900 bucks seems a your attractive price point uh the ecosystem of apps looks you know um you know a lot of gamification here you could see you know a lot of traction how sustainable is it and that's where they might be like okay well right you know how does this actually really scale to

you know hundreds of millions and who's actually incentivizing kind of on the back end like these claimable rewards and Journeys and quests and and how do you think about that from a go to market standpoint and really just scaling this out to hundreds of millions of users great great question great question I'll say this let me clarify this Jambo we are also creating new users that have never heard of crypto to come in but most importantly I think 90% of what we're doing is funneling users around the world that are already using crypto just not in the sense that you use it every day to actually come into our Center Let me Give an example I went to school in New York I grew up in

Africa my friends in New York use crypto every day NYU my friends from Africa that grw up who use crypto every day and New York is for trading africas for paying their supplier when they run a Furniture business in Congo they need to pay for wood in senagal uh when they need to be banked and they need to hedge against inflation now these users are already spread out they already see the use cases you look at El Salvador using Bitcoin as a you know treasury you look at around the world Lam Africa Etc using that for us all we are doing is enabling these users like look instead of just buying Bitcoin stable coins holding on to it or using

this to send to your friend as a transaction you can actually access a whole world of web 3 from our device I don't know if that makes sense but it's like just expanding what they already know to use a crypto but they don't actually know like what mainstream crypto that me and you look at on crypto Twitter they're they're not on you know buying zerro they're not on Dow fund buying a16z or pledging into Etc things they're using it you know for their families and for themselves and for their livelihoods now if you what do they have and what they don't have what they don't have is money most of people around the world you just don't have money everyone needs more money but what you do have is time now you can trade that time to earn more money isn't that

a very like how it should be to be rewarded for using a different company a different network a different protocol so all we are doing is of building that bridge between yeah yeah absolutely and I'm looking at the Dune dashboard here just to kind of put finer points on on this scod market so you have sold all time like o over a little over 700,000 phones there've been 5.8 million wallets created of which you seem to think four are active 4.1 my apologies the data I was using earlier is still from a month ago I think all right well look at that yeah uh um a lot you see here um the regional kind of footprint a lot of it is Africa

uh in Middle East um although you have presence kind of pretty much everywhere 100 mentioned that like 128 countries give or take um seems like your largest market is like Vietnam China uh at least by sales Philippines India this overlaps by the way closely with I think crypto adoption and and and you know in the particular countries Latin America is also important you know you have Brazil you to your point Argentina Mexico obviously just geographically these countries are among the largest um what else is relevant here um rewards by region Asia is just dominating there I think you're just

like more digitally native Savvy active you saw a lot of that with play to earn right like Philippines and Vietnam just like really really dominant markets is there anything to that that you like observe like why is it that Asia just is it just like sheer number of users and just like just that's just a population thing or is there anything particular about the Asian consumer more young digitally Savvy that just gets it so from the time that we are recording right now or even to when a viewer listens to this in probably a few days or currently it's Chinese New Year's and I don't know if everyone around the world knows what Chinese New Year is but basically Chinese right stereotype works very hard doesn't even take weekends like Works 24 hours a day

seven days a week the only time there's no Christmas there's no new year there's no nothing for Chinese the only time they take a break is that one week of Chinese New Year's everyone goes home Beijing Shanghai are ghost towns the biggest cities in China everyone goes back to where they are from in China and you don't do any work the all of China is off work all you do is drink and gamble so Jesus I say all of this to say I I just believe um our ethnicity the Chinese and Asia are very very um risk-takers and uh yeah so probably a lot of volume is from risk taking in many regards now you mentioned that um perhaps um more of a broader conversation around why are people

really incentivized to to use Jambo is it um is it more the speculation like hey I've heard about this mecoin Mania or just crypto as a whole is like you know a lot of speculation does it start like that was was a big part of the user base coming because they're like hey this can actually be my bank I can earn it's it's sort of like a could could become an important form of livelihood for people and the same way that Uber airbnbs you know provided alternative sources of income for many people and then like they really discover or or is it like just the pure idea of just having a stable coin and saying God I just want a digital dollar and I can do this through this phone and I want to talk about on and off ramps if that's relevant but across all those three how do you think

about like why a user a how do they hear about Jambo or why they really interested in it like what's a primary motivation it's kind of hard but just like anecdotally like why do you think that is 100% I think it's this is actually uh so I say our team wakes up and goes to sleep it's just one word in mind distribution that's it like we realize distribution is King but product is very much coming right after it so I would like to think that when a user wants to buy a jumbo phone they see what's on the market like forget web 3 right say you're just a normal guy you in wherever you're like let me buy a phone the cheapest phone you can find is $120 it might be opo Vivo right you go up $10 to $20 it might be a Samsung you

go up $10 $20 it might be a Huawei another few hundred you get to iPhone and there's a lot between that's why Hardware is very hard to scale and uh not a lot of people just start off with Hardware we break even we don't make a single dollar our phones the phone sells for $99 so already you save 20% margin on buying this Hardware device if you wanted to buy a phone then you will realize actually a lot of the specs in the phone are better than even the $50 to $200 phones we see because this company is not trying to make a profit on the phone rather trying to get as many hours possible for the platform onboard more users and make their users happy that's why users buy the phone now why they would state after they buy the phone is actually to spend their time to

earn money as a job I don't know if you know but like in keep using Africa example let's just stick to Africa and Africa typical African household you might have say 10 people maybe there's one or two that are working right Emerging Markets there's not as much job opportunities and if you talk about danger level of the jobs that people do as well very Wily different from the US or anywhere else so with Jambo you spend your time inside this phone which is very explanatory you don't need previous set skills you don't need to know crypto all you need to do is hey you play this game or hey you come into this app you do XYZ which you already see the instructions in Jambo app um so I say that's two of the main

reasons they they come into the phone for the the pricing and the tech and they stay for earning opportunities yeah absolutely and by the way that the user experience it's like you know when people have strong motivation like they'll figure it out kind of thing there's like a great experiment uh done in India where they installed like behind concrete wall like a computer screen really and kids yeah people should go look at that and kids just without any knowledge they just install them without telling anyone these kids just You' see the video of them like you know looking at it and then within like a day within weeks they were like going on YouTube learning stuff playing games like people just figure stuff out right and so that's always been like in the back of my mind where people say oh crypto the uiux is hard I'm like n you

don't understand like you know like the the biggest bottleneck is the on andof ramping which is okay people get rewards in this Jambo phone and the app how do you cash out how do you use that in the real economy y we have essentially our own on and off ram set up uh around the world in jurisdictions but also most places that uh you might be targeting have licensing and other things involved so you work with a third party right so we might be working with transac we might be working with yellow card we might be working with honestly even like big centralized platform forms so um it's just a matter of having a big BD team that can actually reach out to all

these other businesses that be how do you do your on and off RS number one can I tap into that Network because I'm not trying to my business isn't predicated yeah you're not trying to build that yeah it's a service that we provide but it's super integral or second is should I be doing this myself if I have the ability to so a lot of what we're do is actually tap into other uh companies networks locally to provide this to our users yeah absolutely that's fascinating look I mean I I've come to the conclusion that there is no better platform business than a mobile carrier particularly uh Mo what are called mvnos mobile virtual Network operators which is you don't need to have the physical infrastructure you're relying on local partners that have physical infrastructure and tapping into

that or you're building it yourself in a kind of a deep in manner with hotspots and incentivizing people like helium is done in the US there just some massive opportunity to to really just do that why because you're living with a customer 247 right but do you is is it like the margins that's amazing on those mvnos or is there some other parts no no see this this is the thing AA traditional mvnos are dock businesses they have like less than 10% IIT margin why because their biggest costs are buying the data from people that have the physical infrastructure and um you know they can have some sort of like Arrangements a lot of traditional carrier har mvnos it's just like but it and the second component so

like anywhere between 50 and 60% of the co cost structure is how much are you paying per gigabyte and say you have 100,000 subscri 100 you know million or 50 million subscribers a lot of them consume 5 10 20 30 gigabytes per month you give a limited data plan well you're gonna have to buy a lot of gigabytes right to service that customer base and so you're going to have to go and buy that data from someone that has the physical infrastructure that's can be very expensive in the US two bucks three bucks four bucks so that is the biggest cost structure for mvnos because again they don't own the physical infrastructure and and then the second cost is customer acquisition and of course across those two buckets my thesis is and the

conclusion that I've come is you can really transform and become a very best-in-class MV note why because you can use what what makes helium helium is in the US they have 27,000 hotspots that has created sufficient density in the US to be able to offer the mobile the helium Mobile plan 20 bucks 30 bucks unlimited and then you can actually provide feature parody right what you don't want as users to buy your phone like oh great the phone's great the plan is 20 bucks but I don't have coverage anywhere other than New York in Miami well you know I didn't know they had 27,000 27,000 hotpots yeah so they they've been able to all position themselves to actually where carriers are offloading data to the mobile to the helium

network uh sometimes 20 40 60% I've seen and that started last year and that's what's so exciting that you've created this decentralized infrastructure Network like deploying infrastructure is very very expensive even in the US forget about Africa and these more rural areas like India like super underdeveloped right you need to have a player that just deploys the infrastructure a lot of times is government a lot of times it's a Consortium of governments and large Enterprises or Chinese like you know State own kind of companies nonetheless um helium comes in and says I'm going to incentivize this network of people to buy a hotspot and provide that you have internet right and ISP but anyways which you don't may not even have in these

rural countries or places sorry but anyways the mvn yeah like you can really um take that mvn from 5% margin to like a 20% margin just by by instead of buying those gigabyte that that data package that you need to service your customer base from from a large TCO you can go and buy it from this helium Network like this decentralized network of hotspots right uh for like 50% 60 70 80% cheaper and that's very material not only that because you've saved so much on that you can then offer incentives to acquire customers so your customer acquisition game becomes stronger and more efficient and more organic and sustainable you can offer rewards like you see in the jumbo phone right um and

so yeah I think crypto is really good obviously at offering it incentives and acquiring customers the key to your point this overall discussion is how do you retain them and that's where you have to have that's where I think the second leg of truly I think be one of these companies will become the largest company in the world seriously like what tensent did in China you can really take that Playbook and transform it why because everyone needs mobile services right it's essential it's like a it's a human right now almost it's the it's the middle of everything that everyone needs then you can Center of everything you live with a customer 24/7 why are you going to stop there well offer them fintech services oh I don't know we built an entire infrastructure to offer

those services in a faster better cheaper manner just with stable coins right run that playbook in every country in and you literally will create like the the lines of like a mobile carrier in a ftech company are blurring you have companies like newbank that started in Brazil with a as ACH and are now layering mobile you have companies like Walmart in Mexico they have a huge distribution Network hey why am I not capturing more wallet share from the customer I can the customer leaves my store well why don't I offer Mobile offer my mvn I'm GNA acquire these customers super easily I can probably negotiate really good pricing because

I'm a behemoth I want to live with a customer 247 not just when he's in the store so you me Walmart Mexico's mvno uh has become the largest mvno in Mexico in like a matter of one or two years of course because every Mexican walks into Walmart you're going to sell them your mobile carrier plan not the competitors now where none of these guys not newbank not Walmart not an mbn in the US none of them are offering stable coins why not like you already have Robin Hood you already have revolute you already have PayPal you already have it's going to happen right I it's like you're seeing it happen so I mean I I

think I didn't fully cidly appreciate this thesis until I kind of went through it and saying okay which business do I want to own how do we activate and solve crypto's biggest problem which is go to market like no one really cares if youve built fantastic Tech you need to get it in the hands of people ex oh well what do they really want hey possi your phone POS I mean Santi you're touching upon this right now by the way I 100% agreed you should have just done this pod yourself you know to be honest but stable coins like I know there's a bunch of people that are big advocates for stable coins on crypto Twitter and just around in general but I still think it's just so underrated it's like one of those things where your tra five friend is like hey

why can't crypto do XYZ and you're like wait this is what stable coins do like oh like literally your transaction costs reduce from like 5 to 10% in EM to like one bit and you get access to USD denominated savings which is important for high inflation countries which you might not understand as a viewer because you're probably viewing it you grew up in Dr Congo I grew up in Mexico no one you can always anytime you travel there's only one currency that's accepted worldwide there only one you can always whip out a Benjamin and they will take it gladly you will pay anywhere and so I think that that's it like just stop there we don't need to reinvent anything else other than like the the key though is like once you get into the weeds like how do you do on and

off ramping easily right W if you have a store you can deploy ATMs there you can work with local banks like once you have a cash flowing machine like uh mvno or a distribution partner like convenience stores even local like Mom and Pop like bodegas or like that are very popular in you know India or in Africa like you don't have these massive like Supermarket like convenience stores like they're more like small convenience stores but those can be like this company Zar that I invested in and that is focusing on Pakistan you guys should like talk to them because they they're basically their wholeo is hey building a new bank is pretty hard on and offring in crypto is really hard the founder um

Brian was like inspired by um like taking the deepen component and saying um here let me see I think I think I agree with both of those points building both of those is very hard yes yeah and so what he's done is saying hey there's all these network of mom and pop shops where people go and buy like not only food grain whatever reload their mobile plan why not act have them be you know the the on and off ramp for crypto right uh and then you have obviously need to have a whole host of like there's a lot of that goes into that uh that's what makes like Zar Zar it's Brandon By the way um who who's building Zar but yeah I think that would be a really interesting proof point of saying can you take an an

existing network of convenience stores or you know any other distribution partner can that be a mechanism to onboard these people into the digital economy and you hit him with a stable coin once you have them with stable coin it's you're Off to the Races right and a lot of crypto projects to your point you make it a sustainable business right because you as you built with Jambo you have a whole seret of projects in crypto that are going to want to offer incentives to acquire that customer right you don't have to pay for that you become a very you just become a conduit for that and in a more Equitable manner right you're not charging 30 40% like the App Store like I think that's what the thesis that salana had with the Saga and still has right which is someone's

going to disrupt this Monopoly and I think it it is a stable coin like it's just that's that's the wedge that you truly break this because everyone in the world wants to have that and so yeah it's really exciting to see what you guys are doing like I think I mean what is stopping you from becoming not not only do phones like you know their storage here there's you know you can do a lot of things that you know crypto like even you know inference and like what exolab is doing right you run like an AI you know you know inference on your phone kind of thing right so this access to like the the you know additional income opportunities for so many people at a world scale you know becomes so important but like what is

stopping Jambo from being a massive ftic the same way the new bank did it in Brazil like nothing structurally right you're exactly right you can capture the remittance flow you can capture swap flow you can capture you can offer Insurance you can offer credit by the way you can offer credit by the way Cil resistance huge problem crypto oh by the way you have kyc on every customer exactly Cil resistance something underrated as well not talked about but I will say this though like wizar probably only Brandon can do this because of his connections and how well he understands that geography and the payment structure that work there yeah yeah you would partner with someone like Zar and their in P exactly and um I'm not even embarrassed to say this like

we're not really in India or Pakistan right now it's such a tough Market I don't have that distributor connection and I don't have that ability to find that right now like I'm not scared to him like I I might after this pod ask you for a intro to Brandon Brandon are you listening yeah yeah I think what I'm trying to say is it's so tough like where where are you right now what country are we in right you're in Monaco you know like Hong Kong Etc but wherever you are trust me not everyone has that knowledge of how those Payment Systems locally work and that is why there's all this Arbitrage and why it needs to be fixed yeah yeah you're just providing a better

connectivity layer like a conduit um but yeah look I mean obviously I'm I'm very focused on doing it in Latin America I want to become the larest Telecom business in Latin America and there's a way to do that and once I do that once I do that then you know hey what's you know I need a phone right so I'll use a jumbo phone once I have the jumbo phone like you've already built a whole Suite of products and services to make it super easy for my users to you know interact in this world in a safe manner too right because you can you don't control like there's not like you're going to like Whit list apps you're going to like provide only safe apps uh you're going to provide all of that experience and walk that consumer through their web 3 Journey without calling a web 3 this is just an digital

economy it works uh don't call it crypto just drop all of that nonsense digital economy um yeah digital economy real products and services and make it fun right gaming uh and and the lines are really bur I think tenson did it in a way 10 years ago 15 years ago and it really just you would you could have looked at that and said this is where finance and just Digital Services uh are going by the way cut you off but you said 10 cent twice already in the last 10 minutes would you mind explaining for the users and I can add in as well too What tent is yeah yeah I mean it's it started a social right um a social app um and then it just grew into

the everything app um you know it offers in the whole like you don't leave 10 cent for anything else right you can order food you can stream in China everyone by the way no one leaves 10cent 10 cent is the only app you use in China right yeah yeah absolutely there's a great book by the way um I forget which one 10 cent book uh that people should read there's a few but I think it's influence Empire or there's a couple but I'll link it in the show notes anyways but you're right like it started social why why did you start in Social because everyone wants to communicate and social is just that thing and once you have that attention why not monetize it in hundreds of different of ways right and and I think

I mean feel free to layer on here like your your Insight being in China and having you know relatives there but I mean it's a dominant app uh it's hugely profitable um and they offer a whole Suite of just products I mean they their whole Mo I think is we have all this attention we never want our user to leave what else can we continue to add so that that never happens and we continue to monetize and have a higher wallet share for that user and I mean that they've executed on that no better way to put it yeah you're at home in Shanghai you need to pay your electricity it goes out we chat yeah you need to text your friends we chat you need to buy your airplane ticket to see your girlfriend in Beijing we chat

pay phone bills top of credits we chat I think this is what it evolves to in a real super app in web 3 sorry not to say web 3 in the digital economy because honestly when people hear webd they're like oh this is a whole other sector I don't know n it's the digital economy it's what you're tapped into already just trying to enable you to do it better and more efficiently through new rails um exactly I really enjoy so like yeah I think that's that's the that's the comp that's the Playbook that you want to run and and the condo here is just stable coins killer killer product and and you have that mobile and stable coins I won't like I'll just keep hammering home that so anyways what I'm doing is it's just that right Latin America again prime prime everyone wants to hold

dollars the remittance Corridor in Mexico is the largest in the world the remittance Corridor in Mexico Mexico us Mexican a lot of Mexicans have relatives that immigrate and go to the US they're earning dollars they want to send it back to their families in Mexico that flow remittance flow from the US to Mexico is the largest in the world those people get charged six to eight percent by the Western Unions of the world to move that money t plus five days insane 100% why I mean it's something because Western year is like evil You could argue maybe this is too value extractive they just need to run it through a traditional cial rails and that's expensive right

verification the t plus all of that the and so it's not easy to do you know you really appreciate what crypto's built in decentralized finance and stable coins when you travel when you want to send a wire internationally takes days it's cumbersome it's difficult crypto collapses that and I've always felt that that's like the killer use case of crypto in many ways um like just even if you just stopped there innovating and you didn't do anything else we can grow much much larger than where we are today uh but someone needs to do it right someone like you guys when I first met you you were like we need boots on the ground we need local evangelizers local people to run to these Villages towns convince people

show them how to do it and and a lot of times in crypto you see this very idealistic Founders that don't have that appreciation they don't want to get their hands dirty it's like you got to go in there you you have to just either it's you you or working with a local partner that really gets it well I don't know if you know how Tron did it but I mean they have boots on the ground right they're just pushing it adoption they likely always have the strongest presence in crypto conference but I'll give them credit I mean they've just run that Playbook better than anyone and and they're doing it in a local manner this whole idea of like doing things that don't scale you know everyone in crypto and Tech is always like oh you know that's not scalable it's like no man but like you have to do

things that don't scale quote unquote to really get to scale and I'll do them in a cost- effective way right and and so I think uh there's there's just a lot of opportunity um I'm very I'm very excited what what's going on so what's next for you guys like what is what do success look like for you in the next you know five 10 years where do you want to get where do you see the biggest opportunities like what's your focus because you can go literally go anywhere like there's just so much to cover so how do you stay focused and what are your main priorities honestly Santi we're just try to be the onchain Apple that's it I think that's the honestly best comparable to put us at I'm not even going to say 10 cent or WeChat because we don't deal in data in that way but

with the Apple it's very much from the market cap perspective to the tech from Hardware to software to how we're owning the stack um it's a big part what we're trying to do and I know that's a crazy statement right hey what are you trying to do in the next five to 10 years onchain Apple what but uh hopefully we prove it to everyone one step of the way like literally when we started in end of 21 early 22 Yeah boots on the ground right like Alibaba we call it t um Iron Warfare for Alibaba back in the day where you literally have thousands of people army on the ground going through every street every city like the cities that The listeners might be listening to that know is Asia Beijing Shanghai you know maybe a few others Hong Kong you've

never heard of the tier two tier three tier four tier five cities right in a country of 1.4 billion people those are huge that's where most of the population is and what they did is you can literally go to each Street in each of these cities put your advertisements sell those owners and get those users onto yours now I think with the digital age this is not as feasible today so honestly what we are trying to do is make sure we have a loyal user based fan base that we reward that we do a lot with that every campaign that we do we have them in mind for Jambo and that is like have owning an iPhone 1 iPhone 2 iPhone 3 like today we on iPhone what 16 Pro max if you go back and apple says hey everyone that owns an apple one to

Apple 6 these six phones are most loyal users you get x amount of airdrop of Apple tokens right that would be pretty amazing right if you were a big supporter of apple back in the day well as of today this is something that's actually feasible in the digital economy and what we're trying to do so honestly next five to 10 years if we can onboard millions of users and be that then we'll be very proud I mean just drop the unchain Apple just become Apple yes sir but if you become Apple you're gonna have your own app store you're gonna have a lot of different middleman gated things and that's obviously no no no but the next apple doesn't look like apple today the next apple looks like how you're building it which is open more Equitable for

partners like someone's going to disrupt that Monopoly they they've stopped innovating like you know like I don't know how best to describe it like it's obviously the iPhone is just a killer product but there are reasons like is it is it too farfetched to actually believe that that Monopoly is going to be disrupted in the next 20 years I'll almost place that bet I'll place that bet it's like Jeff B said forget what is gonna be disrupted in the next 10 years it's what isn't gonna be disruptive not to be the cliche guy to quote Jeff Bas but I'll go I'll go gigal along stable coins I'll go gigal the Blurred Lines between these disjointed services which is moob essential Services mobile and finance then they get to the core of the

two most fundamental things that a human wants after they you know feed themselves which is connectivity and access to a digital economy that is becoming only more important and for that you need to have a mobile service which because it it walks with you and access to financial services the combinate you you're more and more will see mvnos and fch services that those lines are blurring and that will be the bank of the future that's the that's the next JP Morgan doesn't look like JP Morgan it looks like an mvno with um fintex Services layered on top of them one experience one app don't ever give a reason of the customer to go to a local branch make it all natively digitally

integrated there's only one way to do that and the answer is crypto that's it like you can't do that with a Current financial system now we've been trying to evangelize and push crypto in so many different vectors and ways the way to do it and the way you hack your your way to do that in a like day like today is with a phone right yes sir so like you have you have 700,000 phones five point something million wallets uh why can't you be at 100 million phones 100 million wallets like in the next two years honestly I don't even want to put those price targets and sell targets up there because I hate it when companies

do that no I but but it's not crazy no no Santi that's what I'm saying last year was 715,000 phones this year I can promise you there's minimum seven figures plus of phones minimum the year after that we'll probably do eight figures plus so it's not there's 2.6 billion people don't have a phone damn today okay you offer that you could offer that phone for free because you're going to pay back this is the challenge with Hardware is never where you make the mo most amount of money Hardware has do margins but you need to get the hardware for distribution you make real money in software like GoPro and Polaroid companies just offered Hardware they go

to zero eventually because you can only sell so many units replacement of those units is like every so many years right not everyone buys an iPhone as soon as it comes out they you know but you can monetize on the app store that's where the money is you have a lot of opportunity crypto's really good at incentives and sharing value back to the consumer if you're a Creator if you're sharing your unused storage space like that whole coration layer just opens up a whole new way of earning in a sustainable Manner and it's not just aird drops and you know airdrop campaigns that aren't sustainable there is a whole element of can we become better as an industry to create incentive programs that are far more sustainable absolutely we're kind of in the early days of design experimentation a lot of it's just because we haven't

really been able to play in that area because of regulatory constraints once that goes away you can really start sharing fees back to the customer the equitable distribution between creators and owners just becomes far better because you map that with a token and you can create this more equitable distribution right you know if you're a YouTube Creator influencer you get hosed by YouTube no exactly you I mean like Spotify you get hosed unless you're T Swift and call Spotify and say hey guys you I'm not going to put my new album unless you share more more of the percentage if you're a a less than Tate Swift you don't have any bargaining power you don't have any ability to negotiate those fees it's so lopsided to the owners and a lot of the value in the

internet has been concentrated in owners Mark Zuckerberg of the world no I don't have any problem that it's just there there wasn't a way it wasn't a way to like push back a bid and you can go along like you know content creation has gone has decentralized it has gone from movie studios in LA to people that are on Tik Tok like the attention meta in game is gone to these platforms people are watching less and less full on to our movies they're watching Tik Tok every day the amount of hours consumers spend on a daily basis is just on this fast format games fast casual games you know streams user generated content has blown up to become

the largest media category in the world but how is it that the percentage that we share to these creators hasn't moved that will move crypto will move it because you allow for these new protocols that share value back to the contributor and so when people ask how is this sustainable it is sustainable you pay them with stable coins you lower the fees to and the token allows you to map those contributions you you cut out the middleman you cut out the middleman you have a service that Maps out contribution and ownership in a more Equitable manner the relationship between the service provider and the user is more fair and and I think I'll go along that any day of the week I'll go along stable con adoption I'll go along uh smartphone adoption and and and

blurred lines between mobile carriers and stable coins like that that to me is going to be the biggest AA of opportunity I'm building one myself wait a region I understand yeah I'm doing it myself at uh with inversion this is like after four years I left Pari I'm like okay where where can I really I want to build something I want to really take and it's just been frustrated because I've invested in like 130 plus companies officially more than that and every problem every company that has folded in my portfolio it's go to market you look at other protocols the biggest criticism crypto has is we haven't gone mainstream you know all this is speculation I'm like you can't really argue against that we do have a go to market problem as an industry I

want to get to we have 20 to per a6c 30 to 60 million active monthly wallets users real Inc a lot of that most of that just speculation I don't have a problem with speculation speculation feels adoption it was true for the internet it was true for every major railroad like people went to San Francis Gold Rush at some point you have to layer that with real services and the frustrating part of that is they are they exist it's just you need to like open the the floodgates for people and in that evolution of my thinking was oh maybe I want to acquire a bank well too difficult I'm never going to compete and you're never going to outper form Robin Hood like my insight was distribution is essential I never want to build it you

never want to build distribution you just said it you want to partner with people that have distribution and share that value and so in that evolution of thinking I was like well what business would I own what's the best platform distribution business that I can buy for a attractive price and then transform that and I came to the realization that was a a a mobile carrier that doesn't own infrastructure and and so I'm very focused in Latin America it's a market that I understand that I grew up in and has a lot of connectivity it's a user base that has a low arpo it's just will like just ready to be activated on all right after this podcast uh let me ping you on that real quick because that's amazing and

honestly with your background like that that might be one of the most exciting ideas I've heard I look I think most of the the listeners need to just realize this everyone every product every company needs a Red Lobster unlimited shrimps on a Tuesday moment absolutely what I mean by that is you hear about Red Lobster because you hear about the unlimited shrimp option I heard about that I was like damn you know it's not like I'm short on money but I'm like yeah I'm gonna go there and eat as much shrimp as I can that's luxurious but at the end of the day what they really make money on is the beer or the wine or the alcohol that you're going to order when you're sitting there I think that has so many analogies to what's going on in crypto and going on in the world today

that we we need that Red Lobster unlimited shrimp option to get users in and then we offer them all of the other of alcohol and availabilities there are to bring them really into the ecosystem but you need them to have that distribution to have that step into the door first absolutely my apologies I don't know where else no I love that I mean godamn I'm Red Lobster TCO that's that's absolutely right uh you could give him a phone for a subsidy you you might not you're definitely not looking to make a of profits on on the hardware but I I do the the money really comes from tapping into an essential service where you live with a customer 247 then you then then that customer you know or is going to love stable coins

and it's gonna love earning um yield on their on their deposits a lot of them don't even have Financial Services even in the US most customers you know have most of their money in checking accounts earning zero when they can move it one click to a money market account there in five they don't Finance people don't like to think about money they're not educated enough like unfortunately the educational system doesn't focus on that they'll teach you Shakespeare but they won't teach you how to like you know the difference between a checking money market account and that is the US where you have at least the option for a money market account between checking imagine you in exactly I'm a you can collapse that the the distinction and the fragmentation in finance it's not a it's not a bugs a

feature because that's where Banks make money on the float right you collapse that you the the distinction between a checking account and a um a money market account that allows you to earn 5% or 4% on your money collapses with crypto by the way introduce an AI agent that is constantly there to optimize your money where it earns it and protects your deposit without you ever thinking about that you want to watch a movie you want to order food you want to talk to your friends you don't want to think about what your money's doing and people don't check their bank account 247 we shouldn't expect that we should just automate that and the intersection of AI and crypto AI agents all of that you keep coming back to it starts with a phone and it then and then then

activates with the stable coin my suspicion or my thesis is that AI agents will will really facilitate and Abstract away the complexity of of of how to optimize your money how to manage it in the best way possible and how to earn the most amount in a in a safe manner right without taking crazy risks like terara right unsuspecting people you know the a agent would say hey wait wait a minute like something's wrong and just immediately respond to that react to that in real time and I think that that's the upshot here which is AI agents will just protect your money but also optimize it in the and optimize for like in a risk adjusted basis and I think that's really exciting by the way I know I'm not the host here but there's one question I'm actually really curious

I wanted to ask and this is the perfect segment your thoughts is do you think the top ks in like not even five years two years like and some Etc will be replaced by the AI xpts oh that respond 247 they don't need a sleep and they are objective probably um probably I think that humans will always I I guess um the analogy that I'll draw is like um luxury watches you know when the Apple watch came out everyone's like oh it's a death of Switzerland luxury watches are going to go to die because actually don't know I don't really yeah when the Apple watch

launched it was like oh this is going to like bury to the ground all the luxury watch makers like analog not digital why because digital like your smartphone your smart watch provides time like you don't buy a luxury watch to tell time you know what I mean no proba no one no one ever buys a pek because it tells time you use your phone to tell time the lunar calendar yeah you don't buy a perpetual calendar because you want to understand the lon phase the mo mo lunar phase or leap your indication or all this stuff you I mean you buy for other reasons and and the point I'm trying to make here is the watch industry has actually grown more as a result of the rise of smart watches and digital because it it creates this Nostalgia

effect for and I think AI will allow us to really offload a lot of call them distractions right friction points in our life and allow us to covet and really focus focus on the things that give us meaning and value and sense of fulfillment that will always be a human interaction I don't think AI will AI companions are I think a very important service that will allow people that struggle with anxiety that struggle with of course integrating into society but the human touch I think is going to be very real now you could argue the counter of that is the human brain doesn't really know the distinction between an AI agent and a

human if the AI creates art that you love doesn't matter music that you love doesn't matter interacts and chats with you doesn't matter a lot of our interactions right now you don't really know if it's a human or a bot like turn completeness is a thing but I do think that um real world I'll go real like real world events I'll go long you know that those type of interactions um but I do think that like unfortunately the life of the influencer is shortlived it's just you know but uh yeah I mean the AI agent constantly like you're not going to beat the productivity of an AI agent so to speak but I don't think it totally replaces influencers like as we see them

or just K's call them that right um you know there's some value into going to a real event to go watch Taylor Swift in concert for sure you know I don't think that ever goes away because know day we are humans I don't know do you no um productivity you can't argue it if you believe that AI agents are more productive and if you believe that they can learn more constantly then yeah maybe but at the end of the day I think what makes like a true like for example the influencers that I look at okay don't take this the wrong way not that you're replaceable but like you are one of the guys that I actually look at a lot oh sorry the videoos off yeah you're actually one of

influencers that I uh look at a lot on Twitter along with anom and maybe a few others um so yeah I hope it doesn't get replaced because I don't think if AI agent Works harder than you like Santi AI agent I'll listen to him more than you yeah well how do you know that this is not in that this is what I'm getting to like imagine if we get to that age this handsome guy out here yeah you could always you could always conv Vision me where I live and and you'll you know that that I don't think goes away but I think we'll enhance our productivity will I hope that one day we that they the the most optimistic case about AI is that we can go back to like Athenian times where like people get

paid to think not to do work and it frees us AI robots really free uh create a lot of abundance solve a lot of issues like food productivity um you know this idea of like owning your time you said time is the most valuable construct I definitely agree with that but you know where these AI robots agents can really just work for us Empower and just free up ourselves from you know the sort of the maslo hierarchy of needs right once you transcend the first two you know life becomes you know amazing and so I think if we can get to a place where everyone does that I think that's great but I think anyways just tying it all together I'm very excited I mean I think you guys are doing a very differentiated unique

approach I think there's only very few people in crypto that really appreciate how to win and have a very strong appreciation for the dat day the focus and and and and the go to market strategy and the way that you guys have done it it took me decade plus to come to the conclusion that mobile was the premier platform to do this and you you guys came to that earlier I benefited because I invested in you guys early on but you you always had the phone in mind you always said Hey listen this is going to be a key Gateway for people in crypto and it it's really impressed what you guys have done I'm very excited to see where you take this um you know 700,000 phones is not nothing five million

wallets is not nothing um but yeah this whole satellite thing is exciting any anything else that uh you want to you know leave us with for our listeners anything that we haven't covered that that you think is you know relevant for sure um first of all I appreciate the kind words Santi um I've known you for since I begin this journey and you've always been supportive no matter uh how much I see that you're busy and everywhere um I'll just leave this to the users like look we're not Reinventing the wheel here you know I'm not some sort of a genius that is you know have come up with a revolutionary idea that we're doing end of the day every day when you wake up when you go to sleep it's just

about execution and we've been doing this for three to four years and we're gonna keep doing it for the next five to 10 years you know and if you want to you're like oh James is bullshitting sorry I don't know if we can swear on this podcast course you love oh okay so James is bsing and uh and look at our vesting contracts and everything no one touches any tokens or anything until yours down the line like right it's just so evident for us that mobile is a future internet connectivity in these emerging markets and third this is probably the most important thing is that who has connections when I say connections I mean who has visibility into the region and also is able to make an impact will change the Dynamics so

much one company will literally own all of the value because right now it's so fragmented and we just haven't caught up to it yet and that is what Jambo is trying to do so we're not really trying to you know beat Apple we're not really trying to beat Tron and stable coins but we are trying to use both of their most successful playbooks to do one thing on board more and more and more and more users and people in this world to crypto into our software and platform absolutely I love that you know I'm very much focused like that like we need to get to 100 200 300 500 million users the tech is ready I believe it there's enough proof points uh the regulatory landscape is clearing up nothing holds

us back now but we have we don't have 12 years to prove their we have four years to get our we definitely don't there is a sense of urgency and and I just want to get to a state of the world where you show it to the world and said I became the largest mobile carrier in Africa and the largest fintech maybe in the world and people going to be like oh wait what' you do did you create this crazy phone did you I said to your point it's not rocket science but I just leverag an entire infrastructure that runs faster better cheaper but you didn't believe me because I was sitting in this chair for 12 years I just had to go do it and then I created the best-in-class products and services for so many people that have been overlooked not just people that are unbanked just

normal people you run that Playbook and you become the largest Telecom you become the largest bank in the world you can no more like sir I'm convinced of that I want to run that Playbook you're running that Playbook we should chat after this pod but uh this is great man thank thanks for coming on congrats on all the all the progress It's just getting started truly I mean you're just scratching the surface it's so exciting to see you guys and honestly I mean it hasn't been easy the last couple years um as an industry but it's so rewarding to see folks that just have never changed their tune and have just doubled down and just continue to execute day by day and and and you know I can imagine you know maybe another for another podcast but like the day-to-day

is not easy right like I heard it yesterday was so even Olympic athletes wake up at 6:00 a.m. and they Grunt and they struggle and they don't want to get out of bed but they just do and they do that more than others and that's the difference between a gold medalist and a no medalist so anyways man you know re really exciting thanks for coming on and sharing the story uh really excited to see this uh satellite announcement and uh yeah are you sending like a maybe as a are you sending like like a capsule of aliens like see it are you sending something else in the satellite or is it just like yeah you know we we we just tapping into Elon Musk you know he's an alien himself trust me the announcements are coming sooner than you think and uh definitely more than you would even want

so we're very excited to share with you the salite part but uh honestly guys yeah L Empire P Santi Jason y thank you guys for having us on and giving us a platform to share because uh I know it's not every day that you can share with so many viewers together no amazing no really uh treat having you on it people should go follow you uh um we'll link it on the show notes as well as uh the best way to learn is the Jambo Twitter yes Jambo technology on Twitter please okay and and for listeners that don't know Jambo is what in which language remind me Jambo so in Swahili it's like like imagine you in the stage going to school like yo what's up you good yeah what's up in in Africa

in sahili you say Jambo Jambo it's like hak Tata where as long as we alive everything will be okay so uh it's like a formal greeting yes sir all right well Jambo Jambo James J awesome Che [Music]