Fireside Chat with Michael Carter and Richard Ma

Transcript

awesome hey everyone okay let me see if the slides work oh there we go okay amazing um great so I guess um you want to sit down or uh yeah um you know appreciate everyone for coming to today's talk so uh I'm really pleased to introduce Michael Carter um a Silicon Valley Legend and uh you know contributor to lots of um awesome open source software that people uh use today uh he's the CEO of pleco which is you know billion dollar company and uh about two years ago now he got into web 3 um so I was we we've been friends since

before he got into web 3 and uh he crossed over so would love to learn more about it and with that um yeah do you want to do a self- inroduction Michael um yeah so uh I'm actually very excited uh to be here I think I've been to yoyogi park about you know a 100 times but never to the stadium so it's the very first time despite you know living in Japan for for for a little while um and actually as Richard mentioned uh I'm running a company called Playco which I'll talk more about um is and Playco is what brought me to Japan and so thanks to uh entrepreneurship and gaming and you know web 3 and just uh you know one

thing always leads to another and here I am in Tokyo living you know not far from uh you know this stadium so I was pretty excited when I learned I only had to commute um you know roughly uh like 500 meters to to show up and speak it's the shortest commute to a speaking engagement I've ever had awesome um so I guess to start uh could you talk a little bit about you know how you got into open source and um you know things that you learned there sure so um when I was very young uh I was always interested in uh Network games Network Technology MMOs whatever brought people together online and uh you know growing up as the internet

Revolution happened I was really sort of surprised uh that putting Real Time games and and applications inside of like the web was actually really hard like if you kind of like go back you know to the 9s uh if you want to look at a website you'd have to click on a link and then the website loads and if you want to see some update you click again and then it loads right so it was always like the user does something and then like new information comes back and so if you want to build a something like um you know Twitter or Google Docs or you know any kind of game basically it was just impossible and you know for me the web was amazing because it connected you know people all around the world but at

the same time time it it didn't connect them in an immediate instantaneous real-time fashion and so um I built all sorts of experiments and in fact my work in University you know my thesis was on how do you solve this problem and I realized that actually like in order to solve this problem um it has to be done through technology uh that is free and available to the whole world meaning if I were to create some new system uh you know some new technology or protocol and then go get a patent on it you you know maybe that would would seem to make sense as a business but then none of the browsers none of the open source folks would be willing to adopt it of course and so um you know I moved to Silicon Valley and

instead of joining a company or starting starting a company uh I just volunteered I just worked on open source software I contributed uh you know my work to the public domain um and it actually went uh you know pretty well in retrospect um you know I worked on dozens um if not more open source projects including things like node.js and uh kind of the you know python ecosystem but um probably the most notable would be HTML 5 webset and so this is a technology I created which allows people in browsers to automatically see updates so um imagine Google Docs if you can't see what other people um do or or imagine Twitter if you can't see the latest

updates that was the world before I made websocket and now more than three and a half billion people use it um you know every month it's it's literally like more than half of you know the the online world that uses this actually every day um uh and so I learned a lot and I learned that basically um the the most powerful um way to bring Innovation and Technology to the world is through free kind of Open Source contributions and I guess like um this insight about having free and open- Source contributions um how you know how did it affect your uh gaming startup and you know I know that Playco works on a lot of messenger based games so what was the insight there and what was that Journey

like yeah so um I will say that at the time when I worked on websocket um I did feel a little uh frustrated and in retrospect maybe I shouldn't have been so impatient but um in order to change the way that the entire internet worked um there there's so many stakeholders um so it's not just like the browsers and the server developers it's all of the like security people the the firewall um software people router software people the hardware people um just basically every single component of the internet had to be updated and at the time I kind of felt like hey everyone like how do we all get on the same page here and um you know it it definitely took a lot more

work and was a lot slower um than I thought um and never at any point did I think like oh how do you make this a business um but um I realized later that actually if you can create some sort of economic alignment then it's a lot easier to kind of push things through and you know eventually by the way webset got there it just probably took 10 years longer you know even ethereum now is built using webs at all the realtime updates of the validators or you can subscribe um you know to to Smart contracts all all through websocket um but then I said okay well I want to go build a business and you know kind of you know I I think that like having the taste of Building Technology that then went to billions of people you know I just want to do it again except I

wanted to do it faster um and so um you know Playco is the culmination of you know that interest and I teamed up with some fantastic co-founders um and and friends um you know Teddy and T who who's here from from Japan um and Justin uh who uh previously founded Zinga and we said look we want to build games that connect the entire world like the goal was like web Saka it's how do we get the entire world like billions of people all play the same game at the same time that's the goal and on that path um you know we we've actually made significant progress like we've actually been able to get you know more than a billion people to play our game um and we've

been able to attract outside funding you know to the tune of a quarter billion dollars to see this Mission through um but this was kind of the second big learning you know the first was sort of like how do you go and build huge scale it sort of you know taught me you want to build things where the whole world can get on board but the second second part was you know we got the whole world on board and um actually we were never able to to create a business model out of it you know we still are working on it and the reason is that intermediaries you know notably Apple got in the way and said whoa you know this this sort of like direct web distribution threatens the App Store and so they just shut off all our payment rails and so it's sort

of a root Awakening that you know we rais the money we build the team we get the most talented people on Earth we build the best products we go out we get a billion people to use our products except we're we're basically just rugged where like the payment rails get pulled out from under us and you know it's been a frustrating experience despite having lots of success to have that be the blocker so I guess on the you know payment side and also with your experience in web two games right like what do you think is the opportunity for developers with Messengers and web 3 onboarding and web 3 payment rails yeah so fundamentally Messengers are a fantastic way to reach you know like all all people everyone's on a messenger you know you you have line

messenger or iMessage or Facebook or Whatsapp or telegram or signal or something right probably a lot of those maybe all of those um and so when we looked at kind of the web three space it was like okay when we try to do this through kind of traditional Tech you know Apple blocked everything but looking at The Messengers through a new light to say like which are the most open and which kind of embrace web through the most it was very clear that telegram is a very open platform you can get started super easy easily you just message a bot and suddenly you have your own developer account um there's open apis and importantly there's uh the ability to have connected wallets um from day one so uh no longer do you have to Route all of your financial transactions through the App Store and

so um it was sort of the opposite problem where with with where we got with Playco um we able to get to billions of people right away you know without without any ability to do payments whereas with web 3 on you know the very first user you get you have the ability to transact you have a direct ability to you know have an economic relationship now the question is well how do you scale that how do you take web 3 and how do you onboard the same billion people but like in into web 3 um and you know that's where I think it's really really exciting because um that opportunity exists and we've actually just launched our first um you know our first uh sort of game our first attempt

in web 3 called gems and it's only been out for 60 days and already we have 11 million players um you know almost a million followers on Twitter and and this is without any marketing we we've never spent a dollar you know nothing on marketing this is all viral all word of mouth and what's so crazy is that like all of these people we free to transact with we're free to have them connect their wallets and and do whatever we want and I guess like um you know it's pretty awesome that you got 11 million users in 60 days and um you know what are like the key learnings from gems and what do you think makes gems very unique and interesting um yeah so this is a an interesting moment and if you zoom out

and look at kind of the broader um s sort of ecosystem briefly uh I think the the industry is sort of settled on points as a sort of a way to onboard people into crypto um without having to connect their wallet meaning you you do some stuff to earn points and then you later connect your wallet um and then you you're part of an airdrop maybe or or whatever else and you know that's kind of an industry Trend that's been happening and that's interesting and it's it's a less kind of uh friction full way to like get people involved it's it's very easy um I think the next step now and in gyms is is you know has a point system people are earning points um but I think what's really interesting

now is something like telegram is the ability to then start creating uh wallets for people in a non-custodial manner where you can have the same lack of friction where people just sign up they they tap one button they're playing the game instantly they're playing with their friends they're playing with strangers with whoever um and they already have a a wallet and they're already able to start doing web three transactions without even realizing it and I think that actually the scale that's possible here I think it's very possible to create a web3 game where all of the users are are doing web three transactions they don't have to go through the complicated uh job of of you know that most of us went through over the last 10 years to create a wallet and you know it's been getting easier and

easier but now I think you can do it instantly and I think we can have a billion people on chain in one single game and I think that scale has never been possible before and so gems um is an effort to to basically move that onchain web3 transaction kind of moment earlier and earlier in the funnel to be able to do it very very soon after people start playing a game and so people learn how to play the game and then are very quickly introduced to um onchain behaviors like nfts or other game mechanics such that they understand them and they believe in them um you know and it's all done in a distributed way and I guess um since gem was like you know started last year um AI has really taken off and uh you know I know

um both you and Justin are huge into AI so what do you think are the sort of um features in AI that's going to be put into these Gems games and like I guess how have you guys used it so far yeah it's a great question um so I think what's so exciting about um web 3 in general is kind of this idea of like peer-to-peer relationships of distributed uh you know sort of onboarding Engagement um and part of that I think if if you look at it from a game perspective um user generated content is is sort of the game analogy to that if you look at kind of years and years and years of people modding games and creating their own versions and um you know creating you know anything from

like old school Starcraft you know map mods all the way up to um like looking at you know anything in from from sort of fortnite to Roblox um you know ugc is really really interesting and I think you know part of the problem though is that ugc is like you know it's sort of Hit or Miss it's like you know things look wildly different they might look you know polished and amazing and it might just look you know really really terrible sometimes the fact that it looks terrible is kind of the point but um with AI you're actually giving people the tools to create you know peer-to-peer user generated content that looks and feels you know really cool where now for the first time what you need is creativity you don't necessarily need to know how to draw like a perfect

circle yourself or be a great artist uh you just have to have a vision and so gems is fully embracing that allowing anyone to kind of create amazing content and share it with other people and have that turn into on chain transactions and I think the reason why this is a really exciting important time is that you have the convergence of AI for peer toer user generated content and then you have Messengers that are open um for Distributing that content to the entire world and then you have web3 in order to create the economy and the ecosystem um to make it all work so um we're really excited about that that's um really awesome any clothing any closing thoughts before we jump off into the ramen bow

oh no um yeah no no I'm just worried uh so closing thoughts uh I mean I would just say this um I really believe that it's important to set out to do things that are at the entire like the scale of the entire world and you should say okay if we're successful how can this impact the life of of everyone on Earth and and that needs to be the starting goal because if you start there you might not get there you know you might end up with nearly millions of people um but you might get there and it might change the whole world and I think that needs to be the goal um the only thing I'd say is this I'm a little worried in the ethereum community because the scale I'm talking about um you know surely we can't do that on Main Deb it's

impossible and so we're looking at the layer twos and yeah the layer twos have less gas fees so maybe we could do it there but in terms of you know their Peak throughput it's like double or triple main net I mean it's not it's not you know we're talking about like tens or 100 transactions a second um for what we want to do we need tens of thousands hundreds of hundreds of thousands of transactions per second so the last thing I'd say is if ethereum wants to be a part of this trend um we need to see scale and and only then will ethereum be sort of in this cycle on the next and there you have it so thanks everyone appreciate it thank you hey give a round of applause for

Michael and Richard all right oh hit him with the doo double play be careful I thought I thought for a second Michael was gonna kick Richard in the head