How a Blockchain Venture Studio Works - Mervyn G. Maistry, CEO and Founder, Konfidio and Kintaro C

Transcript

hello and welcome to the blockchain and us we're pioneers and thought leaders talked about their journey in blockchain technology crypto assets and a token economy and I'm your host manuel staggers this episode has support from core ledger core ledger is a blockchain based peer-to-peer transaction infrastructure provider it enables businesses to document tokenize and trade any type of assets in a reliable and flexible environment corletta makes pacing transact able literally anything to learn more about or ledgers technology and how you can transform your business onto blockchain visit coreless or.net that's vor e LED ger dotnet core ledger that met my guest

today is Mervyn Maestri Mervyn is CEO and founder of consider a blockchain venture studio in Berlin and chairman of Kintaro Capital he graduated medical school and worked in pediatrics in South Africa and he also held key positions at prestigious organizations such as CEO of Deutsche Bank global managing partner at Accenture and managing partner digital strategy and transformation lead at ey Mervyn also advises various projects in the blockchain and business world including locket deep torque and siberian mine and now to the conversation with Mervyn Maestri

hi Marvin and many thanks for taking time today it's a pleasure Marvin you're running confetti oh here in Berlin a venture studio in the blockchain space so let's get started with what confiteor does we essentially a blockchain Vinci studio we started out with a number of ideas about where we could develop blockchain products that solved problems today and of course naturally in the space blockchain is a really it's a it's a really beautiful fantastic technology and so we can see the the future potential yeah the the potential that

the blockchain has to change the world in ten twenty years I think that most visionaries can see and that's great my focus was okay we are working towards that vision but we can't spend money working on that vision for the next ten or twenty years without without being sustainable so how do we make that entire experiment with the blockchain sustainable so every long-term vision we had whether it was in energy whether it was in contract management whether it was in legal we always asked ourselves the question in fact we've developed a

quite a clear methodology of how we go through these these ideas and we always ask ourselves a question well what problems can the technology with its current level of maturity solve today so we developed a very nice - by - classical sort of strategy consulting - by - where we looked at what business problems are really well defined and what what level the blockchain technology maturity is and how can we solve those problems and then of course naturally going far out

the potential of the blockchain in the future as well as the idea of a decentralized future with business problems and opportunities that are not that well defined that is in the sort of top right hand corner where most of the value is and that's part of our roadmap so strategically we put that into part of our roadmap the reason you people ask is well why have you gone through this I think it's quite important as a block to Inventure studio with a number of different ventures that I'm able to attract people who really have the vision who I excited about the

blockchain have passion about the the technology and have passion about what the technology can do to change the world so that's very important for us yeah so a passion of understanding the strategy the technology and the opportunity of what the technology and the business models can do in the future mm-hmm do you have specific a specific focus on on use cases or applications our specific focus was based on agreements between people and parties yeah as you know I come from an investment banking background and a healthcare background most of the most of the commerce that exists from well

today are essentially agreements between entities that entity can be a company it can be a person it can be a small and medium enterprise it can be a global corporation but essentially all business interaction takes place in the form of contracts those contracts are governed by legal clauses and that's how we do business yeah and so my initial focus was what efficiency can the blockchain bring to that process as well as who are all of the gatekeepers and the rent-seeking middleman in that process that we can knock out as a result so that's our

focus and we've applied that or business model knowledge to virtually every venture we involved in you have another tagline I think it reads decentralized solutions for real-world problems I mean you just described the contracts I think that makes a lot of sense to cut out the middleman but this idea of decentralization also seems quite important I think in your work so why do you think decentralization is the solution to too many of today's problems I think to discuss why decentralization is important you have to discuss why centralization is important yeah and centralization is very has served the business world and the normal society

extremely well so I think that's the first point to to understand and many of the many of the marketing evangelists that have come to the space in the short term talk about decentralization like it's some sort of ideology and some strong mantra and so when we talk about decentralization we're talking about decentralizing the world by just increasing access and increasing people's access to power people's access to control and so when we talk about decentralization it's basically in talking about the inefficiencies of centralization yeah and then maybe a

further explanation is that centralization is extremely inefficient but it is extremely effective so it's inefficient because you insert a number of governance processes into into any organization you insert a number a lot of centralized control into an organization and all of that costs quite a lot of money it's extremely effective because it it generally prevents quite a lot of corruption it certainly adds to transparency at the center not full transparency but certainly

better transparency than without that the blockchain is the first technology that's given us the possibility to de-centralized those inefficient parts of centralization keeping the effectiveness of centralization but making the transparency a lot better and allowing any any person or entity engaged in that ecosystem to verify that no one has tampered with the data that they are looking at but the data is immutable and so if you look at it like that you realize that the blockchain is that that's why for me the blockchain is a seminal technology it basically

changes centuries of organizational design when it worked when it works now you notice I said when it works not if it works yeah beggars I'm convinced Anna I think we have now enough proof at least in the work that we doing that when decentralization works it is extremely powerful yeah so that is the key reason why we're talking about a decentralized world and I yeah there's some issues about centralization which are actually quite efficient and effective but those are special cases mm-hmm I mean speaking of efficiency right I mean some block chains are

extremely inefficient as well they look at a Bitcoin blockchain I mean it's inefficiency by design I think for me that's one of the one of the misconceptions I have worked in banking yeah and what happens in the banking system is that at the end of every day globally literally tens of billions if not hundreds of billions are unaccounted for most people don't realize that the only reason you don't realize that is because people have agreements they have legal

contracts between bank and customers the commercial banks the retail banks the central banks the clearing houses they all have an agreement about how the banking system will work and the consumer doesn't see any of that behind the curtain but that inefficiencies is huge in that inefficiency it requires for me to have say for example I have enjoy bank or Citibank I have got huge skyscrapers in a number of the global capitals yeah I employ tens of thousands of people all of these people drive to work every day in cars

that burn petrol or they go to work on a bus or they go to work using on a train that might be using electricity that's driven by coal and then they all sit on their computers in their offices and so the cost of the transaction if you're really comparing apples with apples you need to compare the the entire infrastructure of all the banks in the world who participating in a normal transaction and then you've got a clear apples to apples comparison and then you can talk about the number of kilowatt hours that a bank uses for each transaction and the number of kilowatt hours is the Bitcoin users for every transaction and if you don't do that

comparison you're basically bullshitting the public through very nice short statements that actually mean nothing so I've read a I've read a lot of the articles and when someone talks about this this idea of the blockchain being in or the Bitcoin blockchain being inefficient you really know that they have not gone into the depth of what it means the the next point is that the Bitcoin blockchain the light-cone blockchain to file coin blockchain any blockchain that uses proof-of-work as a consensus mechanism well by definition you require a lot of computing power which then by definition requires quite

a lot of energy you need to then you have to compare that to the alternative in the centralised world before you can make any clear statement but that denies that there are other consensus mechanisms they're not as elegant as proof of work they're not as independent as proof of work but they are a lot more efficient so I can reach a level of decentralization in transactions by using for example a proof of Authority yeah and that's where the ideology comes in you have people who are who suddenly in the last year discovered the word

decentralization and I'm talking about a decentralized and decentralized for decentralization for them is like an ideology it's a fundamentalism it's like you meet a fundamentalist Christian and what did they say Jesus Christ is the answer to everything you meet a fundamentalist Muslim you have Allah is the answer to everything you meet a fundamentalist Bitcoin maximalist Bitcoin is the answer to everything and then you meet a fundamentalist decentralized person and decentralization is the answer to that for me is just that sort of fundamental has been fueled at its core by ignorance yeah so we looked specifically at what what is the problem what is the most

efficient effective way to solve that problem and is the business model to solve that problem sustainable so that's that that's the key sort of foundational strategic measures that we use and it could be to solve a problem effectively and efficiently and I will use a combination of both a centralized and a decentralized solution I'm completely comfortable with that then configures built on that we are not here to to make an ideology come alive yeah we're here to solve problems and to make the world a better place and to make the world a better place does not involve ideology in fact if you want to make the world a worse place you

can be ideological about it mmm yeah I think it's a great point that you brought up there there's so many misconceptions about this technology he had also about the potential of course of the technology and one of them we briefly discussed before we started recording is the matter of fundraising so how today in your experience are startups in the blockchain field raising their funds and you know who are the investors and what are maybe their misconceptions about this technology so I think as I mentioned earlier at the beginning of the interview the blockchain has this marvelous potential and in this potential I can see

solutions like a completely decentralized peer-to-peer energy system globally or a global system of payment processing on the blockchain globally and all of these solutions will require 15 20 years to really reach the stage of this nirvana of complete decentralization and of course no investor is willing to to fund that and then came the concept of crowdfunding and that happened in in in with etherium and I was lucky enough to be - ever understood a little bit about the

blockchain then and then a number of other crowdfunding's came through then the IC o---- or the the smart contract and enable the IC o---- was developed and then people thought okay I'm gonna change the world and instead of asking and investors looking for short-term gains - I'm going to ask a community to do this and so the the concept of the IC o---- at its core is also quite empowering and I have to admit in 2015 I gave a talk at the ICO summit and Lynn's one of the first ones I thought I cos

would be would be fantastic but one forgets that criminal energy is like water yeah it will find a way so within a short time you had I SEOs popping up all over the place offering completely crazy things and investors were stupid enough to believe it without really reading the details of the white paper and then you realized that what block 10 does not change it does not change this emotional fear of missing out and it doesn't make suddenly make investors a lot more intelligent yeah so people invest it because their friends would have invested and it went this sort of bubble went quite well because

everyone threw darts at a dartboard and everyone made money at least the people who went in early the majority of the people who came in sort of anyone who came in in 2018 for example is now bleeding yeah so so I think the ICO was a good first step it was an important step in the development to looking at other methods of capital raising now I I think the concept of a security token or a better set and a token which represents any financial instrument but which follows all the rules that guarantee investor protection I think that's that is certainly coming on board

one of the key things has been venture capitalists I mean venture capitalists and I think this is the misconception about venture capitalism that people have venture capitalist exists only to do one thing yeah they exist to make themselves wealthy yeah and they are not interested in the long-term viability of a product they are interested in a successful series a yeah so a venture capitalist if it through a successful series a becomes wealthy and then though the one out of the 100 that go on to become unicorn yeah one of them make some money but mostly they interest in the series a so

venture capitalists have fueled this in my opinion they filled the the corruption in the space because they've they've realized that everyone is got this fear of missing out so a lot of them have started taking stakes in icos or taking equity stakes and someone before they went to ICO now that the market has collapsed that has stopped it hasn't stopped because venture capitalists have suddenly realized this was corrupt they've suddenly realized okay our series a we have no chance of getting money buy tokens quickly yeah and I think one of the problems is that most people in venture capital just don't understand the blockchain I've

seen people in venture capital who threw a dart at a dartboard in 2015 become wealthy and suddenly they are somehow meant to be brilliant in the space and actually in my experience I've found that the people who are most brilliant in the space of people are not completely obsessed with money yeah the people who are most brilliant in the space around blockchain are people are concerned about solving problems people are concerned about the planet those people are for me they develop a much deeper interest in what the technology can do and so when I hire people it's look the clear thing is to figure out whether they are problem solvers whether they're interested in doing something

for the planet and their communities and naturally everyone needs to be comfortable but you can when you interview someone you can see what their priorities are so I certainly check that very carefully if someone's overly obsessed with money or getting rich off is following the crypto market every day you know they are not the best people for innovation hmm yeah I mean it just said hiring people for your own organization but of course you're also looking at a lot of projects to invest in so maybe let's say I had an idea for a blockchain project you know that has to do with contracts for example that also looks at decentralizing a solution that was previously inefficiently

centralized and I wanted to get involved somehow with confiteor and wanted to draw you know your attention to my project so how would I go about doing this I think there are in my opinion there are three things which would try I would look for I really looked to see how well someone has been able to define the problem and define the solution to that problem also in definition of the problem and definition of the solution to understand what the value is of of solving this problem because the value of solving the problem has got to give

you some advantage I think those are the three key things that I look for and then I would look for okay when you solve this particular problem and the the value of solving that problem is X what is the next step what would you what what is your view when the technology develops further when their scalability on the blockchain when we have interoperability on the blockchain how would your solution develop further and then you can have a look at the vision where people have so in all of that together I think that's that's that's what I that's what I'm looking for one of the key things where someone is virtually the conversation doesn't

even last that long is there when they're talking about they need to develop a token they not sure what the token can do but they know the token is good for fundraising yeah those people were waste my time because it's and so generally those conversations as soon as I hear that sort of argument the the meeting ends roughly within about five minutes from the time I hear that argument because you know these people are not serious yeah and certainly in my experience if Deutsche Bank at Accenture at ey the people who are more interested in solving a problem or or really looking

at an opportunity an opportunity to change something those people tend to be a lot more successful than the people who first looking at where can I make some money yeah so and I we are I'm sure in the in 2017 and 2016 you've had a lot of people who want to make money and threw darts at a dartboard I think that's a that's a blip the the exception proves the rule mm-hmm okay interesting when you when you look at startups or also entrepreneurs ideas what you know besides what you just mentioned that they have to focus and define the problem really well and their solution to what else do you think they should be

better at you know when they present their ideas at the moment I mean one of the things I used to say in answer to that question which I was I'm slowly changing my mind on its the concept of look for someone it's got a good team behind them and what I've realized this up as I've been following quite a lot around who manages to raise money through theses and what I've been following as well is the the the VCS themselves how they how they allocating money and I think at the moment we are looking at at how well someone really understands strategy of

project management and finance yeah so some of the core capabilities and the reason for that is I think if you concentrate on the team what we've discovered is that most VCS are generally run by white males and they are more comfortable giving money to other white males in fact I've had three VCS now in the last two years who've told me personally to get more white males on board because we have 22 nationalities here and they were quite clear they said you know if we if we won one guy actually said to me he got quite upset when I said that it was I thought that was actually said I used to work

disgusting he got quite upset he said it's a purely financial decision because they know that teams that are generally dominated by white males have much more success at a Series A and that again is of course of the investor bias there mm-hmm and I thought about that for a long time and actually from a purely clinical objective view forget about your philosophy and your your your your the say that the fact that you might be disgusted by discrimination in whatever form from Anna purely clinical objective way he's completely he was completely right he and his team was

completely right because currently people who allocate money or people who participate in series a give money to people who look like them and so the concept and and so the concept of looking at the team only I think is a is a flawed concept it's a V sees way of looking at here dangerous and so I I I spend a lot of time concentrating on the the real nuts and bolts of the solution and then understanding house how someone is able to implement whether someone has managed large teams before whether someone is has a clear idea about who they should be hiring having a clear understanding of what roles they need

what skills they need and not looking at the team behind them and the I SEOs proved that as well you had a number of people who all over all they did was they went out and got a whole number of advisers put them on their website advisers knew nothing about it but they had good networks and good contacts and I think that's networks having good networks is a very good way to get short term success but our role at least my role at the moment and my my vision and my passion is not about raise raising money quickly it's really about solving problems quickly using using a combination of technologies yeah

interesting and like you said before you said horizon is maybe 10 15 years yeah so it won't be quickly it won't be quick I have but I did say that the big visions are 10 to 15 years old we have found a number of areas where blockchains with the technology of of verification of auditability of traceability of having clear governance roles embedded into smart contracts legal clauses put into smart contracts automated dispute resolution all of those functionalities of the blockchain can be used to solve current problems and we have got one of our flagship product for example solves a key problem

in a three point seven trillion dollar industry yeah so managed services for us Israeli using the blockchain with partial decentralization not for decentralization achieves or unlocks a lot of value from rent-seeking middlemen and makes business models more efficient so that's one one case normal things which you can use at the moment of things like carbon certificates carbon trading invoicing and billing on the blockchain putting the customer at the center of a platform we experimenting

with the case like that at the moment allowing people to order technology for example in in in in in any mining proof-of-work mining like Bitcoin litecoin Z cash etc where we can then using the blockchain and verify SAR out with that where we using the blockchain we can verify to investors that all the energy sources that we use to mine come our renewable energy sources we can also make sure that on the blockchain an investor knows that this machine belongs to me this machine when it's mining produces X number of Bitcoin litecoin Z cash whatever and so that gives

investors transparency and traceability which which I think it does away with some of the centralization of pooling which of course just lends itself to corrupt let's take a quick break and we'll be right back this episode has support from core ledger core ledger is a blockchain based peer-to-peer transaction infrastructure provider it enables businesses to document tokenize and trade any type of assets in a reliable and flexible environment core ledger makes anything transact able literally anything with core ledger is highly dependable fast to implement products businesses can reduce costs and improve processes individuals

can benefit from the full ownership of their own assets and make transactions directly with another party to learn more about poor Ledger's technology and how you can transform your business on the blockchain visit core logic net that cor II led ger the net core ledger that left you mentioned auditing before and you were working at ey yeah one of the big four accounting firms in the past among you know links to other things that you've done before running on video but why in your experience or in your view could a big four accounting firm like a why or or maybe another big you know corporate in

the world a multinational corporation why couldn't they run a venture studio that focuses on blockchain technology like yours I think it's a very good question and the answer is actually very simple consulting firms are run by partners yeah most of those partners have come up through the ranks of that firm so they know exactly in that particular business model how they make money yeah and they make money through networks and and eventually what happens in partners in a in a consultancy or any of the big four essentially they are the rent-seeking middlemen because they are the ones who sell the projects from

their contacts and the various companies to the company and so all the consultants they hire then do all the work and the partners get the benefits yeah and that's the consulting model the people doing the work do not get majority of having been a partner in both at Accenture and ey that is definitely the truth they find many ways to to sugarcoat that pool but it's still it's the truth the other I think that's the first problem the second problem is that most of the partners are generally above 40 yeah those partners that are younger than 40

of those they have got to where they've got because they have participated in the network they've known how to work the network within a so whether it's a woman or whether it's a young guy or they've learned how to work that network and so their skill and their success comes from participating in this traditional structure anything that is out of this traditional structure is a threat so if I develop a blockchain product for example to automate auditing I've got hundreds of partners whose livelihood I'm threatening yeah the other thing about them is in my opinion

and having dealt with a lot of them most of the most powerful partners are generally the older ones yeah they're waiting to be pensioned off they don't want anything that's going to disturb that yeah they don't have the energy or the passion to try something different they know what works you know the dunning-kruger effect they know what they know and they don't know what they don't know and perhaps out of 100 of them two of them maybe 2% will be interested in in the future and the vision for the future but they are a tiny minority and so that's why I think

that in that space they are they are not really interested in changing anything what they interested in is marketing an idea that they are in yeah and that's what they do so you set up a small little innovation hub somewhere and you create a marketing thing that you are really going to be the innovative person and you know so I think it's great for if you're a marketing person and innovation to be like that and that's why it's no surprise to me for example that you find that most innovation hubs are driven by marketing partners yeah or as someone who's been in marketing and

communications before yeah exactly and that's also the case in corporates mm-hmm or the person who's leading the innovation hub is the nephew of one of the senior partners yeah or the person leading innovation has a very good Network into the into the partnership yeah yeah so people are getting this role not because of their not because of their passion about innovation or but their understanding of new technologies they're generally getting the role because of their marketing network and my experience I think people who really are interested in the nuts and bolts of innovation it's hard work hmm and so because it's not a priority at these companies it's not taken into account I

was hoping that that would change so we did I started the digital strategy practice at Accenture and my viewers it because digitalization was moving so fast it would have to change so I think there has been some improvement but I think they're looking at the ways of making digitalization and innovation to increase their margins in their traditional business they're not looking innovation to create new businesses yeah so that's part of the reason why I'm quite I'm always quite skeptical about about innovation I've become quite skeptical about innovation in these larger corporates mm-hmm yeah yeah good

point and you did make the jump out of that structure yes yeah I mean part of the reason was I I was really into the blockchain and I so one of the companies I worked for I even went through an entire process of trying to get them to support the theorem foundation buying ether and this was in 2015 yeah so I actually have the contracts though and eventually it was turned on because it was too risky mmm and that's when I it was part of the thinking process that I was going through whether I'm just not this is nothing that's gonna go forward for me and then I discovered how many of the senior levels of of partners or senior

levels of innovation companies et cetera was supportive of someone like Donald Trump yeah and I thought it'd be supportive of such a dinosaur with such a backward view of the world how how the hell do you ever really become passionate to support innovation yeah so it was a combination of factors that made me make the jump mm-hmm okay cool what you just mentioned is it's this mismatch between the enthusiasm to change the world with technology and to focus just on you know generating profit and extracting some rent so you know in in that regard you also are involved with with another project called charity

Dow so maybe can you explain what what that is I mean that came around that came about so I I'm I've known the inche brothers for quite a few years now and I'm an advisor to stock it I think most people who know the blockchain are listening to the podcast will know about the Dow the first star that we was done in 2016 and part of that project was also trying to figure out could we support projects that are also for social good not just for profit obviously you know that that history the doubt didn't work because of

the of the of the someone exploiting the weakness in the code but the idea that Christoph and I then had Christophe eh we are both both the the co-founders of the charity Dow was how do we you the technology that with this beautiful technology that we love so much how do we use it to try and make sure that we bring a brand new platform to the world of of fundraising or developmental aid and I don't particularly like the word charity but that's another story and I think because one of the key things that people are turned off about in in in in giving welfare or charity or

Aid is that the the perception of corruption which is often true and they don't know how their money's being used and this way we figured out what smart contracts you would be able to choose to give your money to a smart contract that specifically wanted to build a school or specifically wanted to provide vaccines or specifically wanted to fight to fight to advocate for gun control or even people who wanted to advocate and this was the the the objectiveness of the platform if someone felt that advocating

against cut gun control what's going to contribute to a better world then they could put their case forward and people who agreed with them could use the platform so the platform was meant to be a fairly agnostic platform for people who wanted to change the world and it could prove to others that they could change the world with an idea of a clear audit trail so you know where the money is being spent if someone spent money on putting down a foundation for a school you would have all the invoices to the that was used to buy the cement the invoice that was used to pay the company you'd have all of that hash to the blockchain so you could very easily find out when someone was there were some

sort of rents being paid either in bribes or a higher price etc so that's the key idea but I think that very much what I'm saying that's a vision and I think that's probably the technology will be mature enough for that probably in about three to five years at the moment they just individual experiments okay are there any specific use cases where you think it already shows big signs of promise in that space I think one of the key things is is around property so if you've got to build a school for example you can make a smart contract for that directly and what you can then do is say very clear the the the SKU the building the school

is in three phases phase one is the foundation when the foundation is complete the smart contract will release funds for the next phase and the next phase could be building the walls and the final phase could be or the third phase could be put building the roof and the final phase could be employing teachers so what you couldn't do then that's the power of smart contracts with business logic and legal clauses in it what I can then do is very easily say okay the foundation has been completed therefore the next the money from the other donors are released or the foundation the foundation has not been completed the the cement has not been bought the company who's done the laid the foundation has charged is charging

way too much or the person who owns that company is the brother of the project manager so all of those things you can quite easily check and then say okay gate one has not been passed all the money collected so for that so far goes back to the donors and that project manager goes on to a list of people not to be trusted yeah so that's the that sort of concept is is I think at the moment is doable with the with the level of the technology as it is with a private chain not a public chain and just remember I think that's a very important concept so at the moment public chains in my opinion are not

ready for primetime if they do they have more than one parameter so the parameter of Bitcoin four dollars of but confuse that's one parameter one exchange parameter as soon as that contact becomes more complex and the proof of work becomes more complex and costs much more money with the cryptocurrencies being as volatile as they are public chains are at the moment a less than then a less than perfect choice a private chain with proof of authorities and a governance layer is may not be completely decentralized but it's still auditable it's still traceable so you've got a look at you've got a look at designing solutions to solve the problem and not

designing a solution to make it ideologically pure yeah and so we I make that distinction all the time and I have a lot of friends who disagree with me so I know that it raises quite a lot of concerns that some people but our role is not to the ideologues of the technology our role is to use blockchain with IOT AI to solve a problem and to add value that that's where I see our role is okay cool and that role is obviously also developing I think that role is developing I mean an a part of the reason I like to keep my options open is that although I think I have 16 researchers working for me I have 16 technologists or 16 developers although I know that we probably know more than

most there are a number of answers that are still unclear and we need to keep our options open too so if we need to pivot we can pivot that's definitely a I I criticize people a lot you don't know what they don't know so I spend virtually some time every day thinking about what don't I know that I'm not aware of yet yes I do we discussed that a lot what could happen we get people to read what other people are saying so we get an idea of what we don't know I think that's a that's that's very important for the immune it's very important for me that I carry on having

the fun that I'm currently having and that's part of it to continuously learn interesting in your in running configure or also your just your personal life what are you currently in the process of learning I mean one of the key things at the moment in at least in the in in the blockchain space cetera that I find fascinating the controversial knowledge proofs yeah I think that will solve for a lot of problems with privacy that will go a long way to protecting consumers and so I find that particular area quite quite important and then I think in my personal life I'm reading quite a lot

about the philosophy of the future so what does that mean how old societies develop yeah and there are there are real problems at the moment with with I think legal tax avoidance so the wealth gap is increasing quite dramatically what does that mean for how societies will develop what role does technology play and all of that what role does digitalization play and all of that and then of course the one thing we that at least a number of my colleagues forget is that human beings are actually fairly emotionally rational beings and it's quite important to

realize that we had driven by sensation we not really always driven by rationality so reading you've all Harare is quite useful for me and so even if we have this perfect rational auditable traceable world what are we gonna need to do to beings that are essentially driven by sensation to make them adopters yeah because the best technology in the world is completely useless if the majority of the people that it's meant to benefit don't like it and are not using it and so that's that's something that's that that's actually bothering me quite a lot

especially when you realize when you look in places like America for example you've trying to analyze why do people constantly vote against their own economic interests it's a very simple thing to say that they just stupid and ignorant but could there be you know are there other reasons so I'm I'm quite optimistic so it's difficult for me to just write off millions of people just because they stupid or ignorant there's got to be a reason and a number of structural causes that keep them ignorant hmm so yeah those are the important things that that I sort of try

and make try and at least understand who the experts are in those fields and read what they thinking about mm-hmm okay interesting do you have mentors that you work with as well there are a number of people that I that I that I trust or so I I'm not I'm not so maybe personally I'm not I don't believe in the hero culture yeah so I don't believe that one person makes a big one person makes a difference but they make a difference because of the context they find themselves in so the mentors I have are very specific to specific areas so I have one who works for the George Soros Foundation and I'd

trust his opinion on most things social in in terms of of the future I really I like looking at what you've all her re is is saying and and and and writing and then I think someone was a force for good at the moment and it's quite thoughtful is Pope Francis so so I wouldn't I mean in terms of mentors in my daily life I have one or two friends that I trust the person I'm married to I listen quite a lot to what he says but generally I think I don't if I have a

mentor I trust what they saying because they have the back knowledge in that area yeah so so for example what what Jack Dorsey said you know the CEO of Twitter he's a billionaire and he makes a comment about Bitcoin so I don't take that seriously at all yeah just because someone is wealthy does not mean that they have the means to make a decent at least a well thought-through opinion on anything he said something like Bitcoin Oh Bitcoin is the only current so he's basically implying is a Bitcoin maximalist I don't think he even knows what that means but once again he's very good at pushing up his own value mm-hmm so he's probably

bought Bitcoin and so I'm always looking at the at that sort of Howard Schultz is another example and at the moment the real problem is that in the world is that people are listening to people who have money not people who have knowledge and in the world I come from at least my family and my friends we generally have been interested in people who are who have been doing studies like university professors or doctors in charge of something or the concept of listening to someone just because they were rich actually borders on vulgarity now it's actually become fairly common it's becoming a sort of mainstream yeah I think that's a danger yeah it is it is and all these topics I think you

know there we could have a whole pot if there was something that when you look back at your career up to now is there something that you would do different I mean it's it's that's the very difficult difficult question I mean I one of the things that people have often said to me is you know you spend so much time studying medicine and doing pediatrics and looking after kids why did you change and would you there was a number of years of your life would you if you were to do it again would you stop and the answer is no because I think that

medicine taught me a lot about you have to understand you have to have hypothesis first then you've got investigate to see what the disease is then you've got to look at the investigations and then you treat yeah so sounds just like your roadmap exactly yeah and you can see you can you can see you can see that pattern and virtually everything I do and where I said there's some things for example where centralization is important in and that's in one area is in sort of emergency medicine yeah in emergency medicine you don't want to get get a consensus about which doctor is treating you if you've got a heart attack you want to be treated

immediately if you've got blood leaking into your lungs you want it stopped immediately you're not going to try and do a consensus mechanism on the blockchain or anything like that yeah and there you need a centralized body to say that someone is qualified to do a heart surgery you certainly don't want your friends and family deciding who's qualified and who's not yeah and so I think there are things like that where I think about those lessons that I've learned and I think I would never have learnt those lessons had I not done that yeah the same thing with Deutsche Bank I mean working in in in finance was a was very a very important lesson and that's when

I learned how wealthy rent-seeking middlemen become bankers become extremely wealthy and have zero interest in social value bankers actually have no interest in making society better the only interest is in financial innovation to try and make themselves wealthy there's it's it's it's it borders on psychopathic behavior and if I was never in that in that field I would never never have learned all of the financial processes that I now know which we use to disintermediate them mm-hmm so I I don't think I would would change anything I think every every single experience I've had has taught me

something without which I wouldn't be the person I am today and I actually I I'd like the person I am today so I don't did you don't you don't wanna you don't you don't want to try and change something that you that you happy with yeah so what's next for you in the you know in the coming year maybe or the next one or two years I think there's the important thing is we need to consolidate yet confer do we've got now a very successful technology stack we have two of the block chains that are the only block chains globally that I know of that I actually deployed at corporates one of them in a fortune 100

company and so we're doing something right I think the question is to do two to consolidate what we're doing right and then figure out what our next step is in that roadmap but one of the things we've spent a lot of money developing this this technology stack on the blockchain and now what I'm doing is trying to monetize that because we have to be sustainable and monetize that by putting it into an accelerator to help other companies who got the good business model and who've got a very clear idea of how much solving the problem is worth and I think that's the

next big step that we are currently doing is to make sure that all the ventures that we have and all the people we take into our accelerator we make them usable so they're not just a whole lot of marketing blah blah and and that's exciting that's quite exciting so and the other good thing that it's done it's really given me some made me meet some really really bright people really clever people who want to make money and who want to change the world and I think that's the best combination because I have a lot of left-wing friends I just want to change the world and think the

money is going to come from somewhere else but I think the the real the real sustainable way to do that is to make sure that whatever solutions you have making enough money to change the world yeah I don't think anyone needs to be a billionaire you know I think you if you're a billionaire you just sucking resources out of the planet and but I think most people can live quite well if they're millionaires personally I think if you want to be and one of the models we have here is that if you want to be a billionaire you are just being greedy you've grown up in the wrong value system yeah good point this was really great I enjoyed the conversation a lot thanks a lot for

taking so dark thanking thank you very much for coming through thanks so much for joining us today more info on our guests and our sponsors is in the show notes of this episode and on a podcast website the blockchain and ask.com to help people find this podcast it's important that you download subscribe and give it a top rating and review on iTunes or on the podcast platform of your choice I'm Manuel staggers and I thank you very much for listening you [Music]