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You’re going to fail, it’s a feature, not a bug. Accept and embrace it! with Dennis O'Connell
47 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, I spoke with Dennis O'Connell, Co-Founder & CTO at Peregrine Limited, President of ERC3643 Association and Strategic Advisor to several high-profile web3 projects.
We had a fascinating conversation about all sorts of things including Dennis' career journey, the skills he's developed along the way and the skills he wishes he'd have learnt earlier in his career. We spoke about what part failure and setbacks will play in your career, how taking risks is the key to success, how networking will change your career for the better, what being a CTO means, what he'd change about Web3, the regulation landscape and how scams and meme coins affect the reputation of the industry plus so much more!
Behind the blockchain is a series of conversations with leaders who have built successful products, teams and careers in Web3. You will get a chance to discover how successful individuals were able to accomplish their career objectives, the skills they have acquired, the mistakes and difficulties they encountered, and the advice they can offer you to help you reach your own career aspirations.
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Transcript
Introduction of Dennis O'Connell
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Behind the Blockchain podcast. Today I'm joined by Dennis O'Connell, CTO of Peregrine Limited, President of the ERC 3643 Association and Senior Advisor to Polygon Labs R3 and Layer Zero. Dennis, welcome to the show. How are you? Hey, I'm great, the challenge Jack. Yeah, no problem at all.
Dennis's Background and Transition to Blockchain
00:00:23
Speaker
So, Dennis, for people who don't know who you are, could you introduce yourself please?
00:00:28
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. So I am, as you mentioned, the CTO of Paraguin. I'm also the founder along with my two wonderful partners, Simon and Paul Sanacaro. Paraguin is a 3C licensed asset management platform in the heart of Abu Dhabi and Abu Dhabi global markets. And we use our license and work with the regulator to actually tokenize on the Polygon blockchain. And we're very excited about that.
00:00:58
Speaker
I also am the president, as you mentioned, of the ERC 3643 Association, which is a global token standard with over 100 institutional members as of recording. And we're seeking to proliferate the standard and gain adoption.
Early Fascination with Technology
00:01:16
Speaker
As far as my background, I am an engineer by training.
00:01:20
Speaker
I found a mechanical and aerospace engineer, a medieval scout. And I worked for NASA for two years at NASA Langley in Virginia as a supersonic aerodynamic specialist. And then I left that career and that life to go pursue a commodity derivatives trading in New York and Chicago for almost 10 years.
00:01:43
Speaker
And then I moved over to institutional finance in New York, working for several large banks. And that's where ultimately, in 2017, I caught the idea that I actually could do digital assets to blockchain full time. And since then I've been on that journey. So I've actually transitioned into what I call the digital asset industry to blockchain, web three space, since 2017. And I'm sure we can go into it.
00:02:13
Speaker
Yeah, that sounds cool. So why did you take an interest in technology in the first place?
Technology Disruption in Finance
00:02:19
Speaker
It's a great question, actually. In my life, I've had the opportunity to work on two different floors. I worked in a Chicago border trade floor when I was working at a clearing firm in Chicago. And I noticed how paper intensive it was. And at the end of the trading day, there's just stacks of paper everywhere. Receipts everywhere. They would get losses. It's a mess. And you go up to the office and you see rolls and rolls of paper.
00:02:48
Speaker
And I said, you know, this has, this can't be, you know, this seems so, so efficient and moves away to the game for years. And when I started in the 2000s, my career, I really saw the transition of technology. And I saw how technology started to really change the day-to-day business and the roles people had and the value people had. And that was quite shocking.
00:03:13
Speaker
That trend continued throughout my career. I've worked at a fund where there was a bunch of NYMAX traders, floor traders, who had to adopt to pointing click trading with the dawn of internet trading as well. Throughout the whole story of those years, if you were on
00:03:35
Speaker
that stagnant side, the way of the past, that you're doing something in the industry, you were bound to be disrupted. And it became very clear to me that the common theme throughout all the place I had worked was technology and evolution of innovative technology. You want to be on the side that's doing the change, tormenting the change and being the change versus the side that's getting changed. And I think that has played out well and will continue to do the rest of my career, frankly.
00:04:05
Speaker
And so seeing the hardship and seeing the difficulty, you know, the personal struggles that people who were, you know, one's kings of their castle and their domain as technology replaced everything they did and made things more efficient, they became less and less relevant. And I thought that was quite a shocking and stark
00:04:23
Speaker
experience for me to see that that personal
Career Path and Blockchain Appeal
00:04:25
Speaker
side. So I became very committed to embracing innovation, not even as a survivor mentality, but as sort of like an aspirational mentality, as that factor would be my career introduction that in my time on the shoot, I would see several major changes and boy was
00:04:42
Speaker
Was I naive? I did not realize how much it would change. That's what inspired me ultimately. Blockchain to me more than AI was always so fascinating because where I worked, especially in these large institutions with exchanges and institutional banks,
00:05:02
Speaker
like people don't realize how inefficient or arcane some of these systems are and how old they can be. And people think that it's a very modern system all the time and journalism is not.
Role and Skills of a CTO
00:05:18
Speaker
And it's very, very inefficient because they just were building it at scale and they didn't know how to. And it took a while to innovate and improve it, but early just came this like series of bandings and patchworks.
00:05:30
Speaker
And I said there has to be just a better way in a way to transmit data and communicate. And that was always the appeal of watching over the other stuff like data science, AI and microservices and everything else we see now today. Yeah, for sure. And when you started out, did you always know that you wanted to be a CTO or a leader in the technology space? What was your goal, I guess, when you started?
00:05:57
Speaker
I think it's a great question. Coming up with my aerospace degree, I originally worked at Solomon Smith Barney in high school. At Smith Barney, I did an internship and it quickly became apparent to me at that time in the early Os that you have to have an edge on Wall Street. Everyone has to have an edge. For me, I thought the edge would be on the
00:06:23
Speaker
critical thinking and rationalization and STEM skills. At the time, it was probably in full swing, but it was really accelerating people in the STEM field, science, technology, engineering, and math, going into Wall Street and really reaping the benefits of that kind of education, critical thinking, mathematical skills, statistics skills.
00:06:44
Speaker
a whole lot. And so I realized that people that didn't have that background, while it could be very successful, there was more opportunity for those people with that particular type of edge, especially as quantitative finance became a thing. And so I pursued engineering. I pursued aerospace engineering as well, because I figured, well, it's difficult and it's fascinating. And I said to myself, I don't think I'll use these skills long term, but I think
00:07:10
Speaker
that the skills I gained to get the skills would benefit me long term. And, you know, certainly they have. I mean, I got my programming skills primarily in engineering, not in computer science, right? We would have a
00:07:26
Speaker
a model to develop or some homework to do and require coding and so you could code the dynamics of heat transfer or you could code certain dynamics of options pricing and believe it or not you learn later in life that they're almost the same equation beautifully enough.
00:07:45
Speaker
And so I figured that bringing that technology aspect really suited me because, as I mentioned, technology was the main catalyst into Wall Street and to finance in general. And so coming into a space where
00:08:01
Speaker
There generally was a lack of understanding technology or maybe a fearfulness of understanding, by and large, compared to the tech sector where you have some of the best technologists in the world.
Communication as a Key CTO Skill
00:08:10
Speaker
In finance, especially on the business side, you generally do not. You generally have an absence of knowledge because they're focused on things that don't require that knowledge, not that they're not, it's that they have a different domain expertise.
00:08:22
Speaker
So I quickly rose to the top because my communication skills was my differentiator. I was an okay developer. I wasn't like one of the super guys who do the elite coding, the hacker rank into like a top five. I was decent, but I could communicate to the business and I could rationalize concepts and I could push through to strategy and
00:08:47
Speaker
and raise money for projects internally. And through that, I quickly realized that that sort of communication and vision level was appropriate for me. And I started to understand the difference between a VP of engineering versus a director of engineering versus a senior architect and then just CTO. And CTO's come in all shapes and sizes, but in finance, the primary requirement is you have to understand the business.
00:09:12
Speaker
you have to understand what you're doing. Whether that's on the front office side, you know, trading and creating models for other trading or derivatives, or it's on the back office side and there's any complex structures with settlements and different protocols. You know, all of that stuff is very necessary to the business, but it has to be communicated. I also as an Eagle Scout was always a natural leader. I was very luxurious, outgoing, self-organizing. And so, you know, that kind of
00:09:41
Speaker
three-part set of skills of communication, ethical knowledge, and leadership always naturally gravitated to CTO roles. In the situations where I wouldn't seek a CTO role, I would usually organically rise just because people want me to run projects for them or oversee stuff or get resources or whatever. I like to think I'm like a producer. I'm more behind the scenes than on screen. But that has always been
00:10:08
Speaker
and something very natural for me. Being a CTO of Paraguay was something that I was very blessed to have. At the time, I was working for a great company called Subcurrency. I was approached by the leadership of Paraguay to become the CTO of it. I said, yeah, let's get back in the saddle and do it again.
00:10:32
Speaker
It became a very natural role for me and it's something that I continue to evolve and do. It takes a lot of work to be a CTO. To me, CTO is almost three jobs in one. In many ways, if you're a person that enjoys individual coding and a lot of downtime by yourself, just coding,
00:10:51
Speaker
don't be a CTO, even hands-on CTOs, don't be a CTO. But if you're a person that likes leadership and likes building organizations, and yeah, maybe gets to dabble into the technical aspect of it and, you know, build some patents in your next career field, it might be a calling for you.
00:11:10
Speaker
That sounds great.
Roles in Prestigious Organizations
00:11:11
Speaker
Well, yeah, I mean, there's, there's quite a few questions that I'd like to ask you about, um, about what it's like to be a CTO. But, um, if we could go back to, I guess your career journey so far, so if you've worked at some really prestigious organizations, uh, as you mentioned, uh, some really, really large, uh, banks and, and obviously now helping a number of, of really prestigious, um, blockchain, uh, web three companies, could you talk us through in a little bit more detail about some of the roles that you've held within,
00:11:38
Speaker
your career and kind of what those have looked like? Yeah, absolutely. So, as I mentioned at Nestle, I was an aerospace engineer, which was really cool. And I had a really, really great mentor who was actually a paraplegic. And he actually would
00:12:00
Speaker
be in a wheelchair, couldn't move his arms or legs, but he would go up to his computer. They would literally talk code into the screen. And he was one of the guys who helped build the space shuttle. And that was really deeply inspiring. And I struggled. I struggled like hell during my years. But it was good because I really got a permanent background in global computing and that as an individual contributor.
00:12:26
Speaker
And then I moved on to become basically, I would say, almost like a software developer in the traditional sense. For a few years, I think for five, six years, I was
00:12:38
Speaker
different versions of a software developer around algorithmic trading, or clearing systems, or synthetic commodities, or order management and execution, and that sort of stuff. And when you become a senior developer or trading systems developer, that I did at my time at RGL, Brian, I had really, really great mentors.
00:13:05
Speaker
And so it was a great aspect because it was a small enough futures commodity merchant, or FCM as we call it, or future security merchant I should say, where their job was to take orders from institutions and individuals, process those orders and send them to exchange for execution. And so I got to interact with the traders, I got to interact with back office technology people, data architects, and there was a whole cross domain and it was really
00:13:31
Speaker
a very formative years for me to learn that kind of art and skill as a senior developer. From there, I did a couple startups on my side while I was working in creatures back in my time in Chicago. Believe it or not, I actually won a few awards.
00:13:49
Speaker
for being even a part-time CTO, which was funny enough. And I had a really good team during that experience, especially at Elm Spring, which was at the time the number one real estate incubator. And we got to do all sorts of pitching in DC. And so at part-time CTO stuff I did during my day job was really good for learning about VC and pitching and incubation and startup and main developments and very kind of
00:14:18
Speaker
Contra, even though the title was similar in sort of what I did, develop software for brush applications, the approach was vastly different. If you think about it during my job, you're dealing with regulators, you're dealing with exchange, you're dealing with clients, there's massive, massive planning and requirements that go in. And then at night, when you're working on a real estate project, it's you and a couple mates and you're having a beer
00:14:46
Speaker
you know, coding at American Night Smart, which is what Incubator was, 1871. And it was fun, and you just, you know, pure creation and ideation, and I always thought that was interesting, but it was more stressful because the idea was based on, you know, your ability and you had a lot of support, you also had to build a lot of skills.
00:15:07
Speaker
And so that leadership skills took me in a really good direction. Then I moved on to becoming a senior global architect at Merrill for a few years for Stockholm and Delta I desks. And that was an incredible job. At the time, I was part of a team of 100 and 20 developers across the world. It was one of the leadership positions there.
00:15:31
Speaker
and really started honing my skills I learned from my side gigs as well as my main job and I was approached, believe it or not, about blockchain.
00:15:42
Speaker
And I said, well, you know what? I'm used to scourging for, scourging, excuse me, scourging for a talent. Let me go, you know, from Traverse to Bank. There was an innovation fair in December and we said, hey, let's get a group of developers together. We did, free. And believe it or not, we created a blockchain project first of its kind. And that was really, really fascinating. And we ended up placing 11th, I mean, there's only top 10, but the grandfather's saying,
00:16:09
Speaker
you know, all the projects there in the top 10, there were no blockchain projects. And so they kind of felt bad for us or not for us. And we got to do a Shark Tank style pitch for the Board of Bank of America knowledge, which was really awesome. And then my life changed. So then I went from basically being an architect to being probably, I'll be generous to say I was one of the first, but probably was one of the first 10 or 20
00:16:35
Speaker
what you would now call smart contract developers, web 3 developers, architects at the bank. It was very, very far by the line. We still have all the main work that we did. Again, that's why I mentioned the sidekits because it was a skill set of, okay, I have my main kind of mobile work, but then I have all these other projects I'm really passionate about, so I'm going to get that work done, do your job there.
00:16:58
Speaker
So I could get to those projects. And that was very interesting. And I had to give credit to the executive management director, Robert Wilson. Oh, Robert Wilson is a dear friend of mine now, who really kind of created this space for us to, for that team to get compute and to get projects and to meet with the traders and all that.
Career Journey and Skills Application
00:17:18
Speaker
I then moved on to, when Rob moved on to Bank of New York Mellon, I actually followed him on to Bank of New York Mellon and there I was again a principal architect and eventually I was promoted because at Bank of New York Mellon I had my biggest digital assets transformation. I had a lot of really great people around me and
00:17:36
Speaker
That was a very, very amazing journey from being a senior technical contributor or leader to becoming almost a director, managing director, executive of a bank. And it was a very big gift.
00:17:52
Speaker
for a variety of reasons. When you go into such a large institution like New York Mellon, where you come to realize it's actually many siloed businesses under one roof, and then there's this horizontal business that oversees everything.
00:18:09
Speaker
It was through all the different blockchain projects that I have procured and the name I made for myself there that I got the attention of the leadership at the highest level, the executive leadership. I had some really, really great sponsors along the way. Vikram and StarFec were fantastic as well as Luigi of the Year in helping me in that transition.
00:18:30
Speaker
But I made the transition and towards the end, you know, you start thinking like a director, you know, more strategically, holistically about technology, not about like minutia of code, but what do things give you? What does it mean for a long term?
00:18:46
Speaker
Once I did that transformation, then I went to security. I was also a managing director-level role, and then I moved over to the CTO of PowerPoint full-time as the largest CTO role I had. It wasn't a side gig. CTO was a full-blown one.
00:19:01
Speaker
And it was very much mirrored all the aspects of everything I'd done before. There was the architect, there's individual contributing, there was the lean startup, and then there was also the executive side as well on it. So all the skills aggregated along the way. It felt like I had a job or a title that I didn't gain value. I needed to incrementally up the ladder. Every one of those things had an important lesson or had an important skill to develop that, frankly, I actively practiced throughout the day.
00:19:30
Speaker
You know, you could take any hour of my day and I could point to a job I did, you know, not been working out 18 years in my past. And I said, yeah, there's a peer graph. I just did that. I just did that. And so it all aggregates up. And I think that's what you really need to be successful, especially in a high-profile company like PowerPoint.
00:19:51
Speaker
where you have all the expectations of an institution and you have all the pressures of a startup. So it's a tough cookie to manage, but if you have those skills or if you're in one of those jobs, you're like, ah, I really like it. Guarantee, there's always something you're gonna take along with you. Yeah, for sure. And you've obviously done all sorts of different roles by the sound of it.
00:20:19
Speaker
worked in all sorts of different types of businesses. What have you found most fun? Innovation is most fun. Pure creation is most fun. When you get to, I always love learning a new language or a new technology and then starting to get through the kind of like the dip of it, like all this initial excitement and then you get to the grind. When you kind of turn that corner and you start being able to think in that language or think in that space,
00:20:47
Speaker
That's really exciting because those are really new thoughts that you work hard to access. Whether that is a new business that you're passionate about or a new technology or trying something different, to me that's the most fun stuff. That's the pure creation is really what gets me going and keeps me working late. One o'clock nights
00:21:10
Speaker
coding along or developing a PowerPoint or slide, there has to be that passion there, that zest in there. There has to be something deeper that you want out of it. Otherwise, don't waste your time. And don't be afraid to change, too. I always constantly reinvent myself. I always constantly reinvent what I can do.
00:21:31
Speaker
what the way my life is, you know, some weeks I'm a quant, some weeks I'm an application developer, some weeks I'm venture, some weeks I'm commercial, some weeks I'm, you know, legal in contracts, you know. But, well, that novelty, that change, it can be stressful and fun. The most fun I have is with the innovation, by far. That's really cool to hear. And throughout your career,
00:21:57
Speaker
Are there any particular skills that stand out to you, whether that be technical skills or softer skills, that have really helped you achieve your current roles or current roles within Web3?
The Importance of Communication and Planning
00:22:08
Speaker
Any that really stand out?
00:22:12
Speaker
First, communication is absolutely critical. Whether we like it or not, there's some extremely gifted and intelligent people that have not developed the ability to communicate. What I do by communication is simply telling you what you're going to do. It's to be able to express what you're doing to your audience in various mediums.
00:22:34
Speaker
When I was transitioning into this director role, a lot of times I would have to write emails to leadership. As a developer, I was a job developer at the time.
00:22:52
Speaker
You know, I pride myself on, you know, banging out this, you know, little piece of software within a day or so, you know, that go through all the development and everything, you know, that felt like I've done something. But there were times where I would have to write email and it'd be three points. Give me three points on what's going on. And, you know, it took me six hours to do so. It was madness. I was like, what is going on here? This isn't, I'm just writing an email. You know, there's nothing. Boy, was I wrong.
00:23:20
Speaker
Writing email, creating PowerPoints that deliver a message, socializing ideas and getting by, being able to express your elevator pitch or whatever, whether we like it or not, selling and the communication ideas is the single biggest thing. Building your network is the single biggest thing. The reality is there's a lot of smart people out there that don't do these things or look down upon these things for very good reasons.
00:23:50
Speaker
And say, well, my work will just self-convey itself. And it almost never does. And many times you have the opposite problem when you have people who are very good at communicating, actually don't know the core stuff. So they put up this really great, let's say, show. And then you go a little deeper and go, OK, go talk to my tech guy. OK.
00:24:11
Speaker
So, being able to, what I call, integrate the stack, right, which is I can communicate, I can conceptualize, I can execute, and then I can review, is really, really big, a big skill. And that all allows communication to your audience. The way I talk to developers is a very different way I talk to project managers. So, I talk to lawyers and I talk to executives. So, communication is one.
00:24:33
Speaker
The second one is planning and goal setting, which again, you know, when you're a developer or when you're an engineer, you may have a structure with your agile or whatever development they're going to use.
00:24:48
Speaker
like that or it's too restricting. Yeah, it is. Some people don't like it, but it does kind of give you a structure, whether like or not. And I think having a structure in life to what you're doing, whether that's getting a certain goal, allocating time, being disciplined, being consistent, all those keywords we hear, being structured becomes very, very important for you to
00:25:14
Speaker
maintain your focus, keep your attention. You only can do so many things concurrently. You have to make choices and sacrifices. So I think that project planning and that coordination is so critical because, especially when you're successful, everyone wants your attention. And there's many times in my life where I've said yes to everything that I've paid for, from very difficult days of trying to be for people at once. And what I found is,
00:25:43
Speaker
I only could do really, one thing really well, two things kind of well and three things okay. And I think that having that sort of strategic mindset, the fact that I set a plan and saying, okay, I'm doing this today, this is my goal, and what this done by September, really, really calories forward, you know, anticipating things, anticipating failure, anticipating setbacks.
00:26:04
Speaker
One of the single biggest things I could tell people is when I project plan, I rarely ever do, everything goes well. I always look at something, a certain deliverable or a certain part, and I go, if this fails, what happens? What do we do if there's a cash shop failure? And I actually build in weeks, what I call compression weeks, right? So just if that thing runs over, we're still okay, or we have some sort of idea about that sort of stuff. And that has always paid me tremendous dividends.
00:26:32
Speaker
I would absolutely say communication and I absolutely would say structure are two of my biggest. And where can someone go to learn how to communicate more effectively or where can they go? Is there anywhere they can go to learn how to plan effectively?
00:26:49
Speaker
Absolutely. I'm really glad you asked this. So for me, the biggest thing has always been getting practical knowledge, not theoretical knowledge. It's one of the things that always has frustrated me really profoundly with
00:27:07
Speaker
With education in general, getting an education from college is not the same thing as getting an experience. In many ways, it sets you up well, but it doesn't really set you up to the point where you think you feel complete.
00:27:24
Speaker
And so what I've always thought is rather than going on YouTube and just watching videos or Coursera, I like to find things that are engaging. And I think it's important to have both. You don't want to overly learn theory and do nothing. You always want to be, in my word, in a constant action state.
00:27:46
Speaker
And so far the best platform I've seen so far that gives you kind of that tactical, you know, a little bit of information, apply it right away, has been Udemy, believe it or not. Udemy, by far, gives a quality control to what they have. There's also different courses in different domains. So that's another big thing is that for me, you know, I've always wanted to learn, you know, hey, you know, like,
00:28:14
Speaker
being a charter financial analyst or getting a series license or communicating or cyber defense or whatever. There's a lot of mediums where you can watch something and say, okay, I saw the guide code and that was interesting.
00:28:32
Speaker
But where do I start? And Udemy is one of those things where, one, there's a lot of different topics. Two, the courses are very short and sweet. And three, they tend to be heavily action-based, like the authors will give you, do this, do this, do this. So there's a lot of great courses on different types of communication, which I think is also important as well. Different types of critical thinking, which is also very important. And so I think another thing I'm trying to say is
00:29:00
Speaker
You don't always want to just learn your expertise. You kind of want to mix it up a little bit and not discount the soft skills, right? The hard skills being, you know, I'm a developer, I want to learn Go-bling, I want to learn microservices, I want to learn machine learning, data size, AI. You can go on a ton of platforms and do that. You could go on Udacity, you could go on Coursera, you could go on YouTube, and they'll teach you how to do it
00:29:26
Speaker
right there. But in terms of like different skills, YouTube tends to be hit or miss. So I sometimes start on YouTube and if I'm frustrated by what I see on YouTube, I usually go off to Udemy and say, okay, what am I Udemy? I know I'm going to get succinct class, doesn't cost a lot of money, and it's very, very demonstrable. And generally they recommend other ones as well. And that I felt to be very, very helpful for people.
00:29:52
Speaker
That's really good insight. Thank you for that. I'm going to check that out myself. See if there's anything on there that I can look into as well, just to add in terms of communication.
Learning from Failure
00:30:03
Speaker
I think it's actually having the, almost having the guts and the courage to put yourself out there. So if you're in a meeting or you get into a situation where you can then start to practice, it's just throwing yourself out there. And if it doesn't go well, it doesn't go well. But these types of things, you have to be able to be in the situation to put those things into practice and almost try and fail really. So you can learn from that mistake and go again next time.
00:30:29
Speaker
I think you touched on something that's really, really a core concept that I'm glad you brought up, which is this concept of failure. Failure to me is good. I like when I'm failing. I don't love it, right?
00:30:43
Speaker
The reality is that you'll fail and feel like a failure most of the time. In fact, most of my successes when I look back on them felt like failures 95% of the time. Something wasn't going to happen, this is going to fall through, we're doing it wrong.
00:30:59
Speaker
There's never this view that, oh, I know it's successful from day one, and we made it successful, and everything was a peach. That just is not reality, and people don't understand that. But what they don't understand is that what feels like a failure most of the time can become a success. And it's funny how that stuff works out. One of the things I'll talk about was when we did the 2017 Innovation Fair at Merrill Lynch,
00:31:28
Speaker
It was a hard grind. It was an ugly project. We had no developer support. We had very limited support from our leadership. We couldn't even get, you know, servers to run the code. We had some good support from R3, which was great.
00:31:44
Speaker
But the whole time it just felt like this is all a bit wrong, it's all going to go south. Even when we placed with the Innovation Fair, when we placed 11th, we were like, okay, I guess we did all right. It wasn't until that final step where we did the pitch to the leadership and we really showed everyone what we did and what we unlocked.
00:32:06
Speaker
accidentally didn't really start to take effect, right? So they say, you know, don't give up before the miracle happens, but you have to fail. You have to go through that. And it's not, it's not fun. It's honestly sucks. It does. It's scary doing it. It feels bad when it happens.
00:32:25
Speaker
and it takes time to recover i mean that's just reality and you know i know there's a lot of bravado guys and you know believe me i've watched all of them and you know it's sort of this romanticism about um you know oh you know you're successful successful this grind or whatever you know yeah but there's there's a cost to that success of course and
00:32:45
Speaker
I think the best way you can be successful is to fail. That's the paradox. More people are successful because they are afraid to fail. It's okay to fail because the failure is ultimately a short-term thing. Many times in life, especially after school, you dictate the failure conditions.
00:33:06
Speaker
The way I define failure is nothing more than giving up. If I just flat out walk away, and yeah, I give up, I fail. But if I'm some degree still working on it or still having, I wouldn't say hope, but still getting time and energy for it, I'm still in the fight.
00:33:22
Speaker
And the lessons you get from failing will never ever replace what you read in a book or what you hear in a course. When you're in a course, you're in a safe place. The instructor's going to tell you all the knowledge, and you're going to feel smart, and, ah, yeah, see, I'm smarter than the next guy. I did make that mistake. You're going to make whole new mistakes. In fact, you're going to make mistakes that you know you're making, and you still make them anyway. You're going to feel yourself, oh, wait a second. I'm smarter than this.
00:33:49
Speaker
No, because just because you have awareness, you have knowledge of it does not mean you have experience of it. And performing something always looks easy. You know, you go to baseball games, football games, sports game, whatever, you know, they make it look easy because what they do makes sense. But, you know, you don't see that literally
00:34:09
Speaker
hundreds of thousands of times they failed, and that's true in every industry. How many times did I have a cash dropping bug in my program? How many times did I not have a PowerPoint ready? How many times did I stutter? How many times did I misspell things in my emails? All the time they happen. Do people remember that? No, they don't. You know what they remember? They remember
00:34:28
Speaker
How you made them feel, what your intention was, and that you either apologize and you push through, right? And I think that's really, really critical for people who are like, well, how does one get up in these ranks? The reality is you have to take a risk.
00:34:45
Speaker
There's a really great book called Risky is the New Safe, I forget the author, but I definitely recommend that as well because I think taking risks is what you need to be doing every day. Now, honestly, I don't mean go jump off or budget jumping or something way outside your comfort zone. I'm talking about in moderation, right? Everything in moderation. A risk doesn't have to be some large, gigantic, impossible challenge that you're going to overcome. A risk could simply be doing some
00:35:14
Speaker
something that, you know, you want to do and you take a chance and you do it and it doesn't work out and you feel bad and you come back the next day and I work on it. It could be, you know, I just say being in that room and raising your hand and just, you don't have to steal the show. You can just say something, you know, get your expand your comfort zone a millimeter each day. And when you look back, you know, you're going to have a few meters behind you.
00:35:39
Speaker
That's the trick. The trick is to constantly grow in that little capacity. And whether it's, you know, in the communication skills or technical skills, like we talked about, you need to embrace that failure and you need to just kind of almost, I would say almost practically fail every day. It sounds crazy, but it's true. It's do something that you're bad at, learn from it, you know, review it and get good at it, get back on it, you know, the next day. And, you know, you look back and, you know, where you failed before, suddenly you succeed.
00:36:09
Speaker
There's a few YouTube channels that I watch for fun. I'm not going to plug them, but...
00:36:16
Speaker
And what they do is they basically play these games where the games are these impossible challenges and it's very stupid or whatever. But what I love about it is they keep at it. So they go through the first challenge, you know, it's a failure, you know, they're anguished and playing reaction videos so they can drum it up. But they come back at it. And you know, video might be 25, 30 minutes, and by the time you're in the 15 minute mark, they've done four of the challenges already, I would say maybe 10 times. They've done four of the challenges.
00:36:45
Speaker
And, you know, like, oh, you know, I've learned the pattern. I've learned the pattern. And I learned the fifth challenge. I'm failing on the fifth challenge. I can go 10 more minutes and then boom, they're on a nice challenge. And that to me is what success looks like. The whole time you're failing along the way, you know, you're frustrated, you're upset, you're angry, and then you get to the end and you're like, oh, it's over.
00:37:06
Speaker
I enjoyed it and that is another big thing about this is the success you see is actually the end. It means you're going to start a new challenge.
00:37:21
Speaker
you know, when you look back at it, you're almost like, Oh, man, I really, really enjoyed that time. Even though we had all this pain or whatever, and you know, this was frustrating, and this was scary, or I had this rivalry with this individual, or I wasn't sure how to do this. You look back, and I go, actually, you know what, that was really, really worthwhile. So build failure into your life, constructive failure, don't avoid it, make it a feature. Yeah, completely, completely agree. Yeah, completely agree. And I think
00:37:51
Speaker
I think as well something you said there is obviously people, when they see that success, they see that as the end. Obviously a lot of people's success or a lot of people who might be watching this, their end or their success is becoming a director of emerging technology or a CTO within an organization. But what does that actually look like day to day? And what do you actually do on a day to day basis when you reach that point?
Daily Responsibilities of a CTO
00:38:20
Speaker
So on a day-to-day basis, it depends on where you are in the project cycle. For example, this year, we were at a point where a power grid and even the association, we were in a foundational mode.
00:38:36
Speaker
So we're doing a lot of investor reach out. We're doing a lot of grant work. We're doing a lot of pitching. We're doing a lot of vision. We're doing a lot of legal. So very, very kind of, these are not, we call them soft skills. These are more of the hard soft skills, which is actual raising money. Raising money and going through that. So a day in the life of those weeks could be going through contracts.
00:39:04
Speaker
networking, going to events, doing demonstrations, doing data rooms, doing due diligence, answering questions. Really, really hard days of challenging questions on why this business should exist, how this business is going to make money, what is the edge this business has, et cetera, et cetera. And boy, is there a lot of failure in that.
00:39:26
Speaker
especially in this environment. Sometimes things are not going to be wrong. And then as we go through that period and we're lucky enough to survive that, then we go into commercials. So then we're talking with other peer companies and we're doing strategic partnerships, we're doing MLUs, we're looking at organizations and how they integrate together and what they do and what we do as a complementary.
00:39:51
Speaker
both doing the same thing and can we try to, you know, combine forces, you know, other partnerships. So it's very like commercially focused, very, very heavily commercial. And then there's like the actual technical part of the platform, right? Which is what's their platform truly do? What are the benefits? What are the challenges with their tech? How does that integrate? What's the actual frameworks that they build? What's the different, let's say,
00:40:20
Speaker
requirements that they need for data and hosting, you know, SOC 2 and these sort of things, data requirements, cyber requirements, resiliency requirements, architectures come into it. And then of course, you know, there is actual coding development, you know, what do we actually need to build
00:40:38
Speaker
And then we resource that, project plan that out, how do we then start hiring and executing for that, how to be tested, how to deploy it, and then how we get it regulated and bring it live. And so there's a whole belly of actual hardcore engineering development that happens, architecture that happens, approval processing.
00:40:56
Speaker
Then, of course, in our world, since we're a regular entity, there's a regulation process. They're getting approved to be fit for purpose by the regulator, but that leads to requirements, which is additionally challenging. I tell people it's turn up running a startup even harder to run a regulated startup, because everything we do has to be approved by a regulator. There's always that additional steps.
00:41:20
Speaker
So you got everything, you got the VC side, raising capital, you got the partnership side, you got the commercial side, you got the technology side, new tech, a lot of stuff I do, a lot of research, I read a lot of white papers all the time. So throughout the year, I'm reading white papers from different central banks, from different DeFi projects, from different institutions, new technologies, I'm on YouTube watching
00:41:46
Speaker
conferences and going to conferences. I'm building my concepts up, especially for my advisors as well, as they're talking subject matter experts with them and working with them and challenging them and saying, okay, you're giving me this technology. What does it do? Where is it strong? Where is it weak? How is it evolving? Where did it come from? Where is it going? And then also, how do we monetize it now? Can it be monetized now? And then what's the view on that?
00:42:11
Speaker
So it's truly everything. It really depends on what I call the business cycle that you're in. And the way I describe it is fundraising, initial concept of fundraising, partnerships in commercial, getting clients, sometimes in parallel, actually building, architecting, developing, executing, and testing. And then, of course, go into commercials and open market operations and production, and then actually running the business, and then effectively your repeats. We built something. We had return on value.
00:42:41
Speaker
And then, again, I have. And that's generally the cycle that I go through throughout a year. So different parts a year, you could watch me working. You would never know I'm a CTO. You would think I'm a project manager. You would think I'm a developer. You would think I'm an angel investor. You would think I'm a partnerships, a strategic partnership person. All those hats are worn. And I really enjoy that.
00:43:08
Speaker
I think that's really, really useful insight. So I think a lot of people listening or watching might think, you know, my career aspiration would be to be a CTO one day, but without necessarily realizing what it actually entails. You know, it's not all fun stuff of, you know, building the actual take yourself and managing the team to deliver the technology. It's everything else that comes along with it, especially as you mentioned, when you're within a startup.
00:43:32
Speaker
you're looking for clients, you're talking to VCs, you're raising money, you're doing all sorts of things that you wouldn't always assume would be the role of a CTA but I think that's really really useful insight to share.
00:43:47
Speaker
I would even say for different sizes of business, you're going to have some combination of that and some things you definitely won't do. I would say if you're the CTO of a large Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000, you're mostly going to be on the strategic side, the compliance side, and the partnership side. You may not actively have to raise money, although sometimes that may happen.
00:44:14
Speaker
primarily you're going to be a strategic thinker. There's many CTOs out there that don't code at all. This is actually something that really surprises people, but some CTOs never coded or haven't coded in 20 odd years. That's a big thing too where people is like, oh, you always have to be coding or constantly coding. No, people code for a while and then move on.
00:44:35
Speaker
As you get into what I've noticed with CTOs, because one of the things I will say, Jack, is when I was a part-time CTO in Chicago, I had the opportunity to join the Microsoft CTO Club I was invited in. And it was a special club about 30 CTOs in Chicago of all different walks of life. And they recognized me for the work I did and asked me to join them. And I had 14, 500 CTOs, even doubt 30 CTOs in there, and I had
00:45:05
Speaker
startup CTOs and everywhere in between. People would talk about their role and my opener, my corny opener was no matter who they were, I would get into the elevator with them because it's one of these nice hotels and they had a lounge on top floor and I would get into the elevator with them and I would turn to them, not knowing anything about them and say, how many times have you said no today? I would always get a laugh of how many times you said no because that's the role of the CTO is no you can't do that, no you can't do that.
00:45:35
Speaker
It is really about knowing the domain, but not every CTO needs to be a good developer or a coder. Not every CTO needs to be integrated to raising, but it always helps. Like I said before, they may be running a large event in our institution and working on strategy side or commercial side,
00:45:58
Speaker
But you really should have that foundation in coding. You really should have that foundation in startup. You want those skills. And, you know, there are people who do vice versa, who were titans of industry and come into startup or come into FinTech, especially in Web 3. It's a lot of them.
00:46:14
Speaker
and they're fit with, oh wow, I've been in the bank for 30 years of my life. I never developed my fundraising skills. I never developed my commercial skills. I don't actually know how to go on a road show and raise. And that's very common. So the CTO role, I think, has some common themes. But depending on whether you're in a large institution or a small startup, it could look very different. Small startup, a CTO, could be basically a developer that does a few extra things.
00:46:39
Speaker
When people think about CTO, what they really need to ask themselves is, what do they want to do? Obviously, they want to contribute. They come maybe from a technical background, and they want to contribute. But there's things that are unique to CTO that they should want to do, primarily on the commercial, NBC, and partnership side that should be interesting to them. And they don't always have to code throughout their whole lives. In fact, it's a struggle even for me at this point
00:47:05
Speaker
I have to take time out of my day to code or to do a project purposely. In fact, I'll seek projects in my advisor just to keep my coding skill sets fresh because that's something that's important to me and not everyone does that. So I think that's important too is what you want to be a CTO but a CTO where at what level because then you're going to have different skills that you may need to pick up or focus on. Yeah, absolutely.
00:47:33
Speaker
hundreds of CTOs who haven't coded in, you know, 10, 15 years. Yeah, even even I know tons of engineering managers as well, who, who haven't coded really, it just depends on the size of the organizations that they work with. And
00:47:48
Speaker
and how that organization views those particular positions really. They do vary so much from place to place. I just think it's very hard to code. I think this is another really great topic in my career and I've always struggled with is I came up as coding was my edge, going back to your own conversation and my relationship with coding.
00:48:12
Speaker
I'm proud of myself. I won't be able to walk into any place in New York and do a really difficult coding exercise and a whiteboard and all this sort of stuff. Or having the ability to reach out. To me, it never leaves you. It's like riding a bicycle if you do enough years.
00:48:29
Speaker
I think like anything else, you weren't born as a coder. It's something you do for a while, and then I think it's okay to grow out of it. And that's something that I think terrifies a lot of people who go into that or pursue CTO or executive roles, is they realize that they, you know, things that they would scoff at, PowerPoints, emails, meetings or whatever.
00:48:49
Speaker
that becomes the job that is a job you're not gonna be intelligent or visual studio code listening to you know some awesome beats and coding for six hours you know uninterrupted. You know you could do that as a startup but you know your CTO normally at that point. So I think it's something that if you want to go throughout your career
00:49:10
Speaker
That's okay. There's nothing wrong with that, right? I think it's something where if you want to be heavily coding and want a little leadership, that there's other options for you as being an engineering manager or VP of engineering, and that's totally great careers. Absolutely.
00:49:26
Speaker
So I think everyone has to make their own decision with it, but I do believe that eventually people kind of grow out of it mostly. There's always going to be that coder that is a savant and loves it and wants to do it the rest of the life. Great. In fact, many times they will fight promotions. They will fight going up. And what they have to then do is seek places that are very, very advanced, places that truly challenge their skills.
00:49:53
Speaker
What you don't want to do is get comfortable, like get complacent. Oh, I code. I know how to code. I go to work every day. I don't have to think about things. I'm fine. That's complacency. That's the danger zone. If you're bored at work or you're at a point where you're not even thinking about it, because I've seen it too. Especially in Wall Street, you've got a lot of these guys who will work as a contractor, as a Java developer, C++ developer for a year or so.
00:50:18
Speaker
then they're right back out on the market and they're trying to get a 20% raise, 20% raise, many, many times. They look at the resume and they're in the same job for 15 years, just at 10 different places. And you're like, well, I'm next, you're going to be here for a year and a half. I'm going to pour all my knowledge into you and then you're just going to pop off to another person.
00:50:37
Speaker
So I think that if you are going to pursue coding as a career full-time, you should seek challenges and you should seek big challenges where you can grow your skills materially or get into a position where you can innovate those skills and become a thought leader in that space. I think that's very rewarding, right? But if life is calling on you to evolve and take on new roles,
00:51:01
Speaker
you should embrace that as well. Just the way there was a time where you embraced learning coding, you should also embrace moving on from coding if that's right for you. It's a big show for me. It's a big fundamental struggle because I haven't even gotten rid of coding myself. I still have one hand firmly timed. Yesterday, for four or five hours, I was writing a project in Solidity for a patent I'm doing with a client.
00:51:24
Speaker
And I was going to myself, I was like, you know, enjoy this because this may be the last project I've ever worked on. And I could just sit there for a few hours and just code and listen to music. So I think that's a big thing too, people that have to decide for themselves.
00:51:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I see all the time people who have either moved into management and really, really missed the coding side of it and then go back to coding just because that's what they really, really enjoy. You know, I see other people who, you know, it happens the other way, you know, they're kind of desperate to get to the management side of things because they've just had enough of coding.
00:51:59
Speaker
I think if you are going to make the move from coding into management, you do have to see it as a brand new career. It can't really be an extension of the
00:52:08
Speaker
the coding career. You have to view it as, right, I'm entering this new phase of my career, my life. The skills I'm learning now aren't to do with the technical side of things. I'm not deep in the code. I'm looking after the people. I'm managing the people. I'm leading. I'm leading on projects. As you mentioned, I'm looking at timelines, project deliverables. I'm out of the detail now. And that needs to be the focus, really, if you're going to kind of succeed. So yeah, I'll see you go both ways.
00:52:36
Speaker
I couldn't agree more. I think that's a really good point. So as you touched on there, you have a couple of, and obviously we spoke about at the start, you have a number of side things going on and your advisor to all sorts of different projects. What is it that you're working on the tokenization side of things for Polygon? Are you doing similar things for R3 and layer zero?
00:53:02
Speaker
at the moment or was it
Involvement in Web3 Projects
00:53:04
Speaker
that you're doing? Yeah, so I think that one, these are all relationships that were personal, that developed into business relationships. And I think this is a big skill of a CTL is to network with people and to not want that instant gratification.
00:53:23
Speaker
You know, the R3 and, you know, others, you know, I've had those relationships for years, but were only an advisor recently and only when it made sense for specific projects. And I think a big overall theme that I could safely talk about publicly is the interest in the Middle East and the interest of what's going on in Abu Dhabi and the EDGM.
00:53:47
Speaker
And I could say that a lot of friends who at first I have to explain why I was in Abu Dhabi, because I live in New York, you know, and most of the time I live in New York and London. Why am I over there, you know? And obviously, DeFi and blockchain has always been a global phenomenon, right? There's hotspots in Lisbon, in Singapore this week, and obviously now we're seeing Japan and Korea really, well, Korea always,
00:54:13
Speaker
especially Tokyo, Japan, really kind of pop up. And so Abu Dhabi and Dubai, Dubai as well was always kind of like a really hot spot for it, but more on the crypto side. Abu Dhabi, you know, looking at his brother, Emrat, said, you know, we're going to take a similar but different path. We're going to do a real world assets and tokenization.
00:54:34
Speaker
And so in that interest and the opportunity they've created, a lot of my colleagues and friends and contacts in my world have expressed interest in moving into that region and learning the region. They know I've been doing that now for almost two and a half years.
00:54:54
Speaker
That's really the big impetus for that. But there's also other projects that I work on, obviously, where I lend them my expertise from my career. Just in general, and I think it's a pity, in general, Web3 is a very young crowd.
00:55:13
Speaker
Um, not to say that I'm so old, you know, but the older people are meeting in the ground, but by alarms, the rank and file and traditional finance have stayed put. There's actually quite few of us. What do you think about holistically the entire size of Wall Street? How many people who were at like some sort of really serious level in a serious place?
00:55:31
Speaker
left that and went into Web3. There's maybe, I don't know, less than 20,000 people in the world that have actually done that. And I'm being very, very generous with that number, right? Because I meet new people every day, but I'll say even less than 10,000 people that done it. So, which is obviously a certainly small fraction when you think about the size of DeFi and everything. And so many times I've come in and they're engaging with
00:55:59
Speaker
large large institutions and they don't really have that background knowledge of what actually goes not necessarily inside but like what their purpose you know the general stuff right you know the the table stakes like what do they do why do they do it what are the challenges
00:56:16
Speaker
That's always a big thing. And then vice versa is like, well, here's what we do. Would they, would they be interested in ours? That's something, again, it's a very much that partnership, commercial building, but it's all very technical, right? Yes, it's a piece of technical stuff we built. We'll just translate and vice versa.
00:56:31
Speaker
So to recap, you have my own background in it, my own expertise. I bring a very serious level to my engagements, obviously. I only pick projects that I know won't be frauds or won't be pump and dump scams and stuff like that.
00:56:49
Speaker
I don't know if you saw the action on banana yesterday on Twitter. That's the stuff that scares me is because sometimes there's good people behind projects that mean well, but they don't come from these backgrounds or they don't have sufficient knowledge. On Wall Street, your reputation in your world is everything, right? You can destroy your reputation in a moment if you recommend something like that.
00:57:14
Speaker
So there's that almost got like a filter for projects to people. And second of all, is the larger macro pivot into Abu Dhabi and virtual assets, regulatory authority of borrowers, we call that Dubai, tokenizing assets in that regime, which is a whole nother topic. And then, of course, as I mentioned, you know, kind of like a translator between the two worlds.
00:57:38
Speaker
from a technical point of view or like a commercial point of view that tends to be very helpful for them by and large. Yeah, for sure. Sure. Thank you for talking to that. It's interesting. You get involved in all sorts of stuff. I'm not sure how you have the time to do everything you do, really. But what was some of the biggest challenges that you face? You mentioned that there
00:58:06
Speaker
you know, guys from the more traditional finance side of things kind of coming into the work through space. Are there any particular challenges that you face that really stand out to? This year the challenge has very much been cleaning up the mess that's 2022 left.
Challenges in Web3 Post-2022
00:58:25
Speaker
The market and the VC market, the droves market, I think were structurally destroyed in a cash shopping way.
00:58:36
Speaker
The biggest challenge has been, this is actually interesting enough, I personally have said to my friends and family that this has been the most challenging year of my career bar none. You know, you have a tech environment where it's the worst layoff since 2000 in the dot com bubble.
00:58:56
Speaker
We've had probably a close to 50% contraction in digital assets. That includes a lot of my friends and colleagues at traditional banks being let go or made redundant and projects closing. People obviously being victims of some very public and very serious scams at size. And we're seeing those things play out.
00:59:18
Speaker
And so trying to survive in that environment when there's some very real questions and there's a little bit of guilt by association by far has been the most difficult thing. I think even just surviving the business this year is an accomplishment of itself. I usually don't like defensive accomplices. I like growth accomplices or what we grow or whatever.
00:59:39
Speaker
but just trying to scratch, claw, fight our way through a very, very difficult set of circumstances that has really not stopped. I mean, people don't realize, you know, when you raise interest rates, it's like culling the herd, right? And who gets culled? It's the old, right? The businesses that really were operating on the thinness of margins were super leverage and really couldn't, you know, make it another day. And it's the young.
01:00:07
Speaker
Unfortunately, and Web3 was a very young, is a very young industry, is very hypersensitive to VC investment. And VCs went in heavy. And, you know, again, for all the projects that we know originally about the whole news, you know, they took a lot of hits with that. And I think there was a statistic in January that said in crypto, VC activity was down 90% year over year.
01:00:30
Speaker
And maybe it's improved, but not that much. I mean, you just look at the news and we're still in consolidation mode, unfortunately. And so this to me was the first bear market. The last crypto bear market, I was still in the banks. I was still in the traditional sites. I was more observer. This is one of the first ones where we're really working a little dingy in the middle of the Atlantic, getting tossed around kind of deal. And we still are. And so just surviving and realizing that the skills that you
01:01:00
Speaker
conjured need to even be improved. Strengths that are not strong enough, that's a hard thing to swallow. That's a hard thing to swallow. And so you ask me, how do you have time for it? You make a choice for yourself. Either you make the time for it and you make it work, or you die. You don't survive. Or you go back, and I refuse to go back.
01:01:22
Speaker
I think that dealing with a very difficult environment, sharpening our value prop, sharpening our partnerships, making the platform more compelling, has been a huge challenge and we're starting out to reap the reward to that challenge which is effectively survivors bias.
01:01:42
Speaker
I have an analogy that I use for a few of my friends that I've been using about the industry. I said, you know, you can think of Paraguay as a humble little, you know, vegetable shop and an American strip mall. You know, it's a big target of Walmart and maybe all the food stores and all the really fun stores and you don't notice the little vegetable shop.
01:02:01
Speaker
Well, when the big grocery store goes out and all the other stores get burned out and you drive up to the strip mall and it's like two or three stores open, suddenly you notice the little vegetable shop. That's been a challenge for survival. I would say another major challenge that's secular is the origination of assets. It is a very, very
01:02:22
Speaker
difficult thing to get assets to get real investors institutions on public infrastructure. That has been a major challenge for us. And even though we exist in a really great region and a really fair regulator that I would say gives us the option to do that under right circumstances.
01:02:40
Speaker
It still has not been an easy embracement at all, and I think there's still a lot of hesitation, rightly or wrongly, about the embracement of this technology. That has always been true. Blockchain, especially under digital assets organizations, that has always had this hesitation, where other innovations have had kind of like accelerant, people like run towards it, like you see with chatbot GPT.
01:03:04
Speaker
For a variety of very good reasons, there's always been sort of this resiliency to embrace it by large asset matters. They are talking, they're very smart. So redefining product and defining participants is always a major challenge. And they're out there for sure. We are signing deals, but it's a very, very, I don't want to say difficult sales cycle, but it's a very challenging sales cycle. A lot of it doesn't have anything to do with that.
01:03:33
Speaker
I mean, a lot of it just has to do with where the economy is, where we are made to, you know, recession, depression, or whatever you want to call it. Certainly in crypto we're in depression. I think we can track it 50%, like I said. So the goal is to survive. And I think that's, you know, part of, you know, the CTO being glamorous. It's not, it's not, you know, in many ways is
01:03:54
Speaker
times where I was like, you're, when the hardest thing I had to deal with was how to engineer a pattern or to understand an algorithm, you know, as frustrating it ends up sitting there was, you know, I still didn't think about, you know, the bigger existential stuff as a CTO, you're responsible for knowing yourself. But for, you know, the people you employ, and when you employ a lot of people like like I do, you know, it's, it's a, it's more than, you know, hey, like, this is a cool little hobby thing to get back to you.
01:04:23
Speaker
you have to literally make the reality that you envision in many ways. And that takes a lot of failure. So that's been the biggest challenge. I wish I could say I think things have gotten a little bit better, but they're not at the point where, let's say, in 2021, where we were gangbusters. And I don't know if those, I hope those times come back. I do, but I think it might be a little bit longer. And so in that capacity, shifting
01:04:50
Speaker
Shifting what is success is shifting your mindset is the hardest thing to do. Yeah, that's really good insight. Probably over the last two or three months, I've definitely noticed an uptick in the amount of projects that are hiring.
01:05:05
Speaker
the amount of roles out there, the projects that are hiring. So that's normally usually a fairly good indicator of people's confidence in the market or people's confidence in maybe their funding or maybe they've been able to receive a little bit more funding or raise more money, whatever it might be. So yeah, we'll see. I mean, over the next six to 12 months, hopefully we'll be kind of back on the up and back where we all want to be.
01:05:34
Speaker
But no, I can imagine it's been tricky building in the bear market and trying to survive through that, to be honest.
Advice for Entering Web3
01:05:41
Speaker
And if someone is stepping into Web3 then for the first time, are there certain expectations of the industry that you can share or is there any advice for someone who is looking to build a career in the space?
01:05:59
Speaker
Yeah, tons. Absolutely. First of all, good job is the right thing because like I said, you want to be on the side of innovation. You don't want to be the one thing they're going, oh, maybe it's going to work out or not going to work out. It's going to work out.
01:06:15
Speaker
Even if the entire digital assets industry collapsed, the fact that you have these global projects with some of the smartest people in the world working in many cases just on tokens or on grants or even for free or bounties or whatever to build this is a deeper social societal thing. This is not a technology that's going to fail. Certainly we've in 2022 demonstrated that we certainly have tried.
01:06:45
Speaker
But there is, there's a deeper thing happening here. There's a deep revolution. And so, you know, I've seen a lot of the memes on Twitter, and you know, they are funny, like, oh, you know, I was a blockchain developer now, something in data science and AI.
01:07:00
Speaker
What I say to people is don't get tricked because every technology will have its challenges. Every technology will have its periods of ebbs and flows. When I was working at NASA, when I was in aerospace, it was one of the worst times ever because the space show was being sunset, NASA's budget was being cut, and I had the opportunity to go work at SpaceX.
01:07:23
Speaker
And I said, no, I want to call Wall Street. And that was right for me. I don't regret that. But you could have looked at those years and say, oh, man, that sucks. You know, you got to do your dream at NASA. And you know, oh, now you have to go.
01:07:33
Speaker
We're about to hawthorn and work at SpaceX. But look at SpaceX now. No one remembers those days. Similar thing with this. People in tech, tech didn't become tech until the dot-com bubble. That whole culture around Google and Facebook didn't happen until the huge crash in 2000.
01:07:57
Speaker
So this is something that I think happens with nascent industries, unfortunately. It isn't always one to one in terms of this is exactly how it's going to go. But you have to look at what we're doing here and see where else are you going to get the similar benefits, right? Eventually a lot of scam projects are going to be flushed out.
01:08:17
Speaker
Eventually, the right projects are going to succeed. I remember back in 2018, the biggest thing was CryptoKitties. And now, look at NFTs, what they were, with Board 8 Yacht Club and all the other ones. And it was all crazy. And that's now since I guess crashed or whatever. I follow NFTs. But the point being is that if you had looked at CryptoKitties back in the day and said, well, you know, NFTs are not going to work out of theory, and you don't walk away,
01:08:45
Speaker
those guys are stuck around, had a good year last year. I don't know if all that made money, but they did. So you want to get involved. You cannot avoid suffering. You cannot avoid stuff that if you constantly run from anything that's hot, anything that's hot or cool, you're ultimately going to rob yourself of what we talked about before about failure. You're just going to ride this constant wave of success, success, and you're going to be left with nothing because eventually everything turns over.
01:09:15
Speaker
So even in financing investment, there's a whole area called value investing, right? And you have to go back to what those principles are, which is do I ask yourself, do I fundamentally believe that web free and blockchain is going to fail? If you generally believe that, then yes, off you go, go to several other great initiatives going on in the world, right? But if you don't, and I don't,
01:09:40
Speaker
Then you'll look at this and go, this is a major setback. It was very fragile, right? There's a lot of things that were built the last few years that were probably, how do I say, illusions, illusions of growth that certainly have come past, but there's still an industry here to still skill set here. It's going to be one of those things where
01:10:03
Speaker
You get your bear market scars. You get through the process. You survive. And then when things are great, you'll appreciate them that much more. Because just like we were in 2022, or in 2022, where we thought the party was never going to end. All these guys were bigger than ever. We had a couple of seizures with Tarot Luna and others. But they were like, yeah, whatever.
01:10:27
Speaker
That's that's over there and it's not gonna affect the whole thing and then boom within a matter of months everything changed Well as things change down in a matter of months in a matter of months things can pop right back up We may have the best November December ever coming up We have no idea, you know that but that's that's what you have to make yourself available to so the time to get involved the time to join these things believe it or not is in the down cycles because you may enter at a Valuation of yourself that's lowered and what you want
01:10:57
Speaker
But i guarantee it will pay off when things do return and things will return that is the business cycle by definition things will get better and it like i said as long as you have that large community of people which you do you know the conference is still packed.
01:11:13
Speaker
Even though people have gotten their scars, they're still back. You have really great conferences and even this week with token 2049, you have permission lists, all these things, people are still attending it, right? Yes, a lot of people have left the industry, true. But a lot of people leave a lot of industries and a lot of people are coming into this industry. So I think you want to join now, you want to answer the fundamental why am I here, what am I doing? And then you also want to have a longer term view, which is eventually things are going to turn around, as they always do.
01:11:42
Speaker
That's really good advice. And then, yeah, I kind of felt a lot like myself. Obviously I launched Unveil, my recruitment agency in August of last year, which is, some people look at that and think probably fairly bad timing to launch a recruitment business that only recruits web three roles. But no, it's been a really good time to build, to be honest. You're able to speak to a lot of people,
01:12:11
Speaker
you're allowed to share or you can share kind of similar stories and people are really willing to have conversations with you and obviously everyone wants to kind of help and kind of boost up the industry and stuff, I guess. So yeah, it's been a fun time to build, not without stresses, of course, but yeah, that comes with everything, right? And if someone is stepping into a leadership role for the first time then,
01:12:42
Speaker
Any advice you could share with them there? So you mentioned that you've hired tons of people before and managed people and led people. What advice do you have for someone who's in that sort of role?
Leadership and Networking Insights
01:12:53
Speaker
If you can network, network, and network. Tell people around that you've gotten to a new leadership role. Lobby to go to conferences and events. Get out there. Take advantage of that title you've earned, that respect that you've earned. And realize that your ability to make connections with people, people are capital. People are
01:13:18
Speaker
resources, people are money, right? Meeting different people, building that rolodex as we like to call it is the single most important thing. Relying your team to do the due diligence and do your work in terms of planning what needs to be done, but don't stop there. Don't sit there and watch them. Trust them. Go out there and make connections.
01:13:38
Speaker
you know, ask people about acquaintances or partners to have or ask about old initiatives that were abandoned a year ago. I mean, it's certainly one of the best things I've done is within people that remain in our company, I would ask everyone, hey, you know, who do we talk to that we haven't talked to in a while? And all this person, that person.
01:13:56
Speaker
I say, hey, let's talk another conversation with them. Let's see if things have changed. Going to different events and networking. What's amazing about the bear market is that you'll find is that everyone's in the same boat to some degree. We're all looking for business. We're all looking for investment. And we're all kind of in this like, let's all help each other. And in a way, it's almost like a golden age for leadership.
01:14:18
Speaker
because it's so obviously difficult for everybody. So challenging. There's almost this sentiment of like, let's just all help each other because right now we're our backs up against the wall, right? And I love that.
01:14:31
Speaker
No, no. In fact, now is your time to make those relationships, to cement that you were there. Because what's going to happen is people are going to get success. They're going to understand who was there during the tough times, who came later during the easy times. And the relationships you build during tough times are always so much stronger. So my advice is get up there.
01:14:54
Speaker
you know, start getting noticed on social media, do engagements, go networking, go to conferences if you can. If you can't do conferences because they're expensive, do something local in your area, but just pump your network. Network, network, network is my biggest advice to you. Everyone's in the same position. And I think you'll surprise yourself of what you can do with other people. And then the next thing is work harder than you ever have worked before, because look at this as a window of opportunity.
01:15:22
Speaker
We know the opportunity that's passing, where you're kind of in this goodwill space with everybody. Because as you mentioned Zach, once things turn around and get better, people will start siloed off again. You really want to memorialize those relationships when you still can, when the opportunity's there, versus when it's booming and everyone's doing their own thing again, and it's much harder to meet people you normally couldn't meet.
01:15:46
Speaker
It's like you ever go to a party and the party's booming, tons of people, you can't talk to anyone because music's too loud. Versus if you go to a party and there's like 10 stragglers left and everyone's looking for a good time and there's only 10 of you, chances are you're actually gonna have a better time, right? Because you're actually gonna talk to everyone and listen to them. So it's kind of like that. The music stops, it's a mess, we're all here cleaning it up. So come in and help clean up the mess and you'll meet a lot of cool people and they'll remember you.
01:16:14
Speaker
So, you know, I can't give a little analogy, but that's the point. That's what I would do. And in fact, that's why I'm doing it and a lot of others are doing it right now, and it certainly is paying off.
01:16:26
Speaker
Yeah, again, that's great advice. To be honest, that's the first time on the podcast that someone's talked about networking as the main thing that they could advise, really. I think that's a really good way of looking at it, especially at the moment when, because we are so young in the web3 industry and everyone is trying to help each other still, really take advantage of that. Because at some point, the mindset will change when web3 is big enough and everyone will start to become more
01:16:56
Speaker
competitive people probably are competitive now but people will become more competitive and less likely to help each other as the as the industry grows because people will be competing for market share and this kind of stuff right well I think Jack you know to your point is it's like
01:17:12
Speaker
You asked me earlier in the podcast, hey, what does the data life look like for you? For me, it's not that I'm against building or whatever. That time will come. In other words, you're in a part of the business cycle right now where everyone's trying to get something commercial done, some funding done. I'm assuming that if you have a team, they're building tech or whatever.
01:17:37
Speaker
But there will come a time when you make those deals or you build those partnerships that you just won't have the time to go to conferences. You won't have the time to go out there and meet people because you'll have your deal, you'll have your funding and then you'll just be building and you have to focus on that, right? That's the thing is like you're in different modes of operation.
01:17:56
Speaker
So it is, yes, I agree with all your points. The way I look at it is people will get their deals done, and then they'll get into build mode. And then you won't have to have an opportunity to cross paths with them until they emerge from that. And believe me, a lot of people are in build mode. People have done deals early in the year. I don't see them on a conference cycle as much. Why? Because they got their deal, and they're doing their thing. For me and for our team, we did our build. We're now into that.
01:18:24
Speaker
commercial side, but myself, I might have another few weeks of just, you know, conferences and networking. And then I already have a few deals already paper that, you know, we're going to be building into its next year. So it's more like you just want to take advantage of the of the environment, right? You take advantage of that environment.
01:18:40
Speaker
The networking, networking, networking thing, I say that because there's a window for it. I think that's another really good point I want to impress to people, is your constant state of change. Especially as a leader, one month you're doing networking, next month you might be doing engineering, next month you might be doing legal. I think what's of advice to people, I could say, is self-reflect always.
01:19:03
Speaker
You know, you, you changes are you have an instinct, you know, you know how to get things done. You ask yourself, what's your, what do I think I should be doing now, or ask them around. Hey, what are you doing? What are you doing? Get, get advice. Cause I guarantee you it's always changing, right? So these things that happen, it's not like
01:19:19
Speaker
in forever, indefinitely just sit there and go on conferences and network all the time. No, go there with purpose, get what you need, and then switch into a different mode of operation. I think that to me is where a lot of people who are successful can do so. They focus on what's needed right then and now, what's relevant, and then they constantly stay on what's relevant. A lot of engineers
01:19:41
Speaker
And people who come from a different background love knowledge, love knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Oh, you know, I learned this or that, and then they never use it. And so for me, that practical application of knowledge, and then knowing importantly when you need the information, the information, but most importantly, when you no longer need that information, when you no longer need to, when you need to change up the game. And honestly, that's something I legitimately ask myself almost every week. I always say every day, because that's a bit crazy, but I ask myself every week, like, okay,
01:20:09
Speaker
Let me take a step back and look at all the things happening in my life or happening across my company's advisories. Where do I need to pivot? What has changed in this sort of game that I need to now focus on? Do I need to go into engineering mode? Do I need to go into architect mode? All things we talked about, right?
01:20:27
Speaker
Do I need to continue the moment I'm in? So the advice I give to folks about the networking is true today, but realize it may not be true for them for tomorrow. I think that's even more valuable, is constantly self reflect, constantly evolve on your meta. Yeah, that's really, really useful. Is there any advice that you wish you'd have been told earlier in your career?
01:20:54
Speaker
Risky is the new state without a doubt. I really wish I had much more of a background in BC. To me, the single biggest gap in my knowledge that has affected my career is, I won't say the inability, but the inexperience in raising capital.
01:21:13
Speaker
By far, I would say to people that if there's one skill to master in your life, it is to raise capital, VC, grants, whatever. I always thought that the money would be there because of my technical skills or someone else would deal with it, someone else would figure out for me.
01:21:30
Speaker
And for those lucky enough to have someone that does that, congratulations, you've absolutely won the lottery.
Raising Money: Education Gap and Importance
01:21:36
Speaker
But raising money, I think, is something that's not taught in school. Like, financial education in America is not that great to begin with. But even when you go to courses in business administration or finance, you'll learn a lot about index investing or the economy or interest rates. And that's great if you're an economist at some think tank in DC or you're a head chief economist at a fund or a large bank.
01:21:59
Speaker
But if you're like all the other mere morals in this world...
01:22:03
Speaker
And your inability to raise money for your own idea will be the single biggest thing that holds you back by far. And I've noticed that throughout my years, I've met very smart people. In fact, even people at high-level positions. And one thing that always really hurt them late into their career, I'm talking about executives at banks and others. And again, it's not a blanket for those who wish it. Because they didn't build that network of VCs. They didn't build that skill of pitching and raising money
01:22:32
Speaker
really, really hurt them later in life because they're like, hey, I have the idea. I know I execute, but I don't have the network in VCs. Maybe I have a few buddies that name a few bucks along the way. That's great for Angel, but I'm actually talking about the actual process. It's a very ugly skill. It's a very difficult skill. Talk about embracing failure. You will get punched in the face, I promise you.
01:22:55
Speaker
But it is a necessary skill, and it's something that I wish was taught. And people need to realize that VCs as well, they struggle. They claim to be subject matter experts, and they have a subject matter expert. They may have a view that doesn't align with yours.
01:23:10
Speaker
and navigating all of that and even the deal flow. I mean, it's not even like you get the yes and then like, oh, I got a yes and I got a check now. I'm like, no, there's all sorts of stuff where let me say, yeah, we agree. And then you're doing contract for two months and getting to numbers and people talk about numbers may be uncomfortable and terms of settlement and equity.
Engaging with VCs and Networking
01:23:33
Speaker
So I really think no matter, even if you tend to be a developer your entire life, I just personally believe that the lack of education around VC engagement, how to engage with them, how to talk with them, how to build that network, and then ultimately how to raise money, consistently raise money, I think has been a major, major, missing point to a lot of people, especially mine.
01:23:55
Speaker
Because you think a guy who grew up in finance, working on options derivatives, stock loan, equities, everything in between, raising money, no big deal. Raising money is probably one of the hardest things I've ever seen to do, especially in this environment. What bothers me more is that the people who are good at raising money generally
01:24:16
Speaker
I generally don't have the best intention on a project in mind, and I can't tell you how frustrated I often get where I see smart people who like that skill set who would do great projects, and I see people who are just very good at grifting VCs, building a very nice story, because they have just that skill. They have the ability to raise money, but not execute anything else as well. It's very frustrating to me.
01:24:39
Speaker
And so I think for anyone listening to this, definitely dedicate some time, get curious, become familiar with how to raise money. Because if you can raise money for yourself, you will shift in your thinking. You will no longer think, oh, I need a job. You'll be like, oh, I have an engagement. I can advise. I can have this project I can raise. And that becomes my income. That becomes my substance.
Challenges in Growing a Recruitment Business
01:25:04
Speaker
Ultimately, that's how you build wealth, is being in that
01:25:07
Speaker
co-founder position, right? You'll have far more wealth than a reward in life if you learn that skill and benefit from the equity of that company versus being an individual employee or contributor and maybe getting a material bonus or some sort of compensation. I really think that's an important part. So obviously a lot of people who listen to this are in a startup space or maybe even part of a small team. No matter where you are,
01:25:34
Speaker
just get smart around BC, get the knowledge, practice, and try it out, because I think down the road you'll pay really, really big dividends. And if you are a startup, even all the better, because if you want to learn and contribute, and you have someone who's very good at BC, and clearly has raised the money to pay your salary, that's a huge asset you have right there in your roof, and engages people and talk to them, and take advantage of that talent that you may not realize
01:26:01
Speaker
That, you know, we talked about like that, that practicing CTO, right, the startup CTO. And you mentioned a lot of jobs and, you know, started in startup DeFi. Absolutely. Someone raised that money, right? That, to me, is a beautiful skill. And I really think people need to take advantage of it and learn from the people right next to them on that, not just the technical stuff.
01:26:22
Speaker
because technical stuff is always great, but because they raised that money and paid your salary, dead and technical stuff can happen. So that's my one big thing and that's something that I probably will continue to focus on and into my years.
01:26:36
Speaker
That's definitely a skill that I don't possess either. And I'd love to learn and love to develop. I have plans one day that I'd love to raise money and grow and scale the recruitment business and have teams across every continent and be the biggest recruitment company into the web three space. That's my goal, I guess. So yeah, very difficult to do that organically, I think.
01:27:03
Speaker
possible. Obviously, in recruitment, it's definitely possible. But yeah, having the skill to be able to raise money is definitely something I don't possess. I wouldn't even know
Building VC Networks as Recruiters
01:27:11
Speaker
where to start. I'll be honest with you.
01:27:16
Speaker
Yeah, I'd probably approach it like I would do a business development list. I'd be picking up the phone and trying to speak to as many people as possible, not really knowing what they wanted to hear or what they wanted to listen to or how I even would create a deck to impress them, right? So yeah, that whole piece is such a massive thing to learn.
01:27:39
Speaker
I think it's a beautiful example of ask your friends, friends and colleagues who, hey, have you raised? Do you have any advice? Use your tools. There's Udemy out there. If you go on Udemy, there's some really, really great courses that the person I've watched that talk about how do you build your sales back? How do you make your pitch? How do you network with VC? What should you know about?
01:28:01
Speaker
you know if you prefer reading this really great books out there it's like anything else it's like a skill set and you start the journey not knowing anything and slowly over years I think the other thing that VCs actually do appreciate is they like having a network themselves too.
01:28:17
Speaker
They like having people on their radar. In fact, one of the things I think they enjoy most about their jobs are people that go to them and are like, hey, I don't have a project right now, but I just want us to talk. I just want you to know me and me to know you and what you're working on. And this is what I'm working on. And maybe one day I'll write mine out. OK, cool. And it's not going to be like they're going to be captivated, but they know you. It's what we call little data points, right? So I think that building that network of VCs and vice versa, there's tremendous value that people
01:28:47
Speaker
people bring to VCs because VCs are people as well. They need knowledge. They need people to staff their projects. They need subject matter expertise.
Scams in Web3 and Need for Regulation
01:28:57
Speaker
They many times need reputation, someone seriously. VCs are also sort of shapes and sizes. You have startup VCs, guys who raise
01:29:06
Speaker
a diminished amount of five million bucks and says, well, how do we invest this smartly? They need people to help them. Or as recruiters, I always tell them, well, one, you have a great selling skillset. And then number two, you talk to so many people. Imagine like your network multiplier, right? Because you're out there talking to startups anyway who are looking for jobs. And if they're looking for jobs, guess what? They're funded. If they're funded, maybe they're raising more. VCs hate to lead.
01:29:33
Speaker
Leading for VC is the most difficult thing, but they love to pile on. The VC thing is asymmetric. I mean, this is something that if you raise money, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You will grind, grind, grind for that leader, and then a little less of a grind for the next one. And then when you have two or three or four,
01:29:49
Speaker
five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, come in and still know you're pushing people away. And that's why I experienced this year. The majority of the year, it was grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, kids was fine. One, it's something we found a few and then now, hey, we'll see you at the next valuation. So there's, to me actually, I respond recruiters and VC is very complimentary because you're a very network intensive
01:30:11
Speaker
industry. And I always find benefit too in talking to recruiters and people in the space say, hey, you know, what are you seeing in the industry? You know, you have a tremendous amount of market intelligence, right, that people will benefit from. And so you can monetize that, not just by finding people roles or feeling procurements, but also, hey, listen, I have a VC that would love to talk to you. Great. Now you're doing a Captain Trump.
01:30:33
Speaker
You're making the phone calls anyway. What's just another band, right? It just goes into diversifying income streams and not that whole discipline. But this is exactly why I brought it up because as soon as you start looking at, oh, hey, you know, I haven't thought about VCs and then suddenly all your ideas flow in and all the ways you can monetize it and diversify. And then, oh, actually, when I do, there's a lot more value to it than just finding placements, right? And I think that's always exciting.
01:31:00
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I'll have to pick your brains off camera if that's all right. And yeah, ask you a ton of questions. So Dennis, take it back to, I guess, to Web3.
Impact of Lack of Regulation in Web3
01:31:16
Speaker
You've spoken about all the things that you really like about the space. You talked about how you originally got into Web3 at the start of the podcast. If there was something that you could change about the Web3 space,
01:31:29
Speaker
Does anything spring to mind? Oh, tons. Yeah. I mean, for me, the biggest thing is, I'd probably be controversial in saying this, but there's a lot of scams in the space. There's just a lot of scams. There's a lot of pump and dump. And there's this kind of perception that
01:31:49
Speaker
perception of like DeFi and Web 3 are sort of like fresh and new and you know all this sort of stuff has never been done before. When the reality is that we have close to 100 years of market manipulation that I see in practice on a daily basis. And I really do wish for smart regulation. I really do wish for an embracement in the US of this industry. I mean certainly
01:32:16
Speaker
I love Abu Dhabi. I love the opportunities there. But of course, living in New York and whatever, it's very frustrating that we can't go as fast or as aggressive as we can in other areas. So I definitely would like one, to see far less scams. I think they really hurt. And the sort of naiveness that people haven't tried this before they have. In fact, these entire books
01:32:39
Speaker
that a lot of my Shopify guys will send me an article about some pump and dump scam or something else. I'm like, oh, we used to do this in the 90s in Japan or something like that. Like, look how cute what you guys are doing. And just sort of like this back-handed compliment that like web-driven blockchains rediscovering finance all over again. So I would definitely like for less scams. I would definitely like for better regulators in a better regulated environment in the US.
01:33:08
Speaker
for sure. And then I also really wish there was more of less of a tappiness about public infrastructure and more of an embracement of it. I think that we built a world on the internet and I think we've forgotten what that view was back in the early 90s of this kind of like open decentralized network that was the internet. No one owned the internet.
01:33:33
Speaker
But suddenly, you know, everyone's getting worried about, like, who owns the block game, that sort of stuff. I just think it's, you know, quite backwards in that sort of way. So those are my three. I certainly have a lot more than that, because I think if there were less scams and more legitimate projects,
01:33:48
Speaker
I think it would help the perception of the industry overall. Lack of regulatory clarity has caused a lot of weeds to grow in this space. One of the biggest things is Coinbase and others, there's a lot of interest in treating perpetuals and derivatives in the crypto space.
US Regulatory Environment and Crypto Market
01:34:07
Speaker
And it's naive to think that a savvy investor who's worked on Wall Street, myself included, can't either have friends or have second addresses outside, pay our taxes and everything like that.
01:34:22
Speaker
on this, but don't want access to crypto derivatives trading. Meanwhile, a lot of these foreign exchanges allow that to happen. They didn't like KYC. Obviously, CFTC and SEC is taking enforcement action, but the problem isn't the enforcement action. The problem is the environment created where people can't
01:34:41
Speaker
access the crypto market today with the way they want to in a safe manner. And so, you know, they perpetuated this sort of, unfortunately, crime. And of course, you led to one of the biggest mishaps in our industry, if ever.
01:34:59
Speaker
The other thing was tolerance of these large scam coins. We used to think that, okay, the ICO tokens are somewhat harmless, but in reality, many of the frauds that took place were really empowered by these tokens and continue to be.
01:35:17
Speaker
That's the fault of the regulator. Clearly, people want to issue assets. Clearly, people want to raise capital. They want access to capital. They want access to wealth and to ability to grow wealth. And we're doing a very poor job of enabling that, which I think is un-American, believe it or not.
01:35:34
Speaker
And I think it's a very sad day that people, especially Americans, see greater opportunity overseas right now than within our own borders. And I think that's very unfortunate. I think that we, while the regulations have been fantastic, I think certain regulations that were under the guise of protecting investors simply don't, simply do not, or overly harden and
01:35:59
Speaker
I think there's nothing wrong with foreign-achieved wealth, especially if you don't have a lot of wealth. We certainly have the kinds of factional stocks. We could buy a stock for 100 bucks because we have. Why not for crypto? Why not decentralize the ability to raise? I mean, certainly people have mechanisms to do so.
01:36:17
Speaker
So I really, really believe that other countries are taking advantage of the environment that's created in the U.S. right now. I think it's unsustainable. And I think a lot more is at stake than we realize.
Perception of Crypto Industry and Need for Regulation
01:36:29
Speaker
I think when there's this idea that, oh, when the U.S. comes online or, you know, gets us back together, everyone's just going to come back. And that's not guaranteed.
01:36:37
Speaker
People, it takes years and millions of dollars to build these things. Even Paraguay took us four years and well over $10 million to get to where we are. And if you look on the paper, we're
01:36:51
Speaker
air quotes, tokenizing assets on public blockchains like Polygon, right? Why would we pivot into the U.S.? And even the companies that are there in the U.S. right now are suffering. They just aren't, and they're looking for opportunities outside. So I think that would be my biggest thing as a regulatory environment in the U.S. because I think it's at the core root of a lot of scams, a lot of intimidation with institutions. And unfortunately, I think there needs to be
01:37:17
Speaker
a change in leadership. I will say this as I do read a lot of the US Treasury's reports. I read a lot of OFAC's reports. I read a lot of the central bank, the Fed, Boston Fed. The rank and file, the bureaucracy of these institutions, get it. They really do. They're really putting out some great literature, some great thoughts on this. And it's frustrating to see the divergence in
01:37:41
Speaker
the really great thinking and the frameworks being proposed and sort of the narrative that exists in the media and with the leadership. And I think that needs to change and I think it needs to change now because I think if you let the people who are writing these reports and creating these frameworks
01:37:57
Speaker
lead from what they're proposing i think we can we really can get something good out there that's that's workable so it is a very frustrating time for me especially with this so short long answer to a short question but i think it's something that's very important especially if you're getting involved in this industry supporting you need to understand the dynamics of why things the way they are right why is
01:38:20
Speaker
this stuff happening in Abu Dhabi and in Singapore, why isn't it really happening in New York or San Francisco or LA and so much in Miami? It's because of these regulations and understanding that can really give you an edge. Do you think that the perception of the industry has a big part to play in that? Obviously, there's tons of meme coins and tons of scams and this kind of stuff, which always gives the impression to anyone who's not in web three, it gives the impression that
01:38:51
Speaker
it's not a serious industry, it's not a serious place to be. When actually, in fact, when you're in it, there are tons of cool projects building some amazing cutting edge tech, tons of the infrastructure and distributed like cloud storage, you know, whatever it might be. Yeah, do you think that has a huge part to play in the regulations? I just kind of think, all right, it's not a, it's not a quote unquote, like real industry that we need to worry about type thing.
01:39:19
Speaker
Without a doubt. Without a doubt. And look, I don't want to be the one poo-poo at the party, but like the Bitcoin culture and the zeitgeist in crypto, by and large, is a very young culture. It's very young demographic. It's very party demographic.
01:39:36
Speaker
It has a horrible reputation. I mean, people, lives have literally been destroyed in mass by it. I mean, look at like the banana coin yesterday. I mean, first of all, it's named banana, right? So that's not serious. Second of all, it had a major smart contract flaw with the taxes being kept with the transfers, which was, again, how was that not caught?
01:40:00
Speaker
And, you know, people's, people's heart and money likelihood have been destroyed. I mean, there's entire subreddits and parts of Twitter you can read and where the victims actually talk about, you know, I think the canonical story is, you know, I didn't tell my wife, maybe it's a meme, but I know to be true person to a few people.
01:40:21
Speaker
part of their mortgage, all their assets going all in in some sort of altcoin that they were told about or going all in into an exchange they were told about only for it to be completely destroyed or a lending protocol or lending platform that I knew personally getting completely wiped out.
Immature State of Crypto Industry
01:40:41
Speaker
I mean, there are some serious, serious wounds
01:40:45
Speaker
in this industry, right? And at a surface level, it's sort of this party degeneracy culture of like, funny pictures of, you know, food or animals, very artsy, you know, a lot of money changes, very fast money kind of thing. But the reality is, you know, it's a very harmful thing for people, especially financially. It targets a lot of young people, a lot of
01:41:13
Speaker
And it leads to a lot of issues. Now, that being said, you know, there is this struggle, there's this kind of like fight for the heart of this thing, and I don't think it's going to end anytime soon, where you do see, you know, some engagements and NFTs by, you know, Starbucks or Disney or other Fortune 500s, or are interested in the space, or you see the headline, I mean, now that's a large credit card company establishing infrastructure, or you have the CBC initiative.
01:41:40
Speaker
So I think when people look at this on the surface, they see a very ugly industry. I hate to say it. It's for those that actually go past the initial ugliness and see that there's actually a lot of good people, not as many as I'd like to, we're certainly not in the space, but there's a lot of good people trying to what I call mature the space and bring real assets, real use cases. That's why I am a big fan of regulation. And again, I don't want it at the expense. If people want to run
01:42:09
Speaker
their own projects and run NFTs and do the deep eye protocols? Absolutely, because I view them as open internet. I absolutely do. I don't agree with it, but I also believe in freedom and pursuit of happiness, and that's something that people want to do. That's fine, but you have to admit that there's been a lot of difficulty with that.
01:42:28
Speaker
That's not to say there isn't in traditional finance, but the claim that, you know, blockchain is somehow absolving this is absolutely wrong. And it will continue. I mean, it's human nature. But that being said, behind that, there is a lot of really good use cases, a really lot of good projects. And always, whenever, I guess the question is answered best, whenever I talk to someone new about blockchain,
01:42:51
Speaker
I can go through the same set of questions. Bitcoin's a scam. Dogecoin is a joke. What about, you know, name the project entity that exploded, right? I have to go all that stuff always. And that creates a big uphill battle for people to get engaged. And then there's people who got engaged that never want to come back, which means even greater, greater sin, right?
01:43:14
Speaker
So you have to go through all that to get to what I call like the pearl like the good stuff like no actually We're working on really cool projects with stable funds We're working on really great ways of doing the centralized identity and credentials We're giving people more power over their data like all these other stories which take a while to develop kind of get drowned out you know it's hard to compete with the largest financial scheme in the world this year and
01:43:39
Speaker
people really are not going to care about, you know, hey, listen, we launched, you know, some bond on some blockchain, you know, for people in the industry, you know, okay, that's interesting, but for the public, by and large, they're going to pay attention more to the salacious stuff. So that doesn't help. It definitely takes away and it creates this permanent perception. It always creates a perception that if you're embracing public blockchain, and you are from Tradify, there's something wrong with you. I'd give it a screw loose or something like, oh, don't you realize what you're doing or where you're at?
01:44:08
Speaker
And in many ways, I think that has demoralized, or not demoralized, but let me say the sweeter, the banks.
01:44:16
Speaker
excuse me, large institutions, from being associated with that sort of stuff, rightly so, right? And it was to get by associations these large public infrastructures. So like we'll do our own private blockchain. We'll do our own blockchain that's free and clean and doesn't have, you know, any of these like OFAC violations or tornado cash, which was, you know, combing linear funds or any sort of like, how do I say, you know,
01:44:42
Speaker
Your mark, right? Like staying on them. Let's do a purely clean blockchain, enterprise only, and we'll show the technology for itself is fine. But that to me is only part of the evolution of everything. So it has had a major negative effect. In fact, I think that's where the animosity and the hesitancy in the US regulators have come from. Because they're the ones that really look at a lot of the scams that happen.
01:45:11
Speaker
And I mean, we just had a guy in Turkey that was sentenced to what, 11,000 years in prison for operating in an exchange. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that you would be crazy to say, oh, yeah, this is the future of stuff, all the surface of it, right? So I think that has to wash out. And that's only going to wash out if people stick in the industry and stick out a lot of these sort of growing pains, as I call it.
Advice on Continuous Learning and Pursuing Passions
01:45:37
Speaker
And I always use analogies. My final analogy for this is
01:45:40
Speaker
If you look at the aviation industry, we're in the barnstorming era, right? One day, people I'm sure back in the 1910s and 20s were like, oh, you can fly a plane from New York to London. And you look at this little paper biplane and you're like, what the hell is this? There's no way this canvas thing, what is going to fly? And then about 50 years later, we do intercontinental flights and it's all highly regulated and extremely safe.
01:46:04
Speaker
I think that's part of the transformation here. I think we're seeing the barnstorming ages where people are doing crazy acts, circus acts. It's kind of considered a joke, but eventually, like anything, it will mature because those people, unfortunately, will move on to something else. I think right now we're actually seeing them move out of
01:46:21
Speaker
the crypto space and move into the AI space, because now there's a lot of AI scams or deep fake scams. I think the same people that like chase the hype tend to produce those kind of projects go and we'll follow that. We'll be left with the mess and I think we'll see that mature into something much easier. So what does that mean? Well, the craziest thing I could say is in 50 years time, we may have a national blockchain.
01:46:46
Speaker
Every country may have its own sovereign blockchain. There may be a singular or network of global blockchains, and it may be to the point where using a centralized cloud infrastructure provider is crazy. You could just deploy everything on the blockchain, right? People get paid completely in cryptocurrency or in some sort of virtual assets, you know, CBDCs, commercial deposits, and eMoney all coexist.
01:47:11
Speaker
People don't even have paper coin anymore, and those who are concerned about privacy have privacy coins or whatever. Those are the big crazy stuff where like, wow, that's a world that we can't see past because right now we're looking at the barn in the summer days. That is my hope for this industry is that it matures out of those things, but it cannot mature until we create the vector for its mature when that is regulation.
01:47:37
Speaker
Some really, some really, really interesting points. And yeah, no, I agree. I'm definitely for regulation, to be honest. I think it's needed. I think that's how you bring more and more people across because it builds more trust and people are a lot more likely to use it. So Dennis, you've obviously shared some brilliant advice today, tons of it, to be honest. You know, I'm going to be watching this back and I'm going to be able to take tons of it myself as well. And yeah, I'll be able to learn a huge amount.
01:48:04
Speaker
If you could summarize your advice for people who might be looking to follow in your footsteps, what would you say? If you're looking to follow my footsteps, I would say three things. Always learn, always continuously learn, always challenge yourself to failure.
01:48:24
Speaker
And always, you always ask for help and you will find it. And I think if you do those three things and you have an attitude of being humble, not taking yourself too seriously, recognizing other people's strengths, recognizing people's diversity in different backgrounds, being tolerant, open-minded, but also very critical-minded,
01:48:48
Speaker
looking at things skeptically, challenging yourself and challenging things, then I think you will do far better than I could. And I think even if you look at my life and my skill, it is not easy. It's not an easy life. I guess I've been very successful in life and I'm grateful for that.
01:49:08
Speaker
But the journey still continues. And for me, don't do things because of money. Of course, always think about it. But do things because of something that's passionate, because money flows. It comes and it goes, whether we like it or not. And you may obsess over that really nice car, that really nice house, or that experience.
01:49:32
Speaker
Eventually the car gets old, eventually the house gets stale, eventually you've been there too many times. There's always something deeper that you keep coming back to. And I think that's really your focus. And don't be afraid to reinvent yourself over and over again. Certainly you don't have to be defined by any one thing.
01:49:52
Speaker
That's what I would say to people. I would say, and they're not platitudes, they're very, very practical, right? And anyone who can sit down and not even write it down, but reflect. I think self-reflection is the biggest thing to reflect on where they are. And they may get frustrated. I know I do. They may say, I don't know how to do something.
01:50:11
Speaker
It's all just one step at a time. We have the most knowledge out of fingertips ever. If you don't want to do something, just Google it. Just start looking. Just go to the part of your life you've never been. Go somewhere new. It's like internal self-discovery.
01:50:31
Speaker
I think it's really, really critical. Don't be afraid to work hard. Don't be afraid to fail. You're going to fail. It's a feature, not a bug. And most importantly, be your true self. Don't be a CTO. Don't be what I am.
01:50:47
Speaker
be who you are supposed to be. At the end of the day, we're all equal, right? We're all the same. We all have intrinsic value. Just because some of us are super baller billionaires or millionaire entrepreneurs or athletes or paragons or I would say people who are like, you know, metallic, right? Like these absolute geniuses.
01:51:12
Speaker
At the end of the day, everyone is afraid, everyone gets hungry, everyone gets tired, everyone's in bed, good mood, we're all humans. I think you need to keep that perspective, especially when you're talking to other people. When you're looking at your goals, to keep that in mind that you want the goals that are right for you and are meaningful to you, not necessarily meaningful to society or what anyone else says about you. That to me is intrinsic happiness.
01:51:37
Speaker
And I hope for today that people walk away from this saying, you know what, this is my truth. I'm going to go pursue that. These are some of the skills. These are things I can do to help get me there. But it's ultimately internally up to me to say, where do I want to be at? And the last thing I would say that's a theme in my life is if you notice, I've achieved many things in my life and then moved on.
01:52:00
Speaker
I won't point out I was a NASA engineer. I made Eagle Scout. I was an executive director at a bank. I was an architect at a trading firm. Any one of those channels, people would just stay there and say, hey, this is my life now. Keep going. Keep reinventing yourself. The last thing I'll say is you just don't have to have one dream in life.
01:52:24
Speaker
You can do multiple stuff. There's no rule that says, you know, dream. Oh, you only got one dream. And if you cheat that dream, the rest of your life is done. Or the dream you set for yourself is so impossible or so ridiculously specific. If it doesn't go true, your life does that meaning it's okay to dream, have multiple dreams, get there.
01:52:43
Speaker
And then say, well, know what I want to do. Don't be defined by things. I think that, to me, is what keeps things really exciting and really passionate. And there's ups and downs all the way to good days, bad days. So that pursuit, I think that pursuit of happiness is most important. I hope that's what people take away from today. That's great, Dennis. We have brilliant, brilliant words. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to have a conversation with me today.
01:53:09
Speaker
I really, really enjoyed it. I think I mentioned, I've definitely learned a lot. Hopefully people watching and listening will have a huge amount to take away from this as well. I'm sure they will. If anyone is listening and they want to reach out to you, if they have questions, they're able to drop your note on LinkedIn or Twitter or anything like this, if they'd like to network with you, for example.
01:53:32
Speaker
Absolutely. The best way to reach out to me is dropping me either DM on my Twitter or X, I guess, as we call it, at real Dennis O. You'll see my profile there. So it's at real Dennis O. Or you can write me a note on LinkedIn. I usually am pretty fair about connecting with people, especially if they have a good intention. I am in the New York City area, so I'd love to meet with you in person or in London or Abu Dhabi.
01:54:02
Speaker
reach out. Oops, sorry. And yeah, don't be a stranger. You'd be surprised, mention to me, because you'd be surprised I'm still a very precarious person. I do a lot of outreach work in charity. And, you know, I think I would say that if you are curious, you know, even 10 minutes with me would make my day as well. So do please reach out. I'd love to hear from you.
01:54:29
Speaker
It's great to hear. Dennis, yeah, have a wonderful day and I'll speak to you soon.
01:54:35
Speaker
Yeah, what an immense pleasure, fantastic conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed my time. Apparently we had such a good time, my cat tried to break in twice, which by the way, I mentioned for the record, he has never done before. So I guess you could tell we were having a great time and congratulations to you and all the tremendous work that you've done and continue to break amazing ground. I know you're going to be incredibly successful with this.
01:54:59
Speaker
I would always love to be considered for a follow-up. If the audience wants it, count me in for a follow-up. Absolutely. We'll definitely make that happen. Absolutely. Well, Dennis, thank you very much.