The Outlier Ventures Podcast

Today on Founders of Web 3, we talk to Juan Benet of Protocol Labs, the founder of Filecoin, an open-source cloud storage marketplace, protocol, and cryptocurrency, built to make the web more secure, and efficient. Jamie Burke and Juan Benet discuss the future of the decentralised Cloud, the new data economy, data as an asset for DeFi, IPFS and decentralised storage for NFTs, and their exciting new accelerator partnership with Outlier Ventures.

We talk to Johan Unger of Meme.com, the home of meme markets and trend exploration. Meme.com uses crypto and entertainment to measure the value of content, and aims to rewards users for curating and discovering social trends. Jamie and Johan discuss building startups in Europe, the creation of Marble.cards, the importance of community, the advent of meme stocks, and tokens, like AMC, GameStop and Doge, and how creating a platform for memetic assets will allow for users to predict the long term value of online trends.

Today on Founders of Web3, we talk to Itamar Lesuisse of Argent, the open-source crypto-wallet designed for DeFi, allowing you to earn, exchange & invest. We discuss the mainstream adoption of DeFi, and DeFi protocols, and the first hurdle of adoption by crypto-users. Empowering users to control and prosper from their digital assets and identity, competitors as a consideration for development, and the advantages to creating a startup from a blank sheet.

On this episode of FOW3, we're talking to Tegan Kline, co-founder of Edge & Node, comprised of the team behind The Graph Protocol, they create and support protocols and dApps that empower individuals, developers, and look to move humanity further into a decentralised web. We discuss sub-graphs, the importance of Open APIs, strengthening The Graph Protocol through indexer and delegator adoption, the Web2 exodus, and utilising a grants system over an ecosystem fund. Visit: Website - https://outlierventures.io Twitter - https://twitter.com/OVioHQ Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/company/outlierventures/ More - https://outlierventures.io/links

In this episode of Founders of Web 3, we talk to Jim McNelis, (j1mmyeth). As the founder of NFT42, we discuss the importance of bringing NFTs fully on-chain, how the current state of the technology is like ‘painting on cave walls with mashed berry juice’, and how IPFS is analogous to BitTorrent. We also discuss the dangers of onboarding large brands to unrefined tech, the importance of creator royalties, composability for the future of NFTs, projects like CryptoPunks and Avastars as the DNA for an Open Metaverse, collaboration with John Orion Young (JOY), and much more.

Cameron Bale is the founder of NFT.Kred - a platform designed to create simple channels to market for Non-Fungible Tokens and Digital Assets. He talks about onboarding influencers and celebrities to the NFT market, creating events and communities for technological adoption, and enterprise onboarding. We discuss solving the three problems for NFT adoption, accounting for an emerging space for the music industry, putting on a premium blockchain events, NFT.NYC, and building the connection between the ICO community and the NFT community.

Alexander Mitrovich, founder of Unique Networks talks about their NFT Palette modules, solving for the Ethereum gas problem, the importance of a flexible blockchain, democratizing NFTs, and how Unique Networks will provide the platform for the future of NFTs to be brought to the mass-market. We also talk about their continued success with Substrapunks, building a wallet and NFT marketplace on Polkadot, and how the generative NFT art project has allowed them to focus on the success of their mainnet.

Jack O’Holleran talks about how they have navigated various market cycles, deliberately not launching a token during 2017 ICO mania but still securing the backing of the likes of Mulitcoin, Winklevoss Twins and Galaxy Digital to go on to make it easier for any developer to build on Ethereum through layer 2 SKALE blockchains. We talk about their continued success with over $2.7 bn staked, making it one of the top 20 proof-of-stake networks globally, his hopes for ETH 2 and why, despite new entrants like Polkadot or Flow, he is still bullish on the future of the network.

This episode, we speak to Arjun Bhuptani, co-creator of MolochDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) created to fund Ethereum 2 grants, and to help solve the coordination problems in funding open-source protocols. We discuss how most problems stem from coordination, the importance of funding public goods, cost of legal documents vs automated systems allowing for anonymous funding, and treating economics and governance in a scientific way.

In this Founders of Web 3 special, Jamie Burke reads his recently published thesis, 'The Open Metaverse OS' a collaborative piece, from across the Outlier Ventures network, discussing the future of NFTs, DeFi and Web3. The book proposes an antidote to Web2, and a thesis, for how we can achieve an Open Metaverse. The text version can be read at: https://outlierventures.io/research/the-open-metaverse-os/

We talk with Joe Lallouz about Bison Trail’s recent acquisition by Coinbase, and why it is a net good for the wider crypto ecosystem. As a serial founder, who has now enjoyed multiple exits we hear about the process of an M&A from the inside, and explore Bisom Trail’s continuing mission to not just serve the biggest corporations in the space, like Coinbase or Facebook Libra, but the longtail of dApps and startups through a commitment to the democratization of finance technology.

Vivek, Executive Director of Polkadex, discusses how, by leveraging the benefits of building on Polkadot and taking the best of centralised exchanges such as order books and combining it with innovations in DEX's, they have created a hybrid model which tackles industry challenges in price slippage, impermanent loss and democratises DeFi, by removing fees and front running.

Jamie talks to Sandeep who founded Matic Network, now Polygon, about building a layer 2 network for sidechains, rollups and blockchains in a mission to fix Ethereum’s transaction limitations. We discuss Sandeep’s road to a billion dollar network, Web 3 communities in India, multi-blockchain solutions, scaling, and the difficulties of a one-stop-shop for dApp developers.

Today, we talk to Ryan Gill, co-founder of Crucible Network who are pioneering direct-to-avatar commerce in the Metaverse. We discuss the importance of innovations in self-sovereign identity (SSI) and verifiable claims standards to ensure Web 3 and the Metaverse is more open and not limited to a handful of platforms. We discuss the idea of a 'metagame for the metaverse' where its citizens can use NFTs, such as digital art, fashion and in game items, as collateral in DeFi and play-to-earn. This was recorded in Outlier Venture's Virtual Metaverse Studio, follow us on Twitter and YouTube to experience Jamie and Ryan's insightful discussion with visuals from The Metaverse Show.

We talk to Sam cofounder of Arweave about their radically different approach to DApps (decentralized applications) as DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), how he believes they will displace Web 2 platforms and companies entirely, how this vision fits with current data regulations such as GDPR in Europe, and the social mission behind The Permaweb; allowing us to remember and preserve valuable information, apps, and history indefinitely preventing others from rewriting it.

We talk to Amir who (alongside Shawn Fanning of Napster fame) founded Helium the world's first peer-to-peer wireless network and their decade journey to flip the telco model and create a people’s network, inspired by Bitcoin and Filecoin, to what are now 17963 Hotspots globally including partnerships Salesforce and Lime. We talk about how they pivoted their company, built their own blockchain and hardwire devices from scratch attracting investment from Google Ventures, Khosala Ventures Munich Re and Mark Beinhoff personally.

We explore crossing the 'crypto chasm', enabling hundreds of billions of dollars to flow from CeFi to DeFi by solving the problem of ‘The 3 Cs’: Capital, Connectivity and Control. We look at the pragmatic approach of Alkemi's cofounders, who describe their team as the living embodiment of the yin and yang required to understand, communicate and serve the needs of CeFi whilst innovating at the edge of DeFi. We discuss their conservative steps towards providing sustainable yields whilst solving for the counter-party risk required by regulated entities.

We discuss with Alex Atallah, founder and CTO of OpenSea, how the NFT market has evolved as an asset class over the last couple of years, and its various segments from art (which he believes is the ‘reference app’ for NFTs) to collectibles, virtual land and social tokens to the debates around on-chain metadata and decentralisation and its trade-offs. We explore how NFTs are becoming increasingly more multimedia in form, experiential and how this new medium like, MTV or TikTok, could inform the creative format, and industries at large.

Jason Teutsche is a heavy hitting academic in computer science and mathematics who has spent a large part of his career exploring distributive systems security and incentive design. Since writing a paper with Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum on the IICO (Interactive Initial Coin Offering) which explored new token distribution models not based on rampant price speculation seen at the time (back in the ICO mania of 2017) but genuine network adoption, he has taken the long hard path of working directly with regulators like the SEC to bring to market Truebit OS and its token to market, through what he calls a ‘micro economy’.

Brian, cofounder of Kava makes the argument for taking a more permissioned and curated approach to acting as a gatekeeper when onboarding users into formally trusted and verified DeFi protocols - if we want to mainstream the space and its usage. We also discuss how DeFi will break dominance from Ethereum and become 'more DeFi', including a greater focus on Bitcoin protocol.

Alex is a true crypto native, founding several startups since graduation. We talk about Rarible’s learnings as the first tokenized NFT platform, with $RARI as the first NFT governance token. We discuss their commitment to permissionlessly serving the long-tail of creators, progressive decentralisation and NFTs as an asset class from price discovery, fractionalisation to indices.

Aleksander cofounder of Axie Infinity talks about how they built the number one blockchain game in the world, now experiencing exponential growth, the design thinking beyond its tokenomics and governance and why they started with community over platform. We discuss considerations in designing for a digital economy, built around play-to-earn, how to balance and reward productive capital and work in the system, and if you get it right, the power of financial inclusion.

Robby Yung is CEO of Animoca Brands, a leading mobile gaming studio and publisher who have millions of users and a raft of licensing partnerships with major brands globally. They pivoted their business entirely to blockchain when they became convinced it enabled an entirely new category of gaming they call ‘Meta Games’ based on powerful in game economies that combine NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) and DeFi (Decentralised Finance) and flip the classic game distribution model. Since then they have partnered and invested in Crypto Kitties, DApper Labs, F1 Delta Time and Sandbox establishing themselves as the leading blockchain gaming company. We talk about release schedules, content economics and the idea of multiverses.

We discuss the importance of AMMs (Automated Market Makers) and DEX (Decentralised Exchanges) to crypto, especially the role of Balancer Smart Pools to allow for price discovery and the bootstrapping of liquidity for new token projects. We discuss the unstoppable nature of DeFi, how to design or at least accommodate for its attack vectors, flash loans as a feature, and how the world of DEXs will interact with CEXs (Centralised Exchanges) long-term.

Aaron is a law professor, serial founder and CEO of Open Law, the project behind The LAO (Legal Autonomous Organisation) which pioneered a DAO with a ‘legal wrapper’ to reduce and manage liability and risk for operators. The LAO now functions as an investment vehicle for several prominent Web 3 Founders, as well as advisors to the Moloch and Flamingo DAOs. He describes applying open source principles to legal contracting, machine readable ricardian smart contracts, the extent to which ‘code is law’, as well as considerations around arbitration and jurisdiction selection, and how he believes DAOs are the perfect expression of an intermediary light private ordering of wealth, and more than that, improved systems to collectively process and respond to information.

As a serial entrepreneur Matt has two decades of scaling cloud infrastructure selling his first company in 2016 which at its peak was handling 1% of all UK web traffic. During that time he saw huge inefficiencies in both how new cloud infrastructure was being built and operated, founding Cudo to bring The Cloud to blockchain, designed to offload any kind of compute to a distributed network of idle machines from crypto mining rigs, south korean gaming cafes through to major partnerships - owners of AMD chips and The Playstation Network. This allows people and organisations to maximise a return on their investment into hardware, whilst reducing The Cloud’s carbon footprint by removing the need to build more data centers, as well as the power of edge computing for streaming services, gaming and AR.

Gilbert is a serial entrepreneur and pioneer of Privacy Tech for over two decades advising large corporations, advertising agencies and governments on data ethics and their execution, exiting his first startup to the leading Priv Tech Unicorn, One Trust. At TapMyData he is taking The Trust Economy mainstream, repurposing and making usable digital asset infrastructure like crypto wallets and exchanges to enable end users to take back control and monetize their data whilst allowing for secure data dialogue with organisations around data rights building the largest set of data request information in the world. We discuss how The Data Trade was born out of cookie technology giving rise to Surveillance Capitalism and why it is now facing an extinction level event with regulations like GDPR turning data into a liability rather than an asset.

We talk to Dominic Williams CEO of DFinity about his vision for 'The Internet Computer', inspired by the Ethereum world computer, but fundamentally architected in a different way to allow for what he calls Open Internet Services: the ability for entrepreneurs and coders to build applications directly into the internet to remove dependencies on AWS, for truly unstoppable code. We explore his journey as a founder through all three web cycles building distributed systems and how Web 3 can allow for secure economic structure without firewalls, and more resilient to black swan events.

Yaniv, co-founder of The Graph Protocol, talks about the importance of making sure the full Web 3 stack is as decentralised as possible, the indexing and querying of data, and how The Graph as a solution also removes the burden for DApp builders of hosting their own data infrastructure - therefore ultimately improving the DApp user experience to a Web 2 equivalence.

We talk to one of the legendary founding fathers of the internet Mark Miller, about his 40+ year career as leading researcher at Xerox PARC, Google, Xanadu, core contributor to Javascript and creator of the ‘E’ Language. We discuss how he was inspired in the 80s by the economist Hayek’s ‘utility of property rights’ and object oriented programming to found Agorics (in ‘94) to create secure distributed computing markets to lower the risk of cooperation. We also discuss the history of smart contracts, and why in 2018 he rebirthed Agorics as Agoric to make smart contracts more secure, and accessible to developers.

We talk with Tascha Punyaneramitdee (Pan Pan) about Alpha Finance Lab’s, Bangkok-based, DeFi Studio and how they identify, appraise and execute upon opportunities for new DeFi products, whilst managing risk. We also look at how they, as an early stage company, engage with the spectrum of institutions, from Binance and their BNB chain, through to their collaboration with SCB 10 x - the venture arm of a local retail bank.

We talk with Anatoly founder of Solona which claims to be the fastest unpermissioned blockchain in the world (without using sharding) and his 18 year career working as a senior engineer at Qualcomm, scaling distributed systems used by millions of people. We explore the ‘blockchain trilemma’, its history, and what he proposes is it’s false trade-off between security, speed and security and why by solving for the hard concept of ‘time’ and shifting focus to unlocking gains from hardware based on Moores Law could allow us to leapfrog the limitations of blockchains today and enable fully automated highly decentralised discovery markets for machines and the convergence of blockchain, mixed reality like AR / VR and AI. We discuss 5G and we ask him ‘can we ever have a fully decentralised censorship resistant Web 3?’ when state actors can control the physical infrastructure of the internet.

Alex has made major contributions to OSS (Open Source Software) for over 20 years and launched HCAPTCHA, a CAPTCHA tool which now blocks malicious bots for more than 14% of the world’s traffic. What most people don’t know is that it is powered by Human Protocol, a knowledge marketplace leveraging crypto for 100m users worldwide, where machines post jobs for humans. We talk about how they’ve achieved a scale that could make them the most used DApp on the planet, privacy and the open knowledge economy, as well as the composable Open Data Stack that will power Web 3.

To Celebrate our 50th Episode, we enjoy a joint podcast with Tor Bair, Founder of The Secret Network, and host of Sharing Secrets Podcast, where we first explore why privacy is important to both citizens and institutions in Web 3, and in particular DeFi, and how ‘Programmable Privacy’ is now possible across blockchains for both data and computation through ‘secret contracts’. The second part sees Tor interview Jamie on how Outlier Ventures has evolved over the last 7+ years and his learnings investing in Web 3 - coming to the Sharing Secrets Podcast soon: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sharing-secrets-presented-by-secret-network/id1438776388 To Celebrate our 50th Episode, join us at https://superrare.co/spongenuity as we auction off unique NFTs of the Top 10 most popular FOW3 guests, raising money for Computer Aid International!

We speak with Henri, founder of Streamr, and serial entrepreneur in the data economy. We explore how his career in algorithmic trading in capital markets helped him understand the importance of ‘real-time data’ and why the promise of blockchain + IoT in domains like Smart Cities despite its early promise still hasn't happened. We ask if data policy like GDPR is already out of date with regards to blockchain and how policy itself, such as the EU Commission forcing open Big Tech data silos, can become the top down trigger for the Open Data Economy and how data unions can be a way for consumers to claim back control.

Dr. Gavin Wood needs no introduction. Cofounder and CTO of Ethereum, inventor of the Solidity programming language and now Founder of The Web 3 Foundation, Parity Labs, and the Polkadot network. We talk about his mission to re-decentralise The Web as a ‘free trust technologist’, giving the Internet native law, and how Polkadot is a bet against blockchain maximalism with a focus on ‘full agency’ for the network and its network of blockchains (parachains) to adapt and evolve with baked in governance. We also address how Polkadot could co-exist or compete with ETH 2, depending upon the pathway the Ethereum community chooses.

Michael O’Rourke is founder of Pocket Network, a decentralized API protocol, and marketplace. We talk about the history of node infrastructure in public blockchain networks, the problem of increasing centralisation and the importance of democratising the use of full nodes. We address; could Jeff Bezos switch off crypto via AWS (Amazon Web Services), due to its reliance on cloud infrastructure, why sustainable decentralised public blockchains need incentives like the POKT token, designing governance in the Pocket DAO, and the power of gamification.

Jordan is a serial founder, digital advertising and product designer that has a history of making digital viral hits. This time, he half-jokingly birthed a parody on the craziness of permissionless innovation in DeFi, ‘degen culture’ and the various food protocols of 2020. In the process, he started a crazy community experiment in collectibles and NFT (Non Fungible Token) food farming, which raises questions about the role and responsibility of a founder, at the edge of Web 3.

Hugh is a 15 year insurance industry veteran who launched Nexus Mutual, a decentralised insurance protocol, back in 2017 and, with the advent of DeFi, whose time has come. We talk about how insurance has historically enabled risk taking and innovation, forms of risk in DeFi, and how innovations in oracles & NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) make the industry unstoppable in delivering highly disruptive, bottom up, compliant by design, efficient and effective financial innovation.

Justin, a physicist and seasoned executive from the loyalty industry (where he built a billion dollar unicorn), has developed a novel cryptographic game and foundational primitive for Web 3 using ‘stateful NFTs’, with some of the world’s leading game theorists, that removes the need for arbitration in the fulfilment of digital to physical redemption. We discuss NFTs as loyalty mechanisms, and how an emergent dCommerce Stack could one day unbundle Amazon.

Sebastien, a serial entrepreneur and gaming veteran talks about his vision for an Open Metaverse. Enabled by blockchain and new models, like play-to-earn, to allow economics between creator supply, user demand and virtual consumption. We discuss the idea of content-as-the-platform and user created, and owned, NFTs as virtual goods, how that interacts with DeFi (Decentralised Finance) and how it promises new levels of financial education, and literacy, to the next generation.

Whale Shark is the pseudo-anonymous founder of the $WHALE NFT collector community, with the largest social currency by market cap in the world, built in just 12 months, and backed by the world's largest collection of non-fungible tokens. We talk about the difference between NFTs, from gaming collectibles to digital fine art, how they can be used to collateralize an asset backed crypto currency, and the power of principle based communities in Web 3. Coming Winter 2021, the Base Camp virtual accelerator for early stage founders, to incubate and accelerate world changing ideas. Apply here: https://outlierventures.io/base-camp/

Joseph Lubin, Co-Founder of Ethereum and Founder & CEO of Consensys, talks about his continuous mission to improve Web 3’s fledgling but critical ‘trust layer’ for the Internet and how it can bring about ‘granular governance’. We cover his early background in machine learning and autonomous systems research and why he believes creating ‘AI Lego’ is as important to Web 3 as Money Lego. As well as the benefits and challenges of being a fast follower, the promise of ETH2 and improvements to Meta Mask as well as the roll out of their Ethereum Enterprise proposition Quorum - he also hints at an exciting new DeFi stack...

Dawn is founder & CEO of Oasis Lab & Network, as well as an award-winning professor at Berkeley, working on world leading research in applied cryptography, security, blockchain and machine learning - as well as being a serial entrepreneur. We talk about spinning out deep tech startups from academia as well as her important mission to create a more responsible data economy based on privacy and user centricity.

Bette co-founder of Acala Network talks us through her teams passionate belief in a multichain universe, being inspired by Gavin Wood, and why they believe Polkadot will both relieve Ethereum of some of its economic load and allow a greater democratisation of DeFi to grow the pie for Web 3. We talk about the DeFi paradox of yield vs efficiency, the challenges and sustainability of yield farming, ‘progressive decentralisation’ and the creation of the world's first trustless decentralised sovereign wealth fund.

Join some of the world’s most exciting elements of the Web 3 ecosystem, for one-day virtual demos, panels, and more, September 15th & 16th 2020: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/diffusion-digital-september We talk to John Craine about the mission, purpose and growing pains of scaling the world’s leading NFT (Non Fungible Token) platform. We explore how they are breaking out of the ‘crypto art’ niche to become a social layer, and network, for the curation of digital fine art. We look at the market for this new asset class, its experiments in growing forms of multimedia, and its experience in both the physical and virtual world.

Bermuda is one of the only environments with regulatory equivalence with the US and EU and the ‘Risk capital’ of the world, for insurance and reinsurance. Their Premier, the youngest in his country's history, and with a masters in IT from George Washington, holds a uniquely high level of technical literacy talks with refreshing nuance about creating an innovation first environment to evolve Web 3 startups, in particular in Digital Assets and DeFi, without the licensing overhead burden whilst still maintaining a world beating standard in compliance. We look at how opacity hinders crypto, and why choosing a ‘transparency focused jurisdiction’ like Bermuda vs ‘privacy jurisdiction’ is key for Web 3 startups to be accepted by industry and capital markets.

Stani talks about why coming out of the Nordics so early Aave (previously ETh Lend) they had no choice but to be community financed and therefore driven as well as the challenges and benefits of being a first mover in Web 3, and why in DeFi there are no competitors only direct or indirect cooperation. We explore how they evolved their token, its features and governance over time and their Vertical rather than purely Horizontal approach to product development and customer acquisition as well as how he believes DeFi will both interact with and consume Fintech. Join some of the world’s most exciting elements of the Web 3 ecosystem, for one-day virtual demos, panels, and more September 15th & 16th 2020: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/diffusion-digital-september

Jake Brukhman is Founder of CoinFund which has been investing in blockchain since 2016. Through his unique experience in computer science, quantitative trading and product management at places like Amazon, he and his team have developed an approach to Web 3 called ‘Network Lifecycle Investing’, where they work with startups in both an early stage venture capacity but also helping bootstrap networks as they mature. He talks about ‘dogfooding’ Web 3 tech like DAOs, as the 3rd member of Moloch DAO, and actively participating in staking or mining in networks like Live Peer. As a visual artist and creative himself we go deep into his passion and investment thesis in Digital Art and NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens). Join some of the world’s most exciting elements of the Web 3 ecosystem, for one-day virtual demos, panels, and more September 15th & 16th 2020: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/diffusion-digital-september

Toby Simpson is co-founder and COO of Fetch.ai, an open decentralised machine learning network. We talk about his three decades of work in agent based systems: creating MMORGs (massively multiplayer online role playing games) in the 90’s, to biologically inspired systems as Head of Software Design at DeepMind, which went on to be acquired by Google. We look at how these experiences led him to create the world’s first blockchain-based decentralised AI, and its use cases, from DeFi to removing inefficiencies in complex mobility systems. Join some of the world’s most exciting elements of the Web 3 ecosystem, for one-day virtual demos, panels, and more September 15th & 16th 2020: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/diffusion-digital-september