The Outlier Ventures Podcast

Jamie speaks to Mark Wilcox, Founder of 21e8 (The Magic Number Company) the pioneering ecosystem of computational data markets - competitive systems that combine real-time content creation with distributed data exchange. They discuss everything from building businesses in crypto, what the computational data market is, and what Mark looks for in his community. 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

Rune founded ‘the central bank of DeFi’, powering the latest crypto cycle (with over $1 billion of collateral), but he has also created the world's most successful DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation) to coordinate a borderless decentralised credit market that is aggressively adding collateral, beyond crypto, towards real world securitised assets like commodities, central bank digital currencies and real estate. We talk through his unique founder experience of leading MakerDAO from its emergence in chat rooms in early 2014 to becoming a professional organisation engaging with regulators, and now its eventual dissolution into the community. Diffusion 2020 Join some of the world’s most exciting elements of the Web 3 ecosystem, for a one-day virtual demos, panels, and more September 15th & 16th 2020: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/diffusion-digital-september

Angela has a rich background in data led digital product design, venture and business model innovation, founding the global Token Engineering Community and Academy which now holds meet-ups in over 50 countries. It brings together a rich and diverse braintrust of; systems, electrical, robotics & controls engineers, as well as Behavioural & Ecological Economists, Researchers and AI experts dedicated to creating a formal ethic and practical methodology for the development of safe and resilient financial public infrastructure to handle trillions of value in economic load. Diffusion 2020 Join some of the world’s most exciting elements of the Web 3 ecosystem, for a one-day virtual demos, panels, and more September 15th & 16th 2020: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/diffusion-digital-september

We talk with Sunny, the lead researcher at Tendermint, and core contributor to Cosmos and Cosmos Hub as well as cofounder of Blockchain at Berkeley. We talk about the political theory of blockchain as well as its main narratives: sound money, defi, web 3 and open law. We look at the story of Cosmos and how its ecosystem has evolved and the natural devolution from initial founder to community and how they can been so successful at beginning to onboard the 99% of developers with a ‘build your own blockchain’ model.

Michael is a serial Web 3 founder, since 2014, and one of the rare DeFi entrepreneurs with a background as an actual financial services professional, investment banker and analyst at places like Bloomberg, Nomura and UBS. We talk about his mission at DIA to crowdsource trusted institutional grade data oracles in DeFi that will allow crypto to mature as an asset class for mainstream adoption with products like indices, derivatives and loans that will attract trillions of dollars of capital. We talk about why Europe, and in particular his home country of Switzerland, are leading the world through standards, taxonomies and regulation to become a global centre for this emerging capital market.

We talk about building a 150 year startup in Web 3 from first principles with Richard Craib, Founder of Numerai, and why he chose to apply himself to solving what he sees in the ultimate mathematical problem: creating ‘the last hedge fund’, through ‘the hardest data science tournament in the world’. We also discuss his approach of crowdsourcing equities trading models through a network of data scientists, and the power of the convergence of blockchain + AI in open data marketplaces.

Sandra Ro is a banking OG, serial founder and now CEO of The Global Blockchain Council and leading advocate for, and enablement of, the rapidly maturing crypto industry. We discuss the evolution of attitudes within financial institutions towards crypto as an asset class and the trading life-cycle in places like CME (Chicago Metals Exchange) where she created their Digitization department and pioneered research into cryptocurrencies and innovative products in Cryptocurrency Derivatives Contracts, and Bitcoin Pricing Products as early as 2016.

Steven is a veteran Web entrepreneur with multiple hundred million dollar startup exits, his first back in 1999. Now he is CEO of Algorand where he is commercialising the innovations of Silvio Micali, one of the godfathers of Modern Cryptography and Turing Award winner. We talk about how to decide and execute a ‘go to market’ strategy for a generalisable layer 1 protocol and the potential of DeFi, Security Tokens and CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies).

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 Sergey Nazarov, Co-Founder of Chainlink, shares how his experiences as an early Web 3 entrepreneur led him to solving the oracle problem. We talk about how Chainlink has successfully abstracted away its complexity to unlock the potential for reliable ‘universally connected smart contracts’ to become the dominant form of digital agreement which allow enterprise and end users to take control of their relationship to their money and data.

Roham Gharegozlou, Co-Inventor of CryptoKitties and Founder of Dapper Labs talks about scaling NFTs to billions of users and how the Metaverse, as an emergent ecosystem, will not be designed: it will be open fluid and anchored on a blockchain.

Luis Cuende, Co-Founder and Core Contributor at Aragon is a self proclaimed ‘Free Software’ lover and hacker. We talk about how DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) allow us to govern supranational protocols as ‘digital jurisdictions’, with manifestos and bylaws that remove ambiguities, reduce frictions and the changes of forking of networks. We talk about how these technologies are being experimented with, their convergence with gaming culture and potential to some day challenge the nation state itself.

Ryan Selkis, Founder and CEO of Messari, has been at the heart of the crypto ecosystem since 2014 as entrepreneur, investor and journalist / analyst. As an entrepreneur-in-residence at ConsenSys with Joseph Lubin, a founding team member at the industry's most active investor (DCG, Digital Currency Group) and MD of the largest trade media brand (CoinDesk) and conference Consensus, he has been pivotal in making the industry what it is today. Now at Messari he has been working tirelessly to bring professional grade transparency and research to an opaque market. We talk about whether regulators can ever keep up with innovation in crypto and could Covid19 be the accelerant for Web 3 adoption and the next bullrun.

Host Jamie talks to Boris Mann, CEO and Co-Founder of Fission who is helping developers build powerful web native apps in Web 3. They discuss what the pragmatic application of Web 3 technology means, whether or not it fixes the problems of Web 2 and what it means to be part of it.

Lou Kerner is Co-Founder and Partner at CryptoMondays. He shares with Jamie his views on how DAOs are evolving and where they are headed. They also discuss why we’re going to see a huge explosion in value following the crypto winter.

Maria is an Uruguayan scientist and Web 3 Founder who launched the UK’s first 5G UK Testbed out of Kings College London in 2017 and has run several pilots with the likes of The European Space Agency. She is also Co-Founder of Weaver Labs. At Weaver Labs they are building a decentralised connectivity marketplace that accelerates both the public and private sectors mission for greater diversification in supply chains for improved security and competition in 5G. She talks about why you can’t have a truly decentralised internet without first decentralising networking infrastructure and its importance to ‘connectivity inclusion’ into the digital economy.

We talk with Fabian Vogelsteller, core contributor to the Ethereum protocol who has created some of the most used and impactful innovations in Web 3 from the ERC 20 standard (over 250k deployed, 4 of which market cap over $1bn) to the Ethereum Wallet (100m wallets) and Web3.js (over 50k projects, double Facebook’s Machine Learning Diary). Now Founder of LUKSO he explains why his next goal is to onboard mainstream users, and in particular women, into Web 3 as well as fixing ICOs with the rICO (reverse ICO) this time in collaboration with regulators.

Artur Sychov,Founder & CEO of Somnium Space talks about the convergence of blockchain with AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality) to go well beyond the early visions of Second Life to realise an interconnected virtual world, The Metaverse, with security of ownership, authenticity of origin for our digital goods and wealth. He also talks about how Somnium is focused on delivering a truly persistent experience and how they address the digital immortality of users.

Kyle Samani, Managing Partner at Multicoin Capital discusses the future of Web 3 with host Jamie, describing it as the most direct way humanity's ever invented to explicitly codify incentives into software. They explore the history of the web, the future of the web and what they think is going to be needed to get there.

Nischal Shetty the Founder of WazirX, India's largest crypto exchange, talks about its challenges operating in a restricted business environment, and his role in lobbying and succeeding regulatory change. He also shares about his journey as a serial web entrepreneur, what's different running a Web 3 startup and his multi million dollar partnership and venture fund with Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, to make India a leading crypto nation.

Jamie talks to Peteris Zilgalvis, Head of Digital Single Market & Blockchain European Commission, and long time advocate for the potential of crypto and Web 3 about The Commission’s ‘innovation first’ approach to the space and the importance of these technologies to not just make The Web more secure and inclusive but also to decentralise the Data Economy and most importantly better distribute the benefits of AI. He discusses the Commission's attitudes towards innovations like ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings), DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation) and its pioneering €400M Blockchain & AI fund-of-funds mandate to support the local Web 3 ecosystem.

Jameson is the archetypal Bitcoiner and Co-Founder & CTO of Casa, a startup dedicated to helping people realise self sovereignty and secure their personal wealth through Bitcoin. We talk about self sovereignty as a movement and how its emergent technology can secure not just Bitcoin but a growing number of forms of digital wealth and assets like NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) and personal data. We explore innovating in a sometimes adversarial techno-belief system, his learning building products on open source and in particular The Lightning Network. And as a security expert we explore the power of open source and decentralized ledgers to create more secure systems.

Brendan is Founder and CEO of Brave Browser. As the creator of JavaScript at Netscape in the 90’s he talks about how it’s success and ubiquity alongside cookies and behavioural tracking led to the business model of Surveillance Capitalism that has come to dominate The Web. We discuss how the industrialisation of the Ad Tech ecosystem, and its layers of intermediation, has not only led to erosion of user privacy but also a poor web experience and how Brave’s Basic Attention Token incentivises a better outcome for publishers, users and brands.

Dovey Wan is a leading VC in Web 3 and has been bridging Silicon Valley to the Asian crypto scene for several years on Twitter and as advisor to Coindesk and Michael Arrington. We talk about her seminal 2018 post ‘Decentralized Journey to the East’ and it’s key themes: how China’s crypto scene emerged out of the hardware used to power Bitcoin mining, to the retail secondary markets and their exchanges that have come to dominate the global crypto markets. We explore the Asian or Kimchi Premium in Korea, crypto’s ‘9’11’, ‘’9-4’’ in the wake of Chinese regulatory clampdown, how it created a global asian crypto diaspora, how Silicon Valley lost its unfair advantage in Web 3 and why crypto is a Matrix like battleground between privacy orientated Neos and central bank digital currency Agent Smith.

Peter is community lead at Meta Cartel, an innovative Web 3 ecosystem of creators and operators building decentralized applications (DApps) on Ethereum. He discusses the foundational role of DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) in Web 3 a means of organising around public works enabled by blockchain, cryptocurrency and smart contracts. They explore the importance of community in Web 3, its fusion with gaming culture and how there is already a whole generation who will never work for a company and will only ever know digital wealth.

Trent McConaghy, is not only one of the early blockchain entrepreneurs founding several startups in the space, most recently Ocean Protocol, a decentralised data marketplace that enables a New Data Economy but an AI founder who enjoyed a big exit. He explains how Ocean can break down entrenched data silos across industries and allows for the gains of Big Data and AI to be more evenly distributed across society. As the founder of the global token engineering community we talk about why the principles of ‘engineering’ are critical to building safe infrastructure for a new multi billion dollar digital economy centered on Web 3.

Eyal Herzog is co-founder of Bancor Network and a serial entrepreneur with decades of startup experience building Web 2 startups with millions of users so knows about building digital products that go mainstream. He explains his journey in pioneering private digital currencies as early as 2012 gaining an appreciation for long-tail economics and the importance of liquidity that led to Bancor, which has become a key part in the formation of the global crypto capital market. We also discuss his new venture DWEB and its mission to allow communities of developers and entrepreneurs to collaboratively launch, own and operate web apps comparable to a Facebook or Uber without the need to understand crypto.

Illia Polosukhin left Google, where he made significant contributions to Google Translate and Tensorflow, to co-found NEAR Protocol. He talks about how his team of co-founders background in competitive coding (all various ICPC champions, an elite coding olympics) and their work teaching computers to code informed building an intuitive Web 3 Stack to onboard the 99% of developers and go on to be backed by the likes of Andreessen HorowitzPantera, Multicoin, Coinbase Ventures, and Pantera Capital.

Can Kisagun, Co-Founder of Enigma, a cutting edge protocol that allows for ‘secret contracts’, smart contracts that allow for the sharing of secrets that can be used to enable;e collaborative machine learning, talks about his journey as a spin out from MIT with his professor, and the challenges of bringing a token backed protocol to life out of the US. We go deep into the possibilities of allowing a new more collaborative data economy, to move away from closed data silos, the potential for Impact in areas like health, in particular Corona and discuss new possibilities in the governance and coordination of distributed systems.

We discuss the importance of Purpose to mobilise communities in Web 3 with Rene Reinsberg, social entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Celo. He shares Celo’s intense social mission to finally deliver on the decade long promise for crypto-currencies for genuine financial inclusion compared to Libra, and how he convinced some of Silicon Valley’s largest VCs like A16z that it was good business. He talks about how mission gave them discipline to focus down on delivering what features were truly important for a more efficient financial system, a mobile-first platform solution based upon secure and stable digital currencies, to get money to parts of the economy that need it most. We discuss the power of programmable money to finally make innovations like local currencies and digital cooperatives mainstream.

David Rutter is CEO and Co-Founder of R3, a global blockchain consortium made up of some of the worlds largest financial services companies, founded in 2014, and the first initiative to build momentum behind the ‘blockchain not bitcoin’ narrative, that helped raised the profile of the whole industry in an enterprise context. He talks candidly about the difficult decision to open source Corda very early on, what is now becoming the de facto enterprise blockchain stack for regulated industries, and as a seasoned entrepreneur (pioneering early electronic trading systems in the 90’s) his approach to engaging incumbents and regulators when compared to competitors like Ethereum’s Consensys and what he sees as the naive approach of Facebook Libra.

Brock Pierce has been at the heart of almost every major innovation and event in Web 3 from being an early investor in and Chairman of The Bitcoin Foundation. He has raised more funding for crypto startups than anyone else on the planet, pioneering the first Initial Coin Offering with Mastercoin in 2013 which triggered the run to a $20bn 2017 ‘ICO Boom’. He co-founded Blockchain Capital the first blockchain VC, and with them conducted the first STO (Security Token Offering). As co-founder of EOS he conducted not just the largest ICO but largest crowdfunding event in history raising $4bn. As an investor, he was one of the largest backers of Ethereum ICO but also cofounded Tether the first asset-backed stablecoin. He talks candidly about how being an early founder in gaming and esports in the 90s and 00s gave him an edge in understanding the rising importance of digital currency & assets like NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) as well as by growing a powerful network of founders, once described as the ‘Crypto Illuminati’, he built information asymmetry to spot and act on market opportunities.

Muneeb talks about his journey leaving academia at Princeton to fix what he saw as a broken internet. Initially going through Y Combinator he and his co-founder continued to develop an end-to-end Web 3 stack that went on to become Blockstack through 4 years of R&D, attracting investment from the likes of Naval Ravikant, USV, DCG and Fenbushi uniquely not as a decentralised network but as a US domiciled startup with regular employees. He discusses the hard path of working with the SEC to conduct the first Reg A + token offering raising over $23m and taking a rigorous phased engineering approach to making Web 3 a reality, now with over 8k active devs and 270 DApps.

CZ Founder of Binance discusses the art of ‘blitzscaling’ to become the largest crypto exchange by trading volume in the world, with millions of users and billions of dollars in revenue. He talks through how to spot and execute on a ‘10 x’ market improvement opportunity, the challenges of running a ‘public’ token backed company, the future for ICOs and IEOs, what it means to be a 'internet native' organisation and the growing importance of digital assets to the global economy.