Yat Siu | Co-Founder of Animoca Brands: The North Star of Web3 is Digital Ownership
Unhashed Podcast · Sachi Mihara, Diksha Lyer, Kenzi Watanabe
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Show Notes
Yat Siu, Founder of Animoca Brands discusses how he went from learning music to becoming a tech entrepreneur, the ventures he has worked on and launched, his early days in Web3, his advice for Web3 founders, and so much more.
Coming from a musician family, Yat Siu was training to be a musician when he wrote software on his Atari ST in the 1980s to read music notations. While his software did not win him any marks with his teachers, he found that others used and appreciated it enough to pay him for it.
Soon, Siu would begin working for Atari themselves. He would also go on to work for Silicon Graphics and AT&T. His earliest tech entrepreneurial pursuit was establishing Hong Kong Cybercity (the first free web page and e-mail provider in Asia, later renamed Freenation). His foray into Web3 was, thus, inevitable.
In 2014, Siu co-founded Animoca Brands, which now uses blockchain and artificial intelligence to build games and other products. This occurred when Siu and his co-founders understood that NFTs enabled digital ownership of items. In fact, this principle led to Animoca Brands pivoting to blockchain.
“It’s a belief and conviction that came on a theory we had, which is ownership. So that’s why we always talked about digital ownership, which eventually became treated as property rights back in 2018. The principle of ownership creates network effects in which people build and compose on top will become so large that it basically becomes unstoppable."