Building Innovation Protopias: Introduction to Crecimiento

Transcript

welcome to building Innovation protopia cresy Mento hosted by architect systems and Edge City my name is James and I'm Janine very excited that you're all spending your Monday afternoon talking about Innovation protopia um very briefly a set of uh things that we're going to talk about today Janine and I going to sort of just set the stage and and basically frame what we mean when we say Innovation protopia we'll hear from Juan and Emmy talking about the opportunity Argentina has right now and what cres Mento is specifically trying to achieve we'll talk about the unique regulatory sandbox we're establishing in the city of Bonas Iris which is very very exciting um we'll hear about the next wave of Argentine startups we'll have a panel discussion with some of the

founders from Argentina on what excites them about Argentina today and specifically Cento um and then we'll talk specifically about the pop-up that's happening in August which I encourage everybody here to attend and I'm looking forward to seeing many more faces back in bonares um we'll have time to network and catch up at the end and then there a happy hour with protocol Labs from 6:30 for those who are signed up so setting the stage what are we talking about when we talk about building Innovation protopia we're talking about how we can explore a Global Network of hubs that Foster startups accelerate Tech Innovation and ultimately transer economies through sustainable crypto Le empowered growth if you take a big step back and you look back at the history of

innovation and growth over the past 70 years to to 100 years Tech technology has driven the largest scale prosperity in the planet in the history of humanity and that's resulted in huge digital Tech growth integrated circuit chips with Moors law doubling every year and even more now global gbt Rising trade flows going bananas poverty coming down like technology has been the epicenter of that growth and you just need to look at the US and about how much of the GDP of the growth has accounted has been from technology if you get into how Innovative economies are and you look at a number of different metrics from how much an economy spends as a percentage of um their GDP on R&D look at the number of patents the number of startups and how dense the startups are how many investment funds there are and more you

can sort of you can sort of measure how Innovative an economy is and and Argentina ranks sort of in the middle towards the end on a lot of these metrics but is in a very unique position to completely leap for a lot of these other economies through crypto now tech companies come from startups specifically from really strong startup funnels now and there's a number of economies around the world who've taken concrete steps towards establishing these sort of St up and Technology zones you know things like Hub 71 Abu Dhabi Japan Malaysia Estonia other places are sort of like pushing at the frontiers of what this could be but none have really unlocked this and none have really unlocked it through crypto and what crypto can enable hence why everybody is in this room it's it's basically a portfolio approach that approach this

problem there's a massive top of the funnel that is needed to get to big big technology um companies that then have that impact on growth and if you look at the US and you get to somewhere between 80 to 100 late stage companies so a company that has a market cap of at least 100 billion you need about 10 million projects that are trying to become startups and they come through that funnel all the way through to the end you need lots of experimentation so people say we've got tens of thousands hundreds of thousands startups that that won't make it you need even more to get to this level of of wealth creation and growth that then trickle back down now if you then look at it by vertical and you look at technology and AI you look at somewhere by the US which is largely

like the the best use case that we should be looking through economy well for crypto the US has been regressing which means there's a real opportunity for a number of other economies around the world to seize that opportunity now there's countries like Japan and South Korea who are very good at the at the beginning and a bit good at the end but not in crypto and I think Argentina is uniquely positioned to be able to seize that opportunity given we now have top down and bottom up support what do you need for crypto Le Innovation well you need a number of things this is not exhaustive but you need startups you need investors you need like the right regulatory environment with within which to operate you need a set a really strong physical and digital infrastructure you need networks and then you need actually an innovation

culture a culture of Entrepreneurship that permeates the entire ecosystem um there's lots of examples of how this happens around the world um I won't go into them now but if you sort of take best practice across the world and you apply that in Argentina in a localized context you stand like a really good opportunity Argentina has not historically had top- down support now under President mle and a lot of the um political changes that have happened more recently um towards that I think I think there's a really good opportunity now to to like piece together the amazing Grassroots and bottom up support Argentina has has had and generated over the last decade to support that Innovation systems are really interesting because we're increasingly changing from like historic Innovation translation systems what we've had from like arper and the US government um about 100 years ago when you had like

war was the incentive alignment there um through to Bell Labs historically very very um successful in Innovation through YC it's what we've built at prodical labs and increasingly this new cities and cultural movements initiative which I think everybody in this room is really passionate about and I'm going to hand over to one of the world eing experts on it in Janine to tell us more about why that's exciting awesome so who in this room yay got some energy going great um who in this room has heard about a popup City or pop-up Village okay great we've got a room of Believers in this new new sort of concept so this was actually originally empty in the sort of like middle area um bology had this this chot up in his

Network State book and this idea of like well we've seen a lot of conferences we've seen a lot of meetups um and that sort of happens in this like one day to one week range that's thousands of people and then on the other side humans have done universities cities and towns and states and countries really well like we've done that for years but there's sort of this middle zone of of two months or like a month to six months of time period with the like hundred to 2,000 range of people that we haven't done a ton of experimentation with until we started Zulu last year so Zulu was

the first of its kind pop-up City and it was a two-month long experiment that brought together 200 people for the full two months and about 800 visitors throughout the time day since Z there has been a number of different popup Villages and popup cities that have happened um Vitalia happened earlier this year the mo um we've got man over here from the team and Santi who built that both in changai and then another one in Argentina earlier this year and then Edge City we just did one Edge esmalda in uh Hillsburg California where we had 1,200 people come through over the course of the month and ultimately what we've been looking at is like why

why why is this thing valuable like why are the ideas of pop-up cities this new sort of wave of excitement to drive this like techno optimistic future and like serious areas of innovation one big piece of it is this idea of senius which is collective genius and like a scene around genius and how can we bring a lot of people together where ideally you've got people together for an extended period where they're in close collaboration and in close proximity over the course of that time to pingpong a ton of ideas like something that I've explained when talking about popup cities and popup Villages as a whole is

this concept of you've almost got a open container where each person is coming in as their own individual atom that has a dull light and moves kind of slowly that they start to move around and they interact with one another and as they interact they get brighter and they move faster until we've got this just total Hub of collective genius and ideas ping ponging after with one another and a ton of room for experimentation over the course of that month two-month long period what does it look like if we keep prolonging that a little bit further so all of a sudden you're turning what we have now in cities

where like cities are the densest place to have a lot of innovation happen how can we get a smaller number of people together but in closer proximity for a like dense amount of time that really drives these senius hubs um into the future and why is it valuable um what what we've seen is that like these could be the future of innovation hubs in some capacity um there's an opportunity to to really stimulate a startup ecosystem in a place so as James just spoke about Argentina being a spot where like it's very favorable for crypto um and it's very favorable for crypto startups what

could we do if we don't just promote like oh there's an opportunity here but on top of it we create a pop-up City for a short period of time that really stimulates the startup ecosystems that's there to help try and sustain it for a long period after um there's another aspect of it which it it's providing some economic leverage and the there's the funding efficacy and just the the ROI on the amount that's going into to running these pop-up cities is way better than conferences so for example putting on a conference like this some conferences that are for 5,000 people for three days are around the range of 20 to $30

million a pop of Village can be around $2 million for the full month or two Monon period which is just a significant difference um and they can be people can double down during that period on the actual products that they're working on so we're really excited about this opportunity to think about these protopia as a new movement around pop-up cities and pop-up Villages that can drive Innovation and startup ecosystems in different countries around the world and on that note I'm I'm going to hand over to Juan Bennett from protocol Labs um he's the founder of protocol Labs which has spun off so many different technologies that we have um

around filecoin and ipfs and have built an entire ecosystem uh very similar to kind of taking YC and then driving it into sort of a more decentralized uh network of projects and then I'm going to hand it over to Emmy who has been leading the cesa movement down in Argentina and working tirelessly to actually build a a popup that's going to happen in August that hopefully everyone here is going to be at so Emmy over to you