Earning crypto with your car: Hivemapper

Transcript

we use maps every single day 1.5 billion cars around the world what's the first thing you do when you get into a car you open a map well what if everyday drivers like you and I could contribute data to that very map every time we drive to the grocery store and get paid to do it that's exactly what Hive mapper is doing today we're joined by Ariel Sidman CEO and co-founder of Hive mapper in this thought-provoking interview we discussed the power of token incentive mechanisms and why Hive mapper is only possible on chain how Hive mapper honey token has incentivized 10,000 drivers to install a hive maper dash cam and map 10% of the

world's roads in just one year why the world needs better Maps we also briefly talk about what it's been like to be in the salana ecosystem from their lows a year ago to their incredible highs today this is web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet we are here to make sense of an onchain World in constant transformation I'm jbird your host for today's episode and I believe that deepin is going to change the world GM Ariel welcome to the show thank you for having me man I'm I'm looking forward to this okay before we jump in I'm super excited to talk all about Hive mapper but I've got to ask first what

what's it like being in salana right now now we often use the analogy that a blockchain is like a country and I'm in Canada and when Canada does well then the whole country does well everyone's excited there's a lot of energy salana is doing great right now tokens doing great lots of projects doing great a lot of attention has there been a shift in maybe the last few months that you've seen in terms of being in that ecosystem and how that's impacted you on the day-to-day or the business it hasn't impacted me to be you transparent I'm just happy for the salana team like a lot of those people they got beaten up pretty hard you know last year yeah and those guys like they just some people

would respond to that in a very negative way and either give up in the worst case scenario or you know just let it get to them so they couldn't make forward progress and so that team I think as a whole really just you know started to grind out and day by day improve things you know fight some of the fud provide better tools to the community members like hyp mapper projects and others and I think they just never forgot that they exist to serve projects right they need applications being built on that and they said what is in the best interest right how do we provide more value more utility better ecosystem to applications

that that those applications can Thrive and if those applications Thrive then we in turn will Thrive to me me I think is just a great example of customer focus right like at the end of the day like for better for worse Hive mapper has to be happy with salana as a great platform as a great ecosystem and if we are then you know we have no reason to switch and we don't have any reason to switch and you know that was true a year from a year ago when they were dealing with a whole set of challenges and it's still true today it's so great to hear it's also just so interesting a lot of projects that I've spoken to have been affected which I think says something about what you are building at HIV mapper you've got a road map you've got a plan and you're just in execution mode

in the end being part of the ecosystem I'm sure is nice and maybe has brought a little bit of extra attention towards you as a result but it doesn't change your game plan because quite frankly you're not an nft project that's just trying to get a bunch of attention right now and then figure out what they're building later which For Better or For Worse is a lot of the businesses that we see in this space yeah I think look I think that whole period of time I don't call it like probably q1 of 2022 up until like a month or two ago was very painful but very necessary for the crypto Community as a whole where you know I think at Forest people to like get serious about we we got to build things that everyday normal people

really want to use like the name of the game can't be speculation speculation is a business model I mean look it exists it's existed for a long long time right people speculating on Commodities of all types but that's not the end all be all right you're not going to change the world that way and so I think it's been like a very healthy process where people who were just in it for Pure speculation and nothing more have kind of get pushed out and then people who are here to actually build things that are useful and new kinds of things are still around and they're still grinding it out and it's great yeah I completely agree so let's talk about the new and exciting things that you're building I want to go back though first you started your career actually don't know if this

is where you started career but previously you worked at on the Yahoo Maps team on their product team and then you went and you co-founded a mobile tech startup focused on mapping Solutions and now you've founded High Mapp or a decentralized mapping solution which we'll get to I just did you always love Maps did you like the crossover between maps and Tech how did this career happen yeah I was definitely like one of those kids who had National Geographic on my shelves and was always opening it up to the map section and so yeah just like from a young age just that that took to me and I was always like one of these kids that would like when we go on road trips or just like just you know riding around town I grew up in Chicago mostly and I would you

know try to like memorize the names of streets and directions and all this kind of stuff and so it's like my brain just is very much oriented that way people's brains are oriented certain ways right some people are really good with words some people are very good at math I'm very good spatially and it's easy for me and it speaks to me and I like it but yeah once I start to get into no my a Yahoo I started in the search team right so search is how do you crawl and organize the world's information of that Maps is a very large segment of information data that's constantly changing and so you know just because of my prior aptitude and interest in maps that's kind of where I ultimately

navigated to once I was within the search team but no I wasn't like out of college I knew exactly I was going to work on maps and like boom it it was definitely not like that at all and that's okay I think like you kind of go through these processes and Journeys but then yeah once I started to work on maps I was like wow it is crazy and what was happening at the time was Google was starting to really build and scale out their mapping operation and they were collecting their own data and so forth and I started to just see how expensive it was and if you kind of just followed that logic through what was going to happen was because it was so expensive very few people companies even governments could afford to build a really high quality map so I always felt

like if you could figure out a way to Marshall everybody around the world to go and help you build a map you know you could actually build it much more cost effectively now the trick has always been is that you got to do it at a level that's high enough quality that it's actually useful for a lot of use cases so you you obviously have things like open stream map and others the problem sometimes with those Maps is the quality bar is fairly low for a lot of reasons and so the number of use cases that you can actually apply it to is is relatively small so you can't really like make a lot of money off of it and so you have to be able to like pass a certain quality bar or threshold such that you can do it and also crowdsource

or Lage all the people around the world to help you go build a map and that's kind of this like magical you know very very challenging recipe that you have to create and if you can do that then you can do something amazing so that's on the business or sorry the the more on the product technology side from a business perspective it was very infuriating to see a lot of companies get built on the backs of other people data and really know not really share any of the economic upside associated with those incredible data platforms that were getting created you know ways is a great example and I I want to make something clear I don't think ways lie to anybody I think the way they went about their business was very ethical you know but fundamentally the entire

mapping industry was always and other Industries as well it was like people just like give their hand over their data and there was like no expectation that you know wait we're building something here that is worth billions upon billions of dollars I I should get some of that you know like it shouldn't be like free and a lot of these people if you look at there's a wsh journ article from like 2018 where they interviewed all these like ways map editors they were like 20 or 30,000 of them and these people like dedicated many many hours per day editing these Maps you know to the extent that their spouses or wives whatever would be like what are you doing you know this isn't a job this isn't a bad job this is just

out of it's It's gamified so you did it right yeah exactly and so that you know I think now people are Savvy enough with technology and these data platforms where they're like way wa way way I'm actually contributing something here that is very useful and valuable to the entire map as a whole right like if we all do this like we're going to build something that's very valuable I mean look even open street map right and open street map is like the Wikipedia of maps in some ways it's run to some problems recently but it it definitely like achieved scale for sure but even there it's like wait like all these people like working at it and editing it and improving it and then other companies use that data for free and then they go

and make a lot of money right like we're talking about like Amazon you know going using open Stream app for free a 100% right and Amazon is not doing anything illegal and then they turn around and integrate it with AWS and some of the other products and so that's where it's unfortunate that that was the case for a long time and yeah I think we can start to change that and so is blockchain the big Difference Maker here obviously AI is as well and there's some aspects of that but could you build what you're building at Hive mapper without blockchain you could is a short version we tried and we were paying cash before we were paying people in crypto and

people in honey there's a couple problems with it the first problem is that it's a transaction uh cost problem so if you're trying to pay people in Nigeria 100 bucks 50 bucks or even 20 bucks whatever it is MH or Manila whatever the transaction fees associated with sending USD to them is atrocious right the time associated with it is ridiculous so I mean people would be like oh we have digital dollar no we don't like so that's number one and those people by the way to be really you know clear they would ask us can you send us crypto and this is like before crypto was as big as it is now so they were being asked especially the people in Manila they're like it's easy iier if you send me crypto because then I can

actually like pay for gas like the next day right whereas even you send me cash I have to wait three or four or five days whatever it was and that sometimes I go down to my bank and get I mean it's just very complicated I think that that was one which is transaction the other is that people just didn't trust us right they're like wait how do you know like you know this person's not getting scammed is this legit Whatever by putting all the rewards onto the blockchain it's all there it's all trans trans arent you don't have to trust me you don't have to trust high mapper it's there right and you see people all the time talking about it on Twitter Discord whatever it is and they're pointing to different reward transactions in terms of how much they mapped and how much they got rewarded so it's all there it's

great and it's trustworthy the other piece is that when we were paying cash there was like no passion in the system it was like a very coin operated there was no like people who were in it because they wanted to build something of D you know massive economic value that could change the world and all that and so you were missing that energy that passion in the community that now exists because it's all cash operated right it was like oh yeah pay whatever some people would be like H they would have their dash cam and it' be like looking up at the sky and you could see no Road and we wouldn't pay them and we get like all pissy like you're cheating we're not mapping the sky we're mapping and G you see any roads here whereas today Ian hi mapper people are

helping each other Ure that they're mount are good so that the overall map is really of high quality right because they know that it's not just about them it's about the entire community and so they want to make sure that like all the other mounts are well positioned just that the quality of the map is really really good just want to use the map right so you just start to think very differently about it because you're incentivized and motivated to create something that is really great that customers want you want to help the next person yeah it's truly unprecedented the incentive mechanisms that are possible as a result of blockchain and I think

we're all starting to see that but it's still so early it's incredible the power of community when everybody believes in the same thing and has incentive to put in that extra effort such as help somebody out that you know just needs a little help with mounting their dash cam okay I want to just explain quickly how Hive mapper works for all of our listeners so everyone understands so give us the rundown you you I've heard you explain it so well before of how you'd explain hi MPP somebody who hasn't heard of it before yeah so very simple so we're building a map you go and you buy one of these two dash cams from us there's um one that's three $300 and then there's one that's a little bit

price here like 550 you install the dash cam it takes you about five minutes to install the dash cam into your car and then you just drive like you normally drive right so we don't want people like only driving for high mapper we don't want you going out in the road specifically for Hive mapper just if you're already out on the road awesome you know this is a great addition to your drive the imagery offloads from the dash cam to Hive mapper then there's a system called map AI map AI is effectively extracting out from the imagery all of the objects that you see around you every single day right so hey there's a construction the construction works on is impacting two of the three lanes It Starts Here It Ends there there's a a 35 mile per hour speed limit

sign there's a 20 mile per hour speed limit sign for a school zone there's no leftand turn here between these hours all that kind of information that's the data that actually makes a map right and so there's these map AI trainers that are then training the map AI to get better and better and better at its job right and so there's all these different kind of fun games that you can play online some of are quite challenging it makes a little bit more fun and so there's about I don't know 10,000 or so people who are doing that on a daily basis and then ultimately we now have these great data products that we then turn around and we sell to businesses so unbeknownst to most people if you never use Google Maps what I tell people is if you never use Google Maps you are still

interacting with Google Maps as you go by your day right you open up lifp you open up Uber you go to FedEx website you know if you work at FedEx if you work at Uber if you work in the US government if you work at a real estate company if you work at a financial services company whatever right like you are interacting with maps and location data whether you know it or not and all of that data is being paid for right so the primary the biggest player in that market is definitely Google Maps I know companies that pay them $35 million a year right and that's like not you know it's a lot but it's there are companies that pay them more so it's a large business there are basically three big markets that we're attacking the first two that we're operating right now which is businesses

millions of businesses use it the second one is more nent but this is basically autonomous driving now there's a whole range of autonomous driving from something which is like a full Robo taxi you know like a cruise or like a wio right all the way down to like fors product which is called Blue Cruise that's basically Advanced Driver system it will drive for you in certain roads at certain times of day all that kind of stuff so all of those would definitely benefit from Maps like ours that are incredibly fresh and that market is nent but it's very interesting because customers are willing to pay for it right so in other words Ford B Cruise product is not free you you're paying an annual subscription to that product

because you need to it's not like a car like okay the car's engine has to work for you right it's an onoff switch but but with the adash system the expectation is one it it has to be maintained right and the expectation is just that it's constantly improving and expanding yeah and so C consumers in their mind are willing to pay a subscription fee for something that needs to be maintained improved and expanded upon and that's why you're seeing them adopt and pay for and so that's great because we're a key ingredient into those systems and so we're looking forward to the growth of that market the third Market which we don't yet play in is really the consumer navigation experience so this would be

something that's like competitive to like a ways or something like that that will take more years to develop all the layers of the map so that we can potentially compete in there but it is interesting because today when you're using something like a way you know you hit a button says hey there's construction here there's a cop here whatever it is they don't immediately believe you right they have to wait for a lot of people to then confirm that right and so it depends on your reading and a bunch of other factors in terms of whatever a whole bunch of stuff whereas the dash cam sees it you you don't have to believe I mean the dash cam is like is the image it's right there right and we can tell you immediately what's going on and we can tell you the impact of it

so we won't just tell you this construction well tell you the impact of that construction on navigation okay one out of the three lanes are closed or two out of the three lanes are closed that's a lot more actionable and it's a lot faster and so I do think that we can demonstrate some new capabilities when it comes to navigation that the world hasn't seen yet so just to get a a scope here what is the size of the map data market so I'll work backwards from the the navig I guess each three each of those three has their own Market basically right exactly so the first one navigation anywhere between like 20 to 30 billion dollars a year wow Google's

probably like has probably 18 to 20 billion of that the second one is smaller but it's growing quickly it's probably the fastest I mean there's 1.5 billion cars on the road and there's 70 million new cars that are basically shipped every single year of those 70 million let's say 10 million have the right sensors to be able to provide those types of products right so you see this coming outline where at the very early stages it's already in the billions it will only get bigger as time goes on so the critical thing is if you can get there in the early stages and kind of grow with the industry and the industry so that's kind the stage we're at right now and then the the last one which is the B2B you're selling to millions of businesses that's probably the most mature right and so that's also

probably eight to 10 billion a year okay so the second one will be thear to be very clear by yeah yeah it's just that the the hardware is not there yet on most cars on the road but it's it's coming and right now how many drivers are have the hive mapper dash cam and what are the results how much of the world have you mapped yeah so let's see in one year since launch we've mapped about a little over 10% of the world's roads so I think we're coming up on 7 million unique Road kilometers but that's actually a little bit more that's 12% of the world roads in one year so that's like unheard of like in terms of the the rate of growth quite quite quite

fast that number will just continue to grow like it's actually gone we've accelerated the growth of unique Road kilometers which is really hard to do right because as you've you know a road can only be unique once right yeah once you've seen it it's not unique I mean it still needs to be refresh but it just becomes harder and harder to find you know roads that are not unique and yet we've still gone from 6 to 7 million faster than we went from 5 to six so it's accelerating that is Testament to a lot of new people jumping in buying dash cams okay I don't know the back we're back ordered now pretty pretty substantially I me publicly we're you know till May we're trying to change

that say I I think a lot of our listeners are going to be looking to purchase a dash cam after this episode so uh be patient everybody uh it's not a bad thing that they're back ordered everything's going well yeah so the name of the game is there's certain parts of the world where like let's take the Europe for example we've done very well in places like Lisbon and Amsterdam and you know Madrid whatever but now we want to get further into the secondary market so this would be like a maray France uh Genoa Italy like those kinds of places and then even there's certain parts of Asia right where we may have okay coverage but not amazing you know like a new Deli or Jakarta or whatever so that that's so but look a lot of that stuff will just kind of

happen naturally and organically the other aspect of this is maintaining freshness predictability what I mean by that is look there are certain parts of Phoenix Arizona now that we see 180 times a year for context Google Street View sees that location maybe every 12 months once wow so we're just seeing a given location a lot more but what we want is we want predictability of the freshness Cadence so what I mean by that is okay that given location in Scottdale Arizona or in Phoenix Arizona we see it at least twice a week right take a given location in the Phoenix Metro Area 95% of them we're seeing them at least once or twice

a week okay then you have predictability right because a lot of customers are like well it's great that you can see this place in Scottsdale Arizon 180 times but if you saw it all within a three-month period and not through throughout the 12 months that's not as good right that's kind of like the next level is that predictability about the refresh Cadence how many dash cams total in the network uh there's now they're not all active but there's about 20,000 okay we shipped about 12,000 and then there's probably like another 8 to 10,000 or in back order and this would be split between a regular driver just anybody who's interested in

supporting the project would commercial fleets be involved ride share gig drivers they also involved I guess it's kind of across all those categories of drivers yeah I mean look it just by definition an Uber driver lift driver is goingon to do a lot better than somebody like myself totally yeah and so if you know a lip driver Ru driver Amazon Flex driver you know all those kinds of folks that are out on the road they were because that's their job then this is a great fit for them and we definitely have a lot of those we're very thankful to that community and look look there it's also you know what we hear from them oftentimes is like especially with the S model which has a lot of the features that they want just inside of a dash cam for security purposes if they get into

an like if they get into an accident right and it's not their fault they want evidence of that because they don't want their insurance rates skyrocketing if their insurance rocket Skyrocket that could be with them for like two three years and that's just eating into their annual or monthly income so they wanted for that purpose 100% but then I think there's a sense of it's it's fun right like you see you know at the end of the day or end the week you see like what you mapped and how much you helped contribute to the map and so you feel like you're just a part of something that is bigger so you have a sense of purpose and the community is kind of fun it's kind of ruckus at times as well so you can kind of jump in there and it's fun and what would be the

rewards that somebody might get for can you give me an example okay so this is varying there are some people who come into high maper thinking that you get you know X number of Honey tokens for every single kilometer that you do and it's fixed and it's the same everywhere that's not the case at all in fact I tell people if there's a system that presents that to you you should run away fast because like they will never build a map that's useful right because everyone will just attach it to a bus or whatever it is yeah and just go the same thing and they'll never have any coverage they'll never have any freshness right and they'll be very fresh on like a couple bus routes so it is very dependent upon which region of the world you're mapping in

and then your driving patterns right but if you're in a good region of the world right I mean when we say good region of the world what do we really mean like well where's economic activity happen right there's a lot more econ economic activity in a place like Amsterdam or Soul than there is in some random little city in Indiana right and so you know you will definitely make more and then the other factor is that if the region is progressing well so in other words there's enough drivers who are helping mot it towards complete coverage and you will start to earn more than if the region was just like you and one other person and it was never going to reach a level of actual true 100% coverage so there's a lot of factors in there but yeah in general I mean I I haven't

looked at this closely but I think like you know a good driver who's driving like you know fairly diverse frequently I think per week they were doing like 1,200 to like 1600 honey tokens but my data on that could be a little bit dated so don't quote me on that I'd have to go back and get better information yeah then that's okay I think I mean you brought up a good point in that there is utility in a dash cam for itself so you don't join Hive mapper this isn't going to become your fulltime paying job just driving around mapping the roads right you're doing this while you're doing your regular life whether that be a Uber driver or whether that just be you're driving your kid to soccer practice

whatever ever it might be and you're getting token rewards based upon how much you're on the road and I think this is true of a lot of deepin projects that the rewards are great and there's definitely incentive there and that's important but it's just as much about being a part of building def decentralized infrastructure and a belief in that and that's sort of where I want to lead to next is like I want to talk about the current solutions that we have for mapping and I mean you've used the word freshness a lot it's a word that comes up quite a bit and I'm guessing that is one thing that A decentralized system can offer that a centralized system can't offer but I'm guessing there's also other reasons why

a decentralized mapping system is a better long-term solution for the world than Google owning 70% of our mapping infrastructure and having complete control of it yeah so there's if you're talking to a customer what do they go through through right it does start with coverage at the end of the day like you have to have like a really meaningful amount of coverage we've definitely hit that at this point now where we can talk like there's a lot of companies they won't even talk to you like if you only have like half a million or a million unique red kilometers they're not going to spend the time talking to you right well it's not worth it yeah we've definitely resep we so you enough coverage the second thing is quality right like it's the quality there then it comes to freshness so that then it's

like okay what's your frequency of seeing a give you fresh enough and there's a whole wide range of use cases some need very very fresh some need a little bit less and so there's different varieties in there I think the world I mean look would anybody say I want news that is less fresh right every want breaking news right does anyone ever say hey I don't want my package delivered at quite as quickly as that right like slow down the delivery of right that's and so nobody also says like I want a map that hasn't been updated recently like again nobody says that and if you seen to them would you on a map that's more recently updated or one that has only seen whatever a given Street in San Francisco a year and a half ago like it's very

obvious what the answer to that is and so that is crucial right like if you just talk to mik mapping people that is the really the most critical thing and in in our case the vector that we're competing aggressively on and where we have a massive massive Advantage I mean look I think there's other things here this kind of speaks a little bit to the macro I think there's two other interesting ideas so one is there are behind the-scenes conversations that you and I never get exposed to where the government of you know name your government calls up Google and says we don't like the way that you drew these boundaries in your maps that needs to change if you want to continue to do business in our country that needs to change right or we don't even like the

way that when you open up the map that City at this Zoo level that we don't like is being displayed before our capital city so you need to change the labeling order which cities appear when you're opening up the map and you know I can see that for sure we're never exposed to any of that all those changes that are happening I mean obviously like the people at Google are good people the people at Apple are good people and you know I think they they fight back right as much as they can but at the end of the day if you want to sell you know Google ads and Google and you want to you know sell iPhones or whatever in this country you operate in that yeah you're going to agree with them on those

yeah and you know I know for a fact that like a lot of the people who work at Google and apple like aren't very happy with you know that but those conversations happen right to be open and transparent about that and so I think it would it would be very interesting you know if we put the boundaries of all the different countries and cities and St like that onto the blockchain if there are changes to those those happen openly and transparently and so it's not just these like back room conversations that happen between the government of a certain country and a big tech company it's like no no no like here's the boundaries and if there's changes to them then everyone will see so I think that that's pretty interesting I think in terms of just the economics of these systems we talked

about this a little bit which is with Google you have no economic upside you are helping them build their map day in day out you are helping them build their map and maintain their map and all that and you have zero economic upside they know everywhere you go you go to a bar you go to a strip club you go anywhere they know it right I don't think that's a very good world to live in right where like one company knows all of this information about you where you go what you do and then they just like use your data to like basically improve their products for free right and so I think the world does need an independent mapping company that is being governed and run by the people who actually are

building these Maps right there's only one human species that needs maps and that's us right you know so I think the people who actually like use these things day in day out and in in most cases are the ones building them right because we're effectively we should be the ones who are effectively the bet the primary beneficiaries of that versal a Google shareholder and when you say are honey holders given governance opportunities right now yes and no so yes in the sense that it's relatively small set of people who have it but they all are honey to you know all are honey token holders so it's not like you can come in and you can just

start voting anybody yet yeah we don't have that yet to be clear that's okay you can't start there anybody who started with everybody gets a vote fails yeah so yeah I I think now that the system is becoming you know more mature more successful and it's very clear like in the community who are the thoughtful people right that I think it makes sense to start to say okay there's a guy in in the high member Community his name is miji and just you know I don't always agree with him but he's thoughtful right he can weigh all of the different tradeoffs and talk about okay here's the pros and cons of this approach or the pros and cons of this approach or whatever it is and that's interesting

you know that's a lot more interesting than someone just comes in like uh how do I get more honey Chens how more well okay well let's start with the customer right let's start with what does the customer need what's the utility what's the value that's being created here and then we kind of work our way backwards to okay how does that whatever yeah so people like miji got to figure out some way to start to kind of build that part out more robustly so that they can have a greater voice he already has a pretty big voice because everyone like kind of looks up to him in the community and he's considered trustworthy and he has a podcast that he does outside of HIV mapper where he's sharing his opinion he runs a fleet I think he has like 70 drivers or something like that don't

quote me on that he knows the problems in intimately himself and so I think yeah we're at that point where that will start to happen where individuals who have kind of demonstrated that they have the best interest of the network at heart and he you know he's like he's like very sober about this he's like the way you actually create value here is you get customers like end a story what he's a businessman at heart for sure this is the tough thing of building with Community is you also have a business to run and we've seen that a lot in this space where the nft Mania and the Ico Mania really let us down a dangerous

path because a lot of people thought magic interet money we can just print money everywhere and create value but it doesn't work that way you've got to go create a business and sell to customers and give them a product that they want and that is obviously very important too and community members a lot of them especially in the crypto space DG can be number go up only and that's all I want to see so that balance is a challenging balance but the interesting thing about deepend Pro projects is in a deepend project I am as a community member also giving to the project in some way right I am giving data I am giving resources giving my access to my dash cam by driving around that's why I'm so bullish on deep in projects like I get very

excited about these because it is a different relationship than we've seen in the past which as you said it's the more typical Google Apple relationship you get my data and you just take it for whatever economic benefit you want and I have zero gain and I quite frankly don't even really know I'm kind of in the dark yeah yeah look I think everything you said said is 100% true I'll caveat it if I can add two additional parts to it so one is that look there are still people in the deepend projects that just want to see numbers go up they're contributors they don't give a about like the customer they don't give a about a lot I sorry if I en curse but you know hopefully their voices get drowned out by more sober

thoughtful people but the reality is is that those people do exist and I always tell folks as like look if you get involved in a deepend project you really got to understand what is the product on the other side that is going to generate Revenue because I'm basically a worker right helping create something that's useful right through this driving or my dashcam or whatever I'm doing and if I don't believe that there is some valuable service and product that people are willing to purchase you should not get involved Right End the story or if you just feel like hey this is like too wide open right like a lot of times I

see these deep in projects and it's like we'll do this and this and we'll get into this market and we'll get into this market like if you're going after four different markets that are totally different you're not going after any Market yeah know yeah and if okay yeah there may be some adjacencies in the future but like what's your market right now today where you're going to have a product that is useful and competitive and better than the alternative I see a lot of that right now quite frankly it's a little bit scary right because I think we got to be very very careful with deepen in my view because if one or two of these projects go sideways then it's negative for the entire category and so that's why I'm trying to basically tell people as much is they'll

listen like hey let's really understand like what is sustainable right and what is sustainable is like what we've been talking about is having real customers if you're going to have real customers then you got to be in a real market right and if you got to have something that is actually differentiated and I still see like way too much of like a hand waving right blah blah blah blah blah I was like if I don't know what you're talking about then I don't know like that's a problem so are there any deepin projects that you are excited about that are either happening right now or coming up soon well look I think the mobile what helium's done on the mobile side specifically yeah I mean look the iot market is just not that not that big not

yet yeah it could be big and you know and like there's not existing sensors that are already integrated into like hundreds of millions billions of devices whereas the cellular like there's already a you know a chip set they don't like go ask Hardware companies to go you know build a chip set into the thing yeah I think on the mobile side obviously a very competitive market but I think there's there's a ton of demand and it's it's much clearer like how you can grow that into a big business for them so that one I'm very excited about the one that I haven't seen but I would love to see is decentralized energy okay if you can start to say and I know this like a very reg it would have to be who's somebody who came from the regulated energy industry but look I mean I pay you I live in California so I

pay pg& a lot of money per month right and it would be obviously I'm looking for a cost reduction there but I'm also looking for something that is more local energy production right so it' be really cool if like my community like even my neighborhood could produce energy and then share energy with one another that would be really fascinating right because it's all it's it's local so it's like easier to transport that energy to me yeah little bit it's probably a little bit more reliable as well and obviously just more cost effective yeah and that presumably would come through solar solar is the one that comes up for me

wind feels like it would be only for certain locations and wind also feels much more expensive on the hardware side although I'm not an energy expert by any means yes Sol by far is the biggest one right and it's already happening right where it's like hey look maybe you're going to install some solar install a slightly larger array on your house and then start to share it your community and so you put you know 20% or 30% or whatever it is or maybe you're away for the summer partial the summer you put in 100% so that's all up to you in terms of how much you want to give over to this decentralized energy community so I I think something like that could it's it's hard but it man is it valuable yeah

fascinating I feel like one of the things that we need which Hive mapper is leading the way on is just examples of deepin projects that have done both build the community and built a product that is sustainable and has a profitable business because it's very difficult to do both and we've seen multiple examples where you try to do one but you can't do the other I mean you said it yourself right it's a big big red flag so once we have more of those models there will be more people who go out and try but I I hope if anyone's listening and you're in the energy sector and you want to go do this hit us up because I'd love to see

somebody take on that project yeah I I would too I I met an entrepreneur and very talented guy and I haven't catch caught up with him in about a year but I hope he figures it out I me I think he's yeah he's the right kind of background to figure it out cool okay we've talked about Hive mapper Dash camps so if any of our listeners are interested in getting involved in high mapper you can purchase Das cam $300 to $500 we're going to put a link in the show notes check it out this isn't a a sponsored promo or anything like that I just really believe in supporting the H mapper project I think this is a great project we talked briefly about hi mapper Ai TR map AI trainers maybe just go back to that actually we didn't talk a ton about that but that's another cool

way way that people can get in the Pro involved in the project can you explain that yeah sure for that you don't need a dash cam you can just like open up a web browser find the map AI trainers section on our website and then just sign up and start training the AI system and you're basically there's like these little games and so we'll say hey we think there's a 35 hour speed limit sign tell us whether or not that's correct right hey we think this turn restriction sign is located here we'll place it on a satellite based map tell us whether or not that is correct right and so then they'll try to inspect the imagery check this out this is actually a little bit more like detective work it's kind of fun okay so if you're into like geoguesser and those types of games this

is a little bit like that that is another kind of games but there's probably like 15 to 20 different types of games right and then those are also token incentives rewards yes yeah okay and then tell us a bit about Open Road season 2 that is happening right now I think it started a month ago I think it's started in December I can't remember exactly yeah so we have this these campaigns where there's open roads all these kind of different ways to grow the map and also have fun while we're doing it right and so first season was all right let's get to Six Million unique Road kilometers which is 10% of the world's roads as fast as we can right so there was all these kind of fun different incentives and we ran these different campaigns and whatever trying

to most was were during the summer so like people take road trips and stuff like that during the summer so it's kind of fun to get out into these different parts of the world that you know we usually don't travel to so there was some incentives behind this this for season two it's like how do we get more dash cams out into the world and into the right places in the world right so basically there's like a referral system built into it where you're kind of helping refer your friends and as you refer your friends you're earning honey tokens along the way and you know this really speaks to we don't necessarily need like another 500 dash cams in Amsterdam right Amsterdam has done quite well but gz we would really like to get into a Marse France or a nce France or you know some of these smaller secondary

and tertiary cities help us get there right and you know we have customers right now who you know like hey we want everything you have in the EU but we see that you know Mar you don't have as much you know or Genoa you don't have as much right the world is a very big place it turns out that's really the the spirit behind open road season 2 is give people like a little bit more incentive to bring their friends on as dash cam contributors and give them a little bit of an incentive and a nudge to do that but obviously there is already an incentive as you said if I am the only person living in my community with a dash cam then I most likely won't get very much rewards

because there's not much value in the product the data that I'm giving whereas if there's hundreds of people in my community there's going to be more of a product that can be offered so there's that incentive as well clearly there is yeah I mean there's kind of like you it's multi-layered right so okay it's at the regional level there's obviously at the global level this is a little bit more like help us sell more dash cams it's kind of funny because like when we launched the when we launched it I mean obviously this helped Drive dash cam cells but there were some other things that also helped out now we we're dealing with like this massive backorder list uh so I was actually out in uh our Manufacturing facility which is not in the San Francisco Bay area so I flew in

it was like a quick trip but really to try to figure out how do we increase production okay and so for those of you whove ever built Hardware you know this but you know every single station how do you you move that make that station a little bit more automated make that station a little bit faster even the boxes right we're looking at boxes and basically being like okay how do we optimize the box design such that it just takes less time to fold the Box up and package it right so each one of these like Little Steps goes into like how do you scale uh mapping Network it's one of the things about any dpin project that I do not envy is the hardware side

it's one thing to build a tech company and the software but to also build a hardware company at the same time I I have a lot of respect for your patience in that process it's yeah well look we tried doing it with the iPhone and Android the smart okay right it didn't work as a short version and okay it didn't work for a couple reasons one is that customers hated the data product what do I mean by that like you know if you have an Android and I have an Android they're probably not the same imager right if they're not the same imager then they don't have the same camera intrinsics if they don't have the same camera intrinsics then from a computer vision perspective that becomes very very challenging also just like for the human I mean putting aside computer vision just for the human eye they're

all different sizes and shapes resolutions and all that kind of stuff right the same thing is true for iPhones over the years camera specs Etc that's issue number one issue number two is that when you put your phone so every time you get into the car right you have to mount your phone okay unmount it and then you have to open up the app and hit record or play or start mapping whatever it is if you're just going for pizza and then you come out or you grab a cup of coffee like you're not you're not yeah exactly you're like I gotta to my next thing or whatever it is like people are busy they're not going to sit there and do that for very long so our turn rats were just horrible and then for people who were mapping in like warmer climates

Like a Phoenix Arizona or something like that they were just overheat so then the phone would overheat then they get freaking pissed off understandably so like my phone overheated you ruined my phone yeah you ruined my phone I can't use it now for the next hour I have to wait for it to cool down so I can't use maps or I can't listen to music this sucks and they're like screw it I'm not doing anymore right so it was a bad experience overall and we just were like we got to build you know and then we tried a third party dash cam and then we're like now this isn't working for a whole variety of reasons then we decided to go build own you tried you tried everything you could first before building your own and then came to The Unwanted conclusion that the only way to

do this was build your own Hardware yeah I mean I mean it would kind of be if you build your own dash cam and then you realize holy I could have used a phone or some like yeah you know it would be yeah wor way worse exactly so you definitely want to exhaust all your options before you you know you commit to something that big our turn rates are incredibly low and our average driver productivity is like 600 to like 900 kilometers per week wow and so you just have like a very committed Supply base you know of of of drivers and you also have you know many of these people are like professional drivers or commercial drivers right so they're just doing a ton so yeah it's worked out I mean I

remember there was an investor who was like I'm going to pass on you because I don't think your Hardware thing is gonna scale and I was like I think you're wrong sometimes I'm tempted to like reply to that email now being like here's unique Road kilometers yeah but I'm bigger than that I'm bigger yeah totally yeah yeah yeah no I wouldn't do to to that level but sometimes investing is hard right so like you're you're going to get a whole bunch of stuff wrong yeah yeah totally totally but it would it might feel good someday okay before we wrap here couple fun question about the year ahead what are you most looking forward to on a hive mapper basis and then maybe more broad crypto Tech on chain world what

are you looking forward to the next year so there's two things I mean look I I get very excited when people find new ways to use the map right I mean I know all the ways that you know existing customers want to like the big macro use cases like those are very obvious but then there's also like I think once once you introduce a new product into the world that is so different than things that we previously have I mean the phone is a you know our smartphone is a great example of that like who would have ever thought that like the primary mode of communicating between people would ultimately transitions from text or or audio voice into pictures right and Snapchat came along and was like hey the way people actually communicate

primarily is visually through pictures that was only possible because you had this new sensor called the iPhone where you could do that with and so I do think there's going to be new applications and new use cases for what we're building and so I'm very excited to start to see some of that start stuff unfold here so that that's number one number two is on the dash cam side and you know part of my other reason for the trip to this our manufacturing facility was to start to build build out kind of the Next Generation dash cam you know we've learned a lot from these two models that we've had in there so how do we take all those learnings and then package it up into something that is even better make it easier for contributors right make it better even better from a positioning

perspective right push more and more of the compute stuff to the ad there's all these things that we want to go do and you know we now have the experience both on the software side and the hardware side we had always The Experience on the software side but now we have lot more experience on the hardware side to be able to go execute on a broader ambitious level in the crypto worlds in the tech world I I just hope people keep their sanity maybe it's kind of just nature where you have these like boom and bus cycles and I think it would be healthier for everybody is if they weren't so extreme and either because the truth of the matter is is that there's you know now with crypto and now with AI and now with some additional new

platforms Beyond just a smartphone just beyond your computer you know AR VR and all that kind of stuff there's just so many ingredients for smart people to come and come along and put into a recipe that creates a new compelling product experience and there will obviously be a lot of failed experiments through that process which is all natural but I think if you like overhype everything it hurts the entire industry because then the pain on the other side is going to be abrupt and it's going to be extreme I mean look there's natural cycles to these things that's just a reality of that but what happens is is like Risk goes on and on and on and on like we turn risk on on on on on and then when

it comes off it comes off fast yeah it goes boom yeah then you know there's Carnage left yeah exactly yeah yeah it leaves a a wake of Destruction that most people it's like they didn't want to see it right like they they avoided the the warnings they F moded in and now they just want to point the finger at somebody else and that hurts everybody because it labels the entire industry in a negative light I mean it's definitely an exciting time right now when the energy is high and people are feeling good but it also I feel like I'm seeing top signals everywhere because there's

just so many so much frothing happening and that really scares me and I think our listeners know that we certainly preach patience and a very intentional approach to building a business to investing to however you approach anything in life not just foming into the next meme coin or whatever yeah I mean I think it's incumbent upon people to ask like what is I said it before like what is the utility value being created here for real businesses for real consumers and if you can't if you don't have a very crisp and clear answer on that then I don't know bad bad situation red flag two more questions before we wrap here just a personal fun

question I mean you could you could answer this in a crypto blockchain way but what's one thing you've purchased recently for under $100 that brings you Joy that's a good question it's too bad the dash cam is more than 300 otherwise you could this is this is like very specific but it's not a product I guess it's a service so I'm very into like transportation system and obviously maps and whatever and so LAX for those of you who know LAX you have to take a bus to a separate section of the airport that's where you pick up your Uber or your lift car right it is a hassle especially like when you've landed at the airport at like 11 pm or whatever it is and then

you have to like get on a bus with a lot of other people whatever like a big hassle or you can pay slightly more so let's say like you know you're going whatever to Downtown LA or Hollywood or whatever you can pay slightly more and get whatever like the next grade up of the car like it's usually 20 bucks more 30 bucks more whatever it is and in only those situations if you pay a little bit more will they come and pick you up curbside and so I usually don't do this because I like freaking hate having to pay that extra 20 bus it is but I did it and I was like oh my God that was so much easier though um so I like splurged I felt when I hit the button I felt bad but then

yeah definitely felt good when you got in the car and didn't have to get on the bus yeah I'm sure sure this is like a solvable problem right it was like the design and transportation system needs to solve this problem which I think they're doing now they have like an automated people mover type of train system yeah but it's a solvable problem and it's like you know here now Uber is making 20 extra bucks to like kind of them yeah yeah yeah no that profit should not be going to Uber that's for for sure okay last question if you had a billboard that 1 billion people were going to see what would you write on it take more risk good one yeah I think like the world has gotten to the state where taking risk in your personal life or

your business life is perceived as like very negative or very scary or whatever it's like we're now being fed the media is full of a lot of of fear porn and that's being fed into our phones fed into our brains constantly and if you just do that you know enough and enough enough people be like I don't want to take a risk that's like bad I don't want to start a company I don't want to move to a different city I don't like whatever and anything that is slightly uncomfortable the media is just consistently telling you that's bad that's scary high alert all that kind of stuff and none of that is true very few you know very very few I mean even commercial Aviation I don't think anyone has died in the US in commercial

aviation in like eight years okay but but now like the incident that Alaska Airlines had everyone's like oh my God that's super scary you know in the grand scheme of things it is not scary at all right yeah I think it's like how do you start to teach Society to start to re-engage in more risky I don't it's not even so it's not even risk but like just take risk it's totally life and it's a normal part of life to like try different things and fail at some of them and be like oh that's not for me or like oh I learned this and how do I apply to this other thing I'm about to next and whatever it is yeah I think like up and down I mean my dad is a professor so I know a little bit about like higher education and Academia and

all that kind of stuff and like they're part of the problem as well quite frankly yeah it reminds me the old saying do one thing every day that scares you simple advice but it can hold true power to just what that that can impact your life to just step outside your comfort zone whether I think like you said risk doesn't have to be going all in on read at the casino risk can be just something that makes you uncomfortable on a day-to-day basis but that slow progression that slow change can make a big difference in the long run I mean I just I saw this stat where it's like the number of people moving from cities in the United States is like at a record low and look people's

economic opportunities are you know in some cases being limited by those decisions and a lot of it just comes down to that makes me uncomfortable the ideal of moving through this other City is very uncomfortable and I'm not going to do it right and they've been taught right like at school like trigger warning safe places all this kind of stuff is exacerbating the problem and it is okay to sometimes be uncomfortable and that is totally normal part of life and it's like how do we get back into that and I think that I know you're in Canada but I would say this like Canada and America and many other parts of the western world one of the reasons they've done so well as they had these very

Innovative economies well those Innovative econ economies are dependent upon people taking risks yeah people challenging themselves people moving to different cities to be around other people who are likeminded or interested in that specific industry or whatever it is and if that starts to collapse that's really bad for all of us very well said that was a a nice shift away from our episode we could I feel like we could keep going on a on a life conversation those were good questions those were like I I asked this question during interviews which is what's one thing you believe that very few other people believe but now I'm the the billboard one specifically I'm GNA potentially add that to my portfolio of questions well you know the billboard one came from Tim

Ferris it was always one of my favorite podcasts and he used he doesn't ask it anymore he hasn't asked it in a few years but he used to ask the billboard question which I always found was one of the be best nuggets from his podcast because it's you know dumb it all down into a few words if you had a few words to share what would it be and uh it's always interesting to hear what people say you know a lot of people Express life life advice not many people on the show some people take it as a marketing opportunity you know they're like Hi mapper here's a QR code buy a dash cam right but most people take it for the life advice which is always refreshing yeah yeah yeah this has been absolute pleasure thanks so much for the time today excited to see

Hive mapper over the next next year definitely I'm going to look into a dash cam myself I don't do a ton of driving unfortunately as I I tend to stay at home with my I work from home and my family is at home and I just drive to the ski hill but maybe maybe I'll be getting some honey soon and I definitely encourage our listeners to check out Hive mapper grab a dash cam if you haven't already done so because it's just so great to participate in opportunities to be part of these projects and I think Hive mapper is going to be one of the big big ones to watch this year thanks man this has been a lot of fun okay have a good one thanks so much for listening in everybody have a great day thank you for listening to web through Academy your one trusted

source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for our free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web3 insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3 make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and web3 are risky and you should never invest more than your willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one