Starting an L1 from scratch with Mo Shaikh

Transcript

[Music] let me just uh share a little bit about Mo's background and I'll read it because it's written better than I could ever say it uh MO is the CEO and co-founder of apos a blockchain designed for the next billion users MO is a three-time founder and expert in going from zero to one and scaling products Mo has led blockchain strategic Partnerships for Novi Facebook's wallet uh founded merido which is a platform to create and trade fractional ownership and real estate assets uh and led strategy at consensus as a first generation immigrant creating an accessible Financial system for all

is personal to Mo uh and so let's dive into it and and I think uh that's actually a great place to start you know your your story of uh of where you started and how you came to the US is a beautiful one maybe you could just uh talk about that for a little bit sure um my my parents um first of all before I go into that congratulations for all of you being in these uh seats um it's amazing that you're here um and it's truly my pleasure and my honor to to share my story with you all so just you know I just want to say amazing to that you guys are here that's cool um and on that point of like these being very privileged seats to have um to make the most of them is something that's uh a reminder for me going back to my rots

uh my parents grew up in an area in Karachi Pakistan where you know you had to walk to get water um and in search of you know better opportunity they immigrated to Abu Dhabi when they got married um I was born there my younger sister was born there and in Abu Dhabi they realized education system is not going to be what they had imagined it would be so it's still pretty bad in in this is 1980s uh late 1980s um and my dad really pushed hard to see if there were other places for for for us to get a better education um he didn't even graduate from high school um the first uh during the first Bush Administration there was a massive push for immigration um and my my dad and my mom both applied my dad got rejected because the that's

how the lottery system worked my mom had her master's degree and uh she got luckily accepted and um my parents sold their wedding jewelry that they had and packed their bags up and moved to a place called Brighton Beach it was not quite the beach that they were expecting um yeah for those who don't know uh brighten Beach is like a very uh Orthodox Jewish section of Brooklyn I think the how the beach is probably what 20 miles if that from uh from Brighton Beach yeah that's exactly right and it's cold and gray as like New York uh is in Winter Times Obviously um but I grew up I grew up there and um it was a very you know it was just an amazing upbringing

for me and and how I look at the world today uh and and how diverse Brooklyn was itself and so um and even looking at the crowd here there's you know people that come from all walks of life which is which is beautiful it's a representation of of the universe and that really shaped uh my perspective in life uh journey to you know eventually getting to where I am today awesome and I mean I think the um uh I mean your your your dad and mom had to take a pretty big step back to uh to be able to like come to the US and uh and support your family there and and you grew up in a in a pretty uh diverse neighborhood you look different than uh everybody that lived there I'm I'm curious if um if that experience of you know coming to

a new place uh uh being different influenced like how you thought about your career and and ultimately LED you to do what you're doing no no doubt about it I mean I think so we grew up really poor and I think you know that story uh we were on two forms of welfare um my parents had three more kids and and we grew up in a basement apartment my dad was working in a bedding Factory in the morning and driving a taxi cab at night and my mom was a stay-at-home mom and so and we weren't able to move out of that a basement apartment until I was 25 and or sorry graduated out out of college um but growing up like it didn't feel like I was poor inside my house but kids are mean and and and bullies and so I I

definitely got you know my ass kicked um I was very little and had a late stage growth spur that wasn't really that big of a growth spur I'm like luckily average height now uh and I loved basketball so it just like made it even worse um but you know whether it was playing basketball in the streets of Brooklyn um which is a sport that I luckily still get to to play here and there when I can um to you know growing a you know growing up in a very different uh uh Dynamic environment it certainly uh thickens your skin um it makes you a little bit more resilient I would say and I think that resiliency is something that is incred ibly valuable almost more so than how you think about

a strategic you know product Market fit plan uh because you will fail and as you were sort of naming all the different things I worked on I was like wow I think I failed at all of those things and you just have to have this incredible Spirit of like I failed I'm going to get up and do it again and again and again and be really stubborn and that's kind of you know luckily the uh the mentality that I had cuz I mean if I just you know missed my shot or laid down on the floor after I got my ass kicked I wouldn't be able to get up to where I am and so you know it is it is an important reminder to be able to to have those types of environments and learn from them and and talk about how I mean one thing that I think is

interesting about your path right is that you're um you you didn't uh started as a software engineer and then uh discover blockchains you had like you know you you were I'd call it like Blue Chip traditional so you know Black Rock BCG uh Facebook working or actually I guess consensus and between like how did you go from uh you know some of the most traditional firms in the in the US to doing what you're doing yeah yeah there's a funny story before I got to Blue Chips you want me to share that one I'm going off script here so make Jason nervous um so uh in uh in in I guess it was what two when did the iPod come out I was what 200 iPod 2003

yeah 2003 so 2003 2004 my my best friends dad had season Nicks tickets and he was an accountant and I was like wow I need to become an accountant so I can get season tickets to the Knicks that was my that was my framework and logic right um and uh but the cool thing was the iPod came out and I was like a total dweeb and excited about new technologies and played around with things like mini discs and the user experience was abysmal like getting music from Napster and like AOL chat rooms and then like eventually putting it on a device to take with you and while that was happening basketball players were were carrying CDs with them to um to to games uh to get hyped up for the game and I was like this is

inefficient to hold a CD player while you're warming up at a basketball game and uh manyi disc and and then of course the iPod came out but people did not allow to put music on iPod at the time the Apple Store was not there I was able to sort of hack and do it in a much more efficient way through Napster and other you know uh yeah that's how it was done that's how it's done I mean you know that's uh it that's and so noticing that problem and having that wherewithal to say you know I think there's something better we can do after the Knicks games we knew my friend and I would hang out and try to get signatures from the players and so we knew where all the players were coming and so we got a bunch of iPods loaded them up with some

hip-hop songs and tried to sell iPods to the NBA players it worked and and that's how you that's how you became a cryp entrepreneur yeah and uh well that's when I realized wait I can sell something and if I solve a problem and a couple you know that was like my first entrepreneurial venture and I was like okay this is like a not of sustainable business I'm going to go work at a legitimate company and make my parents proud um and and got to work at really cool places like RBC and black rock where I learned Financial systems and how money moves around the world how it's you know created how you you know create Structured Products and and the pain points that existed you know Black Rock I was we were talking about this earlier in 2012 we creating things called ETFs or ey shares inhouse a

passive investment product that was quite pioneering for them and eventually helped them amass you know all sorts of Market data build a fintech product called Aladdin which allows them to do real-time risk management um or close to realtime risk management um and it was just interesting to see all these problems get solved within large companies and the value just stayed there and it took a lot of time for them to get there while I was there and facing these sort of problems and building out stuff my mentor pushed me to go to B school I went to business school I followed her guidance knowing not knowing what I don't know um and just trusting good smart people around you to help give you perspective and and shape your uh uh exposure uh I went to BCG uh after business school and BCG was

an interesting time for me because you know I was a very fragmented thinker you know I would have all these quirky ideas given the environment that I grew up in but I wasn't able to really shape them into something where I can focus that energy to get to product Market fit and Consulting helped really shape and help me create Frameworks um about how I think about going to Market and you know HDI is here he works at abas too and leads a lot of our defi work and we were just talking about having a framework for how we how we think about defi for example and some of the most simple Frameworks end up being the most powerful Frameworks um and so you know being at these Blue Chip companies you know you just learn a lot of like how business should be done how products are

built but then you want to take that learning and apply it in a way that you they can't you know these large companies cannot move at the pace uh that you can right here is a room of powerful Founders that can move much faster knowing the insides of these different companies and industries and I think this is where you know the amazing disruption will will happen especially using web three that was a long long that was a long answer um so so one thing I think is amazing about the uh the history and the founding story of Aptos right is that uh I mean you guys were all uh at at the time Facebook before was meta working on Novi and DM um you know for for those of you who haven't been around as long as I have

which is actually all of you uh yeah the the the history of um of you know good Innovative technology being invented uh within a big company and then spinning out and becoming its own thing is like I mean that that happens approximately like 0% of the time um because you know if you're if you're in a big company and there is something good and new either it becomes a product line of that company or uh like all of the internal knives come out and attack it and kill it but you guys are like the one case that I can think of where you recognize you had something powerful and unique inside uh inside Facebook you know uh no

and DM were were on a downward trajectory uh due largely to Regulatory and Regulatory issues actually outside of the core stuff that you were working on just due to Facebook broadly and you were able to take it outside and turn it into something like talk to like how how the heck did did you do that how did that work yeah and and I guess part of this is also part two of the answer for the previous question so like at while I was at BCD two central banks were trying to send money to each other using blockchain in 2016 and and they were using R3 Corda hyperledger Fabric and you know basically glorified databases that project did not work out for them um or did not scale up I should say um but but I thought removing a bank out of

the out of the system was a very interesting um use case for this technology um consensus reached out to me afterwards and I ended up joining consensus in 2017 uh to help think about scaling ethereum and we learned that ethereum has uh amaz you know it's programmable money right you now have a supercomputer ideally that's decentralized that can you know do all sorts of things that you can't do in centralized systems the challenge with that was though if you tried to build a tokenization platform which is what I was trying to do afterwards um and working on things like metamask truffle and infura is that this technology was not moving at the rate uh we needed it to the the the ethereum foundation's evolution was just slower I

ended up stumbling across Novi um Facebook are building out the DM Libra blockchain and what resonated to me was sort of the same mission that I was interested in um you know as part of my lifelong journey I guess is you you have a way to disrupt uh the the the system in a way that there's a lot more efficiency M Novi wanted to move money peer-to-peer in a far more um efficient way without having Banks or middle parties involved and the and it was a very you know bold mission right if Jason is in in the UK and I'm in Pakistan you want to send money to me and I rely on remittances it sucks that money gram and all these folks take 15% out of your um you know out of that dollar and every penny matters to these

people and so you know I kind of bit the bullet going from a very decentralized world of consensus to a centralized entity but I thought that mission was very valuable um but what the techn what was really interesting is where ethereum sort of struggle to evolve and support use cases and these Ambitions Facebook was able to have an unfair advantage in that I mean you are working with some of the world's best Engineers across consensus across distributed systems cryptography language experts where we built our own smart contract language to try to build DM not only the blockchain but also the stable coin and the wallet and that was very scary right if you can send money peer-to-peer I mean Visa Mastercard dtcc all these payment

networks that exist today would could be gone and there was a lot of value for someone like a Shopify an Uber a Lyft um an eBay all these folks that lose 2 and a half% on each transaction um and you know saw value in that for them all of these people joined the DM Association they saw the business case it was clear as day the people who did not see the business case or didn't were were afraid of it were um folks that did not understand the technology um and so you know it was a difficult path to Market with um either you know Switzerland Regulators or UK or us Regulators for us at the time my co-founder and I we were looking at each other like this this is

like a 100 times better than ethereum and anything out there like we got to get this out in Market and we eventually came to a point where we just knew it was not going to make it and we're scratching our heads and thinking like what do we do how do we like get this out the funny thing was all of this code was open source um and so that was a good you know really good starting point you know being fully aligned with the ethos of web and and being you know out there in the open we asked uh Facebook in October if we can find a path forward and work on this independently we asked the leaders to let us leave this is the most important mission for us and uh they said

no um and then uh we went back and we're like well how about we put a plan together and like beg again which we did um and they're like all right refine don't you refine the GU said no again uh and then um I was like all right they were like can I make the plan better they're like okay well how would how would you fund it and I was like let me see if I can call some really important investors November of 2021 I was in San Antonio with my wife for Thanksgiving Avery my co-founder and CTO he was in California and Cupertino and we were just on calls back and forth our families hated us during Thanksgiving week I didn't come out of like the basement of my my in-law's house and put together the entire pitch deck and and

playing during during the months of November and December Christmas and uh uh Thanksgiving to Christmas we were fortunate everyone took our meetings during that time and um you know we we met with a lot of folks and you know a16z obviously stood out Head and Shoulders Above the Rest and uh supported our vision in a way that we can go back to to Facebook and say hey we have a plan and that gave us the opportunity to run um and they they said yes and we did not look back we were we were out um in December we I packed all my [ __ ] up from New York got a mattress in uh in PA walto actually I lived in a hotel for a month my wife was pissed um because but by the time she got back she met she came to paal there just still a

mattress on the floor um and uh we still live in the same apartment I say she still pissed but yeah the same mattress but now it's elevated a few few inches um it's h yeah it's a good it was a good move um but that that's kind of the story and um you know just persistence again right I think I mean one thing that always impressed me about the plan right was it was pretty pretty gutsy to uh believe at that time that the world needed another layer one right I mean you know ethereum uh had a lot of traction like was uh was amassing a huge amount of developer mind share salana had already launched uh I'm curious like what what gave you the confidence that

there was an opportunity for uh another layer one in the market and and I'm curious like how uh how have things worked out in that regard versus what you you know versus your going in assumptions when you started the company I mean there were a lot of this is a very reflective moment for me I feel like I need to couch um this is uh um it it it actually while we were convincing people we had Promises of people that would fund us but we didn't have money either that's that was another scary thing I was just like I don't have that much money left to pay pay for these things um so that's happening and we're looking at all these protocols that are just you know very aggressively been in either been in

Market or are doing well but I think the conviction that we had in our technology relative to everything else went back to First principles so if you look at Bitcoin obviously that technology is designed to be you know Stone Cold solid and does not get you know it it is what it is and everyone loves it for that ethereum was supposed to evolve but was facing challenges if you want to build a technology that is evolutionary that can keep up with the demand of all the products that you guys might be building then you need something that has Evolution built in it from from the ground up so you know that just you know three and a half years of pursuing that gave us the confidence that like you know we

still don't see any of this stuff evolving and a lot of the in the some of the smartest investors that we spoke with understood that um and so you know we were very very fortunate to have that from the get-go and it was not an easy decision right um you know some of you guys are building you know very difficult infrastructure you have to have those first principles you know cemented early on as you not only build your product out or design your architecture but also as you build your community and the expectations that your community have will have with you uh for of you and you know that's something that I think resonated really well with the market people knew that they needed infrastructure that would evolve for

them uh with for their use cases and if you look at you know the defi ecosystem today if you look at the phenomenon that's going on with meme coins it's showing the fractures that exist within you know these other protocols um just purely from a f a factual and Technology perspective whereas if you compare you know that to apas you know our infrastructure has not only evolved so uh so substantively over the last you know one and a half years of it being live um we can support these use cases seamlessly a trans action on our protocol does not uh scale with congestion on the network you know imagine you're trying to ride a car on a highway and there's all this traffic and

everyone's like oh the tolls are going up that's not a public utility right that's a premium good and I don't think we're in an environment where web3 should be saying that it's it's a it's a premium good and we need to still prove out that this is a public utility that Rivals that of the internet I think that should be the ambition that we're all on one of the things you guys have done that you've spent a a lot of time on this is that uh you've gone deep with some of the biggest web two players like particularly Microsoft and Google you know talk about the decision to focus there as a you know customer and partner base rather than uh going deep on you know the more crypto native Community like how like why did you decide to go that way how's that worked out for you

yeah this is uh this good good question um I think I I sort of balanced myself Between Two Worlds the first world is going back to the point earlier that you know large companies can't evolve and we haven't seen any new company that was disruptive be born inside of an existing company so all of you all here are going to build something that will disrupt an existing industry or business that should be the goal at the same time large companies all you know continue to exist and have power and so you know Jeff baz is famously kind of known for saying don't only pay attention to what's going to change but what will not change I don't think Microsoft's going anywhere I

don't you know all these folks will still retain massive distribution channels and you know we take a world we take a world view of that you know you need to work with the disruptors and also the old guard that will still maintain that power and now when you look at everything that's happening within um different Technologies outside of just web 3 we thought AI was a very important area for us to focus on you know if you you know we're sitting at a place where it's very difficult to understand is content that I'm looking at you know what is the Providence of it um where and these are problems that have real business case at or at even at the government level and as a national security threat all the way to how content is being created and consumed

across social and across media in general you know we shared that Vision uh with with someone like Microsoft who's battling that problem um and finding these types of partners that have massive opportunity to solve these problems and applying web 3 to to a real opportunity here we thought was something powerful and so finding someone like Microsoft is and and articulating that that use case is is very difficult large companies have their own agenda and their own life cycle their own timeline that's very different than a startup timeline for doing anything right and there's and you and I talk about this all the time well you coach me on this all the time that you know there are um there's a risk with that you know partner risk is very real and so you know you want to be very very thoughtful in terms of like who you

partner with who is the who is like signing who's the counterparty why is this the Innovation team or is this their proper business line is it going to have Topline impact or bottom line impact and so with Microsoft we're fortunate to find the team that has real long-term impact within the intersection of AI and web 3 and specifically focusing on finance and so we've been working very closely with them um similarly you know folks like Google have been valuable for us as partners that run a validator on our Network you know Google earns AP tokens that's really cool right like and so you know having someone like Google along the way has been phenomenal too because that and you know we started off completely on a like hey we need infrastru we need Cloud

infrastructure to power our Network they they ended up running a validator fast forward you know two years from now just being persistent with them and going deeper and deeper with them we just launched our game on stack with them and so now with Google if you're building a web 3 game if you're a large company already on the gcp building a building a building a game and you want to add web 3 components you can go directly into the Google marketplace and use app TOS infrastructure instead of having to go find a wallet a protocol in you know node and indexing services and so it just makes it incredibly easy for uh large web two companies and so you know again focusing on the Old Guard and then you know making sure we're helping innovators innovate along the way

amazing all right uh one last question before we turn it over to you guys for your question so um would love to know what what's something that uh you know now that you wish you knew uh when you guys spun out from Facebook oh was that on the list it was on it was on my list what do I know now that I wish I knew when we spun out of Facebook or you know put it put it a different way like so has everything just worked exactly according to plan or were there like you know bumps in the road that you had to learn from and adapt to and figure out um yes hell no to that to that that part um nothing it turned out the way we

wanted it to or had we had dreamt it to be and I think that's kind of the beauty of being an entrepreneur right like you will all have big bold dreams and you should you know continue to be a dreamer in that sense uh but being really grounded in and being pragmatic in terms of like what is the day over day web 3 is one of the hardest places to be an entrepreneur the hardest the market is so it's you know neck whipping fast on top of that you're dealing with you know a very uh loose environment where it's uncertain in terms of how um you know you may get to product Market fit and I think the one thing that I I wish I I paid a little bit more attention to is

actually doing a very simple framework shift the beauty of being in web 3 is you can be really close to your customers faster than anyone else whether it's your consumer or your developer as a customer or maybe a large web 2 company the web 2 company obviously you you'll do it in a more private environment but for everyone else it's in the open sphere it's on Twitter it's on Discord it's on Telegram and man it's brutal we when we launched the protocol we got we were fed to death people talk [ __ ] about us and we like wow we really [ __ ] it up and that didn't feel good but the interesting thing in that where we

reflected and I think you know here they answer the question is you get Market feedback immediately faster than anywhere else yeah no no question you you can always Benchmark where you are because people will tell you yeah well I mean if you have a token you'll see it tonight like you know instantly you know just one question for the crowd like have you used a web 3 product and you're like wow this is a delightful product that Rivals a web experience raise your hand I want to know okay y y'all are struggling so I don't see proud hands going up so I want to know what those products are um that rival web 2 experience I haven't used one and I've been in this space for you know 10 years almost and so is it really product Market fit or is it more Market product

fit I don't know tell me I I think this is like this is a really important question that I've been like scratching my head about and I wish I knew earlier on because you can easily go out and tease something in the market in on Twitter on Discord and telegram get feedback immediately from your community without even having a product they'll tell you and I think that allows you to have that's a superpower for web3 you can iterate faster without having risked engineering and product cycles and I think that's something that I wish I knew uh when it when we spun out of Facebook cool fantastic the floor is yours I told uh I told Mo that based on our experience a couple weeks ago that

uh that you guys were a very direct uh group and so he should be prepared for those questions and that he was free to answer directly so so bring it thanks for the talk one thing I wanted to ask was how you guys kind of got a lot of these native protocols to Aptos because you were kind of a later mover especially of having the newer VM as well how you guys fostered kind of those native protocols they're building on Aptos to really kick off that Innovation on your chain because yeah just C curious about that yeah and what and S what's your name and what are you building oh I'm Noah from no kit we're building a communication layer between rollups it allows synchronous communication when it used to be asynchronous got it cool um so it's a it's a really good point right like how

do you get your first set of core um anchor projects uh you your first set of customers your you know your very um important users I think there you just have there's there's no substitute for just knocking on doors right and I think for us I was I was very we were very lucky that I had really good relationships in the ethereum ecosystem um and you know we were able to get feedback before going live and um spending time with a lot of these projects at the same time you know how easy will it be to convince someone in the evm world to come build on appts use learn a new smart contract language a new VM and you know eventually get them to deploy and so understanding what the

business reason for them would be like really understanding their problem problems and going deep into that allowed us to articulate and actually even better understand our own value proposition like why do we re like confirming why do we exist some said yes others were like me we'll come back to come back to us in about a year and a half we're pretty good on on ethereum and so and then others were just like you know don't waste our time we're we're very happy being Maxis of like XYZ and that's okay right like you learn very quickly how a segment between where you want to spend your time where you want to go back to someone and like people you never want talk to again you you need to find you need to find that like that that categorization for yourself and you know the ones that said

yes we doubl down we spent a lot of time with them white glove them end to end and our team you know learned a lot from White gloving them engineering product even you know legal um so it was very helpful for us un it feels like it's just an unfair waste of time potentially but these folks and just become you know they're your life your customer uh customers for life um what is it like 20% of uh you know fanatic customers are like 80% of the value in in in an Enterprise at times right um and so that's that the second was over time you will see that if you do the get the your core set of you know users right they will help build a lot of your the rest

of your community out the rest of your strategy out um and and you should encourage them to talk about their stories their cases and and whatever it might be and and now you know we just hosted Hong Kong D5 Summit last week where you know we had protocols like a um and Stan come and talk about how move is very interesting right a year and a half ago I don't think stany would be very interested right now that he sees the performance of the protocol we've der risked their ability to come online uh come online right and so all these other protocols like they're like oh we're we're turning off today we'll be back tomorrow how does that work in a 247 hour crypto market right um um and so by showcasing obviously your product and how it stands on its own feet I think is

equally as valuable as the amount of work you put in and that high touch for your community okay thanks that really helps no problem uh you mentioned that um you work with web 2 and web 3 companies um what lessons have you learned um when it comes to positioning and messaging straddling the two and I'm sorry what's your name uh H I'm from value Network and we use Smart contracts to provide trusted data to AI models and applications we've actually worked together when you were working on Pangia way back in the day we should have a catch up okay okay um so I mean if if yeah how do you really think about web two and web 3 companies and aligning the messaging between the market positioning man it that's a good

question like can can you effectively go after both or do you think you have to be focused on one versus the other this is this is a good question and it kind of goes back to your question of like what you know of like what I would have done differently too I think I would double down on web 3 but operate with web two principles because all the web two companies they're not really thinking about how does web 3 impact my business at like the like very specific business line they're more in depending on the business of course but I I'm I'm kind of answering this for your perspective you know like let's say an entertainment company that wants to use their smart contracts for example they're going to want to know like who's used this before

and what impact have they had and you should ideally be able to point to you know case studies that that indicate that those probably aren't going to be web two companies at the onset they're likely going to be web3 companies they'll they'll be faster to adopt higher velocity variety of different use cases and I think I would really focus on web 3 rather than trying to you know convince web 2 to use web 3 it's a it's a painful decision honestly yeah we talk about it all the time well and it's it's also particularly hard right because you I mean you it it's obvious that all the money today is in web to I mean right right you have you have multiple companies with trillion dollar plus market caps they uh are all like massively cash flow positive but the

problem is they just they have no urgency or real need to come over to web 3 they and and where it gets confusing is that um is that every company has some amount of money set aside to uh experiment with new things to make sure that they don't miss like a mass of new wave and so you can you can um get fooled if you like you can get a proof of concept or a pilot uh with a big company and think like oh yeah like this is the first sign of everybody coming over in Mass but it almost I mean this happened uh a ton in like uh 2008 2009 when uh when social networking was just going vertical like uh and before the advertising model was really figured out

there like every Big Brand and we saw this actually in 2021 like withand doing experiments in web 3 but then uh when times got tough or the initial experiment didn't pan out they all retrench but I think that the you know the the hardcore web 3 uh entrepreneurs and companies and projects like all stay of the course yeah and and there's a really good case study today that kind of demonstrate this Michelle I'm with tweed we are wallet of the service and payment infrastructure uh focusing on easy onboarding of users and monetizing them we are CH agnostic not yet on us but we can talk after okay um my question to you is more on your playbook and view on competition entering a space

that's already pretty crowded with kind of very set leaders uh what is what was your perspective on it then what is your perspective on it now and also kind of two questions followup is what do you see today's optos as like main kind of advantage over the rest and what are some of the things that you admire about others that um that you can share oh there's multiple questions there so okay I'll I'll start with the first one and then maybe I'll remember the second one um so the you know I think entering a crowded Market um isn't something you should worry about in web 3 there's still barely you know a million daily active users like think about the the internet right there's billions of daily active users and so and the fact that you're

building a wallet and here means that there is plenty of space uh for for you to you know have a competing product now with that being said said you know what is your differentiation what is your different strategy how is your product going to stand out what is your sort of go to market that's going to be unique are you going to go out and just Target meme coins and be visceral in terms of reactions that you get on Twitter I don't know it might work really well um and so I think you know and and and the benefit of that by the way is you've learned from the mistakes of all these other projects that have not been able to get a billion users and I think there's something really powerful about that um and you were at Google right like Google wasn't the first search

engine not by a long shot yeah right and uh yeah by a long a long shot they were late to the party and like why would they even try how dare they and they completely blew it out of the water they in fact learned so much from the other previous incumbents that they they built a product so differentiated with amazing technology that they grew the market for search and so that's like that's the position and the philosophy or like the mentality that I would sort of approach this world with you have you know 5 billion users that aren't using your product yet so that's how I think about it what was your second question sorry the second was around what you see as your advantages today and kind of other

things that you admire about other chain competitors oh for us specifically I mean I think it's so when I look at other protocols they've done you know a great job of building their respective communities and they're primarily founder Le personalities you see that permeate into the community that they build and it's interesting to observe that and I think you have like you know you have your your your your Rainbow of personalities there and so I I think Avery and I and our team embody you know our principles and our philosophy of you know building amazing technology and letting it speak for itself you know we're not first to the party either we're pretty late um to and you reminded me of that but the good thing is similar to Google right like they still like when you do your search

it still says search completed under what like 38 seconds and so they're kind of subtly just flexing and reminding you that we have the best tech that's what we like to say too so you know we have the best tech and I think over time you know if you have an amazing wallet that needs a billion users guess what it's not going to run on those other protocols you're going to need subsecond finality to rival web to users you're going to need very low gas fees you're not you're going to want to avoid congestion you're going to want to avoid downtime and apos is probably the only protocol that can do that today cool thank you hey what's going on uh my name is saurin I'm one of the founders of titles we built creative tools powered by artist owned AI models um I'm

curious like building a protocol what uh specific kind of tenpole items that you guys Define product Market fit as and are there any specifics to like building in this space that you find unique for product Market fit um versus like previous projects and companies that you've worked at I mean effectively like where is web 3 good right today and um the product Market fit is is kind of almost obvious right again like you can go on Twitter and see what people are talking about and everything is onchain so you can see what people are doing and so depending on you know where you sort of focus your lens it may not necessarily fall within any of those

categories unfortunately right so you're going into a completely different industry um and ideally trying to disrupt them so you know for for us specifically I I can answer this question more for the room than than for for you and we can chat about it at at the happy hour but you know we think about financial systems and the reason for that is you know what is a blockchain really good at you know you can have programmatic Assets Now are those programmatic assets going to be nfts that scale to you know Mass adoption it's probably not likely yet you know well cookies are evolving and like information um uh availability is evolving but I I don't see that effective

immediately where we do see real you know product Market fit is in financial systems where you know money can't move more efficent uh as efficiently as it should you know if there was a stable coin on abas that was native that money would move faster than any other form of money in the world faster than visa and MasterCard and that to us is very interesting now how do you get to that and execute it's it's a very complicated system like you can't go knock on Visa's door and say hey guys we're going to kill you soon um uh it's a good way to again thrown out of the the office probably um instead I think you want to you know let them know in roundabout ways right and I

think defi Primitives do a great job of that right the velocity of money that moves within the defi ecosystem is faster and you know it's 247 and so you know where Capital markets and money movement are not today you're still dealing with t plus2 and a very complicated you know money movement system and so you know by us working in focusing on things like Defi and Hadi can talk about that in more detail later today too we think that's a great place to start now the stuff the the tools that you build there test your protocol Harden it you might get really good smart contracts out of there you might get tvl that you can you know use and extend into other areas like meme coins or nfts and all this other fun stuff and so certainly thinking about how one

building block or one category in Industry can uh can help then be sort of a um you know solve the coldstar problem for the next industry and so that that's kind of how we approach it so we think from finance that can t tie over into gaming which is where we have 25 games that'll be launching on Aptos uh in the coming 12 months to then from there you know working with media and entertainment companies so to your point about financial systems um one of the biggest issues we have today is ACH of uh digital Islands silos that don't speak well to one another and today we spoke to a lot of amazing L1 and l2s and um you being one of them how do you see that playing out in five or 10 years

with the competition that's been great to drive all these Innovations like abose um with regards to interoperability do you see a world where there's hundreds of different l1s and l2s and some type of interoperability or do you think it's uh you know a very small number of really really good ones like an aptose and uh the rest of them kind of just die or fall off like where do you see that Evolution going um so that we don't recreate the same issues we have in the existing Financial systems with lack of interoperability so I can answer this question in multiple ways and I guess you know given the time say 000000 um well uh I think there you're absolutely

right like the financial system is incredibly fragmented um and that introduces latency cost and all these other you know crappy inefficiencies um and all these players just holding on to you know their businesses um which is a very difficult problem to solve for if you had to say I want to recreate the financial system today from scratch right ideally majority of that exists within one network CU if you have multiple networks again you're still creating the same Islands they're just connected better I don't know maybe there's a lot of risk within Bridges there's a lot of you know security uh challenges that you know come into you know making sure that that interoperability um works and so I don't know necessarily and and and to to to

kind of answer that in a in a very direct way I guess is like how many of these inter uh interoperable networks today are adding value in the traditional Financial system absolutely zero no big Bank cares no asset manager cares and so if you want to fast forward into the future Where will Network effects amalgamate you know my view is in one maybe two protocols if you're I don't I don't see another Recreation of all these different fragmented protocols now Chris has written a really good book called read WR own great it's on the Shelf so this is my plug I think I get paid for every sale uh damn they're free yeah they're free it doesn't work out [ __ ]

um and and I think he just like flips this question on its head by saying you know you know Facebook is not a company it's a social protocol you know and all of these companies have their own you know uh protocol their own network and so these networks will need to be interoperable and today they are not necessarily interoperable now will those networks build on one L1 I hope it's Ops that is the goal um and and I do think that there will be some kind of centralization around um a decentralized network funny enough um so that's that's kind of my view hopefully that answerers your question that was very direct thank

you I appreciate it also sorry one I was G to say on the books the two that I've read are obviously the hard thing about hard thing so please grab that one uh Ben Ben does a great job of helping navigate all the challenges that you'll see the second book that was very interesting that has no cover on it is scaling people that's a good one because um you know you're not going to be who you are tomorrow you should not be you know I mean you're you're going to be evolving day by day Moment by moment and so that's that's a good book that just uh helped uh ground my perspective so it's my two book recommendations all right thank you all right thanks everyone thanks well [Music]