The Outlier Ventures Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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