Trent Lapinski interviews Greg Osuri, the CEO of Overclock Labs and Akash Network. In this episode, we discuss distributed networks, blockchain technology, and what it takes as an entrepreneur to build amazing tools for other people to use.
Host: Trent Lapinski
Guest: Greg Osuri
Music: kaffekrus
Automated Transcript (may contain errors):
Greg Osuri: 00:00:05 The key thing we figured out a site we learned over the past year, but something that has always been behind that and behind our top was the challenge for distributed systems is not technology. It’s the experience aligned with the principles of the Internet, how the Internet began. You don’t need anybody’s permission to go to a website or post the website aligned with those core foundational principles. Internet has been built. We built a complication network or teacher. We believe the combination should be scalable, frictionless, and free of censorship and we believe in the unstoppable revenue we’ll be doing is we are cautious is essentially creating a new operating system for the Internet and how you’re doing that is by tapping into unused 85% capacity. 8.2 million data center compliments some cloud. Akash is essentially a peer to peer network of competition clusters designed for global first applications, planetary scale applications.
Trent Lapinski: 00:01:29 Welcome to Techpost. I’m your host Trent Lapinski in this episode. I Review Greg Story. He’s the CEO and founder of overclock labs and Akash network. And in this episode we discuss his new operating system for running a decentralized cloud network. In this episode, we discuss entrepreneurship, what it takes to create and launch a new product and talk about crypto currency, the crypto market at large, and what it takes to create and launch company in this new space in this emerging market of the decentralized Internet. This is an amazing episode, so please stay tuned.
Trent Lapinski: 00:02:11 Welcome to the podcast. I’m here with Greg is Siri, tell us a bit about who you are and what you’re working on.
Greg Osuri: 00:02:17 Thanks Trent. Great to be here. I am the CEO of overclocks labs at [inaudible] overclocks labs. We know we had to create of our cash and we absolutely believe that software is eating the roads and the developer is at the epicenter of distribution and Ben builds. Okay. And everything we do at over clock is centered around making this a builder successful. Every feature we think about every design choice we make, every roadmap B plan is centered around the prosperity of the developer. And we built Aakash network as a mere manifestation of these core beliefs. We, another core belief we have is the ability to innovate on the Internet should be accessible to all. We believe the foundation should be scalable, frictionless, and free of censorship. And we believe in the unstoppable web. And what we are doing is with Aakash is, is essentially creating a new operating system for the Internet.
Greg Osuri: 00:03:40 And how you’re doing that is by tapping into unused 85% capacity in 8.2 million data center. The compliments someone’s cloud and Akash is essentially a peer to peer network of competition. Clusters, designs for global first applications, planetary scale applications, and with the massive distribution that we get with the permission model that we adopted for providers to sell services and for users to consume these competitions services without needing anybody’s permission, without any censorship direct, without a middleman aligned with the principles of the Internet, how Internet began. You don’t need anybody’s permission to go to a website or host a website aligned with those core foundational principles. Internet has been built. We built a complication network for the future.
Trent Lapinski: 00:04:42 Awesome. Yeah. So you and I have talked previously, I actually interviewed you on my previous podcast and I definitely recommend going and checking out that episode if you haven’t seen it yet. But I’d love to kind of focus this episode on kind of an update of where you’re at, you know, what you guys have experienced over the last year since we last talked. And kind of, you know, feel out where the space is. Cause it’s like 2019 where we’re at right now compared to where we were when we first, when I first interviewed you. I mean it may as well be a lifetime ago, but it also may as well be yesterday. So yes, you know, it’s time seems to be moving at different speeds these days. Can you tell us a bit about the progress you’ve been making and some of the things you’ve experienced over the last year?
Greg Osuri: 00:05:30 Yes. Or the last year we built and shipped Aakash network to the hands of our users. What I’m really excited about is the kind of adoption we got. And, and I think the, the secret adoption is not because what we do is because why we do it, right? Because we, by placing the developer in the, in the center of everything we do, our tronics match really progressed to optimize for love from the developers. When you use Aakash command line, what you’ll immediately notice is that this command land was designed for you. It speaks to you, right? And a so we have incredible applications, both blockchain and non blockchain applications. We, you know, we’re we entered into a strategic partnership with a coil ripples subsidiary to bring forth interoperability to the Internet. And also we’re a running, we will be soon running the entire payment network that is supposedly the future of frictionless payments are permissionless payments we made headways and several other blockchain you know, based products because they align with us when it comes to building products for developers.
Greg Osuri: 00:07:05 Right. And the ones that I’m most proud of are our companies that haven’t really thought about blockchain. But after looking at Akash, they are thriving. One of the companies is cactus applications. A cactus is a peer to peer. You use extremely service that essentially strings music directly from someone’s computer to your poem. And so if you’re a music fan, like, like me I have, you know, over time I collected about 40,000 tracks and some of these tracks are were when I was 18 or 17. Right? So all this great music collection that I have, I want to ask, is that music directly from a computer without paying somebody in the middle? Right. So I use, don’t love Cactus, but the challenge cactus had was the reliability in, in, in traffic because coming directly from a computer is not necessarily reliable because that depends on a home network.
Greg Osuri: 00:08:11 So they have to use a relay based architecture at the edge. And cloud wasn’t quite cutting it for them in terms of performance because cloud is optimized for hyperscale less high density data centers, but Aakash doesn’t have that limitation. Aakash will optimize the global scale for thousands of modes. So so by using our cash, they could get the cost down from remember the numbers correctly. I think it’s four x or five x than what they would otherwise pay on the cloud with about four 40 times more distribution than the cloud and decimal. The most exciting part, the most exciting part is this what they have in the future, right. So you know peer to peer abusing service relies on a computer to stream. And in this age of mobile where our computers are moving from desktops to laptops your computer is not on all the time.
Greg Osuri: 00:09:17 So that’s the limitation. So they want to ship to a hardware model where you have a dedicated hardware device in your house as a music center that hosts all your music. And if you’re a photographer or an artist like me I have tons and tons of high large size files and I can be stored on the cloud because it gets really expensive. So for someone like me, I need a large liable hardness that a host my, my, my creative files. So cactus wants to build that, but as you know, hardware expensive and and, and, and, and they found a solution without cash and a solution happens to be so that this device sits in your house and becomes part of the Akash Node Network by rich the rewards you know, that this particular node gains by hosting other workloads through our cosh, we’ll subsidize the cost for the hardware.
Greg Osuri: 00:10:31 So they cleverly a dead beautiful economic model where they can bring the cost of the hardware device to almost free and, and, you know, free in the sense the customer’s paying electricity and, and say it’s that type of redistribution of incentives. And it’s only possible because of a distributed in decent last cloud like Akash. This is the true promise of blockchains, right? Block chain. When we talk about web three, when we talk about the future infrastructure of Internet, the Internet has to work for everybody in this case, a music streaming app, which has nothing to do with blockchain. No. I mean, whatsoever is a benefactor by a peer to peer economy. I like to see those kinds of applications because that speaks volumes to the mission that we all of us share in the decent class community.
Trent Lapinski: 00:11:32 Yeah. And I mean that is a perfect use case and I think for the listener that really demonstrates the power of where decentralization can lead. I mean, as you said, man, like it, you know, they’re saving money on their cloud hosting costs. They’ve got a more reliable network and now they’re able to innovate and do things that they couldn’t have done before. And you know, this is on the precipice of like a centralized Internet that right now is like facing so many challenges. You know, we’re facing censorship, we’re facing conglomeration of these major tech companies, we’re facing monopolies, we’re facing all this kind of infighting that’s happening geopolitically. Right now. The ultimate solution is we have to decentralized, we have to stop relying on these major centralized networks. And you know, you’re essentially creating the recipe and the solution that people need to, you know, in the infrastructure they’re going to need to be able to build these solutions on.
Greg Osuri: 00:12:35 Absolutely. And I think a key thing, we’ve figured out, a key insight we learned over the past year, but something that has always been behind behind our, you know, I’ve taught was the challenge for distributed systems is not technology. It’s the experience, right? And this is very visible, especially when it comes to blockchain based decentralized technologies. The user almost is not at the center of what we do. So by taking a different approach, by taking an approach that involves user solve the adoption problem. And I think that’s how we are going to win. We’re not going to run by simply overstating the mission, but we are going to win by aligning our actions to our mission. And, and we are, we absolutely should never forget that builders are at the center of our society. I mean, this is a tradition that goes back to our primate ancestors. When a builder change the course of humanity by when the realize you can put a stick and a stone together that makes the prey, the Predator, the hunted became the hunter because they figured out by building a tool we can overcome God. Give a limitations and change the nature that will, the builder was at the center of humanity to, to thrive. And by putting that bill there, but continuing that sacred tradition is how we’re going to win.
Trent Lapinski: 00:14:30 And you’ve been going through a little bit of a, you know, some personal development as well. I mean, since the last time I interviewed you, you’re much more grounded. You seem to kind of have a glow to you what’s been going on in your own life that’s kind of helped you through this experience and you know, launching a startup and all the stress of that and then being able to get through that.
Greg Osuri: 00:14:52 Yes, entrepreneurship is extremely hard and unless you’re passionate about what you do, it is going to, you’re not going to succeed. And, but the challenge as entrepreneurs fall under is by being tunnel focused and we miss out everything else. And I think every entrepreneur, every successful entrepreneur you speak to, including Bill Gates, they all say the same thing. And I realized if you find a hobby that you enjoy as much as you enjoy your work, it significantly improves your quality of life. And for me that was art. As a cartoonist I love people, I love listening to people. And I started, you know, I used to take a lot of pictures just to understand the character of people so I can draw them and naturally fell into, I found a love for photography. And what photography made me is, is to really taught me how to listen with my eyes, right?
Greg Osuri: 00:16:05 It opened up this new sensory input to listen. And as an entrepreneur, being able to listen is the number one quality, I believe. And photography or art makes you a better listener. And my goal with photography is to bring humans at their element and capture them. Because to me that I meet people, I don’t necessarily care what they’re bad at. I want to know what you’re good at so I can align myself with those things that are you good at? And I think most of us want to see the best in people. And when you’re good at something, when you’re passionate about something your, the way your eyes lit up, the way you talk about it, your new element. And I wanted to capture that and wanted to capture that because that will be the best photo you’ll ever get. And as you as you learn.
Greg Osuri: 00:17:04 So I, I don’t take pictures of random headshots, no wedding photos or no events, no headshots, none of that stuff. I only photograph what inspires me, what drives me right. Sometimes as nature, sometimes as people and I’m in. And my goal is to become a better storyteller. And you do that by listening. And I think it naturally kind of aligned with my work because now I, it opened up so many doors that were not previously open to me because a few things to think. I think number one people understood my values and my mission with, with art and people want to be part of this journey, right? So I started taking pictures of incredible people that I surround myself everyday, inspiring people that I meet everyday. And those pictures started speaking volumes about themselves. They saw things that they never saw something about themselves.
Greg Osuri: 00:18:20 And the most important thing in business is listening to customers now. So now when I meet developers and I just started a new project called faces of Silicon Valley because I felt we as a society are not doing enough to celebrate the builder, the Unsung hero or heroes behind startup companies, elect founders a and the public facing individuals get all the glory, but the unsung heroes that people that actually do the work don’t get, you know, glory. I wanted to tell their stories and I wanted to bring the human behind the inventor and barked on a, an art series. It’s a humongous project. We are interviewing about 600 developers. And since my process involves knowing somebody before capturing them, so I have to spend time with each one of them in this. I listened and I, and I understand where the come from, understand what drives them, understand the challenges and what do you need to build a good product. That understanding and I think not to commercialize my, my values, but I think you naturally find alignment in everything you do. If you have these core set of values, and I think photography or economics are cartooning are building infrastructure projects are always centered around that person that I’m building for. Yeah.
Trent Lapinski: 00:20:01 And I mean art is ultimately, it comes down to art and artistic direction and there is an artistic element to coding. I mean, you know, many people compare it in spend compared to poetry, you know, a good programmer and a good coder is essentially a poet. You know, they’re manipulating language and they’re manipulating words to create outcomes. You know, it’s often behind a computer and the average user doesn’t actually see what’s executing in the background. But, you know, a good programmer has spent the time and effort to create a structure and how they write their code to achieve a certain result. And it’s a form of art. So it really doesn’t surprise me that, you know, you getting into other forms, art has helped
Greg Osuri: 00:20:48 Kind of open your awareness to bringing those same processes to your products. To your services and to the things that you’re doing on the technical side as well. Yeah. So, you know, if you define art as a medium of self expression, and a code is a medium of set as compression, right? And I think it was Einstein who said, all great scientists are artists as well. And there was study done on this and I think there was a survey about for Nobel laureates. And I think over 40% of them had a creative outlet besides their primary primary you know, upon a primary job. And another interesting thing, I think photography contributed to this realization for me, for us you know, we, I’ve been programming for 25 years, right? And I don’t remember the time. I didn’t program. And and in when we building products, especially the notion that you have to make everything simple is fundamentally wrong.
Greg Osuri: 00:22:08 Right? And it realize this essentially because I shoot on a film camera, I shoot on a camera that was built in 1965. There are no electronics in this camera. Everything is analog, everything is mechanical, but it produces incredible pictures. Every Time magazine cover is shot on this camera till date and, but it’s extremely hard. It, it, it goes against everything about, you know, building products. The products has to be simple and whatnot, right? So in my programming career, I use tools that are extremely hard to use. I use them everyday. Them is one of those tools. If you, you know, use it for the first time, try getting it out, try getting cracked, quitting. If you do successfully, you know you’re, you’re not human. So, so I use incredibly hard products because love and there are products that are super simple to use.
Greg Osuri: 00:23:12 I don’t. Right? And it started, I started questioning what is the metric, what is the framework we need to adopt to build products? Is Simplicity obviously not turns out the answer is cognitive coefficients define, and this is a term I coined, a cognitive coefficiency is essentially the ratio between value delivered to c to a cognitive tax. So how that, what that means is if you programmer here, believe it or not, last time you picked up a tool, you heard about a tool you know, you your friend told you about it or you find it from Internet, you go download the tool and you run it, right? You try to be intuitive, right? Because the tool is supposed to do something and you type Eh, the, the command and because you think that’s how the tool should be used. Two things happen.
Greg Osuri: 00:24:16 One of two things could happen at that moment. One thing is the tool could succeed. Fantastic value has been delivered, captured, beautiful. You’re going to come back and use the tool again. But more often than not, it fails. Especially infrastructure tools. It fails not because it’s broken product. Most often the not, it fails because the user did not know. They have to input something that requires input, right? It is a Delta in knowledge that the tool fails. Right now when the tool fails, the user makes a very important decision consciously or not. And the district decision is, is the value delivered greater than, than the cognitive tax? Should I go back and read the man, which should I go to stack overflow and pay this cognitive tax to to learn is a value greater than the tax, right? You’re describing experiences in entrepreneur right now is it’s always, do I want to cross this delta?
Greg Osuri: 00:25:24 It’s always the question for writing. You know, that comes up that I’m, that’s new, that I don’t know yet. Right? So if the ratio is one, I do it as long as the ratio is one, I do it because the tax increases include at one point you’re going to come to a point that it is not worth it and you’d drop, right? So one thing that thought us is, well, if you delivering value is extremely hard because value is nonlinear, you can’t quantify it, right? Everybody sees value differently. And so delivering value is that it’s not linear. How do you, how do you, how do you measure? So instead of measuring value, how about reduced cognitive tasks? Right? So you’re not, for example, I’m going to do something else. Pale forgiveness. So what that means is in order to deploy a workload on Aakash, you gotta type Aakash deploy you know, and the manifest filed for one of the key and whatnot.
Greg Osuri: 00:26:28 In case you forgot to provide the manifest file or report card, the key Aakash will ask you, hey, we detected a key in your local cash. Would you like to use it? Hey, we just detected a manifest file in your local folder. Would you like to use it? Right? so Alqosh that happens only in interact remote archives. Crum island also supports programmable modes such as gs on and Shell outlets. And js on output obviously is designed to make the command line extensive and have much stricter syntax and grammatical rules similar to with w with Shell command line. But if you are an interactive mode, which is by default designed for humans, you’re going to find Aakash command line extremely easy to use and delightful because and the, in the aesthetics we put in, we understood that command lines are scary. You look at because they over inform a user, they miss out important things and, and, and gives you things in a very linear fashion, right.
Greg Osuri: 00:27:33 And if you look at my history of all the work on a good, how my open source work I’ve consistently have libraries that gain massive adoption to think my first library has 400 stars and 700. And, and in my cofounder Adams, we have height the adopted tooling because my tools improve the command aesthetic of the command line and it’s been adopted by Coobernetti’s. And my favorite is Misha Somato, who’s a founder of Hashi Corp who created a terraform. And if I have to you know, think of another person that focuses on developer experience thing, Hashimoto would be, and you know, him using my tools. It’s just a, a testament to having the builder in the middle of everything we do. All these values just align and they just magically merge into everything we do, right? So fail forgiveness is a novel concept.
Greg Osuri: 00:28:39 We introduced a with Akash command line. And another thing we’re extremely thoughtful is about growth of gratification. It’s another term acquaint. Growth gratification is the consistent gratification you gain from growing in a certain fields, right? To give you the best analogy would be photography. There’s a million ways to take a picture there. Their million risks. Use a camera. It’s an deterministic, right? And if you too deterministic about your product, you will miss out on the under deterministic part and you end up designing products that are very limiting, right? So every time you look at platforms, why we love a certain platform is because yes, they may perform the primary function for you. Like take a film camera and get the technicals right, get the exposure right and take a picture, get a developed and it can get from
Greg Osuri: 00:29:52 Like bad to good by following certain technicals and the gratification you get from being bad to good as immense. And now the next challenge is getting good to great. You’re right. The platforms should be designed around quote gratification. That means making decisions when it comes to design as to how many primitives we have in the court system and how many workflows we have, right? Primitives and workflows are these things that are kind of related because workflows are built on perimeters, right? And really thinking in those terms you know, was derived from my passion for art and, and being observant and being a good listener. And I think entrepreneurs when they found, when they find that that passion, I think it just significantly improves everything around you. And yeah, I think specialization also met some people say that you, you, in order to be successful, you gotta be doing the one thing. One thing only is a myth because greatest luminaries like Leonardo Da Vinci or Einstein always had a creative outlets and all that. They were good at two things, you know, maybe sometimes more. And you start questioning all the popular biases, you know, and I think when people ask me, I think it was a
Greg Osuri: 00:31:34 Thiel he always asked the question like, what is the one belief that is not popular? And one of those beliefs from me is specialization, isn’t it? Yeah.
Trent Lapinski: 00:31:48 I mean, when it comes to specialization, I’ve always almost seen it as a downfall in some regards. I mean, I see so many people who over specialize in one thing that they just completely miss out on everything else. And I think, I just saw a quote the other day, I think it was actually a Steve jobs quote. He was talking about people in Silicon Valley and you know, he was saying the problem with a lot of these people that over specializes the number of dots and experiences that they have to be able to connect is there’s just not enough dots there to make a connection. Because without those other experiences, without trying things that you’re not specialized in and things that you’re not good at, and without getting that extra experience, you don’t have the dots to connect, to be able to find those extra things that are going to help make a better product. Because when listening to you, what I hear is, you know, ultimately your intention for doing this is to create a product that’s usable by these developers so that they can achieve whatever their intention is.
Greg Osuri: 00:32:50 And it’s
Trent Lapinski: 00:32:52 So difficult to do that because your, you don’t know what they’re going to create with your tool. You know, you’re just trying to create the best tool for them to create with which is such a challenge because the possibilities are endless and there are use cases that you can’t even comprehend and that you haven’t even thought of yet. So to build a tool for that person is you know, an incredibly difficult
Greg Osuri: 00:33:18 Task. Yes, it’s daunting and difficult, but if you listen, okay, gets easier, right? So the yes intention, I mean our caution overclocks and mission is to build tools to make the builder or successful developer more successful. But photography and art using art and photography contributes that to the intention without intending [inaudible] you know, so, you know, just the sheer value or the sheer power gives you to listen and express what you listen is what we is, how we build products. And I think apple is a great example. Because they understood that, right? So apple is one of those companies
Trent Lapinski: 00:34:17 I liked how you past tense that
Greg Osuri: 00:34:21 Yes. Sadly, I am with badly the $1,000 monitor. Stan just didn’t sing with me. I mean, it just reminded me that the lost their way so much and it was never the case from the beginning. You know, apple was always, I bought apple products from me. Right? they, I mean the messaging has always been, you know, when you look at why people make decisions, it’s not rational. That derives decisions. It is the inner brain that right. People don’t buy because of what you’re selling. People buy because why you’re selling. Right? And I’m like, if apple would, you know, carry themselves by saying that we make beautiful computers, we make them easy to use, we make them fast. Would you like to buy one? I don’t think apple would succeed, but apple starts off by saying that we believe [inaudible] changing the status quo.
Trent Lapinski: 00:35:38 Right? Do you believe you know, everything we do needs to push the humanity forward and we just happened to make a computer. Would you like to buy one? Right? So Martin Luther King didn’t go and say, I have a plan. He said, I have a dream. Right? I think having those core beliefs are very, very important to accompany. Because you know, when things are great things that great and raise all the money, you can, you know, do all the great things. But unless you have a team that believes in what you do you’re bound for greatness. And I learned this three years into entrepreneurship overclock labs make several mistakes. And finally realizing that what drives people is that shared on dead to their word. Okay. A devotion to common set of beliefs. And that’s what we wake up every day. And then you realize, okay, a good thing you do is that, is that core belief.
Trent Lapinski: 00:36:54 It has not, the number of hours you put in it is every hour that you put it is more valuable. Right. yeah, that’s been a significant contribution. A contributor to my personal growth goal the last one year and a, just going back to the apple thing, just one last second there. But you know, it’s interesting because they, you know, Johnny, I just left Apple, so he was the chief, you know, design. I don’t even know what title he was going for at the end there. But you know, he was their chief designer and he, he did lose that passion. And you can kind of see that in what Apple’s products have been over the last few years and now, you know, it’s ultimately ended with him leaving the company. I’m hopeful that there will be a new generation of designers that can potentially, you know, take his place and get apple back on the right track.
Trent Lapinski: 00:37:48 But you know, it speaks to what you were just talking about. If, you know, finding that passion and making sure that you keep that passion and having that balance that we’ve been talking about throughout this entire episode. Because I think ultimately that’s what it comes down to is having that creative balance to kind of create a, you know, a more round builder or more around a individual who’s creating a round product that has a number of use cases that, you know, can do these things because we, we’ve had a lack of vision in silicon valley over the last probably five, six, seven years, maybe a little longer. And I really love that, you know, we’ve been talking about all of this stuff, but you’re at the end of the day, you know, it’s, you’re building something that you’re passionate about and it’s leading to this decentralized future and it’s creating a decentralized possibility that just didn’t exist five, six, seven years ago. And now, you know, you’ve, you’ve executed it like the codes out there. You’ve got people building on it. You know, you’re, you’re getting that positive feedback. You’re, you’re seeing these, these things become real. Can you talk about like what it’s like to actually see this thing come alive and see developers starting to use your code and create with it? Oh, you know,
Greg Osuri: 00:39:16 I get chills when I see people use it. Especially people tried for the first time and they tear out because they suddenly found something that speaks to them, suddenly found something that finally gets them right. And for me to see that his chest you know, something I want to do every day. No, there’s nothing that the feeling cannot be replaced by the thing I get. I tear up when I see that and it just reminds me, we just getting soldered, right? If we have users that absolutely love the product and that is what is going to, you know, accelerate our mission, that is what is going to get us to the next step. Right. And and people are coming up to me wanting to write two features for Aakash people that have worked on work with us because they’re inspired and they want to contribute to the success of our costs as a shared mission.
Greg Osuri: 00:40:30 Right? And the challenge of course is as the company grows, how do we maintain that core customer focus, that core focus in the builder? And that’s the culture I want to build at old talk Akash and and and that is a, that is going to be extremely difficult because hiring the right type of people, building the team and expanding fortunately we’re also you know, the next big steps for us obviously is to provide the liquidity, self sustaining ecosystem. So Alqosh as you know, is a peer to peer self-sustaining ecosystem. And the most important thing for self sustainability is capitalization. Liquidity, right? And and one of the reasons for the Akash a tokenized computing asset is too okay, is to provide the sustainability because the blockchain function, some consensus of different individuals and the incentives have to be aligned.
Greg Osuri: 00:41:44 You know, in a manner to support their initiatives because they had to pay bills as well. So so we are very, very excited to introduce our, our economics white paper is completely redesigned from ground. Deb. One of the things that dresses is how staking results directly in providing the necessary liquidity and providing the necessity of value for this asset. And because again, for liquidity, the most important thing is investors and when you talk to investors it’s, you know, you have to be aligned with their goals as well when it comes to turn up investment and whatnot. So we designed the economics in a manner that with higher demand, higher usage for the system, the value of the token in significant increases, which in turn increases the value of the ecosystem, which further feeds into more adoption. So it’s a cycle of adoption and value of value creation.
Greg Osuri: 00:42:50 Right now as a business, we need to capture something without okay. And because Aakash is completely independent, I’m really excited about stuff we’re doing at overclock labs to capture value. Obviously cannot talk about it publicly. But but a business model aligns so well with our network, right? And one of the challenges when you build network based businesses is priorities, right? So as an economist I think everybody con every economist’s dream would be to create a marketplace that has perfect competition. So the term perfect competition means no one in the marketplace has an upper hand than the other. So commodities and things of that nature become are considered for, for competition. And perfect competition is no individual player has a significant than tangible [inaudible] player. And everybody exchanges goods and services in a perfect manner. Whereas companies optimize against the companies like monopolies, right? Companies want to be the only provider because that’s how they make more money, right? So when you have a company like overclock labs, and when you have a network like Aakash network, they have different priorities. And I think the magic realize and how do you reach that cat, right? How do we create a business model that is
Greg Osuri: 00:44:36 You know, the same thing that they haven’t experienced so far in terms of censorship, in terms of no, agreed in terms of all the bad things that they’ve experienced today in capitalistic world. How could we build a company that is aligned with the goals of society as well as aligned as you know, as well as aligned with the goals of shareholders. Right. So,
Trent Lapinski: 00:45:01 Well, when you figure it out, let me know because this is quite the challenge that I think a lot of blockchain companies and people that are experimenting with cryptocurrencies and different economic models is how do you create that balance between, you know, doing the right thing and still achieving economic success and what is economic success defined as? Is it stockpiling money and becoming a monopoly like Google or is it doing the greatest amount of good for the most amount of people and making enough money to sustain itself?
Greg Osuri: 00:45:35 I like, I like the apple model. I love Google, but I think I liked, yeah, marvel selling betters
Trent Lapinski: 00:45:41 As a product to the consumer, to the person and versus, you know, trying to achieve total complete like market dominance and just selling a very specific tool to a very specific person. Is that what you’re referring to or
Greg Osuri: 00:45:59 No, I think market dominance has nothing to do a values in the company, right? Platforms. It’s a winner take all market
Greg Osuri: 00:46:10 And you know, there is no place for the second person doesn’t work that way. When you enter a market you want to absolutely dominate and you want to do it because you want the values not to be, you want your values to align with industry to take precedence over people with creep. We are on a mission because we want to make the world a better place. And money is something that just comes and, you know, money is abstraction about you and the more value we capture that distraction is going to happen. You can have high margins, there’s nothing wrong with making money, but you have to be aligned with your core values. Right? So I think we cracked the code when it comes to tokenize business models. And this is something I’ve been thinking about for quite long time. If you look at open source business models, there are essentially three business models, right?
Greg Osuri: 00:47:13 The first business model, the most common one is what we call support model. Which red hat would be the biggest company that builds an entire business by supporting something that’s extremely complicated, that’s Linux, right Lennox or a fully open source and is still fully open source. And the fact that for enterprise to adopt you need someone to pick up the phone and red hat obviously saw a niche in the market and the capitalized on it. Great. Second type of business model, which is more common these days is open coal business model. So the core of the software is open source, but you build additional features on top of this core that addressed side the usability, either, you know, value creations, whatnot. And a, a best example would be get hub, right? [inaudible] Is open source and free creative at list store walls, but get hub added collaborative features.
Greg Osuri: 00:48:17 The push and pull and whatnot. I mean, before it could have, there was an a forking those, none of that cooler pictures and social element to it. Now the social programming element to it, if you look at a spark databricks mix spark, right spark is a beautiful a real time analytics engine, most almost all AI and machine learning folks rely on and data bricks obviously built and beautiful UI and other things. Another friend of mine is doing fantastic job at Kang. Kang is API gateway free and open source and be supporting them at Akash, but they have an enterprise version. So that is called an open core model. Extremely successful. These companies are creating billions of dollars of market capitalization as something to really look at if you are an investor and third type of business model, which is, I think we’re all trying to figure out is tokenized business model, how can we create a high growing company in an open source environment where your, not only your source code is open, but your data is open as well as open data. Right? Okay. And while taking advantage of this token as acid, right. So you know, I would love to talk about a business strategy, but unfortunately I can’t and but I think it’ll be evident very, very, very soon as to what that looks like at the end, what that business model looks like. I’m super excited actually.
Trent Lapinski: 00:49:56 I’m definitely curious to see when you, you bring this to market because you know, it’s the challenge of the entire Crypto blockchain space is, you know, who’s going to crack that model and the person or the company that does, you know, is going to be wildly successful. I mean, you could make some arguments, you know, uranium has probably been the most successful so far. You’ve got ripple and a couple others, but we still haven’t seen that. I Dunno, market adoption, especially on the user side where it’s like, okay, like there’s actually people on this platform using this product that’s actually creating this tokenized economy that’s working and all the parties involved are benefiting from it right now. There’s, you know, there’s still so much speculation in the market and there’s many challenges to overcome that I, at least, I haven’t seen it cracked quite yet, but I feel like we’re close,
Greg Osuri: 00:50:55 Right? The biggest challenge when you’re trying to business build a business model on a marketplace is how do you align a features and what features belong where? Right? And I think the answer to the question a really comes down to your audience and your user, right? I was talking about you know, to give you the best example, let’s put it this way. Camera’s right. Again, low cameras. You can make a camera and you can build a beautiful camera. And camera is a platform because you can do so many things. You can test valences splashes, do different films, and do all kinds of things to platform. You can build your camera that way you want, you can put different types of lenses, or you can put different types of films. Like Fujifilm is a, is the company that makes film, but they also make cameras, right? The other companies that make film as well. It’s ultimately the user’s choice as what kind of film I want to choose to get the results I want to get right is nothing. I mean Fujifilm is of course being the camera, but it’s also boom itself. And to build a platform and build the things that make a platform, they build lenses. Same thing with Kodak, right? They’re just examples how you can build industries at and capture value that aligned to the industry.
Trent Lapinski: 00:52:21 Kodak did launch a cryptocurrency of course.
Greg Osuri: 00:52:25 You know, it’s sad. It’s really sad to see Kodak. They don’t have the same owners that they had. Polaroid is one of my favorite things and really sad stories, but it’s beautiful. Films I love from Polaroid are not available anymore. And you know, I think analog photography’s coming back now into fashion. In this day and age we have so much noise doing digital photography. And what I love about analog photography is it by removing electronics, it, it just makes me more present. Right? I’m not looking at a screen, I’m looking at things, I’m just observing and everything I shoot is intentional. Right? Anyway. So anyway, just not too far off on photography, but I think a lot of lessons we need to learn from other fields. Especially art. And and I was just talking to Gary. And there are a lot of incredible entrepreneurs you know that do amazing photography.
Greg Osuri: 00:53:33 Get a Tan you know, from initiatives capital. He recently bought a hustle bodies. He’s just discovering this power of storytelling. It great. A good friend of mine is, is what, as an early investor and a big inspiration for me is Chris Michael, founder of a military dotcom and nauseous ventures all giggle home. But John has a lot of incredible pounders that, that found this passion. There’s a small community in silicon valley and a lot of them should go, which is amazing. And yeah, yeah, pick whatever your passion is, right? Like, and just, just run with it and try to find ways that you can align your work and the pat and the hobby. You gotta be passionate about both of course, but when you’re passionate with two things, when they merged together, a just, just such a new thing, it’s very hard to explain. You just got to feel it.
Trent Lapinski: 00:54:26 Awesome. Well, I’ve got to ask know what are some of your final thoughts before we wrap up here?
Greg Osuri: 00:54:33 Woo. Boy, final thoughts. Huh?
Trent Lapinski: 00:54:36 We’ve been going for quite awhile already.
Greg Osuri: 00:54:39 Jamming.
Trent Lapinski: 00:54:41 You covered a lot of good ground here.
Greg Osuri: 00:54:44 Final thoughts? I think a big challenge that you’re facing in crypto industry is gross disregard for ethics.
Greg Osuri: 00:55:02 It’s really sad to see how much people don’t care about what some good and bad. I’m not saying this as a sane, but I think there’s incredible evidence and I’m, I’m, I’m a victim of terrorism. Don’t, I’m not a victim, but more you’ve experienced upset, upset, right? People copying your stuff and, and and I think, you know, just a common pattern I’ve noticed is people raising massive amounts of money from unsophisticated investors by presenting
Greg Osuri: 00:55:48 Incorrect, or misinformed information. A by ops vacating drops, suffocation. That means putting all the fancy words and putting all the fancy diagrams you know, it’s sort of like, you know, following the hype, the trend and capitalization capitalizing themselves for that by essentially what otherwise other ones, I mean what generally people would say lies and then you know, shifting their strategy is okay. And I think it, you know, why that’s not okay because it sets the precedence, you know, excessive precedence to our generation out of our future generation that this is how people did it and people think that’s okay. Hm. I don’t, I’m the longterm, I don’t think it’s going to hinder people that took the higher ground. But in the short term is definitely a distraction and a nuisance. Right. and it’s very important for people to,
Greg Osuri: 00:57:02 Have the core beliefs that are rooted in such depth and that connection of your beliefs to, to how strong you connected with this called integrity. A final thoughts would be to not sacrifice for your integrity or short term greed, integrity. I’ve lived in Silicon Valley for over 11 years, and this is a magical place because people don’t build relationships on transactions. People build relationships. You know, and integrity is, is cornerstone. You could succeed, you could fail in your current venture, but if you’re not at the college, not integral to your core beliefs, you’ll never be able to succeed. And it’s a very forgiving place. Look about into failures but not very forgiving place when it comes to integrity. I think people should remember that. And I’m still great friends with everyone. I’m investors from the beginning because, you know having that honest conversations, having their opinions, never, you know, failure or success, trying to communicate anybody important. And my, yeah, that’s really my final test bank.
Trent Lapinski: 00:58:30 Well, and I can tell you, at least from my experience, you know, ultimately, you know, when people do copy, you you know, it’s a form of flattery in one way or another. And ultimately, if they can’t execute on it, it’s not gonna matter. Because without that integrity, without that passion, without all of the things that we were just talking about, they’re not going to achieve whatever they’re trying to achieve. They’re just trying to achieve short term goals. At least that’s what I’ve experienced. And I’ve seen those kinds of people in those kinds of projects fail time and time again. And I’ve seen the people that pursue the right path and the harder path and that stick to their integrity. I see those people succeeding more often than not. So
Greg Osuri: 00:59:17 Yeah, I completely agree. I’m, I’m not questioning the long term trajectory. But what I’m concerned really is about these Shakti term windfalls where you confuse the market and you ruin it for the rest of us. Right? So it’s, it’s, it’s one of those things that people will ultimately realize and if you have to put timing as everything for a market, yeah, it does what it is. And I think of course it’s more than anything else. It is you know, factory, right? It’s extremely flattery. You can come up,
Trent Lapinski: 00:59:54 You guys keep ladder raising. It’s like, oh, I’m flattered. But like it’s also kind of creepy.
Greg Osuri: 01:00:00 It is creepy. I mean you can copy our code, you can copy our research, but it cannot copy us very right. So that’s fair. It is always going to be with us and with the people that we surround with. So
Trent Lapinski: 01:00:12 Well it’s been awesome, Greg, to have you back on the show. And I’m glad that you know, you’ve been able to get this and make this a reality. Cause the last time we talked, I think you were just about to go into your testnet or main net. And you know, it’s so awesome to, you know, follow up a year later and see the progress that you’ve made both on a personal level but also, you know, with your projects and your companies as well.
Greg Osuri: 01:00:40 It’s an absolute pleasure catching up with you again and I’m looking forward to seeing the podcast live. Well, thanks for coming on. It’s been awesome. Thank you so much Trent.
Trent Lapinski: 01:00:56 Thanks for watching. Another uncensored episode of tech posts. Dot Io. I’m your host Trent Lipinski, and don’t forget to subscribe to us on Youtube and hit that little notification bell next to the subscribe button so that you can get notified when we release new episodes. You can also find us on iTunes, Google play, and other social networks, including Twitter and Facebook at tech, post io, and you can find me personally at Trent Lapinski. Once again, I’m Trent Lapinski and this has been another great episode of tech.io. We’ll see you soon.