“I got to see this machine learning AI space progress and now I'm working in blockchain. And I have to tell you— there's a pattern. I just see this pattern.”
—Jack O’Holleran

Today's guest is Jack O’Holleran, serial entrepreneur, and Co-founder and CEO at SKALE Labs. SKALE is a technology company solving the blockchain scalability problem, helping the ecosystem run hundreds of millions of smart contracts and transactions per second.

Before founding SKALE, Jack also co-founded and grew Aktana, the leading SaaS Sales and Marketing Analytics platform for Global Life Sciences companies.

In this exciting interview, Jack takes us on an engaging journey of entrepreneurship— the inevitability of technology, and, the growth mindset behind building or achieving anything new!

Highlights

From riding horses and scooping snow to building tech companies in Silicon Valley.
Patterns in innovation and what that means for the future of technology and blockchain!
The growth mindset behind building and achieving anything new!
A world with much fewer middle-men.
Building an AI & Machine-Learning driven product before people even knew what AI was!

“It just seems to me like an inevitable thing, where you can— through smart contracts and open source software, and essentially blockchains— create new rails rules and governance for the way we use software systems.”— Jack O’Holleran

Transcript

Jack O’Holleran

Awesome. Hey, guys, really appreciate you having me today have been looking forward to this conversation. And I am excited to be here. So my name is Jack O'Holleran. I'm the CEO and co-founder of scale labs. We are the I guess, the team building the SKALE network, which is an open source, decentralized blockchain network. I can get into more of what SKALE does later. I've been doing tech startups for a while in Silicon Valley. Happy to have you to get into that as well. But yeah, really, really a pleasure to be here today.

Jon Low

Thank you. So Jack, unless you are one of those pre-ordained Dalai Lama types, I'm assuming you didn't grow up with SKALE as vision in mind when you were, you know, three years old. Can you tell us a bit about you know, you know, what were your natural interests and tendencies going up? And, you know, how do you how did you find your way to tech eventually, you know.

Jack O’Holleran

Yeah, it was not a direct path. For me, I grew up in a small town in Western Nebraska. I didn't know anything about technology. Fortunately, I think my mom was a little bit of an early adopter, and was always buying the latest Mac that was out. And, you know, I was playing Oregon Trail and Carmen San Diego and the other games the kids of my generation played where we got introduced to computers.

But you know, I never saw myself ever having a career in technology and came from a family of people who are in medicine or law. And that was kind of, you know, if you, you know, similar to a lot of people, I think in, you know, there's different categories and paths, you could go down growing up in a place you're not growing up in the Bay Area, for example, growing up in a small town in western Nebraska. But, you know, I ended up going to school at the University of Nebraska, was pre med and pre law trying to figure out which one I was going to do.

And, you know, at a certain point, I was, like, you know, what, I think I'm gonna do business. This sounds cool. I took a marketing class, and I loved it! And it was so interesting, because the marketing class was not it was not this, you know, binary one dimensional thing of, like, you know, it was about people and humans and behavior and, like perception and influence, and also about products and like, these, these hard components that are parts of these other, you know, medicine and law, but it was, to me a more interesting playing field.

And I also liked the fact that I could just go start doing it after college, I wasn't gonna have to go to school for a lot longer. I could just like, go, you know, play ball and get in the game. So that was that was kind of my path into getting into business. And, you know, I was also a football player at the University of Nebraska.

And that was a starter, my junior year, I had aspirations my whole life of going to the NFL, or being a pro baseball player or professional athlete of some sort. And I remember I had an injury and, and I was like, You know what, I'm not gonna go to the NFL, I better. And I knew that even if I did, I wasn't going to be a career, you know, I wasn't gonna retire off NFL money. And it wouldn't have it wouldn't have filled this, this desire to go do something and build something and get into the business world.

And so for me, when I had this injury, I was like, hey, look, this is my new North Star. And I remember that day, I was like, I'm, you know, I have new goals and, and I had an uncle that lived in two uncles, to my dad's brothers, both live in Silicon Valley and got introduced to a guy named Bill Campbell when I was a senior in college, and I had no clue what I was going to do.

And he's like, I learned about this whole career technology, and I said, “Hey, I'm gonna try to be like that guy.” And, and that was kind of, you know, long story short, I ended up in living in Palo Alto and that was in 2005. And went from not knowing anything about tech to happy to kind of get into the journey from there on forward. But those my steps and kind of how I somehow went from like, you know, riding horses and, you know, shooting pheasants and, like scooping snow in western Nebraska to you know, come into Silicon Valley.

Jon Low

Well, well, well, there's a common thread there — using your hands and feet somehow. And I say that is easy, but I don't joke. It seems like you grew up with a life where you really learned and grew by doing versus theorizing.

Jack O’Holleran

Yeah, you know, I think, I think one common thread. And, you know, this is something I picked up on. But also I, as I grew, I learned a lot more about this, but it was just like the art of learning. And sports taught me that and school taught me that it was like, okay, there's, I have a goal, let me sit down and figure out what things I can do and do well, and what are the things that if I do the best, I will have the best result, instead of doing everything with equal equal effort?

Like, how can I focus my learning to get really good at this, and invest in failure, and then like, Hey, I might strike out the next four or five times that I know I'm using the right technique, and then you know, then eventually start having success. And then you get exponential success.

And, you know, the same thing at school is true, if you're studying for a test, right? You could read everything, or you can say, hey, look, this is what I know, that I need to learn in order to score well. And sports, and then the same thing, I think holds true with business. And, and, yeah, and it doesn't matter where you're from, and, you know, if you're have ambition, and I think like, you know, a desire and like a way a knowledge of how to learn, I think, you know, that's, that's the key to a lot of people success.

Jon Low

That's so well said. And actually, perhaps, that's something that it's an observation is it's not such a common skill, either, because the way you just described it was you reverse engineered, with the end in mind, and, and how to get there.

Whereas we see a lot of behavior where like, it's just learning stuff for learning sake but without a clear outcome. Or, where's this taking me? And that has its own rewards, obviously, but it was interesting that you mentioned, you know, the, how do I get there, right? And then what I need to learn and what's going to get there to give me better faster with maximum success. Yeah, you know, and I remember,

Jack O’Holleran

I remember maybe it was almost 30 years old that I read the four hour workweek. And then after that, I read the art of learning and, and before that, I had a few minutes before that I actually did a full distance Ironman, I never didn't own a bike, I never swam, I never ran a marathon. And I was like, what, and it was in Japan, and I had one of my customers basically talked me into doing this in the morning at a bar. And he's like, you've got five months to train from today.

I was like, I don’t think I can run three miles. But so I was like, okay, like, let me look back at my experiences. What do I need to do if I like it if I've good technique? If I, you know, I can exert probably one fifth the effort that most people would if their techniques are not efficient. And I actually did it, I finished the race. It wasn't fast, but I did it. But I was like, wow, like, I put these, you know, I use what I learned, and then I read the four hour workweek. And then I read the art of learning. I was like, you know, I realized that that was a playbook. I could have been even better at this model, because people are studying this and designing mechanisms for learning and being efficient and investing in failure. So yeah, but you're I think a lot of people don't do but everybody has the aptitude to right?

Arjun Dev Arora

Yeah, we'd love to pick it up from there. And obviously you were introduced to Bill Campbell, you ended up in Palo Alto and you know, got and began your journey in the tech ecosystem, this kind of Silicon Valley startup world. And so we'd love to hear kind of how things progress once you landed there. And you know, who, you know, who helped you, how did you build from there and how did you end up to where you are today?

Jon Low

Yeah, I mean, waking up one day in Palo Alto after being in Nebraska and other places in the world is. So, we're asking a question post post reorientation geographically.

Jack O’Holleran

I'll move the story back one step because I flew out to Santa Clara and ended up getting this job and they said, “Hey, we just opened this office in North Carolina, will you move there?” And I'd never been to North Carolina, didn't know a single person in the state and like but if you do really well will move you out to California in three to six months.

So, it's like okay, sounds like a good deal. And so anyways, ended up doing an inside sales lead generation or SDR BDR type role and selling software for a company called Good Technology. And it was really it wasn't selling I was just opening up leads, right qualifying and, and I went from like, you know, being this high profile football player who everyone knew in Nebraska and then the next thing, I'm like in a cubicle, and just making 75 calls a day getting people hanging up on me.

I was the lowest person on the totem pole in the company. And, and I and you know, I was just shy to even talk on the phone the first and it just getting hung up on and like, everyone's making fun of you, you know, if you have a bad call, I was just like, I remember I called my mom's like, what am I like this, I'm horrible at this.

And she's like, you know what it's you sounds like you just don't know how to do it. Go buy a book or something, I remember I went by like selling one on one or selling by phone one on one, I read this book, I was like, oh my gosh, this is like how you do this and ended up my first full month I did double what anyone had done before, on the job, because I just was like, Okay, I'm just gonna, like, you know, apply all these techniques I'm learning and I heard other people like they're not using any techniques, they must have not read these books. And it was an advantage and, and I've got, you know, got moved out to move out to Palo Alto.

And you know, it was just really fortunate to have a lot of good mentors at Good Technology that really helped me both in sales and in other categories. And the founder of the company and the CEO, and lots of the top sales people just, it was a really great place where people, I think, took time to educate younger people.

So that was one of the most fortunate things that happened. And then, you know, Good had a successful exit to Motorola and stuck around there for a while. And then the founder of the company, a guy named Joel Jewett, a good who had become a mentor of mine, and I started working for him doing business development and, and product management work and kind of engineering coordination, getting and learning the other part of the House said, you know, you should start a company.

And I was like, yeah, that's what I was doing too, and ended up starting my first company in 2008. With three other people and it was called in centerline. It was a digital currency for resource allocation and an enterprise. So NASA was the first customer. You could buy wind tunnel time, or supercomputer time. And there's this whole supply demand curve that balanced pricing. And what it did is create these natural, you know, resource allocations, because people like, well, I don't really need it, I'll wait two days later, I'll wait four days later.

And it was I think, a phenomenal idea that met the buzzsaw of the 2008 economic collapse. And then here, we were, like, okay, we've all quit our jobs. No one's buying this anymore, you know, all the implementations are stopped, like, well, let's go back to the drawing board. And we ended up, you know, taking that team and that the premise of that engine and built a company called Aktana, and, and yet, you know, almost every pharmacy, pharmaceutical wrapper, biotech crap in the world is guided through this analytic platform today. And almost anybody who's, you know, been given a prescription or gotten a medical, like a cancer oncology treatment, in some way, shape, or form, the healthcare professional was impacted and informed and interacted with this technology.

So, it was, it was a cool kind of turn of events, and then to grow and go through that phase. And that was kind of my next chapter, like going from like, you know, slugging it out and kind of growing up the ladder at good to then, you know, being able to, yes, start a company and like, have new failures and new learning lessons. And, and, you know, and, and I've loved it, it's been really fun.

Jon Low

Oh, amazing. Congratulations on Aktana and the team for thinking that. So, that was quite transformational. I mean, that you're talking about something that impacts like a broader ecosystem there.

Jack O’Holleran

Yeah, yeah, it was. And you and I'll tell you, I learned so many lessons. And so did my, my colleagues and co founders, we learned a lot through the process. And I think we would have been so much more efficient and effective earlier had we have gone through an incubator and accelerator program.

And you know, that's a good thing about those types of programs. They're getting really close mentoring and coaching. And we were just kind of, you know, reading blog posts, talking to people figuring it out. And, you know, it's not the most efficient, effective way to learn, but we eventually got there. And we're also early we were, you know, this is all AI machine learning technology. And no one even called it that, right.

It was just advanced analytics or predictive analytics, and we'd go sell this to people and they'd say, okay, so you're telling me that I should have my sales reps, listen to a machine and a computer to tell them who to call and what to talk about, like, get out of here. Okay, like, they're not gonna like though they we go by gut, we know where to who to sell to. We know our territory. I see a lead, I know what to do. And I'm like, yeah, maybe your best reps do but what about 90% of the team? And even the best reps? Why should they waste so much time digging through spreadsheets when they could, you know, this is like human computer interaction for synergy. And it was really interesting. Seeing that progress, and also knowing that I got a chance to see mobile progress. And then I got to see this machine learning AI space progress, and now I'm working in blockchain. And I have to tell you, there's a pattern I just see this pattern. And, and I'm excited about blockchain because, again, it's another disruptive technology. I think that's a huge future. And I just see a lot of the same parallels, which was what got me interested.

Jon Low

Yeah, wow, super excited to dive into those patterns that you know this because, you know, as you were talking about, you know, pre labels of machine AI for, you know, this application, and people say, what each, I should listen to a machine and tell me who actually called. But nowadays, we think, of course, right, like, you know, there's just just so much and it's not just for sales, you know, it's for customer success, and all these other things, right. So you are at the front of kind of an inevitability in the marketplace, so to speak there. What are the patterns you see there that you've translated or kind of noticed in the blockchain space now? Because I think now we're going into territory that leads us a bit more to SKALE labs in the broader vision. And super excited for you to unpack that for us.

Jack O’Holleran

Yeah, so. So I'll give you an example.And the reality was, there's one killer app, it was email, okay, and then text and text messaging, okay? On a smartphone, those are the two things you could do if you tried to use any applications that have any memory requirements, high throughput requirements, bandwidth, battery life, it just didn't work, like a message is okay. Because you can send it and then it doesn't, if it sends later, you don't really know, like, you know, just it's very light, it's a packet, it just goes through, but it's like, we want to play a simultaneous game, if we want to use a like high compute power business application, right? You just couldn't do it.

And so almost every Fortune 500 company is good at that time. And it was, you know, if you had an application, you wanted to get a mobile, that's where you would go, you'd go to good and Blackberry. But you know what, none of these out, nothing ever worked. No one did anything, because the device speeds were so the bandwidth was horrible, etc.

And then, you know, fast forward a few years to 2009. And I think Apple very smartly, was like, well, here's the speed, like, we're gonna wait, we're gonna time this well, when all the other infrastructure comes together. And they did and the iPhone came out. And soon after, you know, 3G arrived,and, you know, computer and battery power, etc, all came together at the same time. And then, you know, and it really exploded, and you look at AI and machine learning. This was not a technology issue. Okay, like, Moore's Law was, like, in a pretty good place. Algorithms were, like, not a new thing, like the algorithms that most people are using for these things are not that complicated. What the issue was, was about the human side of this, and like technology, human technology, acceptance.

And this, so this was a little different, but it was, you know, people had to, like, get comfortable with this new, new social dynamic of interacting with computers and getting guidance. And also, you know, when you use AI, you also have to put it like that, like dirt like, you know, dirty data and dirty data out garbage in, garbage out. And so there's just a lot of things that had to change. And you know, so I saw it, and then, you know, people start getting wins. And then you know, and again, it's like the low hanging fruit. And then you start getting into disruptive categories. And you start getting into these really interesting growth categories.

And I see the same thing, both those dynamics happening at the same time and blockchain where the technology is coming together, just as the mobile piece did with all these different combined parts, the human societal acceptance piece is coming together. And it's still kind of far out there. But you know, you would have told, tell somebody in 2005, that you're never going to take a taxi again, and just anybody can just start their own business and drive their own car around and drive you around, and you'll be comfortable and safe doing so they'll tell you, you're crazy, right? So these things feel a long way out and then they happen quick. And so I see those things happening with blockchain. And, and I'm excited about it. And it's similar patterns, both from Technology Readiness and societal acceptance.

Jon Low

And so even with blockchain, what do you see have been some great accelerants to societal adoption, that has enough, in fact, helped help you and other innovators in the space really pursue building the pipelines of infrastructure, with more support resource, whether that's capital, humans, support and community support, we'd love you to talk through some of those things.

Jack O’Holleran

You know, the interesting thing I mean, a lot of journeys aren't smooth. And that's the case for blockchain. So it's friction fall, and it's friction because there's some things that move the ball forward and other things that move the ball backwards, and they happen at the same time and so one like people have been able to make a lot of money and like in participate in these nascent products, which stimulates growth, which floods more venture capital down to good entrepreneurs and good teams that are starting businesses and finding product-market fit.

But conversely, there's been like, graphed and like, not good KYC/AML practices and like bad branding for like hackers using Bitcoin and as a means to like capture their, you know, their ransom or whatever. And it's and then and then also, there's been just fraudulent efforts and like these fake hype things that try to capture that money in that growth. And so all the balls get pushed forward, it's also getting pushed back.

And I think that's common, but I've never been in an industry that's been so dramatic like the swings, or the motions back and forth. And so I think the industry is just good, no matter. But it seems like one of these things where you look at the value of mobile computing, you look at the value of AI and machine learning, you look at the value of ride sharing, and the gig economy and the share economy. And then you now I think you look at the user owned economy, or, you know, profit sharing communities, and, you know, community owned software products, like co ops that are your ride sharing company.

And, you know, it just seems to me like an inevitable thing, where you can through smart contracts and open source software, and essentially blockchains create new rails rules and governance for the way we use software systems. And it's like water flowing downhill, it's like, gravity is inevitable. And it just, you know, who knows how fast it will get there. You know, hopefully, it hits a nice, nice, nice stream, and, but right now, there's just a lot of friction, and, but we're close, we're really close. So I think in the next, you know, one to two years, we'll start seeing those breakout years. And, and, but that's why it hasn't happened yet is is, you know, all of the technology issue combined with with friction in the space, but, you know, for people that really are perceptive and either want to start a business in the space or invest in it, it doesn't take much effort to see the, like real kernels of value. And, and that, and that's where the promises.

Jon Low

Thanks for sharing that. And, and so like, tell us a bit about as you're talking about these product trends and inevitabilities within the crypto space and its opportunities. Where does SKALE labs fit? Present date? And where does it want to fit in the future?

Jack O’Holleran

Yeah, so I'm going to speak pretty high level here, because I think, getting in the nuances of a structure like we can do that, you know, there's a lot of content, if you wanna hear me talk about that. But I'm going to speak, you know, kind of macro architecturally.

So, blockchains are shared databases. And what it is that creates one database, okay. And imagine if Uber, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, salesforce.com, all use the same database, they had to share it. Imagine and like, all of a sudden, you know, it's the end of quarter and Salesforce is just, you know, and it costs more to send your email or, you know, something's trending on Twitter, and it, you know, your emails slow down, right. And imagine the cost of running this where everybody's data has to be stored on everybody else's system. It's not efficient. And that's not the way the internet's built. The internet is like these, these little, you know, many databases with weak links talking to each other. And so what SKALE builds is, is a large pool of these nodes or computers that work together. And they can be randomly assigned into these subgroups, maintaining the security properties of blockchains. But then giving each application like the email application that writes an application that you know, the decentralized finance product games, like each application gets their own blockchain that's actually in a unified pooled security model.

And so what it is, is we're replicating this infrastructure of the internet. And then bringing the Ethereum ecosystem which is the top developer, tooling, and code and just developer ecosystem, hands down and blockchain, you can bring that into every single chain your own blockchain. And then and then also work interoperability back and forth with Ethereum name net, which is the big shared database that has a lot of value as well to have the big shared database because that's where you get this one source of truth forever, about who owns what. And, and so what SKALE does is scale is actually built on and uses Ethereum to run the scale network. And it works back and forth with Ethereum to help developers have a future experience.

And a lot of people think, oh, they think it's like how many transactions per second, the speed of transactions and those are nice things, but it's actually stepping back a little bit. It's more about giving people the architecture to then create a we-like experience across the entire web three internet. And that's our goal, not just, you know, solve this one acute issue that's, you know, present today, which people like to talk about which is throughput and transaction time and transaction cost.

Jon Low

Wow. How did you come up with name then?

Jack O’Holleran

So we, my co-founder and I have a very long track record in Silicon Valley too. And we even crossed paths a few times where he did the cryptography certification when I was a good he ran a crypto lab for a while, he and I were just like going back and forth on what the name should be. And we had all these different ideas. And I remember I was running as I lived in the Presidio at the time in San Francisco. And I was running trail running on the coasts, because I live right out near the coasts. And I was listening to a podcast, I was listening to Chris Dixon, and on Adam Draper's podcast who Adam Draper is now an investor in scale, with Boost VC, but they use the word “scale” about I bet 200 times in that podcast.

And afterwards, I called Stan, I was like, Hey, we should call, we should call the “Scale Zen.” And he's like, good. Developers like short words, we're gonna call it SKALE. I was like, Okay. So, that was a story. And so and then, you know, and it makes sense for search to use a different letter if you type in S-C-A-L-E blockchain, there'll be like 10,000 results, you'll never show up if you type in S-K-A-L-E. And, and then we, you know, SKALE LABS was a nice way to name you know, the corporation that supports the network, which is a SKALE NETWORK. So that's, that was the origin story there. And our goal of the community is to scale blockchain. So we can have hundreds of millions and, you know, maybe even billions of users using blockchains.

Jon Low

Wow, that's, that's pretty amazing. And, you know, for the everyday person, right, who's not so clued with the building of blockchain applications or building in this space? How does my life look different as SKALE achieve what it sets out to achieve? You know, what are the implications for everyday living?

Jack O’Holleran

Okay, let me try to give three examples. One, let's talk about checking a bank account savings account. Right now, all of our savings accounts are run by banks. And, and there's brick and mortar institutions and insurance hold these, you know, people in marketing and sales, and you know, and then these banks are taking your money, and then they're doing all these other crazy things with it right through the economy. And there's just a lot of middlemen.

Okay, and what banking looks like in the Ethereum world that we're trying to help build in the blockchain world is there's no bank. The blockchain, this shared asset run by all these servers, is the ledger that secures everyone's money. And you And right now, like Bitcoin is very clear, like, yeah, I can, you know, ledger just keeps our money. And it does a great job at that.

But in the Ethereum ecosystem, you can incorporate these smart contracts, which are really computing properties. And all of a sudden, I can have a checking account, I can have a savings account, I can have like these really, in like, highly complicated financial instruments for trading. And so it's like, and guess what, there's no, there's no brick and mortar, there's no middleman, we can cut the middleman out, and then your returns are going to be dramatically higher than what you're getting with banks. So that's, that's one example.

Another example would be, let's go to like the deep end of web three, let's say Facebook, Google, Uber. And if Uber's, maybe not a good web, you know, crossover, web three. But all three are incredibly strong network, network effect companies, that gets stronger.

And then now we have these three properties, three central players that are taking more value than they give back to the community. And I mean, if Google's making 100 billion a year on search, and like taking our data and selling our data and buying our data, and kind of nippy, like you say something, and next thing, you know, you're getting retargeted on Instagram, and, you know, all these NRG, you know, this world well.

So, it was really good and valuable to get us the state. But imagine if we, as the users own the product, and the code was open source, we can all see it. And we could vote on how those ad dollars are shared back to the community. And we can opt in or opt out just how our data was leveraged and monetized. And if we want to opt into how to monetize, we actually get to recoup the benefits, that hundred billion probably goes down because the ad dollars will be lower, maybe it goes up, I don't know. But if so, if it goes up to 50 billion, then you share 50 billion, you know, 30 billion across all the people who just use a product and you have another 20 billion you can give to all the people that run the service. Okay? And the same thing is true if we take Uber and we remove Uber and we use open source code and smart contract And I go, you know, get or catch a ride that 30% Uber takes gets split between the driver and the rider and the people that run the servers and write the code.

And BrainTrust is an example I think you guys have talked to, or instead of having these middlemen recruiting companies, they let the companies work directly with talent. And they do it for no cut. And they just make sure you use B trust as the fee component 10% of whatever the transaction is, you have to pay a fee and B trust. Okay, and that goes back to the community. And so when you have a cryptocurrency, and a blockchain and an open source product, you can do amazing things as far as community growth, governance, profit sharing, etc.

Jon Low

Thanks for taking us through that journey, Jack. I mean, because now I'm starting to think like, Wow, so braintrust is literally just the beginning. And we can expect many more versions of greencross in different with different core value drivers flitting around the ecosystem.

Jack O’Holleran

But I want to add one last thing here just to anybody this is your one of your first time hearing about web three business models are user owned economy. And what else is the one of the problems blockchain has is that there are uses for it everywhere. It's like the internet. And that's why a lot of people are like, hey, it's web three or the open Internet. And so it would it means it ends up being a really big Product Marketing issue and awareness issue because to some people blockchains are these enterprise things that help big companies move money around the world, to other people supply chain software, other people it's like, the next rails of the gaming world, you know, any gaming will be using blockchain and you know, non fungible assets that can be sold across these tokens.

And like, you know, smart contract provable provable gaming, either like, no, it's all about finance, it's about money. It's about, you know, you know, being bank. Plus, it's about removing middlemen, or other people like, Hey, this is web three, like, let's go into these middleman, heavy network, a network effect businesses and create community own properties with open source code and smart contracts. And, and so it's a lot of things for a lot of people, which also speaks to, I think, the potential growth, but also one of the reasons why we're having challenges because nobody knows how to describe it. And even the people that work in space have trouble agreeing on what it is.

Jon Low

That's so well said. And, you know, you know, the idea, it's almost like, these are the implications of operating in a decentralized fashion. Where, if you look, historically, we don't have an architectural precedent to say, what it is like, you know, you can't translate a metaphor to like, you know, whatever something Socrates did, or something back in the day, but he would love to, for you to speak more about how you came to understand or get into this mindset of what essentialized actually means, and its implications, and how you see other people start to familiarize themselves with what that actually means. Because I think we're still in a, arguably a discovery phase, or are we not?

Jack O’Holleran

We are, we are, and I think, I think there's also a spectrum of decentralization too, and, and how much user owned something is, and, and also, it's, it's also a path and a journey. And I think what most of the smart people in the space that I've been talking to, and this is also my opinion, is, you don't want to start on day one with complete, you know, community ownership, you just won't get anywhere you need to be more centralized. And over time, you start giving more and more power. And so the rails have to be there.

And, and the good news is that it's very clear of who has what power because of the way smart contracts work, and because of the nature of open source code. And so you know, you can look at any of these, these products and look at scale, for example, where anybody can show up and run a server and add it to the network. And, you know, let's say we want to change the pricing.

So all these developers that are building, you know, you know, blockchain games and blockchain business applications, blockchain, finance applications, etc, can all use SKALE as their database. Let's say that the people that run the servers, like we need to get paid more like in the example of the Uber driver, like, Hey, we need more money and the riders like, we want to pay less. Well guess what they can actually vote, and anybody who has tokens can vote to change the price, and then like, Okay, I guess the price changes. It literally happens automatically through smart contracts. There's a proposal the contract that codifies the business logic, and then people vote and if it passes, it literally just happens. It gets upgraded. And so that is like a really amazing level of decentralization. That's really clear.

Now, if you started there, the first day you have to organize right now there's 4000 people sitting In the scale network, there are 150 validator nodes, there're 46 validator orgs. And so in six months, the first on chain votes are going to start, but in the next couple of weeks, like there's, and you know, months, it's like, you need a hot fix, like, boom, boom, that you need to have more agility during the early days, and the skill network just launched October 1, right, in its live decentralized form, but so you just take these graduated steps to get there, you know, fix all the bad issues, move to the next phase, the next phase? And but it is, experiments on best practices are being formed now. And, and I think we're all learning, which is also exciting.

Jon Low

Now, so Well said, and, you know, I like that idea of like, you know, you start with degrees of decentralization and move along with the benefits and, you know, building something like skill that has such huge implications. I mean, blockchain obviously, itself has huge implications on society. How do you see yourself moving or bringing old industries along, like the banking system, without because it can be seen, they're obviously freaking out, and it can be seen as a threat. But if you look long term, right. There's a way for everyone to win with this new technology. Could you speak a bit more to that?

Jack O’Holleran

Yeah. Okay. So I, I forget who came up with coined this term, the white hot center, it's in one of the, you know, famous business books, that means like, it's really your low hanging fruit, right? And it's your, like, Geoffrey Moore Crossing the Chasm first bowling pin, okay, like, that's your white hot center.

You know, some people say, sell Bibles to the Christians, you'll your sales will be better, right? Then trying to like, you know, change people's religion. Okay. And, you know, and so when you look at blockchain, it's gaming and decentralized finance. Right now, those are the two big categories. But you know, what? There's a lot of other ones right behind those. And so I think, I think there are people that are out trying to, like change people's religion, sell different manuscripts of religion to people who don't practice that religion. And to be honest, they're just not having much success. Now, maybe their tokens are really valuable, but if you look at the activity on their blockchains is pretty empty, okay. And that's another cool thing about blockchain, you can actually see business traction, because you can see how much information is in the blocks of usage.

So, these are called ghost chains. There's a lot of billion dollar ghost chains out there. But then you look at the Ethereum network, and it's just there's so much use, and it's just the early days still, and, and the network's still getting jam, that's why scale is, you know, building another, you know, Etherum zoom to eat to, and there's all these really good things that are happening, but, but I think, you know, we have to find the white hot center, and then the other piece is just get pulled along in the vacuum.

Jon Low

Thank you. Awesome.Now, I just really appreciate it and looking at time here. And, you know, I think maybe as a quick last question, as you look out to the next, you know, five or 10 years, you know, where do you see scale and, and the impact that it will be able to have? And then yeah, I would love to just hear that Quick, quick answer.

Jack O’Holleran

The goal of the SKALE community is to make the user own node economy in, it would be amazing to see 10,000 nodes and the SKALE network or 100,000, owned by thousands of different operators, and running, you know, the the majority of the world smart contracts, and, and really helping a positive movement for users and and governance come together and in assists from a societal perspective, as well as financial perspective for all the new small businesses that will get up and running. People that are running servers that have, you know, other products and assets and services they sell in and around this network. And I would love to just see this flourishing ecosystem that, you know, and at the end of the day, it's all about making developers successful. And if that happens, then I think a lot of good stuff will happen for a lot of people. And you know, that's, that's our goal.

Jon Low

Oh, thank you. And probably one quick last question to give SKALE an opportunity and a plug for, for anyone, for anyone out there who's looking to get into blockchain or is aligned with this scale vision. What would you like to share with them and what sort of people would you look for it for the SKALE LABS?

Jack O’Holleran

Yeah, so I recommend going to SKALE.network. That's the website SK le dot network. You could follow me on twitter at jack O'Halloran. And or, you know, find me by going you know, through the skill website or, or telegram or discord if you use those products. But yeah, just come to the website. Check it out. It's an open source community. It's community-owned, we're the founding team but you know, there's open source contribution happening if you're developer please check out the documentation in and yeah, come come get engaged and and I think also welcome you to come check out the Ethereum ecosystem because SKALEe is just one, you know, one component of that broader ecosystem and community and I think a lot of passionate people trying to build the future of the Internet.