Web3 Stack and the Convergence of AI | European Blockchain Convention 9

[Music] have a seat we have Richard I can almost not fit this chair okay can you fit do you fit it's very comfortable actually I feel a bit like squeezed in well um we have Richard founder of fabric Ventures it's hot right yeah it's hot but I just I just ran here because I ended up at a a different fear apparently oh you went to the okay yeah that that one yeah there is two fears by the way yeah um it was the the the driver was trying to be very helpful but he just assumed I was going to the multi-day Congress in the anyway well some sometimes I'm not sure if if they do it on purpose oh really I'm thinking cuz people are not that stupid normally that's you know I mean sneaky I definitely am that stupid well okay we have the honor of having Richard founder of fabric ventes one of the largest BCS fly focused on web 3 and AI That's every day not every day I'm talking to a Richard like you so to begin with well I'm Victoria Gago I'm not that important but I am the founder of this event so a little bit important but um I think to begin with I would like you to introduce yourself Richard but without talking about your career we usually always talk about like I do this I do that I did an exit I make that much more much Morey so Richard who are you if we don't talk about your career uh yeah I think it's it's it's an interesting exercise and a good question to to ask oneself uh repeatedly throughout your life I guess uh can everybody hear us by the way this is a lot lot of backround is fantastic um and uh I guess I'm about to describe who I am but who are you folks just to to get it going how many here are are kind of Founders who are building something new Fantastic the rest of you should be ashamed on your of yourselves you should be building something brand new but there's still time um so and then how many are investors or themselves or with with other groups just a that's good just a couple we don't want too many too many of those horrible people um so uh and I'm not quite sure who everybody else is maybe you're kind of voyers of some type and just wanting to kind of to to learn but that gives me a bit a bit of an idea um so I think well I just off the off the cuff like some thoughts of who am I uh I I'm definitely kind of somewhat competitive um I have two brothers and uh we you know did all the classic competing to eat the food off the table competing to for the attention of our parents probably Etc you know so that's definitely part of me um I I feel like I'm constantly lazy so I always feel like I'm not working as hard as I should be um and I'm not but then at the same time people say oh my gosh you're s of workaholic and you're always working so maybe I'm just incredibly inefficient and therefore I feel guilty all the time uh uh but but I think there is sometimes that feeling I see in people who built things um and then but I love the the kind of kind of the harmony of a well orchestrated team um and how collectively uh whether it in kind of cerebral Pursuits or you know physical Endeavor we can achieve more um and um I I can remember actually in this inner sense sort of led into my uh career that I'm not talking about um I I went into the computer room at school and uh first got the idea that there was not just a computer and I'd been playing around with sort of zx81s and tandies and BBC micros and and various other things but this was a set of networked computers and I had this kind of light bu moment I guess I was 12 or 13 or something um uh so kind of about like 1987 or there or thereabouts a bit earlier and I had a light Barb moment that with computers all connected together you know not only could each person have their productivity increased um as Steve Jobs put it you know with a bicycle for the mind um uh everybody know that quote from Steve Jobs a few a few people basically said if you look at you know the animal kingdom and you look at how fast we can go we as humans we think of ourselves as the kind of Pinnacle of God's creation as he could have said it to paraphrase but or the crown of creation but you know of course on so many dimensions we're actually terrible we're not very fast not very strong you know none of these things um but but if we want to go fast like in comparison to cheetah or something we can we can we can make a bike yeah and we can make a bicycle and we can go much faster and so a computer is like a bicycle for the mind and then I had this this light bulb moment when I saw all these bikes for the Mind connected so we could all kind of work together and I think the light bulb moment was connected to how I could possibly get my homework done um for for school more more efficiently so again kind of maybe demonstrating my La my laziness but joking aside that was the the power of networks of humans sort of armed with computers that was an epiphany for me very nice so well now you know Richard is very lazy but at the same time I work alcoholic but uh yeah I do I've heard this I mean I I know this feeling I also feel I'm extremely lazy um but very interesting um how you got fascinated by by computers and I think now maybe we can dig a little bit more into um into your career but just a quick question first when did you buy your first Bitcoin uh I bought my first Bitcoin using blockchain.info whatever back in um uh March end of March 2013 something like that um um and um I yeah and then and then I sort of got into investigating the space after that but I mean I bought it because uh I was hunting for a theme to uh invest around um and I can for a theme to invest around yeah so I mean one of the things so if I'm about to be given permission to talk about my career one of the things I learned in my startup career so I came out of University and I um had studied engineering uh so I was um uh that was Cambridge in the in the UK and I was definitely obsessed with the idea of have trying to have an unfair Advantage when you then build a company how do we get technology from the incredible universities right across Europe and get them um deployed in great companies and right from back then um again you know comp competing with should we say the Silicon Valley ethos that everybody had seen I can remember watching programs about the brain drain to Silicon Valley from the UK and from Europe when I was probably Sub sub 10 and this feels like this is something we needed to arrest um and um in my startup career and I built a few different companies focus and having a theme a specialization is uh a clear advantage and So within when I wanted to start my investing career I was looking for a theme around which to build our kind of specialization and so I asked my long-term collaborator who who also studied AI basically machine learning speech recognition at at Cambridge um I asked him from where he was sitting over in Silicon Valley uh you know what was hot at that point in time and and I'd heard about Bitcoin but had not look into it and he replied just with uh VR and Bitcoin was the two things he replied and I and I was I was like VR not sure that it's going to really take off at the at a tremendous Pace uh and of course there's still challenges of that it's not to be dismissed but Bitcoin I thought that sounded um sounded really cool so like you know I went and bought something basically but there's more to the story after that but very nice okay so at some point in your career you then managed to to loune fabric Ventures and well as you told me the other day you were kind of like looking into like a new paradigm when it comes to S software and and as of now maybe I think to really dig into like your career and also like the sectors you're looking into where do you see the opportunities because we have many Hypes and then it seems like something is going to last forever but then it dies what what where are you investing sure so I mean the perspective we have on L and people come to this this space with many different perspectives I think you can come at it with from a philosophical perspective um that actually you shouldn't have to rely on Banks and governments and you should be able to look after your own assets and identity and data and life you can come out that soon becomes possibly a political perspective um we want to reinvent the notion uh of governance and government we want to increase the efficiency with which we can run democracy in a small scale but even at very large scales we want to hence essentially increase the efficiency of Freedom uh because I think democracy You could argue is the the closest we've got to a kind of non Anarchist freedom of some description so you can you can go down those directions or you can come at it from just a pure sort of monetary perspective and say um uh we we just think that we should have uh our own money as as should we say the people that is internet Sovereign uh and can't be deflated away um uh which of course we're all starting to experience right now the other direction to come at it and it was kind of and I'm not not dismissing any of those um but the other direction to come at it is which is really where we had come from uh with the folks I've been building companies with and and then as fabric is that there are proven waves of technology and Technology adoption the classic colotto Perez waves of Technology adoption if read that book um and um and you can look at going before the information age you can obviously go back to you know Steam and the wheel and all these things but in the information age we've had um mainframes then mini computers and then the PC and then the internet giving birth to to the web and I had been fortunate enough to kind of build in my first company something that was a component of the internet that was getting ready to to carry the the web the first wave of the web um it was something that a piece of middleware using open source that scale to manage that new Data Network and then then I'd worked with um a bunch of you know incredible people to build another open source-based platform on a a tiny component someone laughed at me as when I said it the the other day but a tiny component of what you can think of as the cloud and we would think as the key components of uh uh web 2 is being the fact that you can use your Mobile to get on it it can it can be hosted on the cloud and you have some kind of identity because of social um and so what we saw in web 3 and what we're starting we start to generally more call the open web but let's start with web 3 was uh this new stack and then and to be very simple about it and to build on that point about the efficiency of governance and democracy and freedom a new stack that that facilitates the coordination of many individual people in quite complex tasks devoting a lot of time and resources uh where you you take advantage of The Selfish uh pursuit of self-interest by individuals to uh but you bring them together for the collective good so it's a balance of those two things um that's that orchestration that coordination power superpower of this new Computing stack uh is what got us super excited 10 10 years ago and so we come at it thinking of as a new stack the web three stack that um is everything from settlement on ethereum you know or near or salana take your pick uh all the way up through to you know seress decentralized user interfaces um uh above the kind of identity layer and I think in the future you'll see and this is where I think it takes this into the world of the open web um integration with autonomous AI agents that are going to be both necessary or useful for us to handle the complexity of this new all enveloping web stack but also actually necessary to even U make governance of this new forms of governance work at scale so but if you have to mention a few of your favorite sectors because so you talk a lot about collaboration between people computers yeah so it's a very broadly applicable um uh kind of capability but this is how we have seen this last 10 years um there's been a lot of kind of moment of incredible hype um driven obviously by the price action that we all see by the different types of token within the market and look the fact that these defi capabilities are baked into this stack the fact that this is a software stack that can make and keep Financial commitments and promises and no other stack has ever been able to do that before no other sort of software Paradigm has been able to do that that is not a bug that lead you know that leads to speculation it's a very key uh feature for sure but what it means is that in the effort to build what you know vitalik has described as the world computer over the last 10 years you end up with a situation where the World Casino becomes the headline um and that's just again if you go back to kado Perez's sort of thinking that's just a necessary part that you have that speculation almost that um irrational uh exuberance to co that phrase um that that works to the advantage of of deploying a new wave of Technology um and so I think therefore it's inevitable that from time to time two things happen number one we think that sort of defi has arrived because we see the price action and we think we're about to overthrow the existing centralized Finance sort of Industry that of course is you know uh with care ultimately I think a very powerful and benevolent thing to to happen however it's pretty hard to do because you know there's a few incumbent interests it also distracts from the fact that building this world computer the ability to uh have be comfortable with your own network native identity carrying your all of the data you you generate through all of your activities on an ongoing basis you go about your daily lives and for you to bank yourself and not get worried you're going to lose your private this is really tough to build and make scale and make usable and everybody's got very impatient you know why don't I just have web three decentralized apps that just work for me that that just give me a decentralized way of of sharing my photos with my friends or uh take all of my health data and present it back to all of the stakeholders in the health industry and deliver back to us uh better predictions of pandemics or better predictions of um you know diseases and and and possible solutions for them now both of those things should we say open uh or decentralized you know web 3 social or decentral web three social media and Open Health that that both of those sectors um are definitely coming and ones that we're looking at I would have said that things like lens and foraster and a whole bunch of apps in those ecosystems are doing very P powerfully I think on the Open Health side uh we've seen things who's here has used sweatcoin or steppen so we've seeing apps now that people that you can use to start to get paid to extract a tiny little bit of your data from you about your activities perhaps to get you know fed back to insurance companies need to present you with a slightly better um you know rate on your insurance so I think we're just seeing the beginning of that that you know the uh us getting comfortable with sharing an awful lot of our data on our daily lives and then feeding into the health sector uh to pick another area that's we've invested in quite a lot and is is it continues to take off it's um in gaming and so there were things like axi Infinity um uh who did anybody use that game in the last wave so you could buy little axes and you could b battle them and breed them and and so forth and you could earn money by by doing this but ultimately it wasn't ultimately a sustainable and stable enough you know internal digital economy um and ultimately it wasn't that greater game um and that beautiful but all of that is changing people are thinking very hard about to marry up sustainable token economics what you can earn from your actions within the game to uh superlative game mechanics which which of course people know a lot about to something that is fully performant an onchain game that has got the same sort of characteristics as something you'd expect from a AAA Studio there are a huge amount of people working on that and I think we'll see either on your phone or in D I mentioned at AR or VR context you know really engaging and immersive opportunities um which W with lots of and lots of gamification I'll mention one thing we haven't announced but I'll s mention obliquely so of an investment that kind of both rolls out robots that you kind of own and control and then gamifies the interactions with them in a kind of Pokémon go type fashion uh in order to capture data to train um those robots down the line for navigating The Last Mile for deliveries so if we think kind of obviously navigating roads is its own type of complexity but delivering to the door is also another level of complexity so I think there's there's lots of interesting Innovation going on in all of those different spaces uh and there are spaces beyond that as well fantastic well Richard we we running out of time um I you sound a little bit like a philosopher sometimes have you heard that before absolutely not okay but no that's good that means you're smart even though you're lazy but okay last question um very important right so so we are in Europe we at European blocking convention um where is Europe in the whole web three space compared to the US and China so I mean with each wave of technology I think we we get a new opportunity my parents are actually Australian I'm just kind of arrived and then thought hey you know why don't we have fun and and build great companies and build great products um and why should the US be having all the fun meantime in those last three decades uh you know obviously China and Asia has erupted on the scam enormously I was at token 2049 tens of thousands of people you know uh this is a very borderless very Global movement if we can call it that can call it that um there is an opportunity but we really need to get our act together um you know the the Venture cap The Venture Capital funding is still kind of 20% 25% of what it is in either of those two geographies that's something the government needs to fix I in as much as I can uh spare the time from kind of my day job I try and help catalyze that and and you can all do the the Same by spreading that message I I think we've got an ecosystem that's way better than before look at this uh with you know with with um lawyers uh with with advisors with board members with with role models for Success you know be it Skype or poka do or actually in big part ethereum um that we can look up up to within Europe that's super critical um and the science of startups is much more democratized now right across the the globe so we can all work out how to do it and and so forth so I think that that's critical so but we do do need more Capital still and you know we're kind of at a fifth of the level on the kind of input level to the capital we're at like 1% of the level on the output in terms of the market capitalization it's it's not it's not good having said all of that um I think there is something about this balance of the needs of the individual and of the collective good uh that is quite European in in nature it's kind of a little speaks to the European Mission um of kind a Federation of St States and within states of respect for the privacy of the individual you know Europe has championed things like gdpr um which is I think has had a had a knock on effect effect across the whole of the world and um and I think that as we enter this next age where we are going to have this abundance of expression and opinion and creativity through AI um we need to balance it with the scarcity that kind of web 3 can bring the fact that you can determine exactly who's what who's you know who someone is and where their uh their creativity has has whether it's come from them or not and to ascribe them the the value from that I think that those are kind of ying and yang that need to uh to to work in in in Harmony and and I think that's going to be important because one way of thinking about it is that uh we have kind of like somewhat unbridled occasionally Cowboy very powerful uh surveillance capitalism embodied in in the uh in the US and that sort of us model and on the other hand uh and I'm not meaning to get political about it but arguably they have their own road to kind of uh to Farrow to plow and they have reasons for this they have a large Nation to manage but China obviously has to some degree a surveillance State and a direction that they could go even F you know further uh that direction and so in between surveillance capitalism and surveillance State there's a good book about surveillance capitalism from um Zub um is is um is some middle path and I think there is a middle path a kind of collective capitalism or modern mutualism of some description that that that can be that Europe can try and own um which sounds like a good idea to me I like it well Richard amazing I've learned so much and I hope also you have I know we're a bit of over time but thank you so much thank you if you have some interesting projects reach out to Richard absolutely we're we're we're investing it is nothing has stopped you know there's sometimes there's more noise sometimes there's less noise but there's always a signal of of great uh Founders across Europe in the world and so I'd be thrilled to talk to them fantastic thank you so much Richard big Applause woohoo premium.com