💬 AMA: Building for Users with Asta from Privy - HackFS 2024

[Music] all right hey everybody thanks for joining us uh whether you're watching on YouTube or you are watching uh over here on the zoom um excited to have you join us um and today we're going to be jumping into another AMA part of our AMA series is part of hacka Fest uh where we are doing some quick interviews with Founders uh entrepreneurs VCS accelerators uh just kind of give you a sense of what the journey ahead looks like um as part of building a project for the first time or or for the end of time so um yeah really excited to have ASA who's joining us today she's co-founder and CTO at privy who I think a lot of people have probably heard of over the last uh few years especially um so yeah welcome her up onto the stage um and yeah excited to kind of walk through a little bit more about her journey um experience kind of building in the space and uh and yeah of course at the end will open this up for questions so it's meant to be collaborative as well so if you have any questions as we go through feel free to drop them in the chat or at the end if you want to come up on stage and ask them directly um feel free to do so so yeah we'll welcome EST up onto the stage hi there it's a great to meet you all yeah thanks for coming um awesome well I I think kind of a great place to start nice and easy we just kind of love to hear a little bit more about you know how how you even got into the space to begin with um so we'd love to kind of hear a little bit about that journey and how you kind of ended up joining the community yeah um so my my background is actually in uh large scale data infrastructure and machine learning for Robotics and self-driving cars um so I I uh um you know this is this is a a little bit further from home um but it actually comes from a shared rote in excitement about technology and uh infrastructure and the transformation that you can have working on um uh on on developer tooling which is in my opinion like the most massive leverage thing that you can do um developers themsel like we are already by writing code um doing work that's super high leverage and to get to empower developers to build even more of the the vision that they're trying to create um basically sounds like the most exciting thing that I could be doing um so that's a lot of the the kind of shared background but um I got into uh web 3 um coming from from you know a place of um being really excited to work on privacy and digital identity um I think web3 with the um web3 has the incentive alignment around um really returning control back to users in a way that uh causes um has created change um that is different than uh I think um outside of web 3 where um that change comes from more of a compliance um point of view and U I was really eager to be a part of what I'm seeing in web 3 which is that we are reshaping the relationship that people have with the apps that use online cool very cool when when you were sort of exploring that and and learning more about you know digital ownership or or digital identity like was there were there any kind of like Media or books or content or people that like stood out to you as like part of that Journey that early Journey yeah um there's uh a lot of things I was paying attention to but actually one of the things that um I found really exciting was so my co-founder Henry um uh before I even met him I read his uh like five-part article series on his work and um Research into uh privacy and digital identity and um I found uh his thinking to be so extremely aligned with the way that I view the world and also really really insightful um and it's a big reason why we're working together um because of that alignment and because of the our shared care for uh for our work in digital identity um and so uh that was definitely something that influenced me a lot um yeah I think that uh the other part of it is that in web 3 you know we get to be on the ground floor of shaping The Narrative and what is possible um and so uh in some ways there um there isn't previous Tri and ground here and that's also really cool very cool and I think I mean just because I have to bring protocol ABS right is that right yeah I think he had just left or something like that very cool very cool um awesome okay yeah so I I mean maybe be worth jumping in a little bit um you sort of becoming more and more interested personally about the space I mean how how did you sort of get started with privy and you know I guess you met Henry along the way and maybe reach out to him through that and um but yeah like what what was that kind of early Journey like what what were some of the kind of early days yeah so Henry and I were um introduced by mutual friend and um I was not focused on web3 at the time um I was thinking about um sort of the problems around uh privacy online and digital identity more broadly speaking um and uh uh Henry and I were talking about a lot of the things that um that a lot of the the vision that we had for how the internet should work and what it looks like when users take control parent that um you know there's there's the version of working on um on privacy that looks like uh um essentially like you know building compliance software or dealing a lot with regul there's the version of it that we found in web 3 which was um being driven by a a huge number of very excited um fast-moving Builders who um cared about returning control um to users uh also because that was like um and users owning their assets and data and having full control is also a part of what makes web 3 successful um so I I think that's what caused us to um building for web 3 um I think another part of it is um you know I I see like web 3 being a place that drives um people to uh um experience you know interet should look like um but I also see that it's a place where the user experience is like pretty awful and or at least it was pretty awful and it was a place where um it was really hard to people are telling you to download this like um sort of sketchy Fox extension on your browser and then memorize 12 words where if you forget no one can ever help you um and you're you're stuck forever um and then you hear stories of people digging around in landfills for their slip of paper um and like that's not a user experience that I think makes sense for my mom or you know most of the people who use so a lot of it was like I see a huge potential for change here um but uh in conjunction with um getting people [Music] toly um enable new and different onboarding experiences um and so this is where I think Arc