Has Social Media Changed the Way We Think? with Ayman Hariri, Co-Founder & CEO of Vero

Speaker A: This is Tim Dalhouse and you're listening to the Dao Talks podcast. In each episode you hear me talk to builders and makers of Web3. Together we'll be exploring our multi chain future, share personal stories and discuss how we're investing, experimenting and failing with the startups that define the future. So join me m on this journey of discovery as a chat with these leaders, change makers and misfits about tech, life, the universe and everything. Today I'll be talking to Aymain Hariri, founder by the co founder of Veero. They founded Vero, a social network after realizing that social media was changing people's behavior. This was about 10 years ago and a long time before this problem really entered the mainstream. So we'll be talking about Vero, social media addiction, the global stage, healthy habits and obviously decentralization of social media platforms.

Speaker B: Hey Ayman, how are you and where are you these days? Safe.

Speaker C: Hey Tim, I'm in Dubai these days. This is where I live. My kids go to school here, so officially this is where I live, although I spent quite a bit of time traveling. But home is where the heart is, so Dubai is my home.

Speaker B: How long have you been in Dubai? Now your kids were born there or you moved there with them when they were little or like.

Speaker C: Actually we moved a year and a half ago. So the beginning of the school year in September, not last September, but the September before.

Speaker B: Gotcha. And before that you were in.

Speaker C: I was living in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia and my kids were born between there and Jordan. My wife is originally Palestinian Jordanian, so I had. My oldest son was born in Riyadh and then the other two kids, my daughter and younger son were born in Jordan.

Speaker B: So I imagine they also must hold like bunch of different passports, right?

Speaker C: They're Saudis, so yeah, so we have Saudi passports. We're a Saudi family, originally Lebanese, but uh, we're Saudi citizens.

Speaker B: Gotcha. Okay. Was, uh, curious about that. So I mean you obviously the founder and CEO of Vero Vero has been around now a few years, I think 2015, 2016. Very interested and very passionate in the space. I think, you know, everyone these days cares about social media over and over. Right. You never get out of it and it's part of kind of public discourse. Right. The last thing that, you know, I read in news is Dorsey saying that, you know, Blue sky is going on Android one of these days. Right. Or it just launched, I think it was two, three days ago. So two questions for you to start. What's Vero and why do we need it. What makes it different? Why do we need yet another social media platform?

Speaker C: Yeah, great question. I love how you phrase that. So I'll take advantage of how you asked the question. Vero is a, is an alternative social network. We've been building it from the ground up, uh, to learn from what we perceive are the pitfalls of the attention economy and create an alternative online space that mimics more the real world social network, which we think is the most valuable tool, tool or almost a living organism that, that we take for granted every day. And it's allowed us to come out of the caves as a species all the way to, uh, here we are right now on a zoom call. You know, I mean, it's miraculous what we've been able to do and the advancements that we've been able to do, but we've done them together because we are a social species. We like to work with each other, we like to discover things together, we like to teach each other. It's just part of who we are and how we're made up. So we wanted to take the challenge of taking that concept and putting it online. Where we differ from everybody else is that our business model as a start, is a subscription model. We haven't turned on subscription yet. We're going to do that in the near future. But it has informed the way we behave, the way we design the app, the way we design every feature, how we think about things, how we create communities and which differs very much from an attention economy based platform, which is more about giving, uh, it away for free in order for you to spend a lot of time in that application and that service and then your behavior is farmed out to and sold to third party advertisers who take advantage of the attention that you're spending on the platform and so on and so forth. So what we're trying to do is create a space that feels safe, that feels real, that feels, you know, sort of without a second agenda other than you as a person wanting to discover new things, discover other people who have passions that are similar to yours, and use the Internet, use the technology to bridge space and time so that you connect with people that you wouldn't otherwise have access to.

Speaker B: You founded the company, the project in 2015. 16. When was it?

Speaker C: Yeah. So the app, ah, went live in the app store in 2015. We actually started all the way. I mean the first conversation was in 2013. And um, you mentioned earlier that I'm the founder, I'm actually the co founder. Two of my closest Friends. One is my cousin and one is my friend since I was 12 years old. Just started a conversation around the state of social networks at the time and how they.

Speaker B: How, huh.

Speaker C: We all saw our friends behaving on. On these new, you know, relatively new tools. And it just sort of snowballed from there. And here we are in 2023 and we're still building.

Speaker B: So I'm very interested about exactly this aspect of the very early days. So you started the conversations 2013, that's like about 10 years ago, right? And you just said, you know, that what you're trying to build here is not something that kind of like harvests off the behavior and the data of users. It's a different business model that makes total sense. It's also, you know, maybe a very timely message giving the scrutiny that social media has been undergoing over the last few years. I don't think in 2013 that discussion actually existed. So I don't remember anyone in 2013 talking about Facebook being, you know, a threat or, you know, their business model being screwed or, you know, the companies had different challenges. So was that already the conversation you had in 2013 or where did this really start? Like, what was the conversation you had? What did you see was wrong back then? And how did the project evolve from there? Or it didn't. Maybe it was that the original idea.

Speaker C: So initially it started with. I hadn't gotten on social with everybody else. I'm very much into the latest products, the latest tech, the latest services. But I didn't want to get onto social right away. Wanted to see where it was going. Getting in contact with me, uh, seemed a bit too easy. Generally, people trade my number in the market, they give each other my number, and I get, like, calls from people. And so I didn't want to put myself out there even more. It's a unique problem, or somewhat unique to me and my family. So I got onto social a bit late. And I had basically, it allowed for the people that were using it, my friends, people around me, to get into their own rhythm. And what the three of us noticed was that, uh, the behavior that they had online was very different than the behavior that they had in the real world. Like, we would be at the same events, but the way that they would portray those events was very different than what we saw as we saw them as. So that was the first indicator, an indicator that the platform was changing people's behavior in the way that it was set up. And, you know, initially, just even thinking about, uh, just the concept, if you Give everybody a stage, then everybody's going to perform.

Speaker B: So, yeah, that makes total sense. Do you have a good example of this? Like, you know, one of these events where you saw this, do you have one of these examples from whatever it must be 10 years ago where you go like, well, that doesn't look like the reality that we are seeing. Do you have something vivid in mind?

Speaker C: Still very mundane, Tim. Mundane examples of just like being at very quiet dinner and the way it was portrayed online, it was, it was some sort of massive party and you know, a, uh, moment to show off.

Speaker B: So.

Speaker C: And, you know, it led to the whole discussion around that people started to see where they felt that people were showing the best sides of their lives and that they never had a bad day which caused other people to feel bad about their own lives. And so they then want to show the same thing, et cetera. So that whole thing comes from what I consider a one size fits all model of everybody is a follower, all your content is public. And so it's a stage. Literally, you're coming onto an electronic or virtual stage where the audiences could be millions, could be thousands, could be hundreds of millions, and you're performing for that sort of fictitious audience or future audience.

Speaker B: And. Very good. What comes to my mind is, you know, and trying to rewind back into those times. And in this context being that, you know, I think I remember conversations with like my mother, who's a high school teacher about this, and I guess she didn't notice like the difference as much as you did and how you put it, but she clearly noticed that people are behaving strangely. And I think we all noticed right now. Strange does not necessarily mean bad. Right? And having a global stage or, uh, digital stage or virtual stage is also not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe I don't know what was it that you either disliked about it or that you found whatever not good or dangerous about it, or where you said saw really an opportunity to make something different. And why.

Speaker C: Yeah, I just felt that it wasn't sustainable. And I think we're constantly feeling the pressures that social media put on us as individuals, all the way from kids and to people who are older. Because having a stage is not a bad thing. It's that the only way to communicate is through a stage. I consider to be the issue. So a simple concept that we introduced in Vero, which was unique to us and still is in the way that we've done it, is that you can set your friends when you connect with somebody, when you friend request somebody, without Them knowing you can categorize them as either a close friend, friend or an acquaintance. That was a very simple concept of us, basically allowing you to be yourself. We wear different hats in our lives with different people. You could be having a conversation with your closest friends and having a very private conversation at a dinner or at a party on an event, and then somebody who comes in who is not as close to either one of you, the conversation changes. We know how to do this. Nobody sat us down and told us how to do this stuff. It's just how we're wired. So what we wanted to do was always default to that, um, natural behavior that, uh, we feel is more sustainable. Because before online social networks, we are social creatures and have been social creatures for ever, since the beginning of time. So with that, why not continue down that path and have something online that is more about that and not just about a stage that, uh, forces you or makes you think about creating content that connects with people. We're looking to connect people with people, not people with content. So the tools, the part that I felt was I had a question about, and time has answered that question for me time and time again, which is, is this sustainable? Is this good for us? If our behavior is changing because of the tool? If the tool is changing our behavior, is that a good tool? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? And I feel still that it's not a good thing because it's entering, it's changing our behavior amongst each other. If it's a social network, why are we becoming less social? Why is the world becoming more divisive? What's happening? I have my view of it, but I think for anybody who's looking at the subject should ask themselves that question. It's called a social network. You and I have just expanded our social network by each other. In this call, in this meeting, we could become best of friends. And I could learn so much from you. And I could teach you a few things from my experiences. Where is that happening? Truly online, in a way that, uh, pushes humanity forward.

Speaker B: That was exactly where I wanted to pick up. You have repeated the word sustainable multiple times in your last statement. What do you mean actually by sustainable?

Speaker C: Well, if I'm having to put on a show 24 7, that's not a sustainable life. We see a lot of people who enter the creator, uh, space, the creator economy, space, and do very well, but they feel like they're become hamsters on a wheel. And how can they sustain that over a decade? It becomes a means, hopefully for some it becomes a way of sustaining some kind of lifestyle that then allows them to off ramp, um, some of that fortune to build something else. But to just continue using a tool as a means of. And if you stop, it ends. It's like musical chairs. I don't think that is how we can live. I don't think that's the right tool for humanity. I think that the right tool for humanity is something where you build value over time. And the value that you bring is sort of that there's a longer tail for it. So we're always thinking about that stuff. But as a social tool as well, it needs to fulfill our need to connect with others and not have us either take up, uh, our time. And that is its function, number one. So addiction is not sustainable in any form of it. You know, addicted to love. You know, we could talk about, you know, all of that. Whatever addiction that doesn't sustain. You know, I'm sure that song is now repeating in your head. It's now repeating in mine. But then you have, you know, just the want for added value in your life. And what we found on Vero, you know, to talk a little bit about the platform and the community is people feedback to us that they've met, people that they've become friends with on our platform. If they don't get to use the app in a while, they feel they're missing their friends. They're missing people that they've gotten to know. That is very important because that's what we seek as a species. We don't seek if, you know, we did a few psychology classes and, you know, if there's food on a table in the middle of a room and you put people in the room and they're all in different corners, and you put food in the middle of the room on a table, people will come together and then form little groups and eat together. Why do they eat better? Do they digest better? Are they going to get more vitamins from the food? Will it sustenance last longer or will the food taste better? No, that's just how we're wired.

Speaker B: Yeah. I always thought, you know, like, food tasting better, you know, the Mitch came to my mind and I've always, I think I've used this example throughout my life many, many times. It's when you share a bar of chocolate, it usually tastes a lot better.

Speaker C: Well, yeah, it does.

Speaker B: You see what I mean? You know, I'm just joking about it because that's actually what I think. Your brain tells you the level of joy that you get from the consumption of the same thing.

Speaker C: Well, it's actually more of the shared experience. Because if I sat here and you happen to have the same chocolate, you know, what is it? It's about us sharing the same experience together. But if I sent you a message and I didn't know when you had that chocolate and we happen to eat it at the same time, it wouldn't make a difference. Right. It's more about that shared experience. And I believe that we are. I mean, look, a lot of people call me, uh, an eternal optimist. So I get that from my father. But the way I look at it is we want, because of the fact that we are wired to know our mortality, we are wired to share our experiences with others. It's just how we continue to propel forward that whatever experiences we may have so. So that we feel that we're leaving something behind, whether it's to our kids, whether it's to our friends. And why is it that big apps, uh, in the history of app, uh, building, where people were checking into places and sharing their favorite restaurant with people, what was that about? You know, it has to do with sharing an experience that other people get to enjoy and you feel joy from other people's joy.

Speaker B: Talking about change of social behavior. And I actually wanted to pick up on that. This is my son, um, following on telegram while being on classes in Zoom. So we have been living nomadic for 15 years. The kids, you know, were born on the road then 9 and 10, and you know, they're used to this lifestyle. And I'm a, you know, I've been fascinated with the Internet and the change the Internet has produced since I can remember being a teenager. And I wanted to pick up on the statement that you had, you know, the, on, um, the connection, which is that technology as an extension of ourselves obviously alters behavior. Right. And my thought, being the eternal optimist, you know, like you, is always that ultimately, you know, digital extension of ourselves makes us better and offers a lot of opportunities. So, you know, in the case of, you know, the kids doing schooling over the Internet, remote collaboration, the thing that we are doing here, and remote discussion. But clearly what you pointed out, the aspect of, you know, what's happening on the social media side does not bring that to life. It somehow produces, uses a. I think it's so hard to judge, to say, you know, it's actually a negative behavior or it's not sustainable, because I would agree on that. But I have a really hard time putting my finger on it. Right. Like If I look at remote collaboration technologies and learning, I mean, the positive effect is very evident. You know, the social media aspect, you know, I would see some aspect of it as well as very positive. But there's clear negative thing. But it's. I have a hard time putting the finger on it. Maybe you're better at that.

Speaker C: I've had a bit of time thinking about it and obviously need to, you know, think about ways to articulate it. What I start to categorize things as, you know, where technology does the best job is when it bridges space and time. So what we're doing right now, what this video conference technology is doing, is bridging space and time. You're in Bali, I'm in Dubai. We didn't need to get on a plane. We just chose a time. Here we are. And we're not supposed to be able to talk to each other. If technology wasn't here, we wouldn't be talking to each other today. I'd have to get on a horse or something, get to a ship and then get on the boat and then come to you or something, or on a train or on. I don't know what to be able to do this in the past. And so what technology does best is that. And it gets out of the way. There's nothing in here that's here to change our behavior. We wanted to talk. This is an enabler of something that we wanted to do already. I don't think as fun as it is to watch, I don't think the whole world was flashdancing, you know, before certain social media applications came onto the market. I don't think there was a need for that. I don't think people had an urge to do that. I feel like there was a behavior that was seen on a platform, encouraged by it, rewarded by it in some form or fashion of followings or views or something, and, you know, becomes a snowball effect.

Speaker B: Do you think it is that reinforcement of these kind of behaviors dancing that is not sustainable? What is the aspect of the behavior that has this addictive effect on people? What are they doing? Because I agree, there's obviously people that, as you put it, that, uh, you know, start being out there producing content and, you know, many have the aspiration that they can somehow live off being on this digital stage, which is never going to happen. And then there's a few that actually make it, which I would. You know, they're professional content creators. They could be doing whatever they want. They're just professionally at what they do. But how does this leave everyone else is happening here.

Speaker C: On the psychology side, I think there's some aspirational ideas there. I think also people love to be entertained. There's nothing wrong with that. The way to think about this stuff is it isn't good and evil. It isn't about that. It's more about just looking at the outcome and seeing whether if somebody, in order for them to be social. It's funny because we started calling it social media at one point. It started out Facebook, everybody else, everybody called themselves and were calling these networks social networks. And then all of a sudden it turned into social media. There's a big difference between the two things. One is this broadcast of yourself to everybody and it's your opinion on text, or it's a dance or it's a meme or whatever it is. And then there's a social network, which is, when you think about that, it's who are you connected with loosely or really tightly? And what is makes part of that connection? Is it a shared passion? Is it where you grew up together, same town, et cetera? You speak a certain language. Whatever it is, whatever those ties are, that is what I consider to be more on the social network side, where the other issue that I have, or the real issue that I have, is not just how people use something, but we know for certain that applications that are focused on advertising have, uh, strong algorithms, that their main goal are for you to use their app as long as possible so that they can put as many ads in front of you as possible. So where we went from, and I loved how this was transitioned in the past and introduced, where you had chronological feeds everywhere. And then in order to introduce ads, but not right away, there was the algorithmic feedback in order to then justify the randomness of what you see in your feed. You couldn't do the same thing for email. You couldn't do the same thing for text messages. Because if your email was choosing what you got to see and. And what you didn't, depending on the time of day, depending on your mood, depending on what was written, that would be a disaster. No business would be done. Fallouts and relationships would occur left, right and center. When it comes to social networks, this was introduced. And the issue that I have, I don't have an issue with ads. Ads are informative. How do you know about a certain product if ads aren't out, if ads don't exist? The part that I have an issue with is how much they need to know about each and every one of our behavior to predict what kind of ad will connect with us the most. What kind of behavior gets us to use the app more. And it's really stems from a very basic idea of, you know, when we used to watch Saturday morning cartoons, Transformers or GI Joe or whatever you know, was on, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. You can tell I'm aging myself here. What would be on tv then we would get ads that uh, you know, in the vein of whatever it is that we were watching. But there was an air gap between us and the tv. They didn't actually know who I was, they just knew approximately what kind of profile or the fact that I'm a kid, if I'm watching this, etc. Etc. Whereas today it is a lot more detailed to the point where it isn't just to predict who is watching it, but to change the behavior of people in order to get them to see, to use the app, ah, more for the purposes of seeing ads more. That's it. That is the purpose.

Speaker B: I got you. That's the uh, right transition to just go back into your app. You know, what would be the one, two or three features that you would point out that you know, like let me compare it to Instagram again. Between me creating a private account in Instagram so I don't have a global stage and I only have the five friends. I have four family members and one friend that follow, uh, me on one side and on the other side I would be very selective on, you know, who do I follow and basically use it as a photo sharing tool as it was originally launched. What are you doing fundamentally different or uh, what features have you added that make Vero special?

Speaker C: So we're taking that concept that everybody sort of hacked into services like Instagram all in your one account. You can be yourself with your close friends and they get to see everything and you can have that more public Persona all in the same account to your followers. Your, uh, close friends get to see what your followers see, but your followers don't get to see what your close friends get to see. And we give you more, more granularity than that because there are things. First of all, nobody knows where you categorize and what you categorize them as. That's important. We're not trying to create problems between you and your, your friends. You know who your close friends are, you know what a friend is and you know what an acquaintance is. And sometimes, you know, when somebody finds out that you're on an app, they want to connect with you and you have to accept better to accept them than to cause real world friction. And then you can put them as an acquaintance and they get to see, you know, pretty much what followers get to see. And that's how you can manage your account. So your ability to then be yourself online is a way of you balancing what is asked of you, what you want to share. There may be some things that you're sharing that, uh, only your close friends are going to understand and get you. And so we're putting that all into one account so that you can have full control. And that was one of the things that I saw early on when I got onto other social networks is that lack of control. I saw Google try to do something similar to this. They were obviously before us. Uh, they had Google plus and circles, if you recall. And. But they weren't degrees of intimacy. They weren't concentric circles. You could put somebody in family and work buddy and friends, and then you just get totally lost. You forget who's in what. And, um, the way we did the concentric circles is you think more about the moment. Is this a moment that you want to share with the world? Do you only want to share? Like, for example, if I post pictures of my kids, I only want my close friends to see those. So. And that's just the way I manage things. You've got other people that want to post pictures of their kids, um, out to the public. That's their choice. They understand that we are wired to know what's appropriate and what's not in most cases, and what's appropriate to us and what we're comfortable with. And we're just giving you the tool to be able to do that without manipulating you, making you gain something by posting more to followers and then you'll get more reach or gamifying the app, uh, in some form or fashion. We're not doing any of that stuff.

Speaker B: Let me now put on my entrepreneur investor hat. Okay. And the two questions that then come to my mind, you know, kind of from this insight and the passion you have for this topic, which I love, is how are you now gonna get a bunch of addicts of the social networks to join you? Like, it feels like, you know, you have a bunch of people addicted to nicotine. Okay. And you need to get them off this and without maybe, you know, like, the nicotine. Chewing gums are also not very good. So that's not a good analogy. But how do you get a.

Speaker C: Well, actually, the better analogy, I think is like sugar and processed foods and then organic food.

Speaker B: Yeah, I can bring my wife on and we can make a second, you know, hour of the podcast about processed food and sugar. I hear you there. So the question here is how do you get a bunch of addicts of their addiction into a, uh, more healthy habit? Right? That's what's it about. And two, then, you know, transitioning. I want you to transition in this, is that this addiction business has always been great business, right? Like make a shitload of money with it, but you can re inject into the business to get more people addicted. So with this two kind of like big barriers to, uh, social network and system that you are building, how are you going to tackle that or how are you tackling?

Speaker C: Okay, so, yeah, very good point. And you know, we didn't enter this challenge without knowing that we were facing a cliff. I mean, by making it a subscription app, uh, in and of itself, we were almost making that cliff for ourselves. But as time has gone on, the angle of the cliff has become more manageable. It's something that you can overcome because it's entering the public consciousness. And every app, uh, every new thing needs to go through the normal adoption curve that everything goes through. We always think about history. We look at things very much through the rear view mirror. I always tell people, don't look at history through a, uh, rear view mirror. If you want to look at history and examine history, get into a time machine and go back and look at the events that were occurring, the circumstances that you were in. A rear view mirror is just going to make the latest thing look the biggest and whatever is in the past look very small and inconsequential. So the way what we are seeing time and time again is flare ups of people being upset at the fact that they're on social networks that choose what people get to see from the things that they post. They only have, uh, access to single digits of their followers who will receive their posts that they publish. In our case, 100% receive all of the posts that you publish. These are things that are built into the system of an algorithm, an algorithmic feed, an addiction economy, an addiction tool, because its job is to make sure that what is put in front of you will keep you there longer. Not what you're interested in, what you think you're interested in. It's what it knows about you that will be put in front of you to keep you there the longest. So on an app, um, that has your friends on it and the things that you're interested, the things that you've opted into, not just a sit back and watch you opt into an app, uh, like a social network. First you obviously register, but then you start to follow people. You connect with your friends, you connect with people that you know. That is something that when you compare us to everybody else, everybody else is deciding what you get to see. We Let you see 100% of what you've opted into. We're seeing that that addiction again is starting to wane. It weighs heavy on people. And I purposely changed your analogy from nicotine to, you know, non organic food and organic food, because we are mostly organic food or there's such an amount of organic food. I don't say most, mostly in the world of consumption, but organic food. When we were growing up, you had to go to the edge of town, you had to like import it in and do a, uh, all sorts of weird things. And it costs you an arm and a leg to have that option. Now it is the more favored option. It's the thing that people seek out the most. And it's become so competitive that it doesn't make sense to go down the unhealthy route. And that is again part of how we're wired because we know it's good for us. We reject things. Now the problem is if something is bad for you, we reject it. After a while, it doesn't sustain it. Kind of like even an organ to save your life, like if you got it at a kidney, your body's going to reject it by default. It needs to be programmed to not. And there's a lot of work that goes into that. And when it comes to technology, it's moving relatively fast, so we're not able to really catch up. But I believe that there is that going to be that reckoning. I got into this with an idea to start something, not realizing how important it was going to be. And what prevents me from stopping and what makes me continue is knowing the importance that the world needs to have an alternative. Because I don't see anybody else trying to build one. I see everybody else sort of trying to take on our need to connect with each other and create value in a network like financial value. What I'm trying to do is prioritize what humanity, what I believe anyway, you know, I'm taking a step that's, it's my opinion what I believe humanity needs and whatever profitability and the profitability of that platform that ends up succeeding comes second.

Speaker B: So in other words, we could all think of you as somebody that has, you know, being a believer in the properties and benefits of organic food long before there was organic food or the concept of organic and not organic food. And you're sticking to what you're doing out, uh, of the fundamental belief that you think processed food is just not healthy. And over time, people will be sufficiently educated to realize that what they're consuming is simply not good for them and it will be a general trend. Would that be a fair summary?

Speaker C: I would say so. I'm a foodie. I do enjoy, I love meals, I love going out to and finding great finds and in any corner of the world or during my travels. And I do think about the evolution of how the world thinks, about what it means to be healthy, what it means to be mindful about what you're consuming. We're consuming content we're consuming through our brain now with these apps, it isn't going through our digestive track. And so we do need to be mindful about how we're being fed, what we're consuming, and the kind of content that we're looking at and just see how that fits with us. And again, if it's good for us and if it sustains, great.

Speaker B: I buy into that story. I've tested, you know, I started using your app. I passed it to my wife who has, uh, this Instagram addiction problem as well. So I see this as an opportunity to, you know, get into organic food. Now the question, however, that, you know, lingers kind of the back of my mind is, I mean, I think we are roughly the same age. I'm, you know, sporting 76. I think if I looked up your bayou, 78. You know, you got three kids, you know, between 8 and 17. I think my two kids at 9 and 10. You've been around the block. You know, this is not the first thing you're doing in life. You also had the opportunity to see how technology and the Internet has evolved over the last 20 to 30 years. And if there's one thing that is for me a repeating story, it's the total disappointment with this innovative company. So, you know, I have to say, like, I was, um, a big fan of what Google was doing the early days. Not even the early days, even, you know, several years into, you know, this entire do no evil and the entire spiel about advertising banners are bad. And that's why Yahoo, ah, doesn't work. And, you know, it's about subtle information as part of the daily user consumption. As I cannot be screwed with to spend an hour, I can't spend 10 minutes on YouTube because the ads are impossible to enjoy the experience. And I'm really Not willing to give Google any money. If I had not already the company running on Google Workspace, I would be freaking awkward of it already. I've gotten screwed over by Google more than once. Cell phone plans and it's incredible. I'm an idiot, okay? I'm an idiot. And the truth is that all of these companies, uh, can have that with Apple, you can have that with your cell phone company, you can have this with Amazon. Right? Ultimately they all get corrupted. So what prevents your company Vero to say like, well, you know, tomorrow, screw you guys, we're doing the same thing because we decided, let me put it like this, it's not going anywhere. I got bored and now it should make some money. Who's going to put the backstop on that? Like, why should anyone not trust you as a person but actually trust the organization that you're building?

Speaker C: Listen, it's a, it's a really good question, you know, how do you prove a negative? It's impossible. But I uh, think if you were asking me this question, think about this. You're asking a very good question and should be asked of anybody, like, hear me out, I'm not being defensive. But if you were to ask me this question on day one, I would have a lot less to be able to say and show and prove. I would be saying things like, you need to trust me and you know, this is what I believe in and I stick to my guns and maybe you don't know me right now but you'll know me in the future and just give me a chance, etc. Etc. But what I like about what we've done and the patients that we've had in doing this is that we've been doing it for 10 years and our actions do speak louder than words. This has not been funded by anybody but myself. And um, it would have been a lot easier at the hardest times, you know, to convert the company into an ad based revenue company, start to data mine people's behavior and then, you know, switch it to, to an attention economy app like everybody else. But if we haven't done it up to now, I think it's pretty safe to say we'll never do it for one. And I can tell you for sure, and this is obviously taking my word for it, but if I decided on my lonesome that we were going to do that, everybody in the company who's working on this would leave. I mean it would just, basically it would just end. There wouldn't be any conversation after that because everybody knows and really believes in what it is that they're doing. And we take extra measures on making sure we don't do the things that other people do even. I mean we don't build absolutely everything. We can't. We're a small team and so we use other people's tools, SDKs, things like that. And there's a ton of stuff that's on by default that we turn off. And um, the amount of work that we do to do due diligence on the part, you know, on the partners that we work with to make sure that they're not getting any information about our users is as much work sometimes as it is building something ourselves.

Speaker B: That's great. One of the reasons, and I want to be mindful of your time so I have really two more questions of 100 more questions, but I'm going to stick to two. Okay. One is, um, in my mind, in the space that I'm working in, you know, which is Web three, the thing that brought me into Web three is it's not speculation on tokens. I couldn't care less. I don't care if you can buy your uh, Tesla and Bitcoin. I do not care. I see in the web 3 space a opportunity to decentralize power of organizations. And obviously in the social media space, just going back to blue sky and so on, there's strategies for technologies decentralization and data decentralization. I haven't yet really seen any good approaches in Web3 to decentralization of social media. Okay, in a, in a good way. However, it is my personal opinion and that's what, you know, I'm so excited to have you on the call as well here in um, this interview is that I believe that one of the largest untapped opportunities in Web3 lies in competing, you know, straight on, you know, with a player like Facebook and Instagram. So I've heard twice about, you know, projects that didn't go anywhere to basically launch, you know, a social network earlier version of Instagram and you know, distribute ownership to token holders and build incentive programs around them. I'm just wondering, you know, if you guys are thinking about any of this. If you, you know, discarded the ideas. If you see other projects doing this, this is, this is what I would personally find really, really exciting because I share not only your perspective on organic and processed food. I do also share this about social media and social networks, so to speak. But I would love this to go from a discussion around apps and habits into a, uh, conversation about organization and sustainable long term control over you know, information as an asset and an organization as the means of governance to it.

Speaker C: That's a big question and a big topic. So whenever we're designing something, whenever we're taking on a challenge, we look at the real world, we look at history to see where things are working and have worked in the real world versus trying to reinvent the wheel. Especially when it comes to social behavior, when it comes to societal behavior where people come together with an idea and want to form a group or want to have votes on something or whatever it may be. And what's interesting about Web3, what's interesting about where you're going with the conversation, it has several parts to it. You have the benefit, okay, the benefiting of something and the sharing of that. So having ownership, being a part of something, uh, having some stake, incentive, whatever you want to call it, those are things we believe in very strongly and we're hoping to, to share our plans in the coming months on where we want to go with that. You also talked about voting and control. Now the thing about it is there's also the R word which is responsibility. An organization exists, you have to have responsibility. You have to have a means of being able to make sure that you know as best as you can. And sometimes mistakes are made, but they need to only be mistakes and not done on purpose. Or that uh, something is built into the way the structure is done. Where illegal behavior, for example, like let's just start with illegal something that uh, it's non debatable, it's not subjective, you know, so think about that and you marry that with this idea of control. Then you start to say, well actually then yes, the responsibility and the direction and the big decisions need to be made by a group of people like any management company. And you either subscribe, you know, to that company's beliefs and their methodology and how they do things, or you don't. And then we'll leave those certain elements of how this thing behaves to the community and how they'd like to see it happen. And I think that middle ground is where the next successful network will find sustained, you know, success over the into the future is when the community has a feeling of agency over what's going on right now. What you feel is on the one hand very, very few people gain versus the number of people that use any of these networks. You then have creators that are, like I said, m coming back to my initial comment of, you know, they get burnt out because they can't keep doing the thing for the rest of their lives, then you have the audience that doesn't get to choose their experience. So they may or may not see the content that they asked to see and they don't get. People don't get to see the content that they want to publish. And then lastly, there's no agency whatsoever on how things are going to move forward. So you have all of those things. And when, when I look at that, I look and I see a powder cake, you know, it's just waiting for somebody to come and disrupt that, but it needs to be disrupted correctly. So when you talk about, you know, somebody tried to create a network, kind of the early days of Instagram, but there's tokens, blah, blah, blah. Well, guess what, there's a big wall that's there and depending on how successful you are, it'll. You'll be speeding towards that wall, ready to crash, because there's such a thing as regulation and how to protect people under the law of how something is a security now and things like that. So if we take a step back, Tim, um, and we think about web3 as more of a philosophy and not a technology, I don't believe that technology solves everything. I believe that technology should enable something we want to solve and something we want to get to. A chat app, um, is meaningless if we don't want to chat. If we don't want to talk. A chat app, um, sits there and does nothing. It's there silent. But if we want to talk, it enables it. Web3, I believe, is the philosophy behind Web3 is transparency, inclusivity and accountability, you know, to a certain extent. And so how do you marry that, um, in a business model where you can create very simple concept, a win win right now all I can see, because I come from old school thinking, because I've straddled history of before Internet, after Internet. I used to have a Commodore 64. Like I'm aging myself. Exactly. YouTube, Atari, all of that stuff. And here we are. And you know, you play a game like God of War and it's real and you're VR and you can spend as much time online as you want, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of that stuff. When I look at it, I think of how do you create a win win Right now I see platforms are winning more than people are. You can make, certainly make the argument that now we have a platforms that allow us to have a voice and we talk about revolutions that have occurred thanks to these platforms. And big changes happen, political change, et cetera, which I agree with, they have happened. And again it's that will that people have and technology allows us to bridge that space and time. But at the same time, if we do a net view and you were talking about kids, you were talking, you mentioned your kids, your wife, et cetera. We look at where we are today. I think we want to be where connected with each other. We want bridges between us, but we're being moved in a direction to be in our own echo chambers, our own, uh, niches that have our way of thinking and we can't think outside of what we know. And that's making us more isolated, not more connected, not more social, less social. I don't think we're. It's a win win at the moment. So I like you would like Vero to be in a position or position itself rather as bridging the gap of all of those things that we talked about, whether it's giving people, you know, some sort of benefit, financial as well and incentive benefit, having clarity of future and then having. Making people have agency over certain aspects of it. Allow it to be the people's social network as opposed to a company's social network and uh, people get to use it.

Speaker B: Eman. Thank you for bridging time and space with me here. This was clearly a, I hope a, uh, win win. Thank you so much for your time.

Speaker C: Thanks for having me, Tim.

Speaker A: Dao Talks is brought to you by Grindry.

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Speaker A: to Dao Talks on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google or any other platform you fancy. To find out more about about Grindery, visit Grindery IO. Thanks for joining me, Tim. Out.