Multichain Orchestration with Rowland Graus | Ep. 56

Speaker A: Somebody had mentioned that, hey, there's this blockchain project. It needs a product manager that understands defi really well. Let me know. I saw that post the day before my wedding and so I sent a message and was like, yeah, hey, I'm getting married tomorrow, but I really need to chat about this with you.

Speaker B: Hey friends, this is Podcast Rune by software engineer. On this episode I get to talk to Roland Grouse, Director of product at Agoric. Agoric Co develops open source software to help create a better experience across multiple blockchain networks. If you enjoy podcast written by a software engineer, don't forget to hit the follow button on your podcast app. Um, so you don't miss out on the new episodes and you can pick up podcast merch@perry2.com shop. Enjoy the episode. Welcome back to another episode of podcast written by a software engineer. I'm um, your host Perry and today with me is Roland Grouse, Director of Product Management at Agore. Roland, how are you today?

Speaker A: I'm m doing great. Thanks for having me on.

Speaker B: You know what's kind of crazy is I've done like you know, a couple of these episodes before and like every time we've kind of been like tepid, a little bit timid about like jumping into this defi world, this like blockchain world, this like multi language world of contracts and everything. And today is the perfect opportunity. But before we dive way too much into it, who is Roland and what is Agoric?

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, sure. Uh, so I am um, a, as you mentioned, I'm director of product at Agorek and my background is coming into product from the business side. Um, spent a bunch of my early career doing private equity business due diligence and then went to business school, tried to found a couple startups, ended uh, up doing product for B2B SaaS startups uh, that other people founded for a little while, um, small and large and then got, just really fell down the defi Rabbit hole in 2020 um, after tracking the industry for a while and joined Agoric and now uh, we are building sort of a next generation smart contract platform and blockchain to really, really make UX easier for users. Um, and we can go into a whole bunch of reasons why that's true and what, what we do there. Um, and really trying to sort of push the space forward.

Speaker B: Even in getting all of that though, even like your background, I keep on saying that like how does anybody get into it? I think there's a lot of like maybe influences from back then, but where did you Grow up, though, was it already like techy? What kind of neighborhood was it?

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, really not techy at all, actually. So I grew up in Northern Virginia, um, and I was lucky to sort of be in the district that Thomas Jefferson High School sort of accepts from. Uh, and so when I was in eighth grade, I applied to Thomas Jefferson. And you know, you had to take a test and all that stuff. And that was my first exposure to any kind of computer science kind of things. Right. I, you know, I was using the Internet to like buy and sell magic cards when I was, when I was younger. And so I had some experience there. But, you know, I, I didn't grow up programming. I didn't have friends that did that. Uh, and TJ was sort of the first time where I got exposed to any of that, um, and got exposed to it really quickly and that I liked it at the time. Um, but I will say, like, I sort of made the mistake. I remember, um, I was in, uh, one of the AP Computer science classes, I can't remember the name of it. And we had to build, um, we had to. We had this program that we were working on and I was working on it for like a month and I spent so long, and I, you know, I cared about it and was just like spending all day. And um, I remember the guy sitting next to me was playing this like 3D pong game the entire time that I was working on it. And I was like, man, this guy's not doing anything. I don't know what's going to happen when we have to present our projects. And then the time came to present and the teacher was just kind of walking around looking at everybody's code. And this guy had, uh, written the whole program recursively in one afternoon. I couldn't even read his code. It worked better than mine. And then it turned out that the 3D Pong game he was playing was something that he had programmed and was playing over the LAN with someone in the other side of the room. And I was like, oh my God, I am just like completely outclassed, uh, by all these people here. Like, this is not the field for me. Uh, and so I ended up, you know, kind of leaving tech behind for a while. So I didn't, I didn't do, um, I didn't do any computer science in college. I was very business focused. And so it was only after, after business school that I really came back to it.

Speaker B: But at least the contrast you're mentioning, some people never really get to taste that even for me to be able to say that, like, seeing a next level, you know, implementation. Let's call it that way. Right. Like a next level foundation. Not many people get the chance to witness that. And even for you to be able to realize it when that happens, it's obviously like a good thing to have, you know, witness at least once for everybody. On that one thing, I'm obviously curious. There's two points I could probably double click over here already, if anything. Is Thomas Jefferson High School famous? Like, at least in the, in the US World, basically. Is it true that it's the top high school in the country? Like, did I get that right? I know probably one other person went there, they were saying stuff, and I can't remember half of it. But what is so, you know, special about Thomas Jefferson High School?

Speaker A: Yeah. And so, you know, who knows about high school rankings and it changes year to year and all that stuff? Um, it's hard to know because I didn't go to a different high school. And so I only really know my own experience. I will say that, um, when I went to college, I went. I went to UVA for undergrad and I took. There were a couple classes I took at UVA that had, like, overlap with things I had done at tj. And it was way easier in college than it was in high school. And I. And I think it was just sort of the baseline level of expectation was very high. Um, and I actually, truly, I struggled with that. Uh, my freshman year I was, I was playing football also. And I remember, you know, it's the first time in my life I was getting like, C's and B's. And I was. That my parents were not okay with that. And like, I remember, uh, you know, very clearly thinking, wow, I'm not sure that I can do other stuff while I'm at tj. Um, and so it just, I think it was just harder at that level. Um, there were. And the same way you see at, uh, sort of any other place where there's testing to get into. Just like there weren't nobody really was like, falling behind. Right. You know, the level of that all the other kids that were there were at, you know, it's sort of like TJ skimmed off a bunch of the kids from other high schools that would have been at other high schools and just concentrated them all. Uh, and so it wasn't necessarily competitive in that way. Um, and they, they don't do like, valedictorian or anything like that. But it's just like, you know, you, you Weren't exposed to. None of your classes were slowed down. Right. And so that was. That was kind of the experience that I had anyway. Um, and I liked it. You know, it was definitely fun. It was definitely nerdy. Uh, we lost so much at sports, uh, which is very frustrating. But, you know, it was, it was, it was a good time.

Speaker B: That's so great. And so funny is that it's like that one time, like, Harvard gets to, like, the final 16 or whatever of like March Madness. It's always those kind of stories that are always great, right?

Speaker A: Yeah. I think we lost our homecoming football game, like 60 to 7 or something like that. It just, you know, schools would just come in and beat us up. Um, so that was. That was funny.

Speaker B: That's fine. Well, hey, you learn way more losing than winning most of the time anyway. So I keep on saying that, hey, that's how you learn this stuff. But I'm just glad we just double clicked on that because I think the only reason I mentioned is because I clearly didn't grow up in the States and the fact that, like, I managed to work in the States a lot bit. It's just that influence to understand that, be like, oh, yeah, there's this kind of like. How do I describe this? Maybe, like, make it less severe, the gap between going from high school to university to college. Because I keep on saying that a lot of people, when they go to college, that's like you join from your, uh, local league to kind of like the major leagues. Right? Everybody is like, so different and so smart and everything. So maybe that's probably why I keep on saying maybe TJ makes that gap a lot easier. It makes the transition a lot easier to that. But one thing I'm obviously curious about this is a little bit like, turning to the left a little bit. But first, computers. This is something that I came on saying that like a lot of people, whether you choose it or you don't, you somehow end up with a computer at some point in your life. So do you remember the first time you, um, you had a computer? Where did it come from? What was it?

Speaker A: Yeah, so we had a com. We had a computer in my house when I was young. Um, my dad, he still has, like, punch cards from when he was, like, programming computers. You know, he was a geologist. And so it wasn't like he did that full time, but some of the work he did required some data analysis, I guess. And so he had all these ordered punch cards. So I remember we had. We probably had a computer before this but the first one I remember we got a, ah, Compaq Presario. Um, and I remember we had Windows 3.1. I remember playing Math Blasters on it. Um, and you know, then eventually a bunch of other games. Um, and so we, you know, growing up, we definitely. We had a computer downstairs, uh, that was sort of shared for the family. Um, and that was, you know, at some point I got old enough, which was like 10, that that computer was basically mine. Um, and you know, I was. I remember I mentioned selling and buying, selling magic cards online. And I got scammed one time by this guy in Canada and I remember my mom calling him and threatening the police and then he sent my cards back, which was uh, a learning experience for me and also extremely embarrassing. Um, so yeah, no, I definitely. I got exposed to the Internet really early on and I was lucky in that way for sure.

Speaker B: Oh, that's a great story. I keep on saying that like even from that point, like whether it's magic, the fact that you got it back is even more.

Speaker A: I know it's shocking, honestly. I mean I think I was like so, so upset that my parents were like, okay, we actually have to intervene here, uh, instead of just letting him learn a lesson.

Speaker B: No, absolutely. I think what I remember from back in is like the Runescape, so people would like just drop your items and like see whatever picks it up. It's a lot of these like very familiar scenarios that happen on um. I think you're probably the first person who mentions the compact, uh, on this show. Everybody has always mentioned m. The Apple ones. This is great. I'm obviously loving every bit of this on that. Um, but the good news is that you kind of made good use of it, right as you're saying, even the math Blasters, all the other parts of being curious and just being programming left and right. And you were already sharing those programming stories. But then eventually when we were talking about going to high school and going into all that, did you already had an idea? I know you were kind of mentioning that you weren't exactly geared towards this programming software engineering directly diving into that. How did the brain work in that case if you knew that you didn't really want to get to that direction. You went to college at the end. What did you end up majoring in given the fact that you already had like some stop signs somewhere?

Speaker A: Yeah, I went to college really not knowing what I wanted to do. Um, I had actually. I remember senior year of high school I was doing some uh. I think I was doing uh, whatever was after multi variable calc. I don't remember. Um, and we were like, we were trying to figure out the fastest route out of a three dimensional vector field. And I like couldn't for the life of me figure out why I should care about that. And nobody could explain it to me. And so I was like, okay, well I'm quitting math. And so I literally transferred out of that class into astronomy, um, and you know, sat in the planetarium in the mornings and went to college feeling a little directionless. And I signed up for, I had signed up for a bunch of kind of random classes. I was taking Hinduism and all sorts of stuff. And I took economics as a fifth class to round it out. Um, in part because I knew that UVA had like a, not necessarily a famous economics department, but like a decent economics department. And then I ended up liking it. I um, just kind of, I realized that it was something that was, I was really interested in. I had no background in it whatsoever. You know, my, my family, that wasn't something that we would talk about. We weren't like business family in any way. Um, and so it was all new information to me and I really, I enjoyed it. And I also sort of noticed that I was, I seemed to be doing well at it relative to other people in the class. And like, I took that as a signal like, okay, I like this thing and I seem to be decent at it so I'm m going to stick with it. Um, and so I ended up majoring in econ and it was very sort of organic in that way. Um, and got really interested in the stock market again, something that I had no experience with growing up and didn't, you know, it's just like all new information. Um, and that was sort of how I was oriented coming out of college. Um, and um, yeah, that's where I spent my time.

Speaker B: I really like that. Take in terms of like who goes into college knowing exactly what they want to do. There's like rather a small subset of people I would say. But whether it's like pre med, then you kind of know what you're doing. But then a lot of times you kind of just navigate. Yeah, or law school. Right. You kind of just have to. But I agree with you. A lot of times it's like you navigate through it and all that and, and then you kind of just like bounce a little bit all in between. I actually wanted to ask this question which is kind of a little bit nerdy, but when I was doing a lot of, I guess like studies there's like, some programs that stood out more than others. What I mean by that is more like, oh, um, for the people in doing Java during university, it'd be like Eclipse. Like, everybody hates Eclipse. So that's like one of the ideas everybody had to use. Or if you end up doing a bit of like, geeky programming on gaming or whatever, you'd have like, Unity where they introduce you a little bit of Unity and touch it. Or the people in the math classes, the matlabs, they're like very largely used softwares that if you go into specific programs, you kind of just remember the names that kind of pops up. So maybe when you were doing econ at, uh, uva, was there any, I guess, like, softwares or like any programs I remember using on a quite a frequent level that everybody would know if they did an econ major?

Speaker A: At the end of the day, we had. We didn't really use too much software. And I think if I had gone deeper into econometrics, which is effectively just like stats, um, I think that we would have had more programs like that. You know, as we get to business school, we had software that was, um, you know, for like system dynamics, kinds of things that I think a lot of people would recognize, but I can't. For undergrad in particular, I don't think software was a big part of what we did. I mean, I mostly was taking notes with pen and paper. Um, and this also might be like, partially like when I went to school, um, which a lot of years ago at this point. Ah. So I think, I think the answer is kind of no. Um, I don't think we had anything like that.

Speaker B: Yeah, I actually, I was so curious because I couldn't even answer the question myself. Um, mostly in the sense of does that mean there's a gap in that market? Does that mean that somebody could build software to cater to all econ majors in schools?

Speaker A: Well, at least from the years 2004 to 2008, perhaps there was a gap. Um, I don't know if there still is.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Because obviously nowadays everybody has a Bloomberg terminal for all the econ majors. They're all sitting there at 40k a year subsidies to run those programs. Anyways, um, this is why I absolutely love these kind of conversations. But the reason why I keep on asking a lot of these questions is that, like, I've been very, very fortunate to work with a lot of people in product management. Right. And they come from different backgrounds. It's one of those fields where everybody has skills to be A product manager and even a program manager and even a project manager, which are all three different things. So maybe as um, you were obviously just finding yourself a little bit, you graduated as well. And then maybe this is like a two part question where it's like what were you expecting in terms of the world of project product, program management? And then what did it end up becoming? As in did you already have an idea that oh, this is a path that I wanted to take and then it just slowly built and you were just realizing that path or was it the path that found you where you were just doing stuff and it turns out to be product management or project management or program management.

Speaker A: Yeah. And so, you know, just timeline wise jumping, we're sort of jumping now from, you know, I graduated undergrad, I worked as a consultant for a little while, which is like nothing. We didn't look at tech. It was nothing to do with, with product. It went to business school. And then when I was in business school, it's interesting to look back at the, at the evolution in the last like 10, 10 ish years, um, or 12 ish years. Ah, now there's tons of product management classes, right? Like that's a thing that people are actively targeting. Um, when I was there, there kind of weren't. Um, I remember there were, there were a few people in my class. The class was about 400 kids, um, people adults. Um, and, and there were a few people that were intentionally going after product. And I remember not knowing what that was like, having having them try to explain it to me multiple times because I didn't quite understand what the role was. Um, and again this was me also not working in a tech environment. Like if I, if I had been in tech, I would have probably understood that. Um, but you know, business schools or schools in general tend to lag what's actually happening in the market. And, and so, you know, Sloan didn't really have, have dedicated classes that way, or at least I didn't see them. Um, and so coming out of that, I actually was not targeting product at all. Um, my first, my role, my first startup was actually a BD role. And you know, BD is not necessarily something that I'm perfectly well suited for. And I was kind of managing but not crushing it. You know, I had a couple wins, but definitely wasn't like, I'm not a BD oriented person. Um, and it just so happened that our chief of product was the only product person at that startup. You know, it was like 20 people and he needed help and was like, well, who in the organization can help me? I think Roland can. And so I got kind of dragged into product. I actually, I thought I didn't want it because in my head all he did was like manually test the front end. And that didn't sound fun to me. Um, but after that, and this is sort of in the 2015 time frame, um, I, I kind of took to it. I realized that product allowed me to explore what I wanted to do, which was start my, start my own company. Right. Product becomes sort of, there's a wide range, as you kind of mentioned, there's a wide range of skills that you need to do product well. Um, and I liked it as someone who had spent my early career as a generalist, you know, doing consulting where I didn't ever have to like pick what I wanted to do. Product allows you to sort of be a generalist within the scope of a startup. Um, so, um, it's a long, long winded answer to, you know, how I sort of entered product. But it also is, I just had no expectations at all because I didn't know what it was. Um, and then I, you know, after switching roles a couple times, you start to understand that to different organizations product means very different things. Um, and you start to, I remember interviewing and you know, hearing, hearing somebody that was trying to hire me refer to the engineering team as it and I basically like hung up the phone. Um, and you know you start to hear like red flags like that around how different organizations think about product management and the engineering team. Um, and so you do have to be kind of careful as you go because it just can mean so many different things in so many different organizations.

Speaker B: Yeah, I kind of appreciate what you just kind of stood up a little bit for us little guys over there because of like the engineers and terrible sign. Right, like that's quite funny. But technically I appreciate that people are aware the difference between IT teams, engineering teams, all that kind of fun stuff. Um, and of course like your journey obviously eventually led you into, you do tech and product management and all these kind of like very modern fast forward stuff day to day. Like that's something like a, ah, path that whether you intentionally chose it or not or just grabbed you, that's kind of what you're doing there. But um, actually I probably should just clarify this is what is the difference between a product manager and a project manager and a program manager. I know I throw these words, you know, often and you may have a better perspective in terms of, explain that. And I might at the after Throw like tpm, technical project managers, obviously those

Speaker A: are very, yeah, there's also technical product managers. Um, so I think the core, when you sort of look at what, what the expectations of a product manager are relative to project and program, I think it really comes down to are, uh, are you someone that is leading a voice in the market around what the organization or at least within your context of the organization doing? Like do you understand the competitive landscape for what you're trying to do? Do you understand how your solution fits in there? Do you have, do you spend your time thinking about how do we position ourselves and what do we need to build and communicate to position ourselves in the next six months, in the next year, that sort of thing. Um, and I, you know, often get asked for well what are we doing three years from now? And I reject that entirely. But like at the very least you're sort of looking, looking forward to how are you driving your product or if you're sort of a product leader, like your suite of products forward so that your organization can win. Um, whereas as a project manager I think your, your role tends to be much more like hey, are the trains on time? Like are we executing well? And within the context of uh, what we are trying to do, how are we solving? It becomes it's still an extremely difficult role because you start having to make, you have to communicate trade offs. You have to understand like okay, well if we pull this out of the scope then that affects our timeline in a way that we hit this date in the right way. Like you're, you're making sure that the execution is working well. And then I will admit I don't have too much exposure to program side aside from like government contracting. And so I don't know what that role looks like. Um, but I think it's sort of a, um, I see it as project management where you kind of are probably also dealing with other stakeholders or sort of putting strategic layers on top, um, that aren't quite the same as product, which it may be a little bit more build focused. So that's, that's my view. Um, and I think within the product, within the product role there's a lot of different skill sets. And you know, looking at myself and then looking also at uh, all the, you know, we've, we've hired a bunch of project product managers over time. Like you know, you're always sort of finding people that have some subset of the full skill set that a product manager might need and figuring out like how does this fit within what we, what we need to do as an organization or what this product needs. Um, so, yeah, I can go into more on any of that, but that's sort of my thought.

Speaker B: No, I think you really just put the perspective in terms of, you know, who keeps the trains on time. Like we talk about project managers and I definitely, from my experience, understand why they need to do that and how we feel mostly doing that. And obviously the more illustrious program management. I think the best example I remember somebody telling me of was like, you know, Apple, sometimes, um, they build parts, but then like the engineers don't know what the parts are for. So they'll build a fan, they'll build a screen, they'll build something and they have no idea where it goes. But then you have this little like, group of people called program managers and they kind of just like direct everything. They'll just direct, don't worry, this piece of hardware, make sure it has this interface and as long as you meet the interface, it'll be fine. And then you have to just like, uh, at the end when the product comes together, they'll just, I don't know, program it, program it together and then they'll end up being an iPad or like the MacBook Air or something like that. So I feel like that's one of the examples somebody gave me and I feel like it kind of makes sense, at least from, from what I saw. Um, this is all good. And I want to give a shout out, especially to this part where when we talk about, especially on the shows, like, we appreciate people who found projects, people who really just dive into it. And you do have some, you know, experience in that as well. You already mentioned even working at different startups, even from your own experience. So just mentioning that in terms of like, we could probably spend maybe a minute or two or even just more a little bit. What was that? Seedling. Because I feel like that marks somebody as, uh, somebody who works in tech and somebody who builds stuff day to day that like, do I do it? Do I do it? I'm doing it, like that part. So what was your perspective when you were going through that?

Speaker A: Yeah, and I will admit that I had a little bit of the umbrella of I was still in business school while I was doing it. Right. And so, um, I view that as a little bit of an asterisk. Right. Because it's not like I, you know, I'm still in the umbrella of this is a learning experience for me and so if it fails, I've got to fall back kind of thing. Right. Um, that said I think that. So, um, had a couple experiences here of either working on startups from the very beginning or trying to found one. Um, the primary one where I spent the most time was something called mobileytics where um, I met a guy at MIT while I was at Sloan who was uh, he was selling his business that had um, he had built security focused uh, analytics on how you physically use your mobile phone. Right. And so an idea, uh, just to give a sense of what he was tracking is like as you press down on the touchscreen, how does your finger deform while you do that or how hard are you pressing down like, like tracking things like that. And so he had successfully built a business where that was sold as a security mechanism as like a backup to password, right? And it would just be sort of like a flag like oh, this password got entered correctly. But the, you know, the way it was done suggests that that might not be the person. Right? And it's not like okay, you default, lock them out or anything like that. It's just like this is just one flag amongst a bunch of other flags, right? He had sold that with a carve out for uh, if he wanted to use any of that technology for medical related applications, he still had the rights to it. And so what we were trying to do was create um, a use case for that tech that was focused on any medical condition that would make sense to us. Um, and where we landed actually was concussion detection. So you know we actually a whole like range of possibilities. But the thing that seemed to make the most sense was can we, can we detect if your mental state is off as a result of how you are entering your pin code? Um, and so we spent a bunch of time with that and I think, you know, not to go into like any of the actual uh, details there, but I think in terms of a learning experience, um, I think everybody would benefit from having something that seems obviously useful and good and trying to sell it to the people who should want it. Because that is an extremely difficult process. Um, and you know, especially as, you know, especially as somebody that sort of ends up being more on the tech side where you're, you're building the thing. It's good to get a level of respect to, for salespeople that do a good job because it's just so hard, it is so hard to convince somebody to do something new even if you know for a fact that it will make their life better. Um, that was sort of the experience we had and you know, we ended up kind of, we were starting to get a little interest in traction. It was going to be a B2B kind of play. And so even just one contract would have made a difference for us. Um, but I was coming to the end of school, I don't have any money. Um, and I was like, okay, we are too far from revenue. We're probably not the right team to go raise VC for this. Um, and so I just need a job. Uh, and I made the safety call for myself because I had blown through all my savings the first semester of business school. Uh, and so I was sort of taking on significant loans and I was like, okay, I got to make the right choice here. Um, and I kind of also realized that there was too much I didn't know about running a company. Um, and by joining someone else's startup, I probably would learn the things that I needed. Which actually ended up being true. But I haven't gone back yet to founding, uh, my own thing.

Speaker B: No, but holy crap, that story though, I think even me just sitting here, the couple things I could obviously call out is number one, um, medical space incredibly hard, right? Whether it's the fda, whether it's any of the compliance. Number one, of course, is extremely hard. But then the other part, there was that peak curiosity of finding, uh, condition like concussions even. I think maybe like from playing football back then, there might be some correlation of just being like, oh, there are. You'll probably feel more invested in a lot of these causes as you kind of build them. But then this is the geeky part of Perry that like, of course I love thinking about, like, weirdest example, I think about sometimes like, you know, how people brush their teeth. Everybody has a pattern. Everybody starts somewhere, everybody, whether clockwise or anti clock, whatever your thing is. And then when you describe how, um, the initial idea of like this technology of like tracking the pressure or tracking, you know, when somebody touched a screen, these are the kind of stuff that I. It just shocks me that I've never heard this kind of story before. But the thing is like, I think about this other stuff, how, you know, how people brush their hair or whatever and how strong they do. It doesn't really matter at the end of the day, but it's something like these. I've come.

Speaker A: I mean, it's things, you know very clearly. If you were to suddenly brush your teeth one day in a totally different pattern, that would be a weird signal, right? Like something. Something's different and it might not be something medical about you, it might be something else, but something's different. Um, and so that was, that was the basic insight. And truly, you know, the guy that built this for security was a genius, uh, for doing that. I will say for the football story. Um, my brother in law is a neurologist and knew the neurologist for the Cincinnati Bengals. And so we actually had a call with them about this application and again, this is 2015. Um, their response was the NFL does not want to know that players have concussions. Any technology you try to sell us that will make it more obvious that somebody has a concussion is a total non starter. And I'm not even paraphrasing that was what they said. Um, I think ten years later, uh, it's a much bigger issue and we might have more luck, but the time has passed, so.

Speaker B: Oh well, yeah, but wow. Not only just the story, but just like the behind the scenes and the process as you're saying, just trying to put the products together and just the management and even getting the, the meeting to begin with, like a lot of that is part of it and learn experience. So I'm so glad I asked these questions about, you know, people's, people's projects when they do that. But eventually it leads you to Agoric. I came on saying that like this is. You don't wake up and you end up joining an organization, you know, with, with nothing. Most of the time you wake up with a baggage with you of good practices, hopefully mostly good practices and experiences and everything. So number one, this is another space that when we talk about Agoric, we talk about a space that is very, very wild in a sense of like technology goes really quickly. But, but the contrast that I'm putting there is that there's also a lot of technologies that makes it secure and more robust. Like when we talk about hardened languages, like that's something that we might or might not jump into in just a second. But even to begin with, so very big recap or very small recap actually you kind of join the workforce, the real world as consulting and going into a lot of this kind of like business development and then you kind of have this like lean towards, you know, the tech entrepreneurial kind of aspect of being able to, hey, we could start projects, we could rely on some tech. And then you mostly get dragged into a lot of this, like maybe more program management when you join a lot of these startups and understanding that like, oh wait, there's a lot of things to manage. Regardless if it's product management or not, there's a lot of things to manage to begin with. And then your story at some point leads you to Agoric. So there's probably two parts of this. We're going to ask the second part after, which is, what is Agoric? But the first part is, how did you get introduced to Goric? Or how did you end up joining Agoric?

Speaker A: So I'll start with the sort of, uh, why blockchain story, which I'll do briefly, which is, um, when I was, uh, at one of my startups, the tech lead, who was my peer, you know, he and I were. We started off just the two of us, kind of trying to build out a new product for, um. This was in the health care administration space. And so we got very close. He had been in Bitcoin for a long time. Um, and, you know, he has a story of spending like, 30 Bitcoin on a basketball, which he subsequently lost or something like that. You know, things like that. But, um, so he and I got close. And I remember one. One night in early 2017, and I remember the date pretty closely because of, uh, details that I'm about to share. We went out to get drinks and, um, he just spent the whole night talking to me about Ethereum. And to me, that was, like, the first, you know, I was aware of it, but that was the first time I'd had somebody, like, literally, like, pitch it to me. And this was, like, hours that we spent talking about this. And, um, I. In my head, I was like, okay, Ethereum's $20. I'm gonna. I'm, like, interested in it as an. As an investment asset, because that's where my mind goes. Um, and so I'm like, I'm going to go home and buy some. I was too drunk. I went home and, like, couldn't figure out Coinbase. And I was like, I'll just do this in the morning. And then I didn't. Um, and then, so two months later, Ethereum's at $100. Okay, well, I guess I got to buy some. And so. And again, I think a lot of people fall into crypto in this sort of way. Um, I bought it, and then I was like, okay, what did I buy? Like, what is this thing that I now own? Um, and I started just, like, falling down the rabbit hole, um, which goes extremely deep, uh, and extremely deep in a bunch of different directions as well. And what I saw was something that was extremely interesting, but that I could not contribute to professionally. Like, it was, you either were selling vaporware, um, as, you know, as someone with my background, you could go sell vaporware and make a. Make A bunch of money and possibly be a criminal. Um, or you were contributing to it in an honest, real way as like a cryptographer or someone with a really deep computer science background. And I didn't want to sell vaporware and I was not a cryptographer. And so I, you know, it's like, this is clearly not for me professionally right now, but I'm interested. And so I tracked the space for a few years. Um, you know, I was on a couple newsletters and you know, there was a bear market. A lot of interest went away, but I was still sort of every week I would get the newsletter and read. And then in early, maybe late 2019, um, I was at that point working at a different company, but I started to see Defi products. And for me that was the first time where it's like, oh, here's a web application that I can interact with as a user that's sort of semi technical, but not really. I have a wallet, I can connect it with MetaMask, I can do something. And this is where as a product person is like, I know how to contribute to this. Like, this is something that I can be involved with. And um, that was sort of, you know, late 2019, early 2020, a bunch of these applications started spinning up and, and that became Defy Summer. Um, I was still working in E commerce and was, and just became obsessed with all these Defi applications. Like, I just like couldn't stop playing with them. I was looking at, you know, okay, here, this automated market maker works this way, this one works this way. Which one is better? Like, trying to, trying to sort of understand how this space was going to evolve because it really, it felt like the Wild West. It was like literally a financial system getting built at the speed of software with. And it felt like nobody outside of the space had any idea what was happening. It was like this like, little contained world of just like rapid experimentation. Um, and I just like, I was blown away by that. And so I knew that I kind of had to transition my, my, um, professional career into the space. And I was a little worried. I was worried that there were a lot of sort of semi shady people in the space. Um, it was hard to know. It's hard to, you know, without a deep background and without any contacts. It was hard to know who was legit and who wasn't. Um, and then I remember coming across a post, post on actually a Facebook group for um, um, my, you know, Sloane's Helping Sloany was the Facebook group. And just like people that have graduated from Sloan, you know, stay in touch. And somebody had mentioned that, hey, you know, there's this blockchain project. It needs a product manager that understands Defi really well. Um, let me know. I saw that post the day before my wedding. And so I sent, I sent a message to, uh, the guy who had posted it, who had graduated from, from my school like 20 years ago and was like, um, yeah, hey, I'm getting married tomorrow, but I really need to chat about this with you. And so then a week later we got, um, we got connected. And that was Agoric. Uh, and so I had never heard of a Gork before. A Gore operates in the cosmos space that I didn't know very much about at the time. Um, but what I saw immediately was one, these are legitimate people. Like, they are an organization that wants to do, Wants to sort of push the space forward in a way that matters. They have real differentiated new technology that, you know, has something to say about how, how this space should operate. Um, and, you know, in particular, ah, Dean, the CEO of Agoric, is like somebody that I could see becoming a cult figure, like somebody that people follow in the space because of, you know, his energy and his, his depth of knowledge. And so I joined. I was like, this is this, this is the right place for me to join the industry. Um, and fast forward like four and a half years and here I am.

Speaker B: That buildup was incredible. I absolutely love the part where it's like you need a specific mind to be able to not only hear about this stuff, but maybe also doing something about it and also gearing towards it. Shout, um, out to some of the other podcasts out there that kind of shared, uh, Brian Armstrong's story. Founder of Coinbase. Uh, uh, we're obviously not going to repeat that whole thing, but he was obsessed with the paper behind Bitcoin. He was obsessed with whether you want to say it's Satoshi or whoever it is that writing that there was that like, kind of interest that piqued and then similarly on your path. I'm not saying you did the exact same thing, but whether from that conversation, I was thinking about a couple hours about like, eth, as some people would call it, and just being, uh, to be able to follow it patiently. Like, you didn't really lose sight of that, like within, uh, a week or something. That's something how I keep on saying that, like, you don't get many opportunities. Like, these are many people like these that have gone through that. And then when, by the time you joined a Goric at that point, Point, it's fair to say that you already knew about it just because of following the trends and being able to even make a case for yourself to be like, yeah, there's some stuff that you knew, but some stuff you didn't know. So when we talk about Agoric, when we just even from a very, very third person point of view, what is Agoric, um, today? And then we're probably also going to maybe backtrack a little bit what it was back then when you joined, just to be that contrast. So today, what is Agoric? What does it offer? Like, how do you use it?

Speaker A: Yes. Um, okay, so just as an early distinction, there are two Agorics. There is Agoric Systems or opco, the company that employs me that writes open source software. Um, and then there is Agoric, the blockchain, which is run by a network of global validators, I think about 100 that run software, mostly of which we write. Um, and so when we talk about how does somebody interact with Agoric, we're largely talking about the chain and the applications that are on top of it. Um, and then separately I can also talk about like, okay, well, what does the company Agoric do to help benefit the chain? Um, but that is sort of an important distinction because sometimes those things get conflated and it causes confusion. Um, so the first question was, what is a gork? Now right now Agoric is a chain that has been running since um, I think mid-2022 or early 2022, um, where, uh, there's a smart contract framework where developers can come and build smart contracts in JavaScript, uh, which differentiates us from most other smart contract platforms where you have to either learn Solidity, which is a new language for Ethereum, um, or learn Move or learn Rust, um, which is used lots of places but has a smaller developer base. You can write smart contracts in JavaScript, um, and specifically Agoric as a chain is differentiated because what we allow is um, full end to end user flows to get processed by the chain, uh, over time. And it's hard to kind of understand that differentiation without understanding a little bit about blockchains. But the easy way to explain it is when you send a transaction to most existing blockchains, whether it's Ethereum or Solana or you know, uh, anyone in the Cosmos ecosystem. It is everything that has to happen in that transaction that you've sent has to happen within one block. And so the transaction either is small enough to get processed within that block, um, or it reverts on Agoric. You can kick off a workflow that might require weeks of time and you don't need to interact with that workflow again. And so what that lets you do is program more complex use cases, um, more robust use cases, solve end user problems that don't require them to continuously go back in and sign new transactions to keep doing new things. Um, and where we've started with that is what we call orchestration, which is solving those use cases that are cross chain. But really Agoric is solving end to end user problems that are focused right now on cross chain problems because there are so many.

Speaker B: Yeah. And even from the get go, when you're describing two entities to begin with. Well, not two exactly entities, two understanding of Agoric to begin with. One of them is you're talking about the organization entity. This more human aspect, I guess of like there's a group behind this. If you think about any kind of foundation in a sense that like, hey, foundations work with different, like people, different organizations, different group. And they also have their own like product to build. And then when we talk about this Agoric chain, we're going to spend a couple of minutes on that because everything you just started describing was so good. Not even talking about blockchain or any kind of like defi or anything like even just programming. This is Paris effective. We all see. I'm programmer at them, I'm a software engineer at the end of the day. But like think about an era where you weren't able to do asynchronous calls. And by asynchronous calls it means like where you have to finish your job before you start the next one. If you think about, uh, an oven, you just have to put your cookies in the oven, wait till it's done and then put your second batch into it. But then when you talk about this, you know, back and forth, it's tedious, it takes too much time and then nothing really gets done. And then like we live in the world of technology. So this is kind of where you kind of introduce this concept from what I understand is that when we talk about orchestration in this case, what makes an orchestrator? It's a weird question because I keep on saying that it's obvious, like, here's how it works. But when we're comparing it to when you did not have it, what did it look like? So what makes this orchestrator what it is compared to what it was before? If I did not have an orchestrator, what do I have then?

Speaker A: Right. Um, so it's sort of instructive. To look at the current state of cross chain things in the space. Right. Um, and I think we can. The current state kind of reflects not having orchestration because orchestration is just launching. We actually have our first, I think our first, um, contract went live like a week ago. Um, we just processed our first transaction yesterday. Um, and so really, yeah, very exciting. Um, from my standpoint, uh, I'm a heavy user of blockchain, all sorts of blockchains.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: I have assets spread across Solana, across Cosmos, across Ethereum, across the Ethereum L2s. I have assets on Avalanche. I like, I use blockchain applications. And um, the one common theme in the space is since 2021 there has just been an explosion of more chains, more chains, more assets. And some of those chains will die. Lots of those chains will die. Um, lots of those assets will no longer be valuable. Um, but what's true is it will just keep the number of useful applications and assets will continue increasing. Um, and there's sort of a bunch of structural reasons for that, but that is just like objectively a true statement about the last four years and it will continue. Um, right now if you have assets on, you know, say you have Avax on Avalanche and you want to go interact with Akash in the Cosmos ecosystem to rent GPUs, figuring out how to move your assets from chain A to chain B and do the thing you want to do is a research project like it as someone that is in this space full time, like I often can't figure it out. I, I have like default things that I know where to go. I go to like satellite money to transfer from these places. There are all these different UIs that do different kinds of asset transfer, like different kinds of assets and connect different kinds of chains. It's just a mess, right? And it's because nobody's thinking about this problem. Well, not nobody. There's a group that has emerged that is thinking about this problem holistically. But all these chains are kind of their own silos that want their own ecosystems. And so the communication to other chains largely in the space has been an afterthought. And so as what Agoric can provide here is a really straightforward way for a developer to not have to know the intricate details of what bridging protocol do I need to use for these assets and for these chains. All I need to know is I need to do something on Akash. So I'm going to do get chain Akash. I get an object that represents the Akash chain. I'm going to do whatever that variable was transfer. And underneath the hood the Agora APIs are going to say okay, well I know that we need to swap this asset into usdc, use CCTP as the protocol to move over to noblechain and then use IBC from Noble to get to Akash and then buy AKT on Akash and actually we buy it on a different text and move it. Right. And so that is the sort of power that The Agoric orchestration APIs give developers for their specific use case. And then what I expect um, and hope for in this space is that we start to enable a bunch of verticalized applications that are making use of a very like a set of different blockchains and different applications underneath the hood, but they just expose something very simple to the end user. Um, and I can go, I've got a couple examples of that that I'm really hoping people build, um, and that I might build on the side if nobody else does, um, that I'm happy to like talk through. But that's what Agoric Orchestration will and is providing.

Speaker B: On the one part I keep on trying to bring it back to the tradfi like equivalent. And what I m mean by tradfi is like traditional like um. When we're talking about chains, is this fair to say? And you could definitely correct me if this wrong. When we talk about chains are we talking about just different stock markets? Is that fair to say that it's just multiple different stock markets and then you have one stock market without a specific stock but then you're like it has a value at the end of the day but what if I want to sell that stock on the TX as we go Toronto Stock Exchange, I want to buy it on the Hong Kong stock Exchange instead at another asset. You can't do that immediately today. You have to find a way to get rid of your TXX or like your Toronto stock or asset, whatever it is and then by that point you have a bit of money and then maybe you want to use that money on a different stock exchange like as you were talking about these transactions and this like block gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Is that a fair comparison? Am I not understanding Tradfi versus I guess like all these defi and like newer space of chains and uh, transactions within that space.

Speaker A: I think that is the right parallel. Um, and I was sort of thinking as you're talking about how I would frame the challenge, um, what excites me about the crypto space and I think what excites a Lot of people about it is the dynamic where you are holding your own assets, right? You, in your blockchain, in your browser extension, you've got a wallet that represents your keys, and those keys give you access to your assets. And when you go to an application, so if you're on Ethereum and you hold assets on the Ethereum chain, and you go to an application that's deployed on the Ethereum chain, you are bringing your assets to the application, and that application then makes transactions with your assets that you authorize. And if you want to go somewhere else, it's just like X out of the application and open something else up and you've still got your assets, right? Whereas, you know, when I think about rolling over my ira, I've got a request that Fidelity send me a physical check. I have to go and then get that money to E trade. Like the friction to change financial applications in the tradfi world is giant. It's just like, you know, once you. I still have a Wells Fargo account because even after Wells Fargo, like, you know, there's no Wells Fargo in Massachusetts. I lived in Massachusetts for ten years. Uh, Wells Fargo, like, criminally created all these different, you know, accounts for people. Like, they had this, like, giant fraud thing. I didn't change my bank because it's such a pain in the ass to do it. Whereas in the crypto space, you can change your bank, like, in five seconds. And. But that is true kind of right now only within the context of a single chain. And as soon as you want to start moving across chains now, you suddenly have this friction and this, like, difficulty in doing it. And so, um, and so you're right that it's like, yeah, moving from stock exchange A to stock exchange B is extremely difficult. I think it's still easier in crypto than it is in tradfi. But that friction is still meaningful. And it's meaningful in a way that kind of like, takes away the value that crypto brings to the world. Um, and so in order to really maintain that value, as we continue just getting this explosion of new chains and new assets, we need to have this sort of seamless connectivity, at least for end users. Right? It might always be somewhat difficult for developers. Um, and Agoric's goal is to make it as easy as possible. That's always. That's going to be somewhat challenging. But for end users, if you give them that friction, they just won't do it. And so that's the what I'm hoping we can solve.

Speaker B: Because I would imagine back then like even within a single chain there was already a lot of friction or like there was some overhead that people were just not happy with. And then as you develop stuff within that chain, you could see nowadays a lot easier as we're saying, like within seconds you'll be able to do a lot of the features, whether it's changing wallets or whatever it is today compared to back then. And now that most people have solved this problem of a single chain, somebody's like, let's bring on all the other ones, let's tackle that. And that's why Gork is really just, you know, know, um, in a space that I assume nobody has conquered. And which is why there's always good, good I guess like domains and news and things to follow with Agoric. If we bring back to the part of what do people use this for? Or what are maybe some ideas that are already that you've seen people use, whether it's Agoric API directly or maybe some like behind the scenes. Agoric API is powering a lot of this stuff. What are some like use cases that you've seen people. People do or some use case I even recommend doing?

Speaker A: Yeah. And so what we have started with is solving, taking applications that have already sort of either launched or succeeded in the space and have a user base, have assets flowing through them and saying okay, how can we improve your ux? Right, because that, that, that becomes sort of the lowest hanging fruit for an orchestration contract. Um, and so in some ways what we are starting with almost seems trivial. So I'll start by explaining some of those early examples and then I'll talk to. Okay, well what, what are the things that I want to see people build that are a little bit more complex? Um, we have a group right now that is a chain in Cosmos that's launched and they are a defi chain. They do lending, they do perps trading, they do a bunch of things. And one of the things they want to be able to allow users to do is to easily onboard liquid staked assets. I won't bother to explain that into their lending protocol. And right now, um, one of the liquid staked assets that they allow is called Staked Atom and that requires two chain level interactions and two bridging transfers to be able to go from Atom on the Cosmos hub to Staked Atom on their chain and then another transaction on their chain to be able to deposit into the lending protocol. And so the, the first thing that we were working with them on is let's just give the user one transaction to sign. So user lands on their application and says, I want, I've got Atom, um, I want to deposit into this pool. I'm going to click deposit, my wallet's going to pop up. I sign one transaction, and underneath the hood, the Agora orchestration contract is going to take their Atom liquid, stake it with stride, move it to their chain and deposit it into their protocol. And so what I call that is basically just token onboarding. It's a really basic use case, which is you're a protocol. You want users to be able to use as many of their assets as they can. You don't want to give them a modal where they've got to sign a transaction three times and maybe wait minutes in between those transactions because they'll bounce, right? Like, you know, we know that from web2 that like every click you, you ask a user to make, they're just like significantly more likely to never complete the flow. And so that's the like, early, almost trivial use case that we're looking to solve for all sorts of applications. And so we, you know, one way to think about it is we're right now the bridging step is separate from the use the application step. And the way my, uh, CEO, uh, Dean often describes it at a conference is, you know, he'll ask people to raise their hand if they flew to the conference and you know, half the people raise their hand and then he'll say, okay, before you bought your plane ticket, did you have to take your money from your bank and move it to the bank that United Airlines uses and then buy your plane ticket? And everyone's like, well, obviously not. And it's like, that's the current state in blockchain. It's like, okay, I've got to move my asset to the place that you can understand it and then I've got to do the thing that you wanted me to do. And so, um, solving that problem is the first thing that we're looking for because so many, so many protocols actually need that. The other, uh, end of the spectrum is what I was sort of talking about before, where I want to enable complex, interesting use cases that are like, clearly end user focused and underneath the hood, do a bunch of things. Uh, and so a clear example of that for me is a lot of people are, um, familiar with the concept of DCA or dollar cost averaging. To build a position in, um, an asset, every month you send $100 in, buy some Solana, and then, you know, over time you build up a dollar cost average position in Solana. Okay, what if you want to add a little bit of risk to that position to either use less money or acquire significantly more Solana than you would have otherwise? What you could do is every month you send $120 in or $120 worth of Solana, deposit it in a lending protocol, borrow $20 back, and then send $20 back to your bank account. And so to you, it looks the same. You're $100 in cash less every month, but you're gaining $120 worth of Solana, and you have a borrowed position that is, that provides some risk if Solana declines significantly, that uses at least one defi protocol underneath in a way that lots of end users are never going to actually want to do. But you could just provide, uh, an interface for people that is literally just configure what you want, configure your risk level, and all of that just happens automatically every month for you, and the money just comes back into your bank account. You don't need to, like, do any of this yourself. That's something you could build with an orchestration contract, probably in, like a weekend. Um, you'd have to integrate with a couple of third party services. It wouldn't be that hard. Um, but I bet there's like, dozens of those just, like, very clear use cases for end users that would be profitable for people to build, even just

Speaker B: lending the money back. Like, how does, how is that even an existing thing in defi at the moment? This is the part.

Speaker A: Yeah. So those are, like, extremely common. Every, every major chain has at least one lending protocol where all those operations, if you know what you're doing, like, you know, I, I could borrow, uh, against 50% of my crypto holdings in 10 seconds if I wanted to, and I could deposit it to my bank account. And the part of that that would take the longest is waiting for Coinbase to send the actual dollars to my bank account. All the rest of it would take like 15 seconds. Um, and so, you know, agoric orchestration can just make that happen. And again, as someone, you're adjacent to the space, but you don't know. You could do this. Figuring out how to do it and understanding, okay, here's the risk I'm taking on. Here's how I find the protocols that are legit versus the ones that aren't. All of that is a research project that you don't want to do. Somebody could build that application that just does all that for you. Um, and again, it would be cheap to build because The Agoric chain would process all those transactions.

Speaker B: Yeah, and I could definitely understand why the benefit of doing that compared to other methods at the end of the day. But we could talk about Agoric more the Org itself I guess in the sense of like we understand that it also manages the Agoric chain. And the Agoric chain manages, as a

Speaker A: point of clarification that's actually quite important. The Agoric OPCO does not actually manage the chain. So there are, there are validators that are actually running the chain software that process transactions. We don't as Agoracopco, we don't run any of those validators. Um, those are all just sort of third parties. And what we do do is write software and say hey, we think this would be a good upgrade to the chain that the validators are running. Um, and then there's usually discussion about it. We have like a, you know, uh, usually I think the social convention is a one week discussion period for anything that would go to chain and then there's a vote of build stakers that upgrades the chain. Um, and really there's one Agoric chain that processes that manages and all the contracts that are deployed to it. Those contracts can then subsequently control accounts on other chains. Um, and so you know, it becomes this sort of like deep ah, layer of how does all this stuff work? And the answer is it's complicated. Um, but it is one Agora chain that's kind of managing all this stuff.

Speaker B: What I do want to circle, double click is when we're talking about these suggestions that you're making to the chain or um, suggesting to the chain, if anything, uh, for example would you consider like when we're talking about token onboarding, it's a familiar enough process that many people need it and find the benefit of it. Is that one of those suggestions or is it a more different approach in

Speaker A: terms of like so think of the chain as the platform that software could get deployed on. And then um, any particular use case like token onboarding would require a contract deployed on it that does those things. And so in this case we have a third party that's not related to us. They had this use case that we kind of expected people would have. We went to talk to them and say hey, orchestration can solve this thing for you. They are writing that contract and so what they are going to do is when they're done they're going to um, just, just the same way work OPCO does, they're going to write in our forum and say hey, we have this contract that's going to deploy to chain. You know, here's how it solves the problem for us. We, we want to vote to deploy this. Um, and so then largely from the chain validator standpoint, the question is how much risk does this add to the chain? Because, you know, the reality is the um, other than the contract being poorly written and just really taking up too many resources or something that they're not paying for or you know, causing some larger problem, validators have no reason really to say no. Um, it's, oh, you've got this problem. You're going to deploy a contract to solve your problem. Great. We, you know, we want a gore to be useful to as many people as possible possible. Um, we being not only Agora Copco, but all the validators too, because they hold build tokens. And so, um, you know, presumably Agoric being useful makes the build token, um, more interesting. So, um, that's sort of the flow of it. There would also, there might be other Dynamics where Agorag OpCo says, okay, we have or, or actually, frankly anybody could do this. Um, we see this use case happening across the entire industry. Instead of having all those people independently build contracts that solve their problem, we want to figure out how to build a contract that they can then pay to just integrate into with an API or something like that. Right? And then they are paying for their usage. And we'd figure it out how that would work. That would be a little bit more like not just a generalized software platform, but we are sort of building a specific contract application that could then be sold in sort of a B2B kind of way. Um, and so that would be another pathway to go down that we likely will, we opco likely will, um, over the next year or so. Uh, but right now we are, hey, we've got orchestration. That's a platform for other people to build these use cases on top of.

Speaker B: I definitely like the understanding of like where your work and direction and features come from. The way I can describe this is what, when you talk a company that is probably not in the crypto space, they'll be like, where does the work come from? A lot of times it's either user feedback. So you work with a lot of users and you listen to them and be like, oh yeah, that's a really good suggestion, or that's a bug that we need to fix. There's a lot of those, like incoming on one side and then there's the other part where you have your, you know, if you call it your internal team or even Just your management team. You'd be like, we think this is good based on some of the data that we saw. This is really just the, you know, the part where you could suggest internally what you should build. So as we could see, there's a pattern in terms of, hey, yeah, you have probably more insight inside of what's happening, uh, in your ecosystem than sometimes they use it at the end of the day. The third one is when you were talking about how do I describe this is internally, maybe not from management. Sometimes on teams that I work with, devs are just going to be like, we should totally build this. And it just comes from the actual person. Whether it's like building the API or building the contracts itself. Does that ever happen in the space where it's neither the, I guess like user feedback nor like maybe some like higher management entity or anything? Like what is the other spaces that happens here and there?

Speaker A: So absolutely, at certain levels. Right. Um, and so it's worth mentioning, um, you were kind of asking, you know, how. You didn't ask it this way, but like, how do ideas get sort of prioritized? Is one way to frame your question. Um, we, we are aligning around a metric that we think is a good North Star, which is total value orchestrated, which is not necessarily assets that live on the Agora chain, but you know, for orchestration contracts, how, how much flow are they pushing through the pipes, so to speak. Um, and so when we look at applications or ideas, that's sort of the lens that we prioritize them through. You know, we're also interested in other metrics that matter to blockchains, like, you know, users or wallets, um, or total transactions or TVL or whatever it might be. Um, but I think that's the tvo total value orchestrated is what we're focused on. The one thing that we, that I try to be careful about, um, thinking about it from a product standpoint is when we talk about deploying a contract to the chain, there's overhead that goes with that. Right. And especially as Agoric opco, if we are deploying something to the chain, there's legal implications to that and then there's also like reputational impacts to the chain for that. And so it's kind of hard for us to deploy things that are experiments in that way. Right. Or we can. But, um, I don't want to deploy something and then not have the resources to maintain it, have it flail, because we're spending our time after that on the platform. And so, um, I try to be Careful around. What are we committing to? That actually goes to chain, but in terms of like, okay, how does the API get designed? Or we're going to fix this developer UX problem that's been bugging everybody forever. Lots of those ideas just come directly from, hey, should one of the engineers ramming their head against the wall with this problem, like, they just go solve it like that. You know, that's something that happens all the time. Um, and especially around, you know, even, even at the level of like, okay, orchestration requires a certain feature and somebody's got a really good idea for how to build that that often just kind of gets built. Um, you know, as a remote company, sometimes it becomes hard and so we try to do a better job of making sure we're tracking things and at least communicating how we're approaching things. Um, so fewer things probably come out, out of left field than they did two years ago. But yeah, hopefully, hopefully that kind of answers your question. Um, but yeah, you know, I think there aren't like, hey, somebody's got an idea for a contract, they build it over the weekend and deploy it. Um, yet that might, that might start happening more frequently like as we, as we get deeper into orchestration with more stuff going on.

Speaker B: I'm sure behind the scenes, Perry's world is always like, there's probably a rice chart somewhere where you kind of just like assess the risk and everything behind that. But then there's also the other part where there's a lot of um, open source code that is associated with Agoric as well. So that's the other aspect of like, if anybody has managed a public, um, code base, basically all the issues, all the PRs, everything flying over there, that's they have weight, they have factor in terms of like, I don't know how intense it is that if something gets upvoted like a million times, how much weight that has currently today. But I'm sure it's not zero. Um, at the end of the day for that, what we could probably like double, double check real quickly because I think I know the answer to this one. But being open to a lot of JavaScript developers specifically is a selling point, if I put it that way, right. For me, I kind of understand the space of I've been on both sides where it's like, I absolutely hate JavaScript on some days, but on other days like, oh thank God, I'm using JavaScript or even TypeScript, a certain flavor of it. So if we think about Agoric is that there's a pride to it of embracing this JavaScript ecosystem, maybe from your perspective, and I'll play devil's advocated, but also like on the other side is what are the limitations of embracing this JavaScript technology and what are something that just unleashes the world to you that has like so much benefits behind it. That's kind of the two sides that I can think of.

Speaker A: I think the primary limitation is actually a misconception about what we're doing, which is that smart contract languages need to be deterministic. Um, and JavaScript has a reputation of being insecure and non deterministic. Right? Um, and so um, that's when we talk about hardened JavaScript. What we are attempting to convey there is actually we removed a bunch of the non determinism, not a bunch of we remove the non determinism from JavaScript that we are using. Right? And so on our side, you know, we have to have validators that are using, that are processing all transactions. They have to all like come out with the same answer, right? Because otherwise the chain doesn't work. Um, and so that, you know, and I'll admit that I'm borrowing explanations from our more technical folks in our leadership team, but the way we, the way we approach this is if you remove a bunch of the ways JavaScript is insecure, you end up with a really modularizable secure language to write smart contracts in and it actually becomes a strength. Um, but we have to overcome that objection frequently because people that are passing through or casually understanding us will say well you guys are idiots. Why would you ever do this? Um, and so that becomes a challenge sometimes. Um, and then on the other end, you know, JavaScript, like the number of developers that view JavaScript either as their primary language or if not their primary language, one that they know extremely well is just like it's in the millions, right? It's tens of millions, um, or 10 million plus. And that just dwarfs the existing blockchain developer ecosystem. Right? And so it gives us, it gives us a network that we can tap into of ah, folks that could ramp up on our frameworks quickly. That is very large. Um, and so I will admit that we've been focused on crypto native builders for now. Uh, because it turns out that it takes more time to teach somebody that knows JavaScript how to do crypto than have, uh, somebody who's maybe not quite a JavaScript focused person just learn JavaScript and do it. Um, but as our expectation is, as the industry matures and as use cases mature and the chain matures, that starts to become a lot easier. Um, and so onboarding more JavaScript focused developers that want to tap into crypto is going to be uh, a uh, big focus for us.

Speaker B: Yeah, especially the last part you were mentioning, that distinction of the pool is just so much bigger of developers that are able to contribute not only just the tech itself when we talk about JavaScript, but good ideas and bad ideas. I feel like the more you're able to find a large group of people to get involved. Right. Whether successfully or not. The whole point is that you do have more. How would you call that? Just like, what's that finance term revenue, uh, flow. That one that kind of just like ebda when we talk about just like how much anyways, it's just there's more interactions, there's more. And I think that's just a compounding effect because that like once you have that kind of traction, I guess, um, from a community tens of millions probably, like there's probably a lot of people who don't admit that they write JavaScript, but they do deep down inside. So that's probably how that kind of goes for in terms of who you cater to and what that is for. Um, if I want to think about in terms of like moving forward into the future with the Goric, right. First of all, congratulations. With a lot of the launches, I think it's like sometimes when there's so much work behind it and you're never sure if it's going to work or not, and then the first contract flows and then it's like, all right, the fluid gets of it that's going on with that. That's obviously a milestone that you would describe as part of the story of Agoric. If we think about this milestone journey, what would that look like? And I ask sometimes this question in the sense of do you expect big gaps between milestones or do you expect smaller steps between milestones at the end of the day? Because for example iPhones yearly editions, relatively big, I guess milestones every year. But then when you think about agile companies nowadays, like every week there's a new feature that uses AI for example that just helps you write code. Do you know what I mean? That's the two different gaps. So what does that look like for Agore?

Speaker A: Yeah, and uh, this is something that becomes difficult as or it's a job for a product manager to do well. And I think sometimes this is an area that I don't do as well, uh, at that I should, is making important small milestones in between the larger milestones. Right. You know, I think I can think back to maybe like five or six, no more than that. Seven or eight large milestones in my time at Agora, including like the start of the chain, the deployment of our smart contract platform for the first time, different versions of Inter protocol going out, orchestration APIs launch. Like there are a bunch of these sort of six month separated milestones that we have been building towards. Um, but within that there's also a lot of feature development that happens and improvement that happens that we need to celebrate a little bit more than we actually have. And I think this is feedback from our community around. Hey, you guys seem like you're kind of heads down. We want to hear more about what you're doing. Um, from my side, we work in agile sprints for part of the engineering team and every couple weeks there is something to talk about if we choose to do it. Um, from my side, the milestones around orchestration launch have taken a little longer than I would have wanted. Um, part of that is us, part of that is just sort of running up against, you know, industry roadblocks. Um, but now that things are out and we start to like, you know, fast usdc, the product we've been working on, M has its first transaction go through even on a test version of the contract. Like we start to get that validation, um, and I expect that things will start moving faster. Um, and we also may be in a world where less of our focus is on the platform side of things and more of it is on the application side of things, which will just by its nature move quicker. Um, and so that's my hope is more frequent milestones, um, than we've had, I think in the past. They've been too many months separated.

Speaker B: Yeah. And obviously we wish you all the best with the roadmap. Good luck. That's usually the fun part of getting which quarter goes at to which on that. So, um, this part we're going to move away real quickly from the product and the tech side just for a second. Um, but even just echoing the JavaScript part of like the hardened JavaScript, I'm a nerd with this kind of stuff to be like, what's the difference between hardened and frozen? Um, and what's the difference between like immutable objects? Immutable, apparently hardened. Uh, I never actually used it but like it's technically not immutable. It's actually not pure at the end of the day. So for all the geeks out there, including me, we are definitely, definitely going to keep on following up with the technology behind Agoric and Agoric itself. If I want to come back real quickly to Roland, um, there's so much going on left and right. There's no way you're managing this with all this inside your brain. So one thing I'd probably double check with people is what tools do you use to make sure that your life runs smoothly? Basically some people, they'll be like, I swear by this tool or I swear by these three tools. So whether it's on your phone, whether it's on your computer, computer, anything, um, that must have nowadays for you.

Speaker A: I love the presumption that my life runs smoothly. Um, uh, I mean honestly, at the end of the day it's like Google Docs and Google Calendar. Like that's how I manage things. Um, one thing that has been useful for me in multiple jobs is having a personal Google Doc that's just my running notes for key meetings. Um, and the reason that's valuable is that I can just command F and find almost anything I want right, like by date with names. And um, it starts to give me sort of like a flow of multiple conversations that reference the right thing. Uh, and so I find that useful. You know, the reality is I have to copy paste those notes into shared notes docs a lot also. But, um, that scheduling time on my calendar to work on specific things is really helpful because otherwise I'm just too scattered. Um, I wish I had better tools that, that I used frequently. Um, when I use pen and paper to do, to do lists, that actually works a lot better than almost anything else. Um, I'm bad about doing that enough. Um, and I think largely that's, you know, that's kind of how I organize stuff. Um, and I probably rely on doing it in my head a little bit too much.

Speaker B: We're always guilty of something, like me included, all that. And um, teams are slack.

Speaker A: Slack. I've actually never used teams. Um, we had keybase here when I started which was a little too nerdy and just didn't have threads and that was awful. Um, so slack.

Speaker B: Me either, actually. As much crap I've given teams. I've never been forced to use teams ever. So I think we're part of this ecosphere of just like I. We know we probably only worked at startups most of the time, but you've never touched teams.

Speaker A: That's how it goes. I think that's the reality.

Speaker B: That's so funny. Shout out to the people who use Discord for work or are forced to be using Discord. That's another story.

Speaker A: Crypto is awful in that way. I have to be. I, I've stopped. I. I'm. I'm like, not in Discord anymore. That's where our community is. I, uh, we have chats in Telegram. I have chats on WhatsApp. I have Slack. We used to have Keybase. I have like, Twitter dms. It's just like this. It's very difficult to manage.

Speaker B: Yeah. And of course, sometimes on a call, I could hear the Discord sound like, I know Discord is running over. That's so funny. But, um, last question. Because I've obviously taken so much of your time, but this is one of my. The one that I talk to myself a lot sometimes. It's more like, fortunately, in the, in the software space, it's blown up in the past, like 10, 10 years or so, where you always had champions. Champions of like, oh, you should go into software. You have to do it. But then, as you're saying, nowadays there are programs for product management. There are programs for this. So maybe like, you, if you have this voice, you do have this voice of echoing, of being the champion of talking to people who, you know, maybe didn't know that they want to go to product management, or, you know, the people who didn't know they want to go to Com Sci to begin with. What is the message here? What is the voice of people be like, maybe you should do product. Maybe you should consider it. Like, what was the thing that made you understand that, hey, it's fun.

Speaker A: I think so. And I. There are lots of different flavors of product managers and successful product managers. I think that in my mind, and again, this is just my own experience probably, but, um, if. If you feel like you want to be an entrepreneur, there are lots, there are lots of ways that product can help you not only sort of hone that, but also scratch, um, that itch for you while you learn. And so I think that that's what. And frankly, to be a product leader, you effectively have to, you know, you have to be constantly thinking about what's next, how are we, you know, are we losing? How do we win? Um, kind. Kind of mindset and, and so that. I think there's a lot of parallels there. And so having strategic vision, you're forced to have strategic vision. And so if that's something that comes to you naturally, product is a good way to use that skill.

Speaker B: Yeah. The balance between the anxiousness, but also the confidence in that answer that probably summarizes and describes a lot of how this works at the end of the day, I absolutely love it. So, I mean, on behalf of myself, on behalf of so many people getting to hear all this, it's been amazing. Where could people find more of Roland? Where could people find more of Agoric?

Speaker A: So I'm on Twitter, Oland, Grouse, um, and Agoric, probably on Twitter as well, at Agoric, I believe. Um, and so those are, those are probably the easiest places to find us. And then, you know, Gork's got public GitHub repo. So if you want to dive into what we're building, the Gork SDK, um, come join our community on Discord. You know, gork.com will get you an invite to that. Uh, and you know, if you're in the space, we're often at major events. So Denver is next week. Um, you can find our team there. Uh, and you know, other other major events. We usually have at least one person there. So, yeah, that's probably the best places to find us. And, you know, especially if you're a builder, like, please, please come talk. You know, if you've got ideas that you think we could help with or, um, if you have questions around. Would Agoric solve this problem for you like that? We love to talk about that.

Speaker B: And of course, all the links will be shared in the description notes below. Definitely go check them out. But once again, Roland, it's been absolutely amazing. The stories are great. The usage of Agoric was great interest. I described it. So just want to say thank you again for being on the show.

Speaker A: Yeah, thanks for having me. This has been fun.

Speaker B: And of course, I'll catch you on the next one. See you later. Bye. And that was Roland Grouse, Director of product at, uh, Agoric. All the links are shared in the description notes below. Go check them out. If you would like to be on Podcast room by Software Engineer, reach out to us. Just email contactaratesu uh.com can't wait to have you on the show. Once again, thank you so much for listening to podcast written by Software Engineer. Don't forget to hit the follow button on your podcast app and leave us a review on Spotify and Apple podcasts. It's completely free. And if you want to tell your friends about podcasting by Software Engineer, that's totally cool as well. Anyways, I am Parrotsu and I'll catch you on the next one. Big love.