Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Shobhit. Shobhit is the co-founder at Shovel Company.
Over the last decade he’s worked extensively in the startup world. He’s worked on his own products, he’s also worked, you know, in the revenue generating product of Gojek. His startup was acquired by them and post that now he’s obviously working on Shovel which is basically on a mission to create infrastructure tools for developers and they are creating a DCN, a social graph infrastructure for building rich personalized applications.
So it is more geared off towards decentralized identity and how that they change the way users interact with web3 applications. His team consists of his co-founders and they are all set for a beta launch in January. It was a very exciting conversation.
I think this one would be especially good for engineers and folks who are building in this space, looking at more B2B side of things. I can’t wait for you guys to hear this. Let’s deep dive right in.
Hi Shobhit, how are you doing today? Hey Tarusha, I’m doing well, just enjoying my day. How are you? Thank you so much for making the time to speak to me. I’m doing well.
Thank you so much for asking. So for our listeners, Shobhit, can you tell them a little about your background and how you get around to where you are right now and what you’re building? Oh my god, like it’s more of a historical narrative question. Yes, yes, just to set the context for everybody.
I understood. Okay, so I’m Shobhit. I currently run this startup called Shovel Company.
I have been working on startups for a really long time and I’ve been in technology. I’ve been actually programming for a very, very long time. I’ve been coding since I was 8-9 years old.
I got into startups in 2012 and 2013 is when I started myself for the very first time. At that time, I was building a product like Zoom. WebRTC was an upcoming technology back in the day and meeting room software was pretty bad.
It’s kind of bad in terms of UX but still. So that’s where we were. I think I was very young and dumb so not much happened in that startup.
I was prioritizing a lot of wrong things and it didn’t go very well. In 2014, I started another startup. This time, I was again in the software space.
I was working on this up and coming trend called DevOps. That time, it was slightly new and I was doing consulting for a lot of startups. Through that, I ended up working with a lot of fast-paced Indian startups that we know are big companies today.
Around 2015, we were doing pretty well and like any good software, deep tech consulting business, we were looking to open up offices in Berlin or San Francisco. Coincidentally, we found an Indonesian startup called Gojek. At that time, Gojek was pretty new.
We got an introduction through Sequoia Capital, now PXV, who were about to invest into them. Then, we started working with them. I love the founder over there and we kind of resonated.
I always wanted to build a product and they were looking for people to take that part from them. So, we got acquired into Gojek. My co-founder from my startup became CEO at Gojek at that time.
I was looking after their transport business overall, the product engineering and also the engineering platform. So, Gojek is three companies in one. It’s like a transport business, a payment business, and then let’s say food delivery business.
All of these things are sandwiched together. Our transport would be pretty much like what Uber is, like an on-demand ride-hailing business. Anyways, the core platform was what I primarily worked on.
I was there for five years. Saw company grew from like tens of millions to tens of billions, 10 billion. So, that was a very fast growth sandwiched in those five years for me.
Learned a lot. By the time it was 2020, company was pretty big. We were above upwards of 5,000-ish people at that time, like one year approaching that number.
And company was getting ready for IPO. So, the nature of the work has also changed and I was looking for something different. So, I decided to move out and started Shovel Company.
So, Shovel Company, we started work. So, we have only basic idea of we want to work on something, we want to work at the infrastructure layer of the internet. That’s the primary idea.
Because I’ve always been a tool builder of sorts. And I always appreciate a tool when it fits for the job. So, that’s where the core idea was.
And we started working in that place. I was anyways, pretty much deep into engineering myself. So, natural place for me to start was in the cloud market.
So, in 2021, we started building this product called Odette. Odette. So, the core idea was like, you know, as the larger ecosystem architectures of companies evolve, it becomes very hard to identify and know where what it is, right? Like, it’s just like, you know, you never have a map of what the things are.
So, Odette was the map we were trying to build, right? So, Odette is a small river in France, and world’s oldest 3D map is of that river, right? So, that’s where we got the name. And we were building that product. We tried and we worked at it for a year.
And then we kind of pivoted into Web3. Because like at some point, we concluded, you know, cloud and SaaS feels like a late stage market to me. And we were more keen to go and, you know, think about like, where is the emerging technology space, right? So, I was more interested into that.
And that’s where the Web3 people were loudest. So, let’s start from there and see where it leads. Right? So, somewhere in the middle of 2022, we decided to go into Web3.
I spent like three, four months. By the time it was September, we concluded the primary problem is around digital identity. And like, and all of this notion of decentralization, right? Like, it’s a whole spectrum of like, rational to irrational, what decentralization can be, right? Some of it is very rational, like, it is based out of fake rate of a marketplace, right? Like, like, I was running a marketplace business myself, like with several million drivers, every day on the platform, right? And a food delivery business, like a swiggy, right? So, you can understand, okay, this is pretty rational, because you can look at it balance sheet and say, Oh, this is the money we are talking to decentralize, right? And then the slightly above one is like, slightly more philosophical in nature, right? It’s like big tech versus user privacy tracking, that kind of a fight, right? And then like, above that, it’s like kind of a, that’s where we are in the gray territory, right? Like, for example, central banks and monetary policy, and countries and sovereignty, right? So, there is a whole spectrum of these ideas of where how individuals correlate with a larger institution.
And, you know, and that’s where I felt like it’s pretty much sounds like a digital identity problem. And we started pursuing it from that perspective. And that’s where we got into, that’s where we are, right? So, we realized that, you know, there is an emerging account systems that are we are coming up for every end user, right? And how do we accelerate growth of those account system is how we landed to DCN.
Okay, so just to understand is DCN something, what you’re doing at shovel, basically, you’re building this DCN, is it similar to DIDs or what ENS is doing? Okay, so, so let’s dig into what DID and ENS are, right? Like, and then I’ll answer back to what we are doing and how it’s similar and different. So, so DIDs are pretty interesting, right? Because DIDs are just like an IDs, right? Like, let’s say you have a card in India, right? Like you get everybody gets an identifier, right? And DIDs is is a way to create an identifier. But they are not like a very big and they’re slightly smart identifier in a way because that they can resolve into some data, right? Like you can try and resolve a DID and you can get some data around it, right? So, anything can be a DID.
Now it connects back to crypto world very easily because like a cryptographic key can be represented as a DID, right? So, people can store DIDs and they don’t have to worry about, you know, that this is a cryptographic key or this is a user profile or this is something else, right? They can just store DIDs, right? So, it’s a, it creates a great standardization layer that way, right? So, at the software layer to interact. Now, ENS is slightly different. ENS maybe is more closer to DNS or IPNS, right? It’s like a naming thing, right? Now, so why do we need naming is because underlying infra changes all the time, right? Like for example, let’s say if you’ve done a website hosting ever, right? You will give tell an IP address, right? Let’s say you deployed on GitHub or now you’re deployed on AWS, right? It will change that IP address, right? But everything should work.
The end user knows the name, right? So, DID is for the infrastructure layer and the naming system is for the user layer, right? So, they are like two sides of the same coin in that way, right? Now, both of them are crucial for an account system, right? Both of them are like critical part of account system, right? Because the DID is kind of the software interoperability side and ENS is like, you know, more of a consumer interoperability, right? So, both of them are two sides of the same account system, right? DCN is slightly different, right? Because DCN is about contacts, right? So, let’s say you have an account, right? But you will have some contacts, right? Like let’s say you have a Google account on your phone or Android phone and then you have the contact app, right? In which you have a bunch of contacts, right? Which are associated with your account, right? So, DCN is about those contacts and the interoperability of those contacts. We believe like, you know, social networking as a concept is kind of moving towards the protocol layer and, you know, very simple questions, right? Like, why can’t I annotate physical things, right? For example, let’s say I read a URL or a website or Wikipedia page, right? Why can’t I leave comments for my friends to see, right? These kind of things can only possibly be stopped thinking in terms of the interfaces of the current websites, right? Or the current products, right? So, this kind of discovery of people and contacts is moving towards the protocol layer and that is what we are trying to visualize when we are trying to do DCN. Okay.
So, again, this is like a lot of information that has been thrown at the listener, you know, after your explanation. If you had to explain what DCN is in perhaps a line or explain to people in a way that, you know, they’ll understand it immediately to a layperson, how would you describe it in one or two lines? Okay. So, first of all, I believe DCN is more of engineer-facing product, right? While, let’s say, let’s say an app, let’s say a contact app that we are making called Rolodex is a consumer-facing product or a directory app for a community is a consumer-facing product, right? So, how I would describe DCN is that DCN is primarily interoperability of contacts, like so that, you know, let’s say you start an application, most of the applications are fun when you have your friends over there, right? But the problem is how do we get those friends over there? To do that, we have this infrastructure that allows you to interoperate your contact to different places, right? So, that’s what DCN is all for.
So, interoperability of contacts for in the decentralized world, that will be one, you know, strict way of putting it, correct? Yes, yes. Okay. So, can you give us like a use case example for this? Okay.
So, very simple one, right? That’s what we are trying to work with today, right? So, some, the philosophy that we have is like, you know, once you are building an infra like this, you have to also bootstrap it with the right set of applications in the beginning, right? So, the first application we built is a basic contact app, right? It’s like, it’s a personal relationship management app where you have like a power user interface to a contact app in some sorts. Another application that we are trying to build is a directory app for a community, right? So, a lot of communities are actually running on WhatsApp, right? Or some groups or the other, right? And a lot of times you are joining a group where you really don’t know anybody, but you join for some purpose of the group, right? But you would like to browse who are the people over here, right? So, a lot of WhatsApp groups, a lot of good run community actually maintain a member directory, right? Where it’s kind of an Excel sheet, which is just in the link to the description of the group, right? So, that’s literally the next step that we are making is one of the use case and, right? So, and we are trying to also work towards the creative economy use case, right? Where a lot of these problems are around, you know, who owns the end customer? Is it the platform? Is it the creator? So, that’s the primary build area that we are focused on. I hope I answered your question.
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you’ve kind of answered what kind of applications that you envision being built on the platform. And that is essentially what I was trying to ask you about what would be like a good use case.
So, now the concept of every user and agent having their own keys, it can be, it is very intriguing. And I do think that that is the essence of decentralization. Because, you know, if you want to have the kind of freedom, then you need to take the onus of some responsibility as well.
But how does your company foresee this, you know, changing the landscape of digital identity? And what can be say potential benefits for individuals and users? I think I think the freedom one need to touch upon is a very important one. It’s more but it’s likely philosophical one, right? Sometimes in the cold hearted capitalist consumerist world. Yeah, that’s kind of rationales are not very effective a lot of times, right? Yeah.
Yeah. So I think the most important thing that will change once everybody have cryptographic keys is that there will be no more forms. Right? So think of it in this way.
Most of the webtoon businesses right now, have armies of product managers who are right now using tools like Mixpanel to make sure that user crosses some data input on their website, right? Or their app so that they reach to a stage where they can finally do something, right? And a lot of that is important, right? Because, hey, I don’t know who this person came to my application, right? So I will ask for information right before I can do anything. Right, right. So everybody has to create a new account every time with a new website, new platform, a new platform, you need to make an account.
Yeah. And what do you do? Right? You are filling your name again, you’re filling your age again, for the 100 times you have to verify again. Right? It’s the same thing that you have to fill time and again with any new interaction, any new platform.
Exactly. Right. And nobody likes it.
Not the user, not the company. Right, right. Yeah.
Right. Both parties hate it, by the way. Right.
Because, because we do and there is the solution, right? The whole like, if you think about it, a majority of finance industry problems are in KYC and fraud. Yeah, absolutely. Who should, right? So all of KYC problem is a form filling problem.
Yeah, that’s largely right. So I think like the fundamental problem around, I just believe the experience is going to be significantly different, right? When you go to a place you go, you join a new platform, suddenly they know you, know your valued customers. Suddenly on the day one, you don’t have to be gamified for 30 days to really be of any value to them, right? You can actually start and you can also port your friends to that, right? Like the experience of joining these places is going to change, right? Like how internet feels is going to change.
And I just believe that. Right. Yeah, it’ll fundamentally change the experience, I think.
And that, you know, once the user experience changes, the stickiness increases. And people would, there is no resistance when you’re trying to onboard any new user. Exactly.
Like a lot of fights that is going on, on digital marketing side, right? People spending on keywords. A lot of times people are just trying to make sure that somebody fills the form. Right, yeah.
That kind of changes with your product. Yeah, I don’t want forms, right? Like nobody likes it. I don’t want passwords.
I don’t want forms. I don’t have Yeah, that is what is going to change in the how users digital identity is carried on the internet. Right.
Yeah, it will fundamentally change the way people are interacting with applications on online. So more part of you guys were thinking of something, you know, which is, which is a big problem, but it is such a large part of everyday usage of how you know, interact with any platform, but nobody really thought actively of solving it in this manner. Yeah, I think like, see, again, right, like all of us are building on shoulders of giant, like, we are just trying to look at history and push it a little bit further.
I think a lot of people have been trying to work on it forever. Yeah, I knew this, there is there was a guy called Kim Cameron. He was an identity architect in Microsoft.
Since 90s, I guess. They have been running a conference called Internet Identity Workshop since early 2000s. And a lot of these people have been talking about how internet has a missing identity layer.
Right? Like how would Bitcoin we are talking about internet has a missing money abstraction. Similarly, we have a missing identity abstraction. And, and because of that, we have so many other things that we have to do as a workaround.
Right. So it’s just like looking back and going back exploring and studying those ideas and trying to see how can they be done again in 2023 or 2024 now. Yeah, 2024 now.
Awesome. So, you know, again, like perhaps the spirit of your company, you know, you’ve touched upon it quite a bit already. We could term it like, you know, you guys are on a mission to build basically, the very intrinsic blocks that will help builders in general in scaling more effectively, giving their users a better experience.
So what is the significance of perhaps this, this particular mission? And how is your company contributing to the toolset available for those who are actively shaping in the digital landscape apart from, you know, the DCN layer that you’re creating? I think like, okay, so a lot of it is actually software is very interesting as a concept, right? Because it is, it is just a abstract representation of things we are talking about, right? So it’s not really a something specific, it is how we talked about it, interpreted and implemented it. Right? It’s just that, right? So I think a lot of protocol building and infrastructure building on the software side is about actually traversing the layers of the software that are that exists today and find going to the, the core layer and trying to see where the integrations need to be done, right? I think so that’s, so this basically means you are working with everybody, right? Like, end of the day, software is going to run on a on a VM or somewhere, right? So you have to work with cloud providers, it has to, you know, in our case, we are very working closely around IPFS ecosystem, right? So networking stack comes from that place. Right? And then payments infrastructure is what we’re trying to build with DeFi and crypto, right? So a lot of integrations to that direction also comes from that side, right? So it’s like, I think, I think it’s more about, you know, how does it fit into all of this is the is where most of the energy goes? Right? Can I do I think I answered your question? Or I missed something? No, no, you you have, you’ve mentioned all of the these tooling, you know, tooling kits and tools that you’re creating for people who are actively changing the landscape in the digital realm.
So thank you for answering that. You know, apart from what you guys are doing at shovel and being like a founder that you’ve been actively involved in pushing, you know, knowledge and just, I do think that builders in the space do have that onus that they will do need to create more awareness and create more educational pieces for people to become more aware so that they can become a part of this revolution, so to say, revolution. So how do you perhaps, you know, because there are a lot of external activities and you are in your own startup, how do you contribute? How do you manage to first of all balances? And how does this kind of contribute to your overall vision of the future? So I think like, I think I’m slightly lucky that way, because this is my third startup now, right? And I’ve been in startups and programmer for a really, really long time.
So a lot of it is the second nature, right? So and because of the years of practice that have gone, but, but, but you’re right, right? A lot of it is an education problem also, right? And I think that’s the, that’s, that’s kind of a problem for any emerging technology, right? That a lot of it is also a lot of chicken and egg problem, right? Exactly. Yeah, it is a natural, right? Because if you’re trying to, like, everybody’s looking for, you know, where is the first Genesis point and how, around which how do we bring in more people to extend the idea further, right? So I’ve been like a part of the technical ecosystem for a really long time, right? So I’ve been involved in a lot of open source projects since very, very early days, right? So it’s just like, you know, reading through code, reviewing somebody else’s project, giving feedback. I think this, these are very hard skills to learn.
Now I look back, right? Like, as in I got lucky that when I was not thinking much about them, I was doing it. But these are not very easy, right? Like sitting in India, especially, right? Like where a lot of teams that you really want to collaborate on less in India more outside. Sadly, that’s the nature of the space we are in today.
And you have to work across like a 12 hour time zone difference and then collaborate at a high frequency in the front to go anywhere, right? You have to do that, right? So it’s a it’s a challenging act, but it’s fun. Yeah, it is. I think it’s once you know, it becomes a part of what you’re doing.
And then it starts coming easily to because you know, as you mentioned, you’ve been doing it for a while. So then striking that balance then becomes easy. It’s only when, you know, you start off something, you know, initially, that that there are certain hiccups, but you know, that is the advantage when you do start something young.
I think that is goes back the older age, right? If you are, if you inculcate children with the right set of habits, you know, then they will follow it. This is the whole reason why we have like CBSE board in India. Right.
Okay, so I come from ICSE but I understand, you know, the feeling I have a lot of folks who’ve studied in CBSE board as well. But yeah, that is I do think that ultimately, you know, anything that that that you think would should come easily to you, it will only come easily to when you make it a part of your daily routine. And you know, you’re kind of measuring it, and making sure that you know, you’re somehow doing it and it will come easily to you then because it’s, it’s becomes deeply ingrained in and becomes a part of your personality.
Exactly. Like, it’s very much like, you know, like the Zen style of thinking, right? Like, like, a sharp rock flowing water smoothens it out over a period of time. Right? Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. That’s a good example to give. So, you know, you’ve also co-authored the Observability, sorry, right? So how does the how does this work into, you know, what you’re doing with Shovel? And why is this crucial for the success of decentralized systems and infrastructure? Also talk a little about the white paper so that our listeners can gain some insights, because I’m sure not everybody has read this white paper.
No, I doubt like, unless you are actually deep into like, that space. It’s a niche. It’s a corner of internet.
Absolutely. Right. So, okay, so, so a little bit about, okay, so I’ve been, I think I mentioned that I’ve been DevOps space for a long time.
And then because of that, so, so, so DevOps is pretty interesting, right? Like, now it has kind of become a job title. But initially, it was, it started as a philosophy of like, engineers or developers doing their own operations. So it’s kind of like, you know, it was a front runner in full stack mindset to a certain extent, right? Where like, because it’s the emergence of in the web to world, right? Like the SaaS ecosystem took over, and then we eventually had cloud companies like AWS and GE and whatnot.
Right? So now anybody can rent a server, just through an API, right? Like, effectively. So, so a lot of it is just an API integration that we’re trying to do. And that just started like a lot of cloud world.
And DevOps is primarily philosophy from that world. Right? Now, so as I think, in 2010s, a lot of cloud in the cloud patterns got matured, right? A lot of a lot of companies start seeing scale and have start facing scale related problems. And then CNCF got made last decade, where, you know, larger companies were pulling the technologies that they were making, right? So a lot of technologies around, let’s say, Kubernetes, or Prometheus, and whatnot, like, I’m sorry, sorry for dropping words, have been part of having built in these companies and pulled together as an open source group, right? Like, it’s quite similar to how we had an Apache foundation back in 90s.
Right? And a lot of lot Linux foundation and Apache foundation and how they incubate project, right? Something like that, right? So a lot of cloud technology started getting incubated over there. Right? Now, in that space, like, typically, there is, so there are, I think, the two important part of DevOps world is like the, the CI CD infrastructure, which is more about how can we ship quickly, often with speed and with reliability, its focuses on that problem. And then it’s about observability and reliability.
It’s about, you know, what is running? Is it running or not running? Or is it running fine? Or what do how do we know? It’s the question around that, right? So it comes from this mindset of automation, right? Like you want to have control over the system you made. But how do you have control without a dashboard? Right? So it’s like, it’s like a very basic, I think everybody will relate, right? Like, even if in business or any side that you have to have to look at some data to make sense of what is going on. Right? So observability is that for software, right? So yeah, so I think like, after Gojek, I got some time, I was exploring what to do more in cloud space, observability is something I’ve been involved for a really long time.
And somewhere on Twitter, I found an opportunity that, you know, the work was just getting started. That’s why I was just there. I contributed to some some snippets of the paper.
Yeah, that, but but that’s, that’s the space that I really enjoy. Because, because at Gojek, we got to see a scale a lot, right? And, and a lot of that work, like we were doing 7 million transactions every day. And like, for a good period of time, our whole company was focused on profiling the stack, because scale was increasing every few weeks.
Right? So, so that’s where my interest into observability came, right? And I ended up writing that. Okay, awesome. Like, you know, quite a fellow nerd you are.
That is good to know. And I love how you know, you’ve basically found a way to go back to what you really like doing and what brings you joy time and again. I think that is something a lot of people forget on their journey, which kind of takes me to my next question.
Yeah, yeah, it is, it is the point and people forget that, right? I think in the daily humdrum of things, people just tend to forget that you’ve mentioned, you know, you’ve experienced obviously, like any entrepreneur, I think who’s been around for a while, everybody experiences failure and success, right? Obviously, the scale is different for everybody. And that is absolutely okay. But what lessons did you say learn from your failures as well as your successes? And how has that kind of shaped your personality over the years as an entrepreneur? I think like, a lot of learnings are quite latent, right? Like, a lot of, a lot of time has happened, it’s very, you know, difficult to pinpoint what exactly learned from that, right? But because every, every time I look back, I’m thinking something differently about it, right? Time is going by.
The way you’re perceiving it, the way you’re perceiving the future of the past as well changes, right? Because of the experience that you’ve had in the present or whatever experiences are shaping your personality, that kind of changes your perspective on what has happened as well. Exactly. Because the observer has changed.
Right? Yeah, exactly. The observer has changed. Right? The observer will be joke, this was.
But yeah, you had to absolutely pinpoint one or two lessons, like from your failures and successes for fellow entrepreneurs, what would those be? So I think like, over time, I started, I think like I have, so a philosophy of startups have been emerging for me, right? Like, as in, like, how I perceive management and startups, right? Like a management strategy, whatever you call it, and there’s no good word for these things. Anyway. Right.
So I think there’s some philosophy of mine have been emerging for me, right? So I typically call it as a one true model, right? So, so I believe like, you know, a lot of times, I think, I think this, a lot of people who are doing startups have action bias. Right? They, they are very trigger happy, they are very active, and they want to do things quickly and want to see results very quickly. Right? Right.
So, but I am much more of a minimalist on the other hand, right? Right? Because I try to counter that, because sometimes you start a chain reaction, right? Like you start some activity, it becomes a chain reaction. And then some few weeks steps down the line, you’re wondering why I’m doing it. It happens.
It happens all the time. Right? So I just call it like, you know, a company needs to have a one true model, right? Basically, it’s a model is nothing but a construct of words through which I can explain every activity that we are doing. Right? Like, whatever happens to the one true model.
Right? Whatever anybody is doing in the company should be should be able to be explained through that model. Right? And, and, again, like, how do we make that model? Right? Like, because blanks, canvas is the scariest thing. Right? I just think every company has only two activities, it is building or selling.
Right? Right. Everything. Yeah, gives me something to think.
Yeah, everything stems from there. Right? You can always, you can always map any activity that is happening in the company back to this. Right? Right.
Right. Building or selling? Absolutely. That’s it.
Right. So like, that’s how I see job titles also, right? Like, I just don’t believe like, either you are a builder or you’re a seller, right? That’s you have to be on the one side in the company or you’re, you’re a unicorn on the board side. That’s brilliant.
Everything in the middle of building and selling is a communication flow problem. Right? It’s just a how do I flow the information from what needs to be sold to what needs to be built? Right? It’s just that. Right? So and that is the higher larger mental model I carry when I try to think about management and startups.
Right? I think that’s a very wonderful way of looking at it. And you know, when you it’s very easy, like as a fellow entrepreneur, I think I’ve doing this for a while as well, what happens is that, you know, you get kind of stuck in the micro at times, and then there will be times when you know, you’re getting, you’re making it too complicated for yourself and the way you’re kind of perceiving how you want to move forward or what you want to do. But ultimately, it just falls into these two buckets, you know, you’re either building or you’re selling.
And at times you’re doing both, you know, but but ultimately, I think, as long as your actions are aligned with these two buckets, then you’re doing okay. Exactly, right. And you need to just largely know how what activity I’m doing right now, how is it continued on the either side.
So you can decide how anxious you want to be about it. Absolutely. Yeah, that’s true.
Like what is perhaps you know, your higher priority and then, you know, if you’re just being truthful to yourself about it, because, again, I, this is something that I’ve seen with a lot of entrepreneurs, myself included, when things are like, moving too fast, and it’s very easy to start getting busy, but not being productive. And as long as, right, as long as you’re perhaps aligned with either of these buckets, then, and you can be honest to yourself about it, then I think that you’re on the right path. Exactly, right.
And anyways, work happen in serially, right, it can be planned concurrently, but happens only one thing at a time, right? That’s, yeah, absolutely. That’s very cool. You can you can plan anything and everything, but you don’t, obviously, in a sequential order.
So that planning is always my viewers. Yeah, that is true. That is true.
Okay, so now coming back to shovel, what is like a the next big milestone for you guys? And how do you perhaps see the company contributing positively to the, you know, to the decentralized space? So I think this year, we have spent mostly our energy into, you know, going deep into the core of the problem, right. So I think like most of our focus was on building and much less in selling. Right.
So, and, and a lot of building required us to do have a lot of partnerships and relationships with the people who are also building a building that happens in a building that happens with a peer group always, right? Everything happens with a peer group, by the way, right. So, so finding the teams you want to work with finding the, you know, taking some core decisions on the technology stack that you want to go around, right. So a lot of that happened this year.
Now, so, so another thing that we also follow is, we have like, like, I frequently write a update note, right, where I like to describe the whole model again, right, so that we can secure anchoring on top of this. So on based on that, right, currently, we are about to ship the version of the protocol right now what we have live is a white paper, right? I think white paper is enough to find peers, but white paper is not enough to take the next step as a company. Right.
So come in the coming few weeks, we are about to launch, like launch as a like soft launch product, like nothing big marketing of activity wise, right? We all we want to do is we want to ship out the CN right now and try to start gathering market feedback, right and also like work with different, larger chain ecosystems and see how we can align our objectives together. Right. So that’s the immediate focus for us.
Awesome. Awesome. Those are, you know, bigger goals.
And those are the very foundation that you want to build the whole thing on. So, you know, all the best to you guys, on what you’re doing, because, you know, again, I think what you’re building is very pertinent, and it adds to, you know, the solution for adoption in web three in one way or another. So that that is something that you know, I feel very excited about any which way.
So now let’s like zoom out a little bit before we kind of wrap this up. What are the what is your perception regarding the next bull run? And what are the kind of niches you feel would do really well in the next bull run? Okay, so I think like, I think that again, right, like there are like, you will always hear noise more around like stuff like, you know, Ethereum scaling to Eigen layer or MPC and ZKP as a technology, these things coming up. Like, these are definitely hot for this bull run.
But I’m pretty much more interested in when do we see consumer adoption of domain three, right? I think, I think we are pretty close on that side. It looks like looks like technology is kind of ready, but products are lacking. Like, for every frontier technology, you’re only asking one question, right? Is technology ready? Or like productization has not happened, right? So I think like, right.
So this is the question I was pursuing this year, right? So from what I understand, like, I think technology is kind of ready. Like a lot of narratives around, you know, the wallet experience is not great, or what to do, like, a lot of content and user problems, right? I think like, this bull run next one or two years, I’m very bullish that we are going to see some breakout of some product, right? Like, I’m yet to pinpoint which one, but it feels like some product will see end user adoption. Basically, utility based products, I think that you know, something that can become a part of intrinsically of like the user’s life on a day to day basis.
And that that that would be the kind of products that will bring in adoption as well as a plethora of more people in the web three that is what I truly believe in is something. This is a sentiment that has been echoed by the way in the last few weeks by all the founders and stakeholders that have spoken to everybody seems to believe that that you know, we’ve kind of done infrastructure, like a lot of people are building it and that’s great. You know, that that is obviously required because otherwise, you know, you cannot build anything of substance if the infrastructure is not there.
But right now, if you’re looking at adoption, then the only way to get adoption is to basically create an application or have an application or a bunch of applications that become a part of the user’s day to day life. Exactly. Right.
And those applications will not say crypto, by the way, right? Because yeah, exactly. Because of crypto. Absolutely.
Yeah, it will it will be absolutely no other like, you know, the the apps that are there in web two, and they will be pretty similar to those applications, there’ll be utility based applications, and it wouldn’t really matter that they are being obviously that becomes like a selling point for us. And it becomes for founders, it is like the USP that it is built on decentralized technology. But the user really doesn’t care.
Like I think that is, again, something that a lot of us have realized that the end user really doesn’t care about so much about, you know, the ethos, as you said, where the philosophy is associated with freedom, and you know, just just decentralization that those are not things that the user is actively day to day thinking about, about privacy about, you know, just philosophy always need to be packaged in a product, right? It can never let you you are anyways going to package a philosophy, right? explicit or implicit, right? But philosophy itself is not a product. Exactly. It cannot be a product.
And the product itself has to be that, you know, it kind of takes in all of those philosophies and create something that that is adding convenience and value to the user’s life. Absolutely, absolutely. I think we are about, I am so very bullish on this space, and especially like, you know, these were like one of the my factors of picking up DCM, right? Because I felt like most of the consumer behavior on the internet is around social and like browsing and, you know, that kind of activity, not financial activities that we have, we see in DeFi, right? Like, a zero option trader is a very long tail guy on the internet.
Right? Yeah. So I think that’s where I feel the space is and extremely excited of what happens in the next two years. Yeah, I completely agree.
I think, you know, we are very aligned. And mostly as the founders that I’ve talked to in the recent weeks, they all of them seem to be very aligned with this thought process, which is wonderful to know. And that kind of makes me even more excited for this for the space in general, because when everybody is sort of thinking about the same thing, great things are bound to come out.
So I’m really looking forward to what the builders are going to really showcase that because we’ve been building for some time. And now it’s, you know, once the bull market hits, I think there’ll be much more noise and a lot, a lot more products would be uncovered that are more utilitarian in nature. Absolutely, absolutely.
I think this is the cycle project. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, again, like I keep saying this in almost all conversations I have, and my listeners are saying, you know, I have the same dialogue, but honestly, I really lost track of time.
These conversations are usually so insightful and brilliant, that I, I just don’t remember, you know, looking at the clock ever. So now we’re out of time again. And before we wrap this up, I would love to ask you, Shobhit, one question that I like asking everybody who comes on the show, you know, you, you basically, again, been on the other side, where you were building for Web 2. And now you know, you’re building for Web 3. And you made that pivot.
What would be your two, three suggestions for people who are perhaps looking to do something similar to start living on blockchain? Okay, so I think like, I would say still the space is quite early and you have to actually build things to really understand it. So I think reading goes so far, you have at some point and everybody has to take a plunge and actually, like try to play with the software, right? Like, like make a toy project, right? I think reduce the stake, make a simple toy project that you see where it makes sense. Right? I think that is that is how all great things have started with something toy, something fun, something toy, have fun, right? Play with the technology.
If you like to continue, if you don’t like it, don’t continue. Right? There will always be another time to play with it. Absolutely.
I think, yeah. Get your hands dirty. Exactly.
And if you’re in it, then I will just say show up every day. That’s it. Show up every day.
That is very, very important. I think, again, something that people tend to forget. Show up every day.
The most simple suggestions and advice that are the most impactful and that kind of, you know, really have like a huge impact and a compounding impact in your life. Showing up every day is a very good way for us to wrap this up. So Shobhit, any parting words before we close this particular recording? No, I think that’s pretty much it.
I think show up every day is quite apt. Yeah, I think showing up every day is quite an apt way to close this. Thank you so much once again, Shobhit, for making the time to speak to us and to speak to our listeners.
This was a very insightful conversation and the way you kind of beautifully described what you guys are building. And I was trying to find some chinks in your armor because this is, as you said, this is an engineering facing product that you’re creating. But because, you know, these are listeners who are dialing in and I wanted them to resonate with what you’re building.
That’s why I kept going after the mission and the messaging. But I think you did a wonderful job and I’m very, very grateful you could make the time. Thank you, Tarusha.
Enjoyed talking to you.