Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Jesse. Jesse is a dynamic entrepreneur.
This was such a good conversation. We talked about entrepreneurship, development in this Web3 space, the intersection of Web3 and AI. He’s the founder and CEO of Rapid Innovation.
He’s been in the space since 2014 and he helps basically founders to get their MVP out quicker. And he has done that for more than 200 odd projects. And his experience is right there for everyone to see.
If you listen to this conversation, you’ll clean off a lot of amazing insights. So I can’t wait for you guys to hear this. Let’s deep dive right in.
Hi Jesse, thank you so much for making the time to speak to me today. How are you doing? I am doing phenomenally, I think. The week is a little early to tell a hundred percent, but I am fortunate that I get to do something I love to do for a living.
So it makes it hard to have a bad day. Yeah, that’s a wonderful way to look at it. So now for our listeners, can you tell us a little about, you started your career in real estate and then you made a significant shift into Web3 back in 2014.
What kind of inspired this pivot, so to say, how did you initially get involved in the Web3 space? Yeah, so I was in real estate. I was actually building out some software that replaced real estate agents because I felt like real estate agents made a lot of money and there was no reason for it because software could just do it. And on that journey, I met a young guy who was like two or three years younger than me.
And I was pretty young at the time who was buying a lot of real estate. I think he was like, he was like 18 years old. He already owned three homes or three pieces of real estate.
And he was just, he was very, very, very smart. And I met him probably in 2009 and then 2010 rolled around. And one day he called me up and said, Hey, Jesse, I absolutely have to talk to you today.
It’s an emergency. It’s super important. I thought he had some real estate thing that was going on.
And so I dropped a couple of meetings and I met him at a Starbucks somewhere. And he proceeds to tell me about Bitcoin and how he had just discovered Bitcoin. And he thinks that Bitcoin is going to be something that absolutely fundamentally changes the entire world.
And he was going to go all in. And so he needed to sell all of his real estate. He was going to sell his personal home.
He was going to sell all of his worldly possessions, and he was going to live in a, in a shed that he bought and put on his parents’ property, going to the bathroom in a bucket and eating the cheapest food he could buy because he wanted to buy more Bitcoin. And I thought he had lost his mind because he just seemed like he’d gone crazy. So I tried to talk him out of it because I thought it was a bad idea.
In the end, I couldn’t. And he ended up selling everything he owned, including like he sold, I mean, he was homeless by the time he was done. And he had any bought about, about $300,000 USD worth of Bitcoin.
And this was 2000, this would have been 2010, middle of 2010, probably somewhere in there. And so I was not convinced, but, but because he was my friend and I was watching this whole thing happen as Bitcoin, as the price of Bitcoin went from, I think it was like 43 cents when he bought it, you know, it went up to $3. I thought, oh my gosh, this was probably one of the best investments I’ve ever seen anyone buy.
And so then I was trying to convince him to sell it all because he had just made like tons of money. And he’s like, no, no, no. Bitcoin’s going to go to, you know, Bitcoin will go to 30, 40, $50,000.
And I thought, man, this guy is just nuts. But eventually I started to buy into it. I finally read the Bitcoin white paper and, and realized that there was something to this whole thing.
And so decided that I would also get into the, into the space, you know, just became very, very fascinated with it. Eventually he started a blockchain company that was, and this was, this would have been 2014. Where he wanted to find a bunch of node developers and teach them solidity, which was just in the process of being, being developed.
I think Gavin was working on, on building it back then. And he asked me if I would manage those developers, if I would help them learn solidity, and then we could become a blockchain software development company, which was really an unheard of concept at the time because Ethereum hadn’t even been deployed to main net yet. And so I, yeah, I, I quit my job, sold my company and joined him.
And I started working with developers to teach them solidity. And when, when the Ethereum main net launched in, I think August, maybe summer of 2015, we had three different real estate applications that we had built on chain. And yeah, one of them went a little bit viral on Reddit and that got us more, more people who wanted to build stuff.
And before you know it, we were helping lots of clients build lots of things and, and building a lot of different stuff for ourselves. And yeah, it was, it was crazy days back then. But yeah, that’s my origin story.
Yeah. It was quite a journey indeed. Wow.
So, you know, you, you have worked with industry leaders and, you know, you’ve worked with, I think, Charlie Lee as well, and you’ve worked with Vitalik as well, I believe, at least that’s what my research tells me. So how did these collaborations kind of shape your understanding of the technology? And what were your lessons that, you know, you kind of gleaned off from those experiences? Um, that’s a really good question. On some levels, I would say that I have learned more from watching the no-name, the no-name startups that I’ve helped build companies than I have from watching the industry leaders.
You know, everyone wants to write articles and do interviews with people who are really, really successful. But what’s interesting is you don’t find a lot of people doing very much research on everyone who has failed and why. And at this point in my career, between blockchain and AI, I’ve probably helped almost 500.
Well, in fact, I know the number, but it’s almost 500 people launch minimum viable products. Because that’s what I’ve been focusing on for, for a long time now. And, and the truth is I have learned more from the hundreds and hundreds of failures than I have from the people that I’ve worked with that were, that were very successful.
But I would say probably the biggest thing that I’ve learned from the people that were really successful is that typically speaking, when you read stories about them and you think about someone’s success in the industry, you shorten the timeline in your mind to believe that the company, you know, just launched and six months later, eight months later, one year later, you know, they’re, they’re very, very successful. But typically when you start doing research, what you find is they’ve been grinding for years. And, and so as I’ve worked with, you know, the, the different successful people that I’ve worked with, what is interesting to me is the amount of perseverance that they have and the, and their ability to just continually grind to try to be successful in the space.
And I, and there are a lot of startups that I work with that just don’t have that, like they want the get rich quick or make a big impact quickly you know, result. And that really affects how discouraged they get in that process. And so I’d say that was, that’s probably my biggest insight is how long it actually takes to be successful.
Cause a lot of these people have been grinding for a decade in some capacity or another that really led them to that success. Like, you know, Vitalik would be one of those guys that, you know, although he’s very, very, very smart and that also helped him. He’s, you know, he’s not the smartest human being I’ve met.
And, but what is true about him is that he has been passionately pursuing blockchain and decentralized technology for a very, very long time. And, and even with Ethereum, he, you know, that was a project that he really, really had to work hard at in order to get it to be successful. And I, and I don’t think people think about that.
Yeah. Like you said, I think, you know, all of these, the overnight successes, the seemingly overnight successes have been a decade in making, I think somebody very wise said that at some point. And that was like a, pretty much an aha moment for me as well, because I’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time and I’ve seen my fair share of failures.
I would say more failures than, you know, successes, because I think, you know, you feel more over the years and only then do you see and you learn what kind of works, but usually people are unable to see that. You know, they just see the headlines and the fear and the noise. That is when people really take notice of you.
I do believe, like you said, that the greatest learnings come from just, you know, your own failures and also perhaps learning from other people’s failures so that perhaps you can avoid those mistakes at the very least. Yeah. It’s one of the most fortunate things that I’ve done.
And I accidentally fell into this kind of but I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds and hundreds of companies that have failed and been very close to them while they’re doing it. Right. Because the, the, the process of building out a complex piece of software, whether that be blockchain or AI, or it doesn’t really matter.
You, you end up building a pretty strong relationship with the people that you’re working with. And being able to watch those people struggle and fail has taught me so much about what it looks like to succeed. Right.
Because there are so many, I mean, being a successful entrepreneur is like walking on a knife’s edge. There are failures on either side and the path is very, very narrow. And it just takes a lot of focus.
And there are so many things that can go wrong if you’re not paying attention to it. And just because you’re paying attention to, you know, eight out of nine things that can go wrong, that one can take out your, you know, can take out your company if you’re not, if you’re not paying attention. And so I’m just very fortunate to have been able to watch a lot of really successful people, people be successful and a lot of really, really smart, talented individuals fail.
And to me, the failures are as, as really as encouraging as the successes, because a lot of them went on to, to reinvent themselves, start again, and then be successful. You know, they, they say that you’ll probably as an entrepreneur fail at your first three or four businesses and maybe even more. And so it really is perseverance that pays off in the end in this business.
Right. Yeah. So this is just clear, I think, and persevering despite the failures, I think, is perhaps the secret sauce behind a lot of people’s success, I think.
And you’ve kind of started this, this particular episode on such a great note, I think this is something that we need to talk about more often. So that, so that we can, it’s not about romanticizing failure, but it is about just not perhaps losing heart. And like you said, that people sort of reinvent themselves and those who do, they are the ones who taste success.
Yep. And I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it.
I’ve seen it dozens and dozens of times, people who had, you know, there’s a particular client that comes to mind that he had had some success and built some software. It ended up costing him between the marketing effort and everything he did in the business, it ended up costing him about $3 million. And the mistake that he made is he never went to market early enough.
And so he spent a full $3 million to build an entire product that was very polished. And when he went to market, no one was interested. It just wasn’t a product people wanted.
And what he really ended up building was a customized personal piece of software for $3 million, you know, threw away his life savings. He had to sell one of his homes, like put him into a financial place that was really, really difficult. And, you know, and he learned from it.
And the next time he went and had, you know, and pushed a product out, he launched it in 90 days. And then he got user feedback from that and was able to make adjustments. And then as he made adjustments and with that user feedback, he experienced more and more success is incredibly successful today.
And there’s dozens of stories like that of people that just made mistakes that cost them money and they could have gotten discouraged and decided to be done. But a lot of them did not. And they’re reaping the rewards of that today.
And also, you know, just as a caveat on top onto all of this, I do think, and this is new for me to like in the last three years, start thinking this way, but AI is going to change a lot of this because AI has the ability, if you really understand it to 10 X or 20 X or 50 X, your productivity and your skill sets, your ability to do things. And I do think that entrepreneurs that are really embracing AI, and I’m not talking as a product side of things, I mean, internally in their business, in their own workflows, in how they personally do things. The entrepreneurs that are doing that, they have, I mean, the odds of being successful just go up exponentially because of the augmentation that AI can add to your personal life.
And I’ve seen that trend as well over the last three years, as people have begun to adopt it and the technology is getting better and better. And so that’ll change some of this because I think it really will lower the bar of entry into being an entrepreneur. I mean, I think that five years from now, it just isn’t going to be as hard to, or as costly to create something that is successful.
I agree. I think because of AI, I think that that kind of time period that is usually taken in research, testing it out, building an MVP, all of that has shortened considerably. And that’s great.
It’s a good time to be alive and to start up some innovation of your own. Speaking of innovation, I really want to talk a lot more about rapid innovation. What was the motivation behind starting it and what is your company’s mission and how does it kind of align with the broader vision that you have for the space? I started rapid innovation mostly because I realized that I loved working with entrepreneurs.
For me, it was probably the most satisfying work that I could do. I have ADD and I’ve got a short attention span. And so I can come up with ideas, but I can only focus on them for about one year of that decade cycle that it takes to be successful.
And it just really appealed to that. Plus I wanted to have a really big impact on the world. And I’m not somebody who really needs to stand in the spotlight and have everyone praise me for a product that I built or something amazing that I’ve done.
And so the combination of just my personality and what I’m really passionate about really led me to the concept of rapid innovation, which was there was a need in the market. I’d worked with subcontractors and contracting companies to build software and software development companies all had the same mindset, which was, how do we keep you working with us for as long as we possibly can so that we can get as much money from you as we possibly can? And that’s not what an entrepreneur needs. What an entrepreneur needs is how do we get your product to market as quickly as possible so that you can go out and start bringing in revenue so that you can go do fundraising and things along those lines.
And so rapid innovation, the idea was really born out of just the unmet need in the marketplace for really rapid software development, specifically for entrepreneurs and startups. Started in the blockchain space because I was really passionate about blockchain. And it just made sense to start in the blockchain space.
But from the very beginning, what we talked about was the four pillars of future technology. And I’ve called it a lot of different things over the years, the four pillars of web three or the next generation of the web or whatever it is. But it was decentralization and what blockchain technology has to add to the world.
It was AI and learning. How do we make computers smarter so they can work for us? It was virtual reality and augmented reality. How do we get computers to help us start actually seeing things around us and be able to allow human beings to have different and better experiences? And then it was IoT.
How do we connect all of this stuff together? And so I’ve always seen those as the four pillars of what the future looks like. I started in the blockchain space about three years ago. We started really building out our AI capabilities as well, because I saw that as something that we personally needed inside our company.
And so we’ve built out, I mean, there isn’t a single aspect of what rapid innovation currently does today that is not heavily augmented by AI. And it’s part of the reason that we can keep our costs low and we can get software developed as quickly as we do. And then IoT, I don’t know when we’ll get into that someplace, when it’s right.
And then we’re playing around with virtual reality and augmented reality right now and helping entrepreneurs in that space. The main focus is probably 50% blockchain, 50% AI at the moment. But it really just came from that need.
There aren’t really software development companies that specialize in helping entrepreneurs build things. And so I wanted to meet that need. And I love working with startups.
I love working with entrepreneurs. It is the thing I’m most passionate about. Okay.
Well, I think that is a true USP, just making sure that there is an MVP that is ready quickly and it is shipped. So you guys, you promised to deliver MVP in 90 days, which is, I believe, your USP. Could you perhaps explain how this process works? And if somebody wants to entail onto your services, how can we go about doing that? How do you ensure that you guys are able to consistently deliver with such a tight timeline? Because I have been on the other side where I’m working on our own product.
And most of the time the tech deadlines are not met or delayed because of testing, etc. Might be my own personal experience, but I’m very curious to know what your process is. No, it’s not just your experience.
I can’t tell you how many people I’ve worked with in the past that have had the exact same experience. And to be quite honest, I would love to say I’ve got a perfect track record and no one’s ever had that experience at Rapid Innovation, but that would be a lie. Development is a complex business when you’re building software and so things can go wrong.
But the process honestly is pretty simple. It stemmed from this idea that most people really don’t have a budget that reaches out eight months or a year. And what they need to do is they need to make money.
And so we started from that first principle thinking of an entrepreneur needs to bring in capital, whether that’s user’s revenue, and then they’re able to go out for a seed round. Or a series A, but it has to happen quickly. Otherwise they’ll run out of runway because when you’re first starting, you just don’t have a lot of capital.
I mean, some people are emptying out their investment accounts or their kids’ college funds in order to try to build this dream that they have. And so ultimately we started there. We said, we have to do it and we have to out how to build software in 90 days or less.
Otherwise the failure rate of our clients is going to go up. They’re going to run out of money. When they run out of money and they can’t market and they can’t do the things that they need to do, they fail.
And if they fail, we fail because ultimately my goal is to make sure that people have money so that we can have those year long, two year long, three year long contracts, and we can work with people for a long time. And we’ve done a lot of things to do this. I mean, one of the very first things that I did with my co-founder was sit down with them and say, okay, if it was an absolute requirement that every single product that ever landed on our desk was done in 90 days, how would we do things differently than a typical traditional development company? And some of that was figuring out where the fluff is at, because there’s a lot of things that development companies charge a lot of money for that is absolutely not needed in the beginning.
And oftentimes development companies will reinvent the wheel every single time. And so we have one of the things that we’ve developed over time is a very large library of proprietary, basically proprietary foundational code that can be deployed towards anybody’s project, modified, and then given to them when the project is done, that really creates a foundation for growth. And so we’ve thought through the different kinds of architectures that are needed for different kinds of projects, and then implement those as efficiently as we can and really build ideas or bring people’s unique proprietary ideas or their IP into our system.
And in the beginning, pre-AI, that was really all we focused on. And so what would happen is we’d have to cut the features down in the MVP a lot to the primary USP of what it was that our clients were building, or maybe the primary and the secondary. But a lot of the other features would get pushed out to another development phase.
One of the things that’s been really interesting about the AI augmentation that’s happened specifically, I would say in the last year and a half, two years, is that what we’re building today is probably 50% more feature rich than what we were building four years ago, just because AI allows you to reach a lot further for the same amount of money. And I think we’re going to continue to see that trend happen. I mean, to be quite honest, there’s going to be a time when a company like Rapid Innovation is not hired because we have developers, it’s hired because we understand architecture.
And really, we’re going to be working with AI developers, and we’re going to be designing the architecture for products to make sure they can scale. I don’t know when that future happens, but it will happen because development is something that AI is actually getting better and better at all the time. And eventually, other than specialized cases, developers will become somewhat obsolete.
And luckily for Rapid Innovation, a big part of what we really offer and what helps people move quickly is our understanding of the architecture and how to build something that can scale very quickly, which is just, it takes other companies a long time to do that. And so, I mean, ultimately, that’s what we do. Does that answer your question? It’s a little vague.
Yeah. No, I think it does. On a macro level, it does.
So, if somebody wants to perhaps get in touch with you, what is the best way that they can do that? And is there a wedding process that you have or do you take on projects? How do you perhaps go about choosing which projects and founders you’ll work with and how do they get in touch with you? I think that’s the way to put it. Yeah. So, I mean, you can find it if you just go to rapidinnovation.io. That’s probably the best way to get a hold of us.
We’re actually going to have a new feature drop hopefully in the next couple of weeks where we’re going to have an AI consultant that will onboard you and vet you. But right now, it’s a manual process. And ultimately, what we look for within entrepreneurs, and we don’t take on everyone.
And the reason we don’t take on everyone is because we want to work with people that we feel have as much potential as possible to succeed. And so, what we look for are we look for visionary people that have a very clear idea. They know what they want and we feel like they’re going to be able to persevere through the process of doing that beyond actually getting the first version of their software up and running.
Do they have a strong team? Are they going to actually be able to do the marketing, build the team through the HR and the administrative side of what it takes to run a company? Are they going to be able to raise the money that they need to raise? And so, we look at all of that stuff and then we basically shortlist the people that come in and we pick those that we feel are most likely to succeed and then work with them. That makes sense. I think it’s good to be selective here to make sure that they are able to deliver and the vision of the line.
I think that’s very, very important. You mentioned earlier that there are certain AI tools that you have integrated to streamline development and reducing timelines. So, can you tell us a little about this? Is this proprietary software that you’re using? Are you using AI for testing or is it for development? What exactly are you using AI for? If you could shed light on that.
I would love to. That’s actually my favorite subject. I’ve been up to my eyeballs in AI for the last two years.
And so, I am incredibly passionate about what AI is bringing to the table. But the majority of what we’ve built that we use in-house for our process is proprietary. So, the way to think about it would be to think about it a little bit like Microsoft’s co-pilot probably.
But we do it in a lot of different areas. So, we’ve got AI that will interview and vet developers that we’re thinking about hiring and shortlist it because it’s very difficult to hire hiring managers who understand all of the nuances of, say, senior level node development or solidity development or rust development. And so, we’ve actually increased the quality of the people that we’re hiring through our HR process and the augmentation that we can use through AI.
We’ve built an entire AI DevOps platform that basically will go through and do a very, very, can run a very, very complex DevSecOps and DevOps process completely autonomously with just a little bit of human intervention. I’ve got, like, if you look at our YouTube channel, we’re experimenting, and this is definitely an R&D project, but we’re experimenting with AI-generated content. And so, like, if you go on our YouTube channel and you see me on there, it isn’t me.
That’s an AI, it’s basically an AI that has been trained to look like me, sound like me, and then there’s an agentic system that has about 38 different AI agents that do research, put content together, write the scripts, record everything, do all that. Our entire website is managed by a large agentic system that creates content, optimizes it for search engines, et cetera, et cetera. We’ve got another AI agentic system that can run ads and do things along those lines.
We’re just now finishing an estimation system that will go in and listen to an entrepreneur’s idea, ask relevant questions, and actually get all the information needed to go through and do what used to be and what typically is like a 30-day process for most companies, maybe a 90-day process of discovery. And the AI agentic system that we’re building can do all of that in about 24 hours. And it’s just like a swarm of AI agents that are pulling out the data, doing the architecture, understanding all the user requirements, creating all of the epics and the story points and the tasks for JIRA, estimating the timeline.
And most everything that we’ve built is proprietary, although uses modules. We haven’t built our own or trained our own large language models to do this. We’re using either out-of-the-box, open-source LLMs or things along those lines, or even just OpenAI Cloud, things like that.
But yeah, it’s the thing that I am most passionate about. Wow, this is super interesting. Okay, so because you brought it up that your videos on YouTube have an avatar and your voice clone perhaps, and it’s not you who’s doing it.
This is extremely interesting to me because like you, I think I have been also really hiding my nose into this entire AI and so much development that keeps happening. I keep reading up about it and I’m always trying out new tools in this space. So this is very exciting and interesting for me because I was thinking and considering of doing something similar.
But just asking you on a personal level perhaps, I’ve always thought that, okay, is this the most safe thing to do perhaps? Cloning your voice or cloning yourself as like an avatar. And I just want to understand your perspective here because I’ve been sitting on the fence just because of that particular reason, even though I’m such a sucker for new tools and trying out new things. Yeah, is it safe? That’s the million dollar question in AI, right? There’s lots of people who get paid lots of money to know whether or not we’re actually playing with fire and that fire is gonna burn us up in the end.
So in my personal opinion, no, it is not safe. I think that it is probably, I think that it is probably or has the potential to be, maybe it would be a better way to say it, dangerous. Like one of the things I had to do is I’ve got a family, I’ve got a wife and I’ve got kids.
And the very first time we’ve got an AI calling system that I could plug in your phone number and they can call you and have a conversation with you. And it is indistinguishable from me to the point where I was able actually to use it to have a conversation with my kids and they could not tell it wasn’t me. And so as soon as you’re creating the kinds of tools that can mimic you so well that even the people closest to you can’t tell that it isn’t you that’s talking to them, you have created something that is dangerous.
And case in point, when we first started putting out AI videos on the YouTube channel, I remember one time I was having a conversation with my wife and there was a new video that had come out that morning. I hadn’t watched it yet. And my wife in the evening after the kids were in bed, she’s like, hey, I saw, do you actually believe what, like, do you actually believe that? And I’m like, what, what do you, do I believe what? What in the world are you talking about? She’s like, well, I just watched your YouTube video that you put out and I just can’t believe that you believe that.
I’m like, well, like what? And it was something, I don’t even remember what it was about, but it was something that I would have never said, something that I absolutely do not believe. And she knows that I don’t have those values or believe that. And what happened was my marketing team had, put this video together and they reviewed it and they’re like, oh, this looks like a great video.
And they pushed it out. And my wife has been married to me for 20 years, thought it was actually me. And so once again, that you’re in the realm of something that could be considered dangerous, but here’s my view on it.
Although I do think that there’s danger involved in utilizing these tools for a myriad of reasons, they’re here to stay, they’re not leaving. And the truth is I’d rather be familiar with them and have my family be familiar with them, my teammates be familiar with them and really understand them than just stick my head in the sand and hope that they don’t hurt me. And so part of the reason I am as involved as I am in the AI space is because I do think it’s dangerous.
And I think that when you have something that’s really dangerous, sometimes it’s better to stay closer to it so that you understand how it can actually harm you. You know, they say, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Maybe it applies in a situation like this.
And so that’s been my theory. We’ll see, maybe watch me for a couple of years and see if I get burned. But as of right now, that’s the truth.
But yeah, I think that that is a good way to look at it. It’s one way to stay ahead of the curve, I think. At least you’re aware of what can potentially hit you.
Yeah. Well, and then the other thing that’s going to happen to a lot of people, and I don’t think people realize that this is the case today. We released a product for a guy who owns a manufacturing plant in the Midwest and it took one AI developer 30 days to build his product.
And the day that it released, he was able to let go of 300 employees. Wow. And I don’t think that people really grasp the- Magnitude, I think.
Yeah, like the effects of what this is going to do. And the truth is, if people are not seriously thinking about how AI affects their future, they’re going to get screwed just like they did during the industrial revolution, just like they do any time that a new tech comes out that has the ability to replace human labor. And I’m not even above that in the sense that, like there are systems that we’re working on right now that will eventually replace me as a decision maker for my company.
And instead of coming to me and asking me what somebody ought to do or direction or vision, they’re actually going to end up going and consulting with an AI for that that has accumulated a lot of the knowledge that they have. And so even my job was on the line. So I’m working to repurpose myself to learn how to work with AI in order to augment my abilities and do the things that only I can do and that the machines currently cannot do.
And I think that if people aren’t thinking like that, they’re going to be in for a very rude awakening at some point in the next three to five years. How do you stay ahead of the curve? Like, again, this is something that I’m, you know, personally very curious about, because I do think that, like you said, that this is such a dynamic technology. Something or the other is happening every day in VR.
And how do you even make sure that you don’t become obsolete? That is a really good question. And I think that there’s a certain level in which all of the answers currently in circulation are theoretical, because we don’t know exactly to what extent intelligent machines will replace humans. But what I personally do is I try to look at the past, right? So I use the example of an administrative assistant.
If you go back 40 years, 50 years, and maybe even 60 years, we didn’t have computers. And an administrative assistant’s job looked very, very different 60 years ago than it does today. You know, they manually, you know, called people and set up and kept a calendar.
They took, you know, they sat there with their typewriter and they took notes in business meetings and they did all these different things. And then over the years, as technology increased and say computers showed up and, you know, you had things like spreadsheets and word processors and calendar links for calendars and things along those lines, what ends up happening is that the human element of an administrative assistant continues to exist. And the reason that they remain valuable isn’t for what they can do, but for how they think.
And so for instance, you know, my administrative assistant knows what’s important to me and knows how to prioritize the things in my work that are important to me. And so they remain relevant and valuable. And so at the end of the day, it really starts with understanding what it is that we do that is human.
And that really adds value. You know, for instance, a factory worker, their ability, a factory worker’s ability to go put a screw, you know, through a screw hole on a production line is not very valuable, a machine can do that. But their ability to maybe troubleshoot complex problems on a production line might be incredibly valuable.
And so part of it is first just have a mindset where you understand where human value comes from in the workforce. And then the other part of it is staying really, really on top of what machines are learning to do so that you can become an assistant to the machines. And so for instance, you know, I augment what I do on a daily basis with a bunch of different AI tools.
And, you know, I no longer spend my time sitting there writing, you know, long documents or briefs or things along those lines. Instead, what I do is I spend a lot more time thinking about what the future looks like and where things are going, what people we can connect with, how we can connect with them. And then I interact with the intelligent machines in my life and I have them do that work for me.
Because I know that my value really comes from the gifting that I have as a visionary and seeing what the future is gonna hold and how things are gonna change, what people are gonna be affected and who we should be, you know, talking to today. But on some levels, like I said, that answer’s relatively theoretical because we don’t really understand the impact yet. And there isn’t, like, we don’t know where the end of this intelligence explosion is going to be.
Like, will it be machines that are, you know, are 10 times more intelligent than the smartest human beings who have ever lived? Will they be a hundred times more intelligent than the smartest human beings who have ever lived? Or will they never be able to count how many R’s are in, you know, the word strawberry? Like, we don’t really know. And so that’s why, like, I pay very, very close attention to the technology and what’s being built because I want to be able to exist in a future where it’s here and it’s having an effect. And that’s kind of how I work on future-proofing myself and my company.
Yeah, I think that’s a good way to look at it. So, you know, we’ve been having such an interesting conversation that I haven’t, I didn’t realize I was gonna say this, at the time, but now I want to jump to, you know, some questions that I have. It will be more meatier, perhaps, for entrepreneurs who are building in this space because you’ve been, you know, around for some time in Web3 and AI.
There is a growing interest, you know, for that particular intersection. So how do you see these two technologies complementing each other apart from the obvious? And what new challenges does this combination bring and what are the kind of new opportunities, perhaps, this combination brings? So that’s a complex question with a lot of different answers, but, and maybe a lot of different viewpoints. I see blockchain technology as a very, very deep, but small well of opportunity and utility.
You know, blockchain is very good at a few, is very, very good. Maybe the only technology that currently exists that even can do certain things, like, you know, like zero knowledge trust, like create information or store information in a way where I don’t have to know anything about how that information originated, but I can still trust it. Those kinds of, those kinds of applications are the kinds of things that blockchain is very, very good at.
What blockchain isn’t super good at is being applied, you know, like back in the day when I first got into the space, everyone wanted to apply blockchain to everything. And what I think the industry learned very quickly is that it just cannot be. There are some things that should be centralized.
And then there are some things that are very important and that should be decentralized. And there are some things that are very, very inefficient on chain. And there are some things that are very, very efficient on chain.
There was a very, there was a super smart business coach that once said, just because something is efficient, it doesn’t mean that it’s right. Like learning, like efficiency is learning how to do something very well. Doing the right thing is learning how to actually do, you know, be focused on the thing that you should be focused on.
You can actually do the right thing inefficiently and you can do the wrong thing efficiently. And just because you’re doing, if you’re doing all the wrong things, but you’re doing them very efficiently, you will be very unsuccessful. And if you do all of the right things inefficiently, you’ll actually will experience a great deal of success.
The kind of killer combination is learning how to do the right things efficiently. And those are the people that make the biggest impact in the world. And so I think some of it is just understanding the limitations of say a technology like blockchain and understanding the limitations of a technology like AI.
And then where they intersect to me is simple. I think that AI has the capacity to be incredibly dangerous. Anytime that human beings have access to unlimited knowledge.
And this is something that all of these companies are facing right now. In theory, a completely uncensored version of a large language model that has consumed all the world’s information could explain to anyone, anywhere how to create an intercontinental ballistic missile. And in some hands, that information is actually very dangerous because there are some people that should not know how to create an intercontinental ballistic missile.
And so how do we determine how these AI technologies and who these AI technologies provide different information to is kind of up in the air, right? Like right now it’s very, very centralized. You’ve got Sam Altman just deciding who gets what and who doesn’t. You’ve got Microsoft and Google deciding who’s allowed to have certain technologies and who’s not allowed to have certain technologies.
And ultimately I think that that is where blockchain could play a massive role in the governance of say an AGI or a really, really advanced artificial intelligence. And I hope that we see that come about. I know that there are people that are working on products like that and they’re kind of starting the process of thinking through how you can make that work.
So that’s an intersection that I think is really necessary that I hope gets more attention over the coming years. The other side of things that’s really interesting to me about AI technology is that in a decentralized environment, one of the things that happens is that you end up crowdsourcing intelligence from people. And some things don’t work very well because you have a crowdsourced intelligence when really it would work better with a centralized entity guiding the project.
But if you have a centralized entity guiding the project, it’s no longer decentralized and it doesn’t work as, it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do on the blockchain. And I think there’s potential to actually plug in a synthetic intelligence into the workflow of a decentralized ecosystem to get a centralized intelligence into a decentralized system and make those systems more efficient and work better. And so I’m excited.
There are some people that I see that are working on products like that and ideas that kind of revolve around that big picture concept and that’s very exciting to me. And I think that we will see, I think that we will see technologies come into existence that look a little bit more like that. And so those are, I would say those are the two areas that I think about the most.
Okay, that’s interesting. And that I think gives me something to think about as well. But this is interesting and this is very dynamic, but still we are at a place where we are still solving for a broader adoption of Web3.
Obviously it has changed over the years. It has increased. It’s become better with wallet abstraction and account abstraction that is happening and any other advent in technology.
But what do you think are the main barriers to broader adoption of Web3? And how can developers perhaps overcome, the users overcome these? Well, there’s the oldest barrier to adoption that has existed probably since the very beginning of blockchain, which is just the transactions per second problem that exists that a lot of people have been working on solving. If you think about all of the major credit cards of the world and how many transactions per second just credit cards are in need of, it’s a staggering number. And blockchain still has yet to even come close to being able to actually absorb the capacity of what is needed just from a transactional standpoint.
And you get projects that I think like, it’s really, it started probably with Ethereum and then EOS came out and they were gonna solve it. And then Solana came out and they were gonna solve it and it’s got its predecessors going down the line and each one gets a little bit better. And so I think that that’s a barrier to the mass adoption problem.
I think that the other one is that there’s a generation of people that are going to actually have to physically die that are holding an old system together and not allowing a new system to come in. Specifically, when I think about that, I think about finance and I think about the old Wall Street. Because you look at the efficiency that blockchain adds to the financial industry and the transparency that it adds to the financial industry.
And it already is far superior to the old antiquated gray hair system that we currently have in the US. But that system- It’s pretty much all over. I don’t think it’s just USA.
I think everywhere there is so much resistance in finance when it comes to adopting anything new, right? Yep, and I think that there’s a generation of people that are physically going to either have to die or retire. And that will bring on another wave of adoption. Yeah, and so that’ll just take time.
I think the real estate industry is another one. In the real estate industry, the kind of the governance, the current traditional governance system that is in place worldwide in real estate has got a stranglehold on the old antiquated way of doing real estate, which has existed for what? A thousand years, maybe, give or take, and hasn’t really changed that much. And until those people are gone, I don’t think we’re gonna see the kind of adoption that I would like to see in a system like that.
There is one caveat. You see places like the United Arab Emirates that is really actually adopting all of these technologies as a very, very, very successful, say, global presence. And I do think that as countries like the UAE adopt these technologies, they will force other entities to compete with them.
And the old inefficient, broken systems that we’re currently using can’t. And so with a global presence, I think we’ll start to see stuff like that. An interesting example of this would be like poly market, right? Poly market, it’s a predictions market, and it makes predictions about certain things that are going to happen or not happen.
And in some ways, it’s kind of a voting mechanism. And as technology like that becomes more and more mainstream, you’ll see people that actually might push to have elections take place on a blockchain or things along those lines where it just makes so much sense to do it because our current system, like say in the US, our current system was set up hundreds of years ago when they had to consider the logistics of people hopping on a horse and riding from one side of the country to the other, which was a big deal. Well, we don’t have those limitations today.
And we should probably start innovating. But once again, there’s the powers that be kind of have a stranglehold on the old system and people know how to manipulate it and use it to their own end. And so they’re not gonna let go till they’re gone.
And there’s a little kind of macro ways that I see adoption happening as well, like in industries that are really influential or money-making industries, large industries like gaming. I think that as we see gaming move more and more towards blockchain and assets being owned by the actual buyers of games and their ability to recoup some of their costs after having that entertainment experience and maybe pass that along to somebody else, I think that we’ll see more adoption coming in those areas, but there’s still limitations on the chain that are preventing, that are just preventing the user experience from being where it should be. And then I would say probably the final, probably the final one that I think about would be just the mindset of people.
So we’ve lived in a world where custody is not thought about. And self-custody is something that is so incredibly foreign to people that it just isn’t thought about. I get calls from people on a weekly basis that have lost their keys or they didn’t do a good job managing their keys.
And they call me up hoping that there’s some way that they can get them back because they’ve just lost a great deal of money. And so the understanding of how to actually do self-custody well, where you have human beings that are responsible for their own assets, I don’t think that that’s been cracked yet. There are problems like what happens when I die and I’ve got a hundred million dollars stored on chain somewhere and now I can’t give that to my kids and I’m not around to help them recover it.
Does it just disappear? Like how do we solve some of the more practical problems of just life in general? And there are once again, people that are working on a lot of these problems, but as everyone kind of pushes forward and the old way of thinking either dies off or retires, I think we’ll continue to see more and more adoption. Okay. Yeah, I think that’s a very insightful answer that you’ve given us.
And again, lots to show and lots to think about. But we are really out of time. And, but I do wanna ask you two last questions before I kind of let you go.
One would be, what is next for you? What is next for you as well as Rapid Innovation? Where do you see yourself as well as the company say in the next two five years? So for Rapid Innovation, that’s really simple. I wanna continue to understand and adopt technology that helps us support entrepreneurs because I do genuinely think the best way I can make an impact on the world is helping lots and lots of really smart people build really cool stuff. And so as far as Rapid Innovation is concerned, we’re gonna continue to pursue that and continue to adopt technologies and ways of doing things that support the entrepreneurs globally that exist that are really trying to make an impact.
And so that’s gonna remain the same. And we’ll continue to do that in whatever way we can. For me personally, that’s an interesting question.
One that I’ve never been asked before. You know, I’m personally passionate about upgrading the user experience of humanity, of human beings. Like how do I make the gal that you drive past every single day on the way to work? How do you make her life just a little bit better using future technology? And that has been something that I’ve been thinking about and focusing on for the last 20 years. And for me, my hope is that is that I can continue to stay on top of all the technological changes that are that are happening, because it’s a lot to keep up with, and really understand how to start combining some of this really cool future tech that we’re building into something that impacts everyday people and makes their lives better, not worse. And that’s been a lifelong pursuit of mine, I don’t, I don’t think it’s going to change anytime soon.
I think I will continue to pursue that and continue to try to figure out how to help individual people have a better life, because this cool technology exists. Okay, I think, yeah, I think that’s a good life goal to have. Now, on to my last question, Jesse, and this has been such a wonderful conversation.
Really, I, I have a lot to think about. And, you know, you, you’ve given me some wonderful ideas. So thank you for that.
But this particular question is something I ask everybody who comes on the show. You’ve made quite a leap from real estate to Web3. And you know, you are continuously trying to upskill yourself.
And you are curious, you’re growing, you’re learning about AI, and all of these new technologies, you’ve made a, you’ve taken that leap of faith, right? What would be perhaps your suggestion for somebody who is still unsure about all of these new technologies, a little skeptical about these new technologies, so that they can really start living on blockchain? Just be curious, and have an open mind. I mean, at the end of the day, I think that the most successful people I’ve ever met in my entire life are the people that are the most curious. I’ve, I’ve yet to meet a skeptical entrepreneur that has $100 million in their bank account.
And so for, you know, for me, that’s as my, that is my, my personal opinion is that curiosity is often times the fuel that, that will allow people to make the connections that create value. And so if you are constantly looking for ways to create value in the world, and staying curious, it will happen. Yeah, I think that’s a beautiful way to end this show.
Thank you so much, Jesse, once again, for making the time to speak to me today. This has been absolutely insightful and really personally enriching for me. Any parting words before we wrap this up? No, this was a ton of fun.
I really enjoyed, I really enjoyed chatting. Likewise. Thank you so much once again.