Jack:You have to find product market fit. And I think a lot of products have beenbuilt in Web3 that just didn't get users or developer traction, et cetera.

when you knowyou're fixing a problem when you have the problem yourself, it's one of thebest ways.  

it'sdecentralizations important for a lot of reasons. You have a lot morescalability.

Julian:hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast.Today we have Jack O'Holleran, CEO of SKALE Labs, the fastest blockchain networkwith zero gas fees for users. Jack, I'm so excited to chat with you, not onlybecause of the work you're doing on at SKALE and, and really excited aboutwhere that ecosystem is going and the network, and in particular how you'redoing it, which is, I, I think super exciting and we'll get into how yournetwork is, is a little bit different than most and how you're able to actuallyaccomplish what, what you're setting out to, but also, Your, your experiencebuilding companies and, and it's not your first rodeo and, and you really had asuccessful umin in your first company, so wanted to dive into that and thechanges that you've seen over the years.

So before we getahead of ourselves and SKALE and all this whirlwind,  

What were you doingbefore you started SKALE and what kind of was the inspiration behind thecompany?  

Jack:Yes. I've been doing tech startups since 2005. I started in mobile and mobileslash cryptography. It was a mobile security application company called GoodTechnology.

And did that for awhile and then started a machine learning AI company and did that for aboutnine years. Where almost every large pharma and biotech in the world use thisproduct. And so, so really cut my teeth in terms of being a founder and,company building in traditional enterprise software, B2B software.

Yeah. And, thatwas, I learned a lot about Deep Tech and in the process just got reallyinterested and ish first in Bitcoin then in Ethereum. Yeah. And then when I wasstarting my next company in 2017, it was, I, literally could do nothing elsecuz I was spending all my time reading and learning about blockchain and wascompletely inspired.

Julian:Yeah. Yeah,  

it's fascinatingthinking about, the times where you built those, those previous companies,thinking about mobile back in 2005 was really just gaining traction. I, I don'tthink that the iPhone hadn't come out at that time. Right? I think iPhone camearound with 2007, 2008, something like that.

What was mobilebuilding in Mobile like at that time? What were you seeing? In term, were youseeing that it was gonna be widely adopted before you started working in it?Yeah. What, what in particular made you decide that?

Jack:I, so I, I just, I think I got really lucky that got it. There's a really fa I,I didn't start this first company.

It was, I, I joinedthe startup called Good. And just, was fortunate to, I think I saw that mobilewas going to be massive. I saw, it used to be the separate industry and nowmobile is just a piece of everything. Right. And mobile's, yeah. Almostinfrastructure that drives every type of application and every type of usecase.

So, I saw thathappening, but mobile was not very good back then. It was, yeah. And, preiPhone everything was blackberries and then, or we competed with Blackberry andwe were the, a like enterprise email client that could run on a whole, every,basically every other phone on Palm Trios and Nokia's and Windows smartphonesand, all the like pre era iPhone phones.

Julian:Yeah. Yeah.  

And, and what wasthat like thinking about, having that opposition to a, a big. Player likeBlackberry. I, I, I could see it just creating a lot of, like creativity withinhow to widely adopt, and, and, and add value to, a customer base, with a newproduct.

And has that kindof carried on thinking about, the adoption of Web3 and, and how to, that's kindof, is there any similarities there?  

Jack:Yeah, my kind of, the biggest similarity to me is, is just, The adoption curve.So everyone, I think more people, well, there were still people that didn'tthink mobile was gonna go anywhere.

Like, you can't doanything on a mobile device. You're just never gonna be fast enough. Thedevices won't have good enough battery life. There's just all these mobilehaters, just like there's Web3 and crypto haters and Yeah. And the, the realitywas the user experience sucked for everything other than email.

And email wasreally easy because, You could just store everything locally and back it up andfind servers, and then you just had to, the technical requirement was justsending a message. It wasn't that complicated. And so you could have a good UXand it could be asynchronous. It didn't have to be like instant, but, hey, ifyou wanted to, like, imagine if you wanted to play a video game, like a supercell game with all these people in real time playing the same game, like itwould be, just, it was unimaginable that you would be able to do that in 2005and 2006 and 2007.

Yeah. Right now inblockchain, people are, are saying, ah, well it's just too slow and it's tooexpensive. There's no way these things will ever improve. And the wallets andthe ux and, and the reality is that all of these problems are being fixed now.Just, it's like, yeah, deja vu. And, I'm seeing the, the light at the end ofthe tunnel, just like I did before.

And I think we're,we're, we're, we're getting really close.

Julian:Yeah. Yeah. Obviously,  

I, we're on thecrux of letting this, conversation. Go just so deep into what you're doing and,and, and how, there is this kind of another founder, I think from Block Nativementioned, like, I've seen this movie before, and all the pieces are there andit's really just following the same evolution, but learning from previousmistakes.

But just thinkingabout like, Your experience building an ML company at the time you did it, itwasn't as popular as AI and MLR today with, chat gpt and all these othercompanies, open, open ai. But what in particular did you see in terms of itsapplicability at the time and, and did you see that it was gonna turn intosomething that it is today?

Jack:One of the, the biggest values of blockchain and smart contracts is just youcan create different types of business entities and business models. Yeah.Okay. Like it's really cool tech and Chad, g b t as I'm a huge user and fan ofthe, but worked in machine learning for a really long time.

Yeah. But what I,and. That it'll be fully complimentary with everything happening in blockchain.The thing about blockchain and it that inspired me is that you can havedifferent types of business models. Yeah. You can have businesses that are userowned. You can have it's almost co-ops. You can have, full ownership of assets.

Yeah, transparencyof currency, instant sending of current and so of, of, of money, programmablemoney. So all of these features technical features are really important, but atthe end of the day, the implication is that, you could have these newstructures and I think we're just starting to see that come alive in, the N F Tcommunities and Gaming guilds, gaming communities, gaming dows, and obviouslyin, in protocols that, and blockchains where there's real voting and,validators and delegators and people involved in the network are are co-owningthese things.

But, yeah.Eventually we wanna see applications, being decentralized at the same level,but the user needs. Needs to have, be actually able to see the immediate value.Yeah. Without having the UX friction.  

Julian:Yeah.  

Well think,thinking about, running a company and especially within the Web3 ecosystem, howis it different from building and how is it similar being that, do you have tostart with a singular product like you did and, and then bring people into thecommunity, into the network?

Or do you startwith the community and identify what you needed to build? What was the kind of,what's similar and what's different than than building companies that you didprior?  

Jack: Ithink at the end of the day, like, well, this, this is lost on a lot ofblockchain projects is Yeah.

You have to findproduct market fit. Okay. Yeah. And I think a lot of products have been builtin Web3 that just didn't get users or developer traction, et cetera. Yeah. Andand, we really took an approach of same that we, you had take in web two of,of, understanding users, understanding needs, understanding requirements.

So we actually werebuilding SKALE, so, Based off our own needs, cuz I was trying to build a adaptand so was my co-founder Stan. And that's how we met. And yeah, and we both hadthis infrastructure and middleware background and so we ended up, doing thisand trying to then help applications.

Yeah. So that wasreally our, that's when you know you have, you're fixing a problem when youhave the problem yourself, it's one of the best ways.  

Julian:Yeah.

Well, it's also a great way to identify, thestarting point. But thinking about where it evolved from that point on, didyou, was, the original idea to create this network that then could reallyenable these developers.

To be able to buildapps more, more quickly, more readily, and, give them a little bit more broadcastingability, was that the original idea or, or did that take some time to identify,okay, this is where the biggest, friction point in, in getting deliverableapps, this is where we're gonna start.

Jack:Yeah. You know what it, it, it really, we believed in Ethereum and the power ofEthereum, but we, this is before the term layer two existed. So we wanted tohelp people building on Ethereum. But we also didn't wanna sacrificedecentralization. And so for us it was just a matter of saying, Hey what is thebest model to help Ethereum applications?

Like we wanted tobuild Ethereum applications. How can we make those faster, easier to use? Howcan we make it so, yeah, non-technical users can use these, these apps because,I think that's an angle and approach. A lot of people still just don't thinkabout, they're so focused on just security or just decentralization that theyforgot about.

Like what's thepoint of building something if only 10,000 people can use it? You know what Imean? Need something that's accessible to lots of people, to millions ofpeople. Hundreds of millions of people.  

Julian:Yeah. Yeah.  

And what's is, andfrom my knowledge of the product, you've kind of created this amazing way thatthe nodes kind of, when you're using these applications, They kind of take onsome of the computing power that's a little bit more localized to the app, andthen they interchange themselves for security purposes so no one node staysconsistently running someone's application.

And that was justmind blowing to me in terms of, it's not necessarily creating any new resourceand material, but just really organizing and distributing which ones are takingon, say, a bulk of that compute and, and for what time. Am I describing the appcorrectly and, and what in particular? Is there a preexisting model out therethat, that, helped you, move in this direction?

It just seems so.Simple, but, but actually, actually solves a problem rather than trying tocreate some new infrastructure.  

Jack:Yeah, you know what, it's I think we took this approach that why should the enduser have to pay gas? And then we had to do a lot of innovation and, and reallyengineering work to make that viable.

Cuz you can have,gas fees that are subsidized. But the problem is if your consensus model is, isbuilt on paying validators per transaction, yeah. It's really difficult to havethe unit economics ever get to a point. That makes sense. Yeah. And so for us,like we needed to have a few things like we needed to, so, and for thoselistening, I'll try to describe this bef in a different way.

First, we wanted tomake it so application developers or companies or dows or communities could payfor gas fees in advance instead of end users paying for gas fees. Okay. Yeah.And so, the best way to do that we're like, great, then you need to pay for itin advance. But instead of having to pay for a transaction, what people arepaying for is actually compute space.

Mm-hmm. That coulddo, they could use it to do hardly any transactions or a lot, and they're gonnapay the same amount. And so then the, I guess the load balancing or theresource allocation piece is not about okay, who gets each piece of each block.It's which application gets which amount of space in the network.

And that issomething that's elastic. Then all of a sudden you don't have a confinedamount. If you have a confined amount, like a traditional blockchain and youneed to, charge per transaction, well, there's not much, flexibility there. Sowe had to really think outside the box and say, oh, we need linear scalability.

We need lots ofchains that can work together and share sec, but how can you do that and, haveshared security and not have. Other issues I had like fragmented liquidity andhow do you and poor user experience. So there was, just so many challenges. Butand that's one of the reasons why it took a long time for, for us and all theopen source devs that collaborated to build this.

Julian:Yeah. Well,  

it's amazing tothink about what it can help deliver and please, share with the audience what,that allows these application developers or companies or whatever, what does itallow them to do and, and what is your hypothesis for, or your bet, I guess,on, on what your technology is going to have, in terms of not only, its, itsimmediate effect, but long term.

Jack:Yeah. Well, we our feeling was. Where is the, where's our sweet spot and it'shigh volume transactions If we can help people that, if you are a DeFi projectand you have 10,000 users and they're trading, a hundred billion or, or ahundred million in, volume a day, like they don't care about gas fees.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.But if you have hundreds of, if you have a million users or 10 million usersthat want to do. A hundred million transactions a day, you need a completelydifferent model. Mm-hmm. But you also need to maintain decentralization andsecurity. And so we really are focused on those areas like gaming and Web3products that have lots of users, lots of transactions, so, Yeah.

Julian:And,

and thinking about, doing, giving that or, orworking that horizontal approach, what needs to be orchestrated or whatstrategies need to be deployed to make sure that, okay, if we're not gonna go,upstream go vertical build for a large enterprise organization, but we need tocapture a large, larger marketplace.

What do you do as afounder and what, what strategies are you deploying to really kind of capturethe amount that you need to, to really, get the product to, to, a point whereit's productive and people are using it and kind of flywheel starts to, startsto carry off on his own.

Jack:Well, one, it's, it's decentralizations important for a lot of reasons. So youjust, you want to be, you got, you have a lot more scalability. Yeah. If youreally have a lot of co-ownership and like, support and work from lots ofpeople. Yeah. So like that's one thing that's really critical.

And if look atEthereum, I bet 50,000 people work for Ethereum, but. None of them actuallywork for Ethereum, like all day long. We're out promoting and supporting andbuilding Ethereum because they've built this like amazing open source and publicgood. And so SKALE tries to do the same thing.

Number one, thenumber two, A lot of it's just basic. So if you have a core team or people inthe community that are, working at, like, bringing on developers, it's aboutsharing value proposition and like helping solve people's needs and targetingthe right people and getting in touch with them.

And, a lot of theblocking and tackling you might see in a different type of, of Yeah. In abusiness that comes together in a, decentralized organization and, and Yeah.With, obvious centralized entities like a core team helping and supporting. Butyou know, you've gotta like, at the end of the day there's, if you're not, ifyou have something that you're trying to, bring to market mm-hmm.

You've gotta be solvinga problem for people and then you need to, approach the right people with that.Yeah. At the right time with the right messaging. Yeah. And then, have a greatproduct that can follow through on the, on the promises.  

Julian:Yeah. Yeah.  

You're thinkingabout, your attraction.

The company seen sofar, tell us a little bit about. How many people you've been able to get ontothe platform, what's been particularly exciting about the products that havebeen, being built but what's particularly exciting about, the next milestone inthe journey?

Jack:Yeah. You know what, there's been, we've had, we've saved over 1.25 billion inU S D and gas fees on SKALE. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. We've had over 70.Around 74 million on chain transactions. I can give you the exact number rightnow. It'll be different whenever someone listens to this, but you know, around74 million transactions.

And, and, lots ofgames, lots of Web3 products. If you go to the, you know, the SKALE blog, youcan see a lot of the a lot of this. But yeah, as of today, 76.3 million onchain transactions and 1.27 billion in gas fees saved. So, yeah, it's been anover 430,000 unique users in the last year, logged in and used and, used anapplication that's running on SKALE, but, we're it's kind of amongst theEthereum developer community and especially in gaming.

And Web3 we're verywell known, but we're still, I think there's just a lot of projects out there.So we're still driving, growing awareness. And it's interesting, I meet peopleand they say, hold on, you have. You've saved 1.27 billion in gas fees and Ididn't know who you were. And I'm like, oh, we're talking now.

Now you do.  

Julian:Yeah. Yeah.  

It's an interestingthing when, when you're at the stage, right? It's like you've got the productmarket fit, you're, you're growing your customer base, and now it's just, forlack of a better word, you're scaling. And, and a lot of that is that exposure.And how has that just been hugely impactful as a Web3 company having this.

Really kind of,it's almost, it, it's, it's almost like an acceleration engine for, kind of ago to market strategy once you hit, how's it been different from, buildingproducts prior that, it wasn't as, I don't wanna say as big of a community, butit, it seems like Web3 in particular.

Has it as, as anessence of, of most part, yeah.  

Jack:You know, when you're doing a B2B company, you just, you just, you work so hardto have anybody even care at all that you, you write in a blog post. It's likethe, like phenomenally different. There's just a dramatic change in, in Web3.It's cuz you have all these people, tokens and open source software, publicgoods, like people own these, it's not you.

And so it's just,It's an order of magnitude easier to, but it also to, I guess, drive, reachpeople and talk to people and have the community and, at the same time, it's adouble-edged sword because if something's delayed, you're gonna hear about it,there's an update that's coming, the update come, they'll be like, where's theupdate?

And so, hey, I takethat any day. I, I love that, that there's people that care and they're.Passionate about, yeah. What the project does and, it's part of the, I guessthe weight of carrying, being on, working in any, type of project like this.

Julian:Yeah.  

What do you view assome of the biggest risks for the company today?  

Jack:You know what I think, for us, I think we're gonna really, or this project. Isin a really strong position now in the sense that V2 lifted a year ago. Yeah.And the number of, transactions on chain a year ago was, we've had, 70 somemillion now, 76 million.

And a year agothere was, in the first, year and a half of the network history, there was aless than, probably less than 500,000 total. Yeah. And so when you know thisnext as things just continue to progress, which they always progress. Like youhave to constantly be building in this type of environment and, and growing.

But, we really, Ithink got into a really strong position then. And, just like, I think, peoplejust, we just have to keep executing as a community, as a project, as opensource developers, as validators running the network. And then, clearly macrorisk is something that everybody is dealing with.

I think everyone's,who's watched the news lately knows, I think so. I think we have a lot of thesame risk points any crypto project does, but I just hope that there's, yeah, Ithink we all, see that there's light at the end of the tunnel. There's a lot oflogic out there that points to having, clear reg regulatory guidelines and,win-wins for everybody.

Protectingconsumers and people that are participating in networks, but also, protectinginnovation. Yeah. And growth.  

Julian:Yeah.  

If everything goeswell, what do you view, SKALE becoming down the line?  

Jack:Yeah, I mean, the goal of, of of people building in the SKALE network is, it'sreally, it's a mission focused objective and, to be, the number one supportresource for scaling Ethereum applications.

Like we want tohelp Ethereum developers and, but not every single type of developer, but inevery single type of application, but, Applications that, are building ingaming and Web3 social products, lots of users. We want to, we want to go helpthose developers. And I think the project will be successful and at, all,various different goals if we can just, really help devs be successful.

And so that's atthe core team level, that's what we're really focused on.  

Julian:Yeah. Yeah. I like this next section I'll call my founder faq. So I'm gonna hityou with some rapid fire questions and we'll see where it gets. So, all right.I always like to start it out with  

what's particularlyhard about your job day to day?

Jack: Imean, my, the hardest part of my job is that I have way too much work to do andway too many meetings. So I just work a lot. But you know, it, it really comesdown to prioritization and also like learning to balance your schedule and nothave too many meetings so you can actually. Deliver. You get to, I thinkanybody who, whether you're in a Web two company or Web3 company, like ifyou're, I'm the CEO of a SKALE Labs, right?

If you're in myposition, yeah, you want to be able to talk to everybody and support everybody,but you end up having meetings sometimes where people are just saying, okay,now here are the three things I need from you. I'm like, well, if I didn't haveall these meetings, I could get everything done. Yeah.

Yeah. And I, I'velearned, I think I've really learned how to do that well over the last coupleyears, but it's definitely always. A consistent challenge is just managing likea mass workload and schedule load and trying to be efficient and, yeah. Servicepeople well, like give good support to your team and community and, keepdriving innovation.

Julian:Yeah.  

You thinking aboutyour, your experience scaling companies, obviously, the last company you runjust had such an amazing growth over time, but I'm just curious to ask, wasthere any time. The company would say at risk of whether it's closing or,taking a significant hit.

I don't know if youhave a story about that time and, and what you did to overcome it.  

Jack:Yeah. Well, my first company, we started in 2008 and Right. In June, so themarket was hot right before the, big real estate and financial collapse. Andthen there was the big, a much even, even far scarier recession or yeah.

Then this one, eventhough this one's been scary, and I think but that was tough building throughthat. And there was one point where, we, we ended up raising our first VCround. We'd raised a, couple seed rounds, but the founders, we were just nottaking paychecks for a while.

And we were Yeah.Running up our credit cards and, keeping all the employees paid. And, as ayoung, I was like in my twenties doing that, and it was like, that was scary.Yeah. Yeah. And but we just, we really believed in what we were doing and,like, Put ourselves at risk and then, we're able to then, raise our a round andget past that.

But it it was, a, astressful experience.  

Julian:Yeah, yeah.

Thinking about the transition, I'm not tookeen on your, your, your professional history. So correct me if I'm wrong, butfrom what I've, viewed, transition from CEO, founder to, to strategic advisor,and then now building this new company, what, what goes on in that transition,seeing that, you've built this company up to a certain amount, Kind ofrelinquishing some control and then, kind of getting inspired, to do anotherpro project.

A lot of foundersgo through this a lot and what, what is the conversation you're having withyourself during each time being that you're, you're changing a lot of, of yourreality that that's been the same for a while.

Jack:Yeah. I think it's one of those things that as a founder, you feel like, Icannot leave this company until we get sold, or.

We go public, wehave some sort of like big exit event. Yeah. And I had been at my company fornine years and we had, hundreds of people at that point. And it was a bigcompany and I, I, and for me, I just, I had the itch to go start anothercompany and, yeah. I just kind of felt like I've gotta go build, I've gotta gostart over.

Like I've, I'm inthis huge company now and like, and and I, that's fun. But for where I was inmy life, I just felt like I had this, window again to go start a company. Cuzwhen you start a company, you are working night and day, you're working. Insanehours. And I already had one. I had my first kid then, so I was like, oh, Ibetter do this now before I have any more kids.

And yeah. And youknow, and I, I think I had, I took almost a year to transition because as afounder, when you wanna leave and go start something new, it's hard. Causepeople are saying, well, why is this person leaving? They're a founder. And Itook a lot of care and time to do it the right way.

But I had to go, Ifelt a calling to go build something and I'm, so glad I did. Cuz working inWeb3 has just been a. Just life changing, transformational thing. I'm gonnawork on Web3 the rest of my life. Yeah. Might be web four at some point, or webfive as we progress, but definitely in blockchain and like decentralizedinternet.

Julian:Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be like versions of the iPhone. It's gonna be a new one,new version every year or half version every other year. One follow up questionto that experience, how do, how do you,  

what advice wouldyou give other CEOs looking to transition out the right way? Being that.

There can have somenegative PR ramifications even, not, not even meant to, to, to be so, or teammorale or culture. How do you do it the right

Jack:way? Yeah. It's difficult. And for me, I was co-founder and I, I ran allbasically go to market, yeah. Sales and partnerships, but I wasn't, I wasn'tceo.

We had somebodyelse who, there was another one of my colleagues who was ceo, so it was, it wasa little easier when you are into the CEO position and Mm. And, and for a lotof, I was, almost a co ceo in a lot of ways. So it was, yeah. Similarlychallenging.

But I think thething is just you have to like, use a lot of transparency and, and be slow and,yeah. And chilly, and I believed in the product. I believe in what we weredoing, but. I think people get that about founders too, that some people, youget to have time point in time where you have a big company and you just wantto go start something again.

Sure. I think a lotof people have empathy cause not every, not a lot of people wanna do that. Alot of people want to join, when you've got your series A or when you're at theseries B and you're a little bigger and. There's less risk, but there's, maybeless upside. It just, people kind of typically right-size companies for theirrisk profile and their right, excitement and, and I think people knew how Ioperated, so it was all good.

So anyways, just betransparent, be give lots of time and yeah. I think, you can do it.  

Julian:Yeah. Yeah.  

What's somethingthat you're, you're good at now as a founder that you wish you were better atearlier on?  

Jack:You know what I think it's like, it's tough to let people go when you're in aleadership role.

Yeah. But almostevery time that you do it, you end up realizing that it's like better for bothparties. Yeah. You're doing people favors. And I think that's something that alot of people I've mentored people and people have mentored me, and it's justsomething that if you have empathy for people, that is challenging.

And, but you, asyou get older and more experienced, you realize, well, It's good to just dothese things quickly and you're Yeah. Doing everyone a favor, yeah, yeah.People find conditions where they, are gonna thrive instead of, be challenged.It's, it's a win-win.  

Julian:Yeah. Yeah.  

Thinking about,Web3 and, and its evolution and seeing, seeing, kind of it from two differentlenses. Right. Seeing, you mentioned, you've seen this movie before, it feelslike deja vu. What in particular, do you feel is different about thisexperience?

Obviously there'sdecentralization approach, but you know, is it the accessibility? Is it thevelocity that, one's traction can really gain, the adoption curve, can, canreally be. Extremely fast. What in particular gets you excited about thisdevelopment and technology?

Jack:More than anything. I mean, the big thing is there's always going to be newer,better tech, and yeah. We see that in AI today. The AI that exists is likeleaps and bounds better than the prior ai. Mm-hmm. But the thing aboutdecentralization and blockchain is that you can't come in and just, have abetter technology.

Yeah. Like, likeGoogle can't come in and be like, Hey, we have the world's best blockchain. Andeveryone's like, well, You, they're a public company, they have revenue goalsto meet. They Right. Aren't just going to disintermediate themselves and like,give all the money to the people and the users instead of the, yeah. And soit's, it's really tough to compete with the business model of blockchain andWeb3 right now. Yeah. And I think it's the biggest technical advantage is the.Social implications of these products. Yeah,

Julian:yeah. Thinking about,  

I always like to ask this question, whetherit's early in your career or now what books or people have really had a lastingimpact on you, something that you would like to share to other founders or, orthe audience.

Jack:You know what, that's a okay. I feel like, let's see, there's some, what aresome good books to read? I mean, from, from, from like, I think everybody hasto sell. There's a really great book that early my career was called QuestionBased Selling, and it was, you just learned about like, whoa, you can be moreimpactful if you ask people questions.

Yeah. Like how touse questions. That was really helpful. I think I think. Dow's a good bookabout like presence and like perspective that you can pull in actually tobusiness. Yeah. Really? Okay. That was a really great book.  

Julian:Yeah. What, what, what, in per what perspective in particular?

Anything. Anythingcome to mind?  

Jack:Oh, I mean, it's a lot of, it's just about like, acceptance and like having azen attitude towards, towards things. And as a founder, as a business person, aceo, a, sales director, manager, engineer, whoever you are I think you canwaste a lot of energy trying to control things that are outta your control.

Yeah. And so it'sjust, it's like really worth reading to just get a sense of like, okay, like.You've gotta learn to flow with things, but also, yeah. Figure out where you,what you can control and then, bring your best to it. And and it's a deep bookthat is, I think it doesn't tell you exactly how to use these like kernels ofknowledge.

You have to figurethat out, which is one of the interesting things. But yeah, if you can do that,you'll have a lot more, I think, like you'll have a lot more of a like, I'd sayintelligent and perspective towards what you're doing that is like notemotionally driven. It's, you basically learn to manage your own emotionsbetter to, to optimize where you are in different work situations.

Julian:Yeah, yeah. Well said.  

You thinking aboutWeb3 in addition, to to SKALE. What, what's a te piece of technology that'sbeing worked on or a product that's being worked on that that, that you wouldor are curious about where, where it's gonna go? Or particularly a fan ofoutside of, SKALE and Ethereum and, and what's, part of your ecosystem,anything outside of that that you're particularly keeping an eye on and, andexcited about?

Jack:I'm really excited about the u the use of AI in blockchain, especially forengineering. Yeah. And like, finding, gaps in solidity code and. Buildingthings faster. And my, my prediction is we're gonna build, we're gonna have 10times the number of applications built for Web3 in one year than, or in thisnext year from now than we built in the last year, from this day.

And it's becausedevelopers, engineers, QA people are all, they're able to, especially on smallteams, they're able to build so much faster. Yeah. And there's so many, there'sso much great tooling out there. And so these AI products are just going toreally power Web3 in like a Yeah. Dramatic way. And it's gonna be fun to seelike AI products integrated with blockchain products, but the build piece ishappening like right now.

Julian:Yeah. Well, what's it, what do you think in particular, in terms of how peopleare going to, I guess have different relationships with these different,whether it's, SKALE Labs and your network or some certain applications, willyou see a lot more collaboration between products and service and companiesthat we hadn't seen before?

Just being thatpeople now have the choice to opt into certain communities. If, if I'm abusiness, I'm thinking about how can I not have this individual leave mycommunity? I'm thinking about retention, so, do you think a lot about that oris that, getting involved with the system in terms of companies and productsworking together?

Jack:Yeah, I think, I think it's already happening. It's one of the beauties of Web3is that, yeah, like we're even like our somebody in our, I think someone wastrying to reach out to L two B or something for a while, and then one of ourdevelopers just, submitted a pull request for an integration and then theirdeveloper looked at it and accepted it, and, We talked on GitHub and it's likeso efficient because they're able to look at, they're able to look at our code,we're able to look at their code and just say, oh, okay, great.

And boom, open. Thebeauty of open source, it's just so much easier when, and in traditionalsoftware, you have to like make all these agreements. You only have thesepieces you share with the other company and. You're hiding things in thisworld. You're just able to share everything and yeah, so I just think it'salready, that's already happening and it's probably will just get even more andmore, open and, and synergistic.

Julian:Yeah. Jack, I know we're coming to the end of the show and it's been such apleasure chatting with you and not only the, discussing your early career, butalso, scaling what you're working on now. Last little bit as I always like toask, is there any question I, I didn't ask you that I should have?

Anything that weleft on the table here today?  

Jack: Ijust say one thing at SKALE. It's, we announced levitation protocol recently.Yeah. Which will be, an integration of zero knowledge proofs to SKALE. So checkthat out. That's something I'm pretty excited about and, but otherwise, no.

Great, greatquestions and it was really fun.  

Julian:Amazing. Jack, it's been such a pleasure having you on this show. I hope youenjoyed yourself. And thank you again for being on Behind, Company Linestoday.  

Jack:Thank you.  

Julian:Of course.

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