YouSaid · the spoken record

Alok Vasudev

lines on the record: 80
first: 2022-07-26
most recent: 2022-07-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Truckload of samples and putting them on wafers and shining light and measuring things. And it was very like mechanical formulae at work, but it was very much the grunt work in the lab. But I loved every minute of it.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Top of it. So you put a mask on and then you can either like etch away the parts that are exposed or you can like grow another layer. And that's how these integrated circuits are built layer by layer where you're basically masking each time to connect all the wires. We were working on photo resists in the way it worked. Again, this is hilarious that we're getting into this. But if you want to make the resolution of these masks higher, you want to have smaller features. One way to do it is you want to have smaller wavelengths of light that actually like do this photochemistry within them. The smaller the wavelength of light, the smaller the feature you can define in the mask, the smaller and higher performance semiconductor chip you can write with it. So we were working on cutting edge photoresist chemistry for a lower wavelength of light that hadn't really been pioneered yet. And the goal was we were trying different things to figure out what worked and I was the guy that would basically test how well it worked. And so it meant me just having this big.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. My job was to produce these things called Meyerhofer plots. Semiconductor chemistry. And so the idea is that you have these things called photoresists, which are chemicals that you put on top of a wafer and you selectively expose the photoresist to light. And then you can dissolve the parts that haven't been exposed to light. So it forms like a mask.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had published papers in high school which sets you up for research and undergrad, which sets you up for research in graduates, all these things. And so it was awesome. And I don't think I'd have accomplished anywhere near what I have if it weren't for Grant Wilson.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was in high school. I was working at a sandwich chop, and one of our neighbors, who is one of the most distinguished chemists of all time, and he's a prolific researcher, but he was my next door neighbor, and he saw me in the sandwich shop, and he was like, what are you doing in a sandwich shop? I was like, I don't know, making money, 15, like, what do you want? And he said, do you want to work in my lab? Basically, I got the chance as a high schooler to work in his lab. I'd basically taken one chemistry class at that point. I'd gone through some personal stuff. My dad died about a year before that. And so I think part of it was just like, you know, him just helping me on a very human level. But what it did was it really set me on a path where science became something that I really fell in love with and it became so fundamental to who I was in a part of my identity. It set me on a really terrific trajectory kind of academically and professionally.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's like the easiest punching bag out there, the idea that these things are just like a database and the token doesn't matter. I hope one day I hope fully disabuse ourselves with that notion. I actually feel like I'm an optimist by default. So all the stuff is going to work. NFT is going to work. Crypto gaming is going to work. Blockchains are going to scale most of the Web3 concepts that we're talking about are going to work. It's just a question of the sequencing and what do we need as kind of structural enablers from a tech standpoint, from a behavior chain standpoint, and then how much learning from kind of trial and error do we need as an ecosystem, as an industry, in order to actually just get it just right where it can actually.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of those ideas had that base assumption in them. I'm pretty bearish on off chain to on-chain stuff, even some things like reconciling IP off-chain, but kind of keeping the on-chain piece working, that to me feels really hard. There may be narrow situations where it could work, but I think as a category, it's not going to work. If we do this again in years, I'll be perpetually bearish on enterprise blockchains.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somewhere, however many steps behind the scenes, there was some token that was ultimately being bid up by retail speculators that was being market sold. Generated the yield. So when that goes away, the yield collapses, everything goes away. And I think there are genuine structural sources of yield within crypto that are real and sustainable, and they're probably rightly so not going to provide eye-popping numbers. But for example, like staking for blockchain security, super structural. And it's like a net new form of yield that we've never seen before because blockchains are new. If you're kind of counting on some like bottoms up movement or speculation to really drive what you're doing, it's not going to work. I think a large part of, I would say like the second half of what we saw in DeFi.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My most bearish on like in this moment, I'm very bearish on things that really need count on retail speculation as kind of a driving force for it functioning or gaining adoption in general. It's not great when you're counting on that as a chief component. But I think especially so when we're not going to have any for some time, if you're not kind of viable in a fundamental way, then it's not going to work. I actually think people deeply appreciate how much retail speculation was the driver for a lot of what we saw, even things that were kind of dressed up as not speculation driven, like the yields that people talked about in DeFi were the yields come from or like these iPop and yields. I think that if you actually like decompose those yields, where do they actually come from? Where is like a dollar being turned into like a dollar 10? A large part of those yields.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sense that all the newest and zaniest and best ideas tend to take place within the Ethereum community first, the ecosystem's done a great job over time of just systematically addressing the biggest issues with it in 2017. It was this thing won't scale and your roadmap for how to do it is ridiculous. Imagine a world in where within the community people just build things that have higher performance that attach to it, this idea that you don't have like a centrally coordinated company developing and hiring engineers against a roadmap that's never going to work. This idea that you can just plant a flag for how you think it should work and then let the community almost build the bridge along the way. That's exactly what happened. We have roll-ups that are functioning. We have sidechains that are functioning. Every single thing that people thought couldn't happen, but Ethereum kind of the community at large chose. It's kind of working out. I still think it's just underappreciated as one of the most monumental tech projects we've ever had.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredibly bullish on Ethereum as an ecosystem, everything, every advantage it's had has, in my mind, been strengthened. I think there are a few upgrades and changes in the pipeline that are going to further improve it. I think it's always been the ecosystem that is at the top of the innovation supply chain in the space.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know if it's going to work. It's one of these things where it's like, but the world to me, where you can actually think about IP just as free flowing and you can remix it, you can do whatever you want. It's a pretty interesting kind of form of abundance that I don't think we've seen yet with IP. And if NFTs could be the solve for where value can still be created, I think at least it's a very interesting version of the future. But I totally understand how it's going to fall on its face as well because it's really nice to be able to directly make money from IP.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I get paid for those listens on Spotify. And there's this inherent tension between getting it distributed far and wide, but also being able to bear hug it so you can make sure to get what's yours. CC0 and NFT users here, what if there's now like another access to this? What if you can monetize in a way where you don't have to even think about constraining distribution?”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a project Nouns DAO that I think a bunch of Ethereum people and myself included love. And we think of this as one of these really interesting concepts in the NFT world that a lot of people are paying attention to. I would say it's probably one of the most notable CC0 projects. And we've seen the nouns glasses has become this iconic image from this project. And we saw it in a Super Bowl commercial. I think Budweiser, one of the beer companies, had the nouns glasses in the Super Bowl commercial. They didn't pay royalty because all of that noun's IP is CC0. It's this really interesting question of kind of indirect value accrual. And there's a really cool frame on it where right now with IP, distribution and monetization happens along the same axis. I get views on YouTube and I get paid for those views on YouTube. I get listens on Spotify.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Applies for music. If you're promising royalties, etc. And then there's this idea CC0, which is Creative Commons license, which is the same, right? Like Shakespeare is under this license, right? Basically free to use, do whatever you want with it. There's this movement within the NFT space where like, what if you just didn't put a license on the NFT at all? What if it was just, literally do whatever you want with It If you owned an NFT and let's say you had no structural claim on the IP with it, but if maybe that meant that the NFT project could actually get distributed further, it could actually have more cultural relevance because you remove barriers for it spreading far and wide. Could that actually have an indirect feedback loop where you still, your asset still becomes more valuable?”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a deal done where this NFT is used in an ad or something like that and your NFT was used or something like that, then you would get you would be entitled to that or you could sue them for claim on cash if you didn't get anything from it. The core idea here is that there is some IP. These NFTs have licenses that are protected. And then we're kind of debating who controls it, who has the rights to income from it, and who decides how it's used. And ultimately, that requires reconciling the blockchain with Some sort of off chain legal system.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A really interesting idea, and it's still in this phase. We're like, I have no idea if it's going to work or not. I want it to work because I think it'll create a very interesting future if it does work. With NFTs, there's IP behind these NFT projects. And we can think about a basic art PFP 10,000 picture NFT drop as the example here. There are some situations where like the IP is owned entirely by the company that issues the NFTs. The company can do a deal with that IP and they can make money on it, but there's not necessarily a right to any of that that you have as a holder of the NFT. Then there's another situation where the holder of the NFT actually gets the IP license for like their NFT.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On chain maximalism, like I described earlier, and this actually stems to the kind of the NFT IP question, which is interesting. There's this idea that can we have things like IP rights attached to NFTs, maybe like the use of IP or the downstream monetization of IP, can we have a way for that to flow back in some form to the holder of an NFT, I tend to be more skeptical about these ideas, again, just because I think that reconciling stuff in the legal system with stuff in the blockchain is just really hard. I don't know, this may be content, but I'm really intrigued by the CC0 movement in NFTs.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they probably know something about crypto. They probably have a stronger point of view on the right way to use these tools to accomplish their goals. They're kind of the definitional early adopter for something new. They live in the same future as the creator of the tools or the platform.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Already people will meet us where we are because they want it and we've struck a chord in terms of what they actually want to do. That's why I think even especially for thinking about this idea of NFTs as a substrate for kind of early financing and coordination around creative endeavors, it's Jeffrey Moore one-on-one stuff. It's really understanding who are the early adopters and understanding that like new concepts have this diffusion like a law of physics that they follow. You can't skip steps in that progression. And so it's not about just am I going to appeal to like a mainstream writer today that's going to turn down a book deal in order to do this weird NFT community thing? That's probably not the right fit. The right fit is somebody that's just the right. They are a creative genius and they can succeed at the highest levels. They need this medium in order to actually achieve that potential.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cryptocurrency. You'll never have to have a wallet. We will make it seamless. It will be like using Substack or something like that. And it worked, right? I think there were kind of people that were like, yeah, you've kind of adequately removed friction for me. And so now, you know, I guess I can try this thing. And then what happened is NFTs went bananas. They struck a chord and the appetite for NFTs went haywire. And then it was the total opposite. You had people saying like, well, excuse me, where do I connect my MetaMask here? And why are you not giving me ETH? Because one of these situations where you're like, oh, it turns out that NFTs weren't just”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Believe it's somewhat of a controversial opinion on this, which is that there's this idea that, oh, we need to kind of smooth away the crypto, abstract away this stuff, make it really polished, make it really frictionless, make it look like products and services that you're used to using, only then will we have mass peel. It's kind of cope for not having good enough draws for the mass market into crypto yet. And I think what we found is, for example, early in NFTs, there was these ideas that, you know, I'm talking kind of pre-2021 and even kind of early 2020, this idea where how do we get more mainstream digital artists? How do we get people that are outside of the crypto orbit to start to use this stuff and think about it? You'd go through these painstaking steps of, well, we'll let you get paid in dollars. You're never going to have to touch.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This creative endeavor that ultimately went the distance. I think it's just such a cool story. That's kind of one of the examples I point to as to where we could do more of that. And that feels like a thing that we're going to get more of in the future, not less of.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Andy Weir had a day job as a programmer, I believe. And he was just blogging chapters of the Martian. And he would post a chapter on his blog. And then like a couple months later, he'd post the next one. People on the internet found it and he got basically this fan base that was building up this community that was forming around it. They would do things like fact check the science for him. They would add value to the story. And of course, they were in on it. They were, you know, can't wait for the next chapter to drop. I imagine that community and the fact that he had a fan base that he could point to probably played some role in him securing the book deal. And of course, like the book was a bestseller and that validated the concept to get the movie Greenlint. And so this idea that actually an internet community was there on the ground floor.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something that I'm a part of and even get rewarded somehow, some way for it. One of my favorite stories about the role of internet community in actually creating and succeeding with aiding a creative endeavor at the highest levels is the Martian. Have you seen, like obviously Matt Damon, Blockbuster movie, but”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're spot on, like what I said earlier is I think that NFTs are a great way to seed capital and seed community is what you can get with NFTs. It's one of these things where like, I think that a lot of the celebrity NFT drops are probably in the unproductive speculation category that we talked about earlier. But there are a number of these things. This concept of, hey, I want to pursue a creative endeavor of some sort. And I'm looking for seed capital and a seed fan base around me and NFT is a great fit for that. As an artist, you've got a chance to, you get to capital, you've got kind of an embedded fan base, and you've got a community that you can use that can grow over time. And as a member, you get all the special feelings of kind of being in on something early, everything from like it being the form of your identity into even this idea that maybe there's even upside in it, right? Maybe I can even follow along the journey for.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's a really important function of money, and ETH has really done a terrific job with penetration on those dimensions. And then the even deeper structural reason is that NFTs live on blockchains and the economic security underpinning a blockchain is what gives you the guarantees it can operate. And that economic security is just related to the reserve token and whether it's an adequate incentive for people to maintain consensus. And so the higher the market cap of the token, the more valuable Ether is, the harder it is for somebody to go and compromise the computer. The more valuable the block space in Ethereum is, the more valuable that is, then the asset either should improve and value commensurate to them.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's extraordinarily unlikely that kind of NFTs work and then somehow the blockchains are built on top of and the monetary assets that secure these blockchains don't also benefit from that value creation. Extraordinary unlikely. I think there are some deep structural reasons where kind of really can't have one without the other. For example, if you think about ETH as a monetary asset or the qualities of its moneyness, one of the big benefits ETH has as a form of money is its use as a unit of account within this growing blockchain GDP that we have, right? So NFTs are priced in ETH. The trading pairs for on-chain liquidity is ETH denominated.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To press the hundred dollar button a bunch of times, if you can get a much smaller fraction to press the million dollar button once, you can actually get an equivalent outcome in terms of value to the company. That's where I love the way that he thinks about it. And to me, it makes all the sense in the world because we have these singular moments of commerce that we've had on the internet, right? I think the blockchain's probably set all the records for them.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“that can blow minds in terms of what the experience of being a part of game is but that's also rooted in what makes a good game and what might people actually want to do and does it actually jive with the incentives and motivations for all involved i mean unrestricted payments i think people don't appreciate how big of a deal this is for games the app store has the hundred dollar limit on how much you could pay into it at any given time and it takes a 30 haircut on anything that goes through and so when you contrast that to like a middle of the curve nft project routinely has asset sales in the tens of thousands of dollars hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions in kind of the top end case you just compare and contrast those two and you're like wow there's such a big opportunity just to explore the upper end of monetization for games the idea that instead of driving millions of people”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say like gaming applications of blockchains or blockchain assets. That's been conceived of pretty much since the beginning of the space. And I think people have pointed things like. Game economies have become really important value drivers for modern games. Everyone talks about skins. Everyone talks about these types of things. And so it's been clear that, hey, these two things, they're probably going to fit together at some point. Some of the crypto people, I think to some degree, are a little bit more like optimistically forward looking around it. The idea that you can take, I'm going to take my sword in this game because it's an open and interoperable sword. I'm going to go like play with it in other games and there's going to be this shared economy between games and all that. Maybe, but I think that I'm pretty skeptical, at least in the near term, of those type of ideas working. But what I love about Gabe is that I think he's done a great job of correctly assessing what it is that crypto can give you.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you have that proof, then you know the computation was done correctly. You've kind of now provided a guarantee for something that's been done in a way where other people can do it. You're not reliant on a single person to do it for you, but you still have a form of that guarantee. It's abstract”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which authority reigned supreme in most situations, it'll be the legal version of it. So then if the legal version is ultimately supreme to the blockchain version, what's the point of the blockchain version? That's kind of the argument for why putting your house on the blockchain makes no sense. You have a token that represents your house and then somebody hacks it and they'd steal your token or you just walk out of your house. Like, I guess I lost it then. Off-chain on-chain, really hard. And I think that for the most part, I'm not a big believer in people pushing the boundary and off-chain to off-chain. But with zero knowledge, you can at least say that, hey, I can guarantee that this particular compute task was done correctly. For example, anybody could do it, right? It could still be permissionless. Let's say for this toy example, we're talking about zero knowledge proof of audience thing. You could have a number of companies or a number of entities who could run this task of you authenticing with Twitter and then they kind of verify that you own that account and they run some like compute task that verifies your proof of audience.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost as perpetually like that. And the fundamental problem for this is that you have competing systems of record, competing ledgers. Blockchain is one ledger and then you have the courts or the legal system or something else that's a competing ledger. And ultimately like you want these two to keep in sync all the time, but there are situations where they can get out of sync and then”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is where I think that zero knowledge cryptography can be one of these bridge solutions. At a high level, it's really about how do you extend trust guarantees around computing operations, computational integrity is a term that a lot of people in zero knowledge talk about. How do you know that a computer is doing what you said it's doing? Proofs are one way that you can enforce a degree of integrity or accountability on a computing service. For example, and again, we're getting into wildly speculative territory here. I think this technology is still pretty nascent and there's a lot to come. I would say just undergone this transition from stuff that's the domain of the research lab to stuff that now can be tinkered with in production. But you could imagine part of the problem is so off-chain on-chain has been really hard. And I would say that I kind of biased towards being an on-chain maximalist in the sense that I think off-chain on-chain is something that always feels like just within arm's reach, but it always”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's another way to improve the speed of it, and that's the first, I would say, most obvious use of zero knowledge proofs. But I think it's going to get wild. I think it's going to get beyond that. Like, for example, so let's say that you wanted to start in a non-Twitter account. What are your problems is how do you bootstrap that audience? What if you could construct a proof that said, I can't tell you who I am, but I'm somebody who had this many followers on my real account, like zero knowledge proof of audience as an example, right? These are the kinds of concepts that can be opened up by this stuff. And I think it's going to have broader implications beyond just blockchain scalability.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly zero knowledge roll up is the term, or if you use a zero knowledge proof as a form of blockchain scalability, you can have a really fast blockchain that can prove that it operated correctly. And rather than needing to have every single node validate every single step themselves, which is how some blockchains operate today, this proof can suffice for the validity of what the computer did. instead of like everybody replaying every single operation that a blockchain went through, they're just checking the proofs”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. The first application for these things that people are using them for is in blockchain scalability, where blockchain itself, it's a computer and the computer is updating its state every time a program executes, it's going to execute its state. These are state transitions that a blockchain computer goes through. The job of the blockchain is to ensure that these state transitions it goes through are valid. The rules of the computer that means nobody's double spending money, that means.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The simplest way to understand it, there's a bunch of really rigorous math and cryptography behind it, but the essence of it is that I can prove something to you. I can prove a fact to you without revealing the specifics. I'm doing some sort of zero knowledge proof of the amount of money I have in my bank account, I can construct a proof that I can hand to you and you can kind of quickly, easily verify this proof says I have more than $100 in discount But you don't need to know where that is. You don't need to respect it. You don't need to know anything about it other than this proof is sacrosanct.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years of really hard and pioneering RD work. And here we are one cycle later where there are some of the most popular applications in crypto live on these stark chains and they use zero knowledge proofs under the hood for improved performance. I think zero knowledge cryptography is going to be one of these general purpose technologies that we're going to see take all sorts of forms and it's going to blow people's minds as it proliferates.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money in kind of the hype of still was kind of caught up one of those Bitcoin bubbles, it took a couple years for it to be built. But then that's an example of something that really pushed us forward as an industry in terms of really making this tangible general purpose blockchain computer. Another example in kind of 2018, I think that zero knowledge cryptography as a theme was still in the lab at the time. And there were companies like Starkware and disclosure we work with them. That's an example of a company where zero knowledge cryptography was kind of on that cusp of going from science to engineering. And there wasn't an obvious near term market for it. And so it really, I think, took the exuberance of a bubble in order to adequately capitalize a company like that, to undertake.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something that can be broadly applicable, that creates value across the economy. That's kind of the general frame. So it's basically like, what are the types of things that get funded in bull markets that actually play out often years down the line or cycles down the line? Productive is where you say that, I'm going to take advantage of the fact that the money's flowing and I'm going to build something real that may take more time or that may be much harder that I may not have been able to capitalize in a moment where we didn't have this excitement. And then when it plays out, it's going to move us forward materially. And so examples of that are Ethereum is an example. In 2014, it was a story of Bitcoin and the altcoins and then the idea of having a smart contract enabled blockchain. That was a wild concept. A lot of people thought it was infeasible, unworkable. Ethereum raised”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Janeway definition of productive speculation is where the euphoria in a bubble. Allows or facilitates the funding of RD that otherwise would not have been funded that ultimately leads to what he calls a general purpose technology.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you would kind of pre sell multi year licenses to buy applications kind of before the SaaS model was there. Part of why that worked is because they would pay up front to subsidize the R&D costs of the innovator in order to ultimately deliver what they promised over the horizon of that contract. So you have government, you have enterprise, and both these were kind of these monolithic buyers that basically through contracts subsidized the R&D work that led the maturation of these technologies, but crypto never had a monolithic buyer. It actually just had retail. It had people that were kind of putting in money to these things. So I always wondered if that was kind of a part of the volatility. That was a part of kind of why crypto has evolved in this path-dependent way is the fact it's kind of the only tech revolution that didn't originate in that manner.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He talks about the role of the state in innovation in his books where ultimately he views it as a critical part of this innovation supply chain and they provide a form of kind of capital and direction that really is the straw that stirs the drink downstream for kind of innovation that we get. One interesting observation about crypto is, and I'd love to see you're a student of tech history as well. I think it's the only platform shift or only kind of tectonic wave that's emerged that didn't originate with a monolithic buyer in the sense that semiconductors, kind of the computing industry, the government was the monolithic buyer for it, right? They were commissioning chips for missiles. They were building data centers for intelligence. And then you look at things like application software as computing matured. And it was the enterprise that was the monolithic buyer. And in fact, like Janeway talks about this a lot, but the idea”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many of the use cases that we wanted to use tokens with. That's one. I think anytime your instinct is to write something off for dead because it had a bust or this specific version of it didn't pan out and as durable a way as you wanted almost count on it coming back in a strengthened form the next go-round.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then every time, inevitably, what happens is that the idea gets hardened. Maybe there's a technology enabler, or maybe in most cases it's just kind of putting pieces together just properly where it works and it works in like a staggeringly big way and it catches so many people by surprise so that pattern is going to play out it'll happen with nfts nfts is so obviously here to stay they're so obviously this game changing building block for everything from providing seed capital to seed community to ideas that it's going to work and i actually think if you looked at all of the tokens market cap collectively as a percentage and you looked at erc20s or fungible tokens versus non-fungible tokens i actually think the non-fungible token dominance against fungible tokens is going to increase over time just because i think it's a better form factor for so much of the use case”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Phase where you have a these ideas come onto the scene and they strike a chord and there's an initial flurry of interest and excitement but the early movers are imperfect in some way. And then you get some sort of a collapse and then the entire notion is written off for dead. That's this pattern that's played out every single time we've had a crypto cycle. I think NFTs are probably like the prime example of what people are going to be talking about in that vein this time around. Like, oh, these things are dead. Like, I can't believe we spent all of that time talking about monkey pictures. What a waste.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the payments use case is almost going to be perpetually underrated. Just because we've known about it for so long, it's there, but I still think that it's just going to be underrated because it's so staggering in terms of what you can do, but it's also like we've already talked about it. Let's move on. Even the way to frame, people have oriented around how many transactions per second can you send or can I do visa scale transaction volume on a blockchain? And that's always been where the comparison is. But I always thought the money bandwidth concept is really interesting. Think about bandwidth. It's kind of a combination of it's two-dimensional. It's how much can you send over a given unit of time. The money bandwidth of a blockchain is crazy. You could send billions of dollars in 10 minutes. That's unprecedented. To Gabe's point, I think that just the fact that these are truly unlimited payment rails that facilitates some of the largest commerce events that we've ever had in the internet's history. It's going to be perpetually underrated as something that blockchains can enable. I mean, so many things in crypto are they go through.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of belief in, and I think that even NFTs, things like that, right? We're getting things like art, things where like a really important property is its durability and its ability to be lindy and last across generations. And now we have a piece of artwork that lives on a blockchain that you can say, I'm going to hang on to it for 100 years. I'm going to hang on to it for 200 years. I'm going to pass it down to my children. And it's viable because the subsidy lives on can viably live for that long.”
2022-07-26 · Invest Like the Best · Alok Vasudev - Searching for White Space - [Invest Like the Best, EP.287] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source