Jay:  This week’s show guest is Roger Haenni, serial entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of Datum, a distributed database governing safe exchange and trade of data. Datum allows individuals to take ownership of their information so they can share it with businesses on their own terms. Roger, welcome to the show.

Roger:  Hi, Jay. Thanks for having me.

Jay:  It’s good to have you on. I’ve been slowly trying to do more research into blockchain and this sort of thing. Luckily, we had the chance to meet and chat not too long ago at the Startup Grind event, and so I thought it was a perfect opportunity for me to ask you to come on the show because I think that the project that you’re working on is quite interesting and also you are a practitioner within the field of blockchain, and you’ve been doing it for quite some time, which I don’t know if I could say the same for a lot of the projects out there. Anyway, Roger, please introduce yourself to our audience.

Roger:  Yeah. My name is Roger Haenni. I’m one of the three co-founder and also the CEO of Datum. We set out to build Datum last year around June. We then did a token sale to raise the funding. What we’re trying to achieve is to give anyone their own digital identity. When I talk about identity, we don’t focus on only the basics like get your passport attached to your identity, but we see this more as something like your Facebook or Google account, which, in fact, is mostly used to attach other data to it so that absent services can exchange this data and access this data.

And we don’t think it’s right that these large companies are basically controlling all the data that gets attached to these accounts. And we felt that blockchain really presented a unique opportunity to actually try and provide a decentralized alternative. And so that’s what we’re trying to do with Datum.

Technically, it’s really two things. The first thing is a decentralized data store. So you can’t just store it as data on the Facebook or Google servers anymore. There needs to be a decentralized storage network. And then the second part is a data trading protocol. So we define how you attach value to you data, how you define data, and then make it easy among developers to exchange and share this data. All of this is controlled by you as an individual.

As a result of this, companies can also cut you in to any profit that is made from your data. So when the data gets monetized, you can get a share of it.

Jay:  Got it. So data nowadays, and especially data privacy and this sort of thing, is quite a hot topic. It’s much talked about right now. So I think this is quite a timely time for you to come and share the project that you’re working on. Before we really dig into the specifics of how your project company works, maybe you could give a little bit of background on yourself as an entrepreneur and how you got into the whole blockchain scene to begin with.

Roger:  Sure. I dropped out of college to start a web design agency. That was just before the internet bubble, and I did that for two or three years very successfully. At that point, all companies needed a website. And that was just a time when dynamic websites were coming up. So I quickly focused on doing that. We were primarily using something called Cold Fusion. That was sort of a commercial precursor of PhP or ASP, and I quickly got into co-founding a financial information portal — a website where investors could get real-time streaming quotes. And that was only available on Bloomberg terminals at that time. In some markets in the US there were some websites where investors could access quotes, but in Switzerland and Europe where I was based, there wasn’t really much available. So I did that for a few years.

Then I also co-founded an online PC and components store in Switzerland, and then that grew to one of the largest independent e-commerce websites in Switzerland. And after that, I really focused on doing early mobile apps. So those were the days when web was just introduced — kind of black and white browsers on the phone and the first apps could be developed. So I did that for quite a long time.

And then during that time, towards the end of it — so around the end of 2013 — I basically started looking into Bitcoin and, more specifically, Litecoin and all these ELT coins that were starting to pop up. I’d been following Bitcoin for a bit but didn’t really see, frankly, much potential in it at that time. But what interested me was when the prices started moving up. There were all these ELT coins being spawned off of Litecoin. So people would fork Litecoin, change the name, and try to create a community around that. So Dogecoin is an example of that, which was very successful, but there were many others. I remember one was simply a China coin and the premise was clear. It’s going to be the coin for China.

So I dabbled, during that time, in mining pool software for these ELT coins and also doing some mining pools that could switch to the most profitable ELT coin and also kind of focused on basically just exploiting the dynamic at that time in the market, which was that if you mined the coin in its very early days or even hours, you could mine at a very low difficulty and get lots of coins. At that time, the listing criteria on, for example, Poloniex was simply that you needed to have a Bitcoin talks, and it didn’t to be more than five sentences on there. So it was very easy for those coins to get listed. And ultimately, a market was created, and you could sell these coins at a profit.

I did a lot of cloud mining at that time which simply meant you would spend literally hundreds and sometimes thousands of cloud instances — so servers on Amazon, for example — just for one or two hours, which is actually not that expensive. Since you can mine so easily in the first few hours, you could basically get a lot of coins and then basically later sell them off.

That was also the time when Ethereum was created. So some of these projects were, of course, larger than just doing a fork and changing the name. But I totally missed Ethereum, and I kind of got out of the space when the price went down and flat lined. I think Bitcoin went to above $1,000 USD together with lots of these ELT coins. And then in early 2014 or so, it kind of went down to $200 USD or even lower and just kind of flat lined there. After a few months, I thought, “Ah, this is not going anywhere.”

Then I did two other startups in the meantime before then starting Datum. These were IoT-focused things. One was a Fitbit for babies and the other was sort of a Bluetooth mesh sensor network.

At the beginning of last year, I really felt like Ethereum was gathering lots of steam and not just in the price action but also in terms of projects starting to form on top of Ethereum.

As part of these IoT startups, specifically with this Fitbit for Baby project, we had this big pain point. We were collecting very sensitive medical data, and on top of it, it was from babies. And we tried to start this thing, and we collected over a million data points with some prototype devices. We tried to start selling this data, and the big question was, “Where does this data come from? Did the parents give consent for this data to be sold?” Out of this really developed this kind of problem that, why isn’t there a solution where I as a developer don’t have to take so much care about the data? Of course, the data should be protected, but why do I have to develop all this stuff myself?

There were, of course, solutions, for example, specific for medical data and very expensive kind of data warehousing solutions where they would handle all the compliance for you. But they didn’t address the user side at all. So they didn’t give back any rights to the user or made sure that the user understood what’s happening. That’s really how the idea for Datum developed.

So we’re saying, “Why isn’t there a data store what I as a user can actually own my data and I can delegate access to this data as I see fit?” So it’s not Apple deciding who gets access to the HealthKit data that your phone is collecting, but it’s really you that decide that. And if there is a service or a developer that does a mashup of services that needs some data and you feel that service provides value, it should be you deciding if you want to give permission for that to happen or not.

And also, very importantly, again, this notion that it’s really users that are creating a lot of the data nowadays. And the users should be rewarded for this. It’s just not right that any… This is a commonly understood thing. In terms of Facebook and Google, you are really the product. Right? So whenever you’re getting stuff for free, you’re probably, in the end, the product. We just felt there was an opportunity there to try and see if we could change that a bit.

Jay:  You certainly went after, I guess it was, like you said, a pain point from when you were doing your Fitbit for babies. But also, this is quite a hot topic right now, particularly after Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica, this whole data scandal. People are more in tune now with the fact that your data is out there.

Specifically with Datum, maybe we could talk a little bit about exactly what the business model is, what the offering is of this service. How does a consumer… What’s the user experience? For someone like myself, if I were to engage and want to basically sell my data, how would Datum help facilitate that?

Roger:  Basically, you can download our data map. At the moment, this is just an MVP. But ultimately, this will be the app that you can use to manage your digital identity and also the data that is attached to that.

We’re trying to get to the point where Datum is like your login with Facebook or login with Google alternative. So that means any developers that are building apps can use our APIs to access your data — of course, with your previous permission. Again, the big difference is that not even us, as Datum, have access to your data. It’s really just you controlling this. If you’re sharing data with some other company and that data goes directly only to that company, there is no middle man in the middle that has access to this.

And then in terms of actually monetizing this data, of course that mainly falls to the developer. So developers are building services. They may be collecting data on you and all their other uses, and they may aggregate this data and find someone who is willing to pay something for this data. Of course, the simple example is the advertising sector. If you’re building an app, for example, for a specific niche of users, it’s usually easy to find some value in the data of your user base. By selling this to advertisers, they can use this for targeting and really find the people or the leads that they want, and they’re happy to pay quite a lot for that, actually.

So even in our MVP app, we have two data sources that you can add. One is basically background location data, and the other is a general data profile that has some of your interaction with the Datum community embedded. So that means if you participated in our token sale or were active on our Telegrams, things like that.

Just to give you an idea of the value of this data… The location data is already aggregated at a very large scale by many apps. But that data is really not worth that much. It’s only about $0.10 US per month that an advertiser pays to get someone’s individual location data or, ultimately, use that for targeting. Versus your Datum profile with your email attacked… We’re paying out up to about $5 USD to the most qualified users just to receive one single promotional email from an advertiser.

As a user, if you look at this — and I had asked you without giving you values before — what do you think is more valuable? Your whole location history of a whole month — so every single place that you visited — or receiving one email. I think most users would say, “My location data sounds pretty sensitive, so I would assume that’s pretty valuable.” But that’s just an example.

When we’re talking about data, it’s often quite difficult to assess the real value of data. Ultimately, you have to look at what insights and actions can be taken on data. And that’s actually why just receiving one promotional email is so much more valuable because that’s what the advertiser really wants to do. And the location data is just an additional data set that helps them target you.

So this is what we’re building. Of course, in the future, we are onboarding our first initial development partners now who are basically using our SDK, building their own apps on top of it. And all this data is attached to your one Datum identity, and that creates a very interesting profile about you for advertisers. And, of course, that’s the same that Facebook and Google have, but what we do differently is that all of this data is in your own control. So you can completely opt out of any advertising or any data sharing, or you can opt in for specific cases or on a blanket permission basis. That’s basically up to you.

Jay:  Like you said, this is actually a very strong use case for being a blockchain technology, for having a decentralized database that you guys yourself at Datum.org cannot even access. So in theory, it’s like a removed third party, and the trust issue is taken care of that way because it’s not some listed company like Facebook that has access to all this data. This is a third party. Like a vault, it’s locked up there.

So once this gets developed, how will it work? Advertisers will be paying Datum to access this data? And then Datum will then flow that compensation on to the end user?  

Roger:  Correct. But they’re not paying Datum as a company. That’s also decentralized through our smart contract. So they can go in and say something like “I want to have 1,000 users that are based in Washington, D.C.” And they can see that these users are available, but they don’t know who the actual users are. And then they can basically buy this targeting data through our smart contracts. Again, there’s no intermediary. Then each user gets, individually, rewarded for that.

When the developers come into play… Let’s say you’re building an app or a game. You can basically ask your users if they want to opt in, to have whatever data you collect on them attached to their Datum identity. Again, advertisers can use that to narrow down their targeting. If that data from that specific app or game is being used, the developer can take a cut of the proceeds of the data sales. And the other cut he can basically give to you as a user which creates an extra incentive for you as a user, an extra reward for using this app.

Some good examples are, for example, all these free weather apps, because those are the ones that actually have these location SDKs integrated that basically constantly monitor your location and send it to ad networks. And, of course, when you installed this weather app, initially it asked you, “Can I get access to your location?” And you probably said yes, but you were “Well, it’s a weather app, so obviously I want to weather of my current location, so sure.” But you don’t know that that is happening, and you don’t get rewarded for that. So that’s really what we’re going after.

Jay:  Quite interesting. You’re in the process now of basically curating developers to come on and build apps on top of the Datum database, so to speak. What is that process like? There must be some sort of quality control as far as when you have developers come on. Is there any risk of breaching or hacking into the customer database? In my mind, conceptually this, Roger, is a very good idea. Something that actually has a real practical application to be on the blockchain. But, of course, with data, there’s always the biggest concern is privacy and breach and hacking and this sort of thing. How do you feel about that? What measures—?

Roger:  There’s two aspects to that. First, on the security aspect, where we completely differ from a normal centralized database is that each data record is encrypted with a unique key. There is not one key for your Datum identity. Literally, each piece of data, a random password is created that is used to encrypt this piece of data. And then when the data sharing happens, you are basically encrypting that specific password against the public key of someone who should be able to access this. It could be a developer or a data buyer. So it creates kind of a one-to-one encrypted channel where the data flows through, and that channel only exists for that specific piece of data.

Now that is very different from your average centralized database because there you have something like a firewall, and they have this huge database behind. Either someone hacks it from the front — so they hack through your firewall and other protections. Many times administrators just leave a default password and things like that. And that’s how these large data breaches happened. So like Equifax lost like over 100 million social security numbers, basically of every third American. And so something like this can’t really happen in our system because each record is individually encrypted, and there is no kind of central store for all of these passwords. Everything happens on a one-to-one basis on one piece of data.

Now the other thing is around data privacy. That’s also really critical because companies now have to comply with the GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union. And the US and Australia and many other countries have similar laws, and these laws are only getting stricter and stricter. So that means developers also have to take care about the whole legal aspect. So they have to get the proper consent from you, and they have to take a lot of reasonable technical measures to actually protect this data. So in the future, it’s not going to be okay, in the case of Equity Fax, to just say, “Well, we were unlucky. Our database got hacked.” They’re going to have to prove did you guys take all the necessary steps to protect this data.

And so with the tech that we’re building, we’re basically doing all of this for the developers. So the developers can basically build or use personal user data in a GDPR-compliant way and complying with many other data privacy laws without having to build out of this kind of mundane infrastructure themselves.

Jay:  Well, Roger, it’s a very interesting project you’re working on, and I think, like I said, it’s one of the real practical use cases of blockchain. On that same token, I want to ask you and talk a little bit about the whole space in general. You guys successfully launched an ICO towards the end of last year, and it was a success. I feel like in the last six to nine months, the entire blockchain crypto space has evolved. It’s gone from this very hyped-up type space to now where people are, because prices have come down in this sort of thing, people are like “I don’t know. It sounds kind of scammy. ICOs kind of have a negative connotation attached to projects now.”

And then there’s also the issue of, because they is money — easy, quick money — that can be raised via ICOs, a lot of these projects are reverse engineering things that don’t necessarily need to be on the blockchain. This is something we had a discussion of this the last time we met up. So I wanted to just hear your thoughts in general. This will be for the benefit of people that aren’t into blockchain or crypto or aren’t practitioners like yourself. What are your thoughts in general? Are we ending number one or two of an 11, 12-inning game here? It sounds like prices have run ahead of actual real use cases on a lot of these projects and this sort of thing. I’m just curious about your general thoughts on the entire space, being someone that’s working on a project in it. What broad strokes can you give to someone that is just jumping into crypto right now?

Roger:  First of all, I would say, as you already mentioned a bit, blockchain is not the cure for all. Actually, when you look at these projects, what is essential for me is to identify if using blockchain or some sort of decentralization or even if it’s just a token or financial aspect, what value-add does that bring to the pain point or the solution that the project has. And the reason I say that is because blockchain, for example, from a development perspective, it’s like the most horrible development platform ever. Every time you call a function in a smart contract, you have to pay money for it. So imagine your programming language charges you every time you call a function, and that’s literally how it is.

I think end users are not really willing to accept any shortcomings in the user experience. And if you have done any Bitcoin or Ethereum transactions, you know it takes a while to do a transaction, so there’s really huge challenges in terms of providing an experience that is fit for the mass market.

Having said that, it’s really important that blockchain really add such a kind of killer argument or just makes your solution so much better that people are basically willing to put up with the other side, which is basically this bad user experience. And if you look at the kind of classic killer use case of blockchain, which was basically payments, a lot of initial adoption was driven by people who wanted to have means of anonymous payments outside of the existing fiat system. And of course these people didn’t mine that it takes five minutes to do a Bitcoin transaction or to get sufficient amount of confirmations. And they also didn’t mind that it would cost them a few US dollars, which doesn’t make it very competitive to modern mobile peer-to-peer payment offerings.

So I think when looking at projects and also the market in general now, it’s really important to ultimately focus on what are people actually using blockchain for. I think, right now, we see the first steps. Of course, we had CryptoKitties, which was a big success, but it’s interesting to see now that the usage of CryptoKitties now is extremely small, and that is one of the few real things that Ethereum is being used for.

And then, just to talk about Ethereum, the most used steps of decentralized application on Ethereum is probably IDex at the moment. That’s a decentralized exchange, and they do anything between like five to ten million USDs of volume per day through that. But just compare that to an exchange like Binance or so who 1.5 billion in a day. One of the main reasons is Binance just has a much better user experience. As a decentralized exchange, IDEX is very slow. It always fails. The whole experience is not good, and that really shows in the usage numbers. It’s an order of magnitude different.

And so I do think we’ve been in a big of a hype cycle where we went far too advanced into the future already, kind of hoping all these problems would be solved by blockchain, and I think now there is a bit of phase of maybe disillusionment. People are actually looking at what is actually being used on the blockchain, and it’s all kind of very basic and kind of nerdy cryptocurrency stuff.

If you look at EOS, the most used dapps on there is EOS Dice. It’s basically what Satoshi Dice and other stuff was. It’s a simple dice game on blockchain. It’s basically gambling. Sure, that makes sense, but you’ve got to take a step back and say, “So what are people actually using this for? Okay, it’s some kind of gambling or a dice game.”

I’m not sure when we’re really getting into the phase where we see some adoption at scale, but it’s safe to say that right now with Bitcoin and Ethereum, there is massive challenges in scaling. Of course, many projects are working on that with the blockchains themselves. So Ethereum is trying to scale the blockchain itself through sharding and proof of stake and so on. Then the projects themselves, the ICOs, can do things like stage channels or side chains and so on. But it’s still really early days.

Ultimately, you still need to solve a real pain point in the real world, and blockchain kind of needs to really radically improve that to make sense. Because even with the most slickest user experience right now on blockchain, there will still be lots of shortcomings for the average end user. I think, realistically, we’re still probably at least a year or two away, I would say, until we really see a killer app on blockchain that really good out of just kind of making anonymous payments.

Jay:  Absolutely. Having gone through a successful ICO and given that fact that we’re in somewhat of a confusion part of the cycle where people are kind of worried, and there’s been a lot of scams, and people don’t know… If you were a blockchain entrepreneur wanting to get into the space and you wanted to run an ICO, what would be a quick advice that you would give, other than don’t do it? I think one of the things that you mentioned that was a benefit from your ICO, above and beyond the money itself, was building the community, which essentially are your early adopters, your early champions of the project that will help you scale down the line.

Roger:  Yeah, I think that’s a bit similar to kind of when Kickstarter started. If you did an ICO last year, you were still able to gain lots of public traction, but realistically right now, there’s just too many ICOs around, and they start to raise less and less money in so-called public sales. So already, many months ago, a lot of the ICO market started shifting to more like private placements — whether that’s whole private presale or whatever. And they basically focus mostly on accredited investors, so it changes the game completely. So it’s much harder to build this initial community, and it’s also what happened on Kickstarter at some point.

When it started, random projects was a great idea. It was outdoing any marketing themselves just by the power of Kickstarter — find a few hundred or thousand people that would back their project. But nowadays, realistically, if you want to do something on Kickstarter, as well, you have to put a lot into marketing, and that’s no different with ICOs.

This era of really these large public ICOs seems a little bit over. It’s getting too costly now to do the marketing for that. And many projects also realize that it’s much easier to do this kind of private sale to accredited investors. So that means we’re almost kind of going back to more traditional venture capital structures. There’s usually just a token involved as well and some token economics. But then also what I’m seeing in the market is actually many of these accredited investors and traditional VC’s and so on are basically asking for equity as well. So they’re saying, “Look, this token thing is interesting, and your token economy may or may not make sense — who really knows? There are many, many proven models that we can look at, so we also want some equity.” It’s probably more likely that you stumble on solving some pain point and may be able to monetize that in a more traditional way that really all of these projects creating these self-sufficient token economies that actually work and then also provide value back to token holders.

Actually, the market is heavily correlated at the moment, which means as Bitcoin and Ethereum goes down, many of these kinds of projects go down as well. There’s a few that can sometimes decouple, and there’s two main dynamics at play.

One I’ve been seeing a lot is this whole notion around staking where people can buy a stake and then can earn some sort of revenue or dividends or whatever it is. And the other thing is that some projects are simply doing is they found ways to monetize whatever they were building in a more traditional way, which means they just send an invoice somewhere, and they make some money. And then they use parts of this money to buy back their own token and then burn these tokens. So the idea there is that, with restricted supply, your token price may go up if there is demand.

I’m just interested to see… If that becomes a very regular thing, it’s not much different from running just a normal company and not really creating a token economy, because if you sort of have external revenues completely outside of the blockchain, you just take that fiat money and use it to buy back your own token… I hope it’s not going to end up that way, that that’s going to be the standard model. I do hope that we are going to see some more interesting token economics at play here.

Jay:  Absolutely. But I also appreciate, Roger, your realism. I think there’s a lot of extremes, especially within blockchain, and some people think that it’s the next best thing since sliced bread or whatever. But there is a real potential for this to become a token economy, and a lot of great things can happen. Hopefully, it will go that direction — maybe not to the extreme that some of the people way out there are believing, the maximalists, but we shall see, I suppose.

As far as, Roger, your goals for Datum in the next year, couple of years, what do you hope to achieve? Is there any data points that you’re particularly excited about that you’d like to share?

Roger:  Yes. It’s always hard to project these kinds of things. But we were able to build a community, or actually acquire about 60,000 users in our web and mobile apps, and those were just kind of the MVP implementations. So within a year, we’re really looking to get to a million scale user base with people that have a Datum identity. That also then creates the important critical mass to make this really attractive for developers who want to easily onboard new users and, even better if these users come with very rich data profiles attached. So that’s the short-term goal.

Long-term, over a few years, we really hope we’ll be one of the options or alternatives that you have if you basically don’t want to give Facebook and Google all your data. And so it’s really about having this self-sovereign identity and having all the data that should really belong to you, attached and under your own control to this identity.

Jay:  Let’s look to wrap up here, but I want to just ask you a couple more questions. This one is kind of fun, and you can answer it however you want. People have said that within the crypto blockchain space, the time is sort of compressed or accelerated, whichever way you want to call it. That basically, one year is the equivalent of — I don’t know — five years maybe in normal tech startup scene. Let’s say in four years’ time from now, what does the space look like? In addition to Datum being one of the leading applications out there, what does the landscape look like? Are we still looking at a thousand-plus projects that are floating around that are still trying to validate their use cases? Or are we going to see a consolidation? Is Bitcoin still going to be dominant? Is Ethereum still going to be around? What about the rest of the top 100 tokens out there? What does this all look like to you in four years’ time?

Roger:  First of all, I think we’re going to see, literally, hundreds of thousands of tokens. That’s the whole point about tokenization. Basically, you can take your apartment and tokenize it and give shares out to everyone. So that, I think, is only going to scale up. In terms of the larger projects, now we’re kind of in this early explorer phase, and I do think some of the big incumbents will, of course, survive, but I think in four years, it may very well be that there is a new player only one year old that just kind of learned from everything that the previous blockchains and projects did wrong and just manages to really disrupt some of the big blockchains or tokens out there.

So I would be very surprised if the top 20 on CoinMarketCap looks anything like it does now in 20 years or in four years. For Bitcoin and Ethereum, those are the huge incumbents. Bitcoin is kind of used as a digital gold now or kind of just a store of value, and it’s kind of hard to dethrone that because you can’t really improve on that concept much more if everyone just keeps believing or using Bitcoin for that purpose. But then when it comes to Ethereum and all these chains that actually try to run the apps and provide utility… I’m still super bullish on Ethereum, but with EOS and Tezos and these other projects, if you provide a much better experience, then by all means, I do think Ethereum could also be easily disrupted, and I would actually fully expect that to happen. Who knows with Ethereum, but definitely with many of the other chains.

If you look at the blockchain space itself, what happened over the last three years, a lot of the successful projects now are also iterations of previous experiments. So just look at the history of EOS and the projects that the EOS founders had done before — Steemit, right? So these were early iterations that are getting more refined, and I fully expect the same thing to happen. So in four years, Bitcoin may still be there and Ethereum, but I would otherwise think the top 20 on CoinMarketCap would look pretty different.

If you look at the top 20 now, it’s all kind of core infrastructure blockchains. Right? But I do think that there is a place for utility token that solves very general problems. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few actually kind of utility tokens be in that top 20 in about four years.

Jay:  Yeah, that’s pretty interesting. You’re absolutely right, Roger. This sort of thing happens in tech all the time. Web 1.0, you had a slew of companies. And Web 2.0, they just improved upon it. Where we’re at now, we don’t know. But I would tend to agree with you. Other than, I guess, Bitcoin because of the unique properties it has, everything else is fair game to be disrupted. Right?

Roger:  Yeah.

Jay:  The last couple of questions, Roger, and thanks again for your time and for sharing the project. It’s quite exciting what you’re doing, and obviously we’re looking forward to see the progress that you make.

Second to last question is, again, if there is one piece of advice, you’ve basically been an entrepreneur in every single aspect of technology, I think, from web design to ecommerce to cryptocurrency and mining and even a little bit of telco type stuff. So you’ve pretty much seen the entire spectrum. If there’s a piece of advice that you could give from your many years of entrepreneurship and building companies to a younger entrepreneur that maybe wants to get into blockchain or maybe just wants to get into tech and do a startup, what would that piece of advice be?

Roger:  For me, it’s really focus and focusing on the pain point and doing a lot of customer discovery. That is an advice very widely given by many great accelerators and incubators as well. We’ve been through a similar thing with Datum as well. Before you even build something, basically, you need to be able to find some customers. If you can’t convince someone to be a customer just off of your napkin drawing or slightly more elaborate pitch, then there is a high chance it’s not going to work.

With something like blockchain, I see so many that say, “Yeah, but once we build the solution… We can’t get the customers now or demo it now, so we have to build out the whole thing, and then they will come.” If you try and do that in the blockchain space, you’re in for hell because blockchain tends to be much more complicated to develop on than other things, so you simply don’t have the resources and time to build out fully functioning stuff. So basically, early customer kind of discovery and kind of validating the pain point that you’re trying to solve.

Jay:  Right. That’s sound advice for any type of entrepreneur that wants to break in and do their own company.

Thanks again, Roger. Last question is basically where can people find you, follow you, learn a little bit more about Datum and maybe even sign up for updates on your projects?

Roger:  Sure. Go to our website at Datum.org, and we’re on Twitter, @DatumNetwork. We’re also on Telegram @DatumNetwork. That’s where we can be found.

Jay:  Fantastic. We’ll have that all linked up in the show notes. Once again, thanks for your time. Roger, we’re looking forward to following and tracking your progress. I’m quite interested in what you do and, obviously, since you guys are somewhat based here in Hong Kong, I have a soft spot for my local Hong Kong comrades. So we hope to see some success coming out of your project. So thanks again.

Roger:  Thanks for having me.

Jay:  Alright. Take care.

Roger:  Thanks. Bye.