hi this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado and today we have a very special guest on people of iog dr danelle patel he's a good friend of mine and also the chief product officer of input output how are you doing today i'm doing great uh greetings to everyone from actually it's not so sunny in a warm cape town we're actually getting into the autumn season here but um yeah i'm doing great though oh great beautiful okay so let's we always do these things chronologically so let's start to the very beginning where are you from yeah so that's a interesting question so um and there's multiple kind of dynamics to it so i'm originally from zambia so i was born in zambia but i've got a mixed heritage so my dad is indian and my mother's zambian um so yeah spent um the first 18 years of my life in in zambia and then pretty much around the world since then okay so let's start there in sembias so first how did your father get this mp is he originally from india or was his father from india or how did that work yeah an interesting story too so he he actually grew up in india um he was a bit of a rebel so didn't really like the the caste system um and you know was looking for a way to kind of escape that um and you know go find kind of a new land where he would have more freedoms and he happened to have an uncle actually who was um initially in south africa made his way up to to zambia and was running a business there um and yeah eventually he managed to actually get himself um all the way to zambia to to be with his uncle and help help his uncle out with a trucking business so uh initially actually started off as um he his uncle also had some some buses so he had started he started off as a as a bus conductor so he would you know kind of follow the drive on all these journeys uh throughout zambia so you really got to know uh the country um really well um and um yeah over i think probably a period of three three or four years um actually if i go back um so when he landed in zambia he ended where my uncle was living when was this the 1970s 1980s 1960s 1960s okay so he arrived in zimbabwe in 1960s yeah okay go ahead and um yeah and then he lived in this um small town called kanini it's in in andola and it actually ended up being you know a lot more extreme than india was um basically because you've got a lot of indians and they all just lived in in in this small neighborhood and then you know they practiced the religion 10 times more religiously than than you know anywhere else in in the world and then he thought oh no i need to kind of escape this place in zambia and uh and he he literally went to the furthest place in zambia where there's like uh there's no tar road there's like a path i mean it's like um you know just you know just before the jungle uh you know you've got congo and angola on both sides it's like a really thin strip of land and um you know both countries were actually had these brutal civil wars and he felt that this was kind of a better place to live than uh this place in canadia but that's also an interesting story actually where he settled to to live so and we might have to go back and forth in time a little bit so that'll be fine i did like a pilgrimage to actually my dad passed uh probably about 10 years ago and i did a pilgrimage to kind of india to try and uh we'd never actually travel to india together so it was just to try and uh get a feeling for like where where he grew up where um you know what his life was like because we hadn't really talked much about that um and um so i went there with a group of friends and you know we rented this car that came with the driver and drove you know all the way from mumbai uh going up uh the west coast uh to to his village and um you know as we got closer and closer to this village i was like wow this looks really familiar i mean you didn't expect to see ant hills in in india that are in zambia this is one of the unique things you see these massive angels that might even be you know six or seven meters high and i was like well this is really unique and you know we came i remember we just came down this valley i was like i've seen this before somewhere and there's a river that kind of meandered through through the valley and we came up and there's this you know small sleepy town that you know you come up it has one post office and it's got the hospital it's got the catholics school and then church and then you know the primary school and you've got you know one or two shops and you basically made your way through this small village and so literally he must have you know uh gone there and figured out wow i'm finally home and uh it's a carbon copy of actually where he settled in in zambia and it's actually not far-fetched if you think about kind of plate tectonics where india was joined to africa yeah it's not too too far off so your father found the one place in zambia that looks exactly like history exactly where he came from and he chose to settle there yeah the downside is that it was straddled by these these countries that are geopolitically weren't doing so well so is that where he met your mother or did he meet her somewhere else in zimbia how so i'm going to ask you how did he meet your mother yeah so um first i have to explain kind of his business so uh when he was working with my uncle he set up these well what he did was he kind of got to understand kind of how zambia was set up and where all these kind of small towns were and what you realized very quickly was you know kind of beyond the big towns there weren't really any supermarkets anywhere and you know and you know you quickly figured out actually maybe i can make a business out of you know as indians do setting up a corner shop somewhere and and uh and um you know just supplying it with goods because his uncle already had this trucking business and um so he basically did that he just figured out like where where where in zambia kind of more than a thousand people and set up like little distribution hub and then have little motorbikes that go and uh you know fill up basically a one-room shack which had really basic goods so nothing more than you know salt oil you know blankets matches and so on and you'll then kind of distribute um the goods with a small motorbike because you didn't really have roads there so you'd you know make you just use these kind of country trails to to get there and um it sounds like like close to angola and congo literally it is really on the board of of like a you know a massive forest there and um um yeah so he was and then you spent his time doing stock taking so you'll just you know travel i mean he liked he liked adventure as well so you'd travel around and this one time he was in this kind of remote village uh stock taking and my mom walked in and yeah nine months later there i was but you know he got in a lot of trouble because my uh my mom was from um the royal family there and uh you know um so he actually had um you know it's quite an interesting story because then uh he was told he wasn't the world bride so he had to go through cleansing ceremonies i gotta ask your mother is a princess you're she's part of the royal family what what is it you have to go you have to go there yeah well i mean in zambia it's so diverse and i think you know almost every small country has its own little tribe and the lunda tribe um you know you've got lots of chief terms and uh you know in this small area with a couple thousand people yeah there's a chief and uh you know she was the chief's brother's daughter at the time chief's brother's daughter so that would make her the niece of the chief okay okay so so your father meant zambian royalty and so he he wasn't allowed to marry her unless he had to go through some ritual or some proving did he had to go through like a rite of passage or something like that yeah exactly exactly that so i've got these like wonderful photos of this you know skinny indian man with these african feathers and he was standing there not knowing what's quite happened to him and uh you know and then he was worthy and then you know they got married and and he chose to settle there with my mom not exactly where that shop was but in a slightly bigger town like 15 kilometers away oh that's that's absolutely amazing so what what what's your mother's tribe what what's the affair the lunda tribe okay and so what's zambia like in in terms of um unified culture is it 25 cultures stitched together kind of like india and lots of different languages or is there kind of like a central government and a central culture how does that work in zimbia growing up um it's exactly like that i mean there's hundreds of languages and dialects and but you know growing up actually our first president was was a socialist or humanist it's a lot like a lot of the african leaders that were trained in russia and came back and had their own kind of flavor of communism so actually growing up in this small village all the neighbors had to be from different tribes and that was kind of the way uh the intercultural mixing worked and it was fascinating because as a small kid you ended up speaking so many languages um and that's the way he got kind of the different cultures to blend and and and you know not have the infighting that you see in in many other african countries okay so you you grew up in a not only geographically diverse but very ethnically and linguistically so how many languages did you end up speaking as a kid when you were growing up well i at some point seven um and and and then i went to a boarding school which was run by very strict christian brethren and i couldn't speak any indigenous languages and was forced to speak english only so yeah all some of them just dropped over their years wow and this 1970s or 1980s or when was this um yeah so that would have been early 80s yeah early 80s okay so your father met your mother in the late 60s early 70s or when when did they meet because yeah so this is seven eight seven eight i was born yeah and do you have any brothers or sisters i've got one sister she just got her phd as well yes my mom's very proud uh two two in the family oh that's so incredible okay so you have a and she's a younger sister yes yes okay all right so uh you you were born in uh in the 70s 80s and you kind of grew up in zimbia in that time period and you started an incredibly diverse area and at some point they said all right we're going to send this kid to boarding school and how old were you when you went to boarding school um yeah that was yeah when i was seven years old so there was a government school um that i went to initially in in um um in this small village called munilunga um and yeah i mean the education system in zambia actually wasn't too bad to begin with but then it deteriorated really quickly um and i was doing really well at that school and um you know basically the community got together and said look we we should send this kid somewhere else and you know at the time there was basically a um a school that had been set up for um the missionaries that came in and um literally what they did was they tried to figure out where all the missionaries were across zambia congo and angola and then kind of drop dropped a pin and then sort of said okay this is kind of the central point and we'll clear the land make an airstrip and and just build a school there and then get teachers from the uk to to volunteer and teach these uh missionary kids um so at the time it was only the missionaries they could send their kids there and my dad was lobbying for a long time to to allow you know other kids from the region to to come there and um yeah eventually you know there was a breakthrough and they started allowing kids um other kids there were missionaries in zambia to attend and actually even the president sent his kids there which tells you a lot about the quality of education there okay now your mother zombie and your father's indian so i imagine english wasn't your first language uh so was this was the curriculum in english this is that where you learned english to school or how did you learn well actually zambia all of your education is basically in english in primary school they mix it up mixed up a bit depending on where you are so you'll learn in the local indigenous language and then around grade six seven then all your exams than in english okay okay so how old were you when you you attended the school was the school in the same location or was it a different area of sembia it was in the same location where i grew up so but you know it was only like 20 kilometers away but it would take you like seven or eight hours to to get there by road and uh just because the road was so atrocious sometimes you'd have to build the bridge yourself to cross it and get stuck in bottles and you know trees had fallen over the road and you know and you know there's fascinating stories of actually the missionary kids because they would like um i mean those days they didn't have roads even though trek um you know across zambia congo and angola with their porters and you know there's wonderful stories about you know lions coming to attack them and them going hunting on their way to school it was it was uphill both ways and we had to make the road ourself and every now and then a lion would jump out and attack oh it was exactly that well the school's over 100 years old so it's uh yeah it's got quite a lot of history as well wow wow okay and it's run by british missionaries or it was well i think now it's mixed up a bit so you've got canadian american british yeah so volunteers mainly okay and and how old were you you were 12 13 at the time or well i went there from seven till i think 11. okay yeah yeah did you have to walk there or drive there did you live there because it was 20 kilometers from where you were at but the road was quite bad so how did yeah that basically had a it was a boarding school um so yeah we stayed there for kind of nine months in in the year so um and then you know travel back home uh for a month and then go back to school for another three months so were you allowed to leave the school given you were so young or did they just kind of keep you like a prisoner there no you were stuck there so like some of my best friends are actually from that euro because we kind of soldiered through it together and uh yeah it was it was a fascinating time i mean special as well i mean like um i mean we were so in tune with with nature that would allow us you know six-year-old to go out in the bush and and pick berries and you know you know i can tell you countless stories when i almost got bitten by snakes and other wild animals and um but yeah it was fascinating i mean we had this massive uh pool um and basically what we had was it was basically like just think of someone just came and excavated and basically stuck concrete against the walls and then we had this canal so there's a river at the bottom and that this canal that kind of took water off the small stream and just before swimming class someone would run down and you know uh you know get the water coming into the pool um and then you know the first thing you just kind of fish out all the snakes you know every now and again you'd miss one because it drained and the water was brown and then literally everyone would levitate out of the pool and then fly out but uh it was fun times though it was it was a great time except for the water and the lions well maybe not at the time but when you think about it like well not many people have that as their childhood education and have you know go through that experience so what was the education like was it a religious based education because it was a missionary school or uh you know was it like attending a jesuit school or what was it what was it like it was yeah very strict christian brethren i mean we you woke up and you had to pray uh you know for uh 15 minutes and you know throughout the day basically you'd have um you know various sort of christian activities that you would do you'd have to um at one point i'd actually memorize i think half of the new testament so you you do things like that and they'll have challenges like that and you'd win win prizes um but yeah having said that it felt like it was you know a big family uh environment because actually you were stuck there for nine months of the year so the teachers were like your parents really and and uh you know you were there from when you were six or seven years old so it was you know um you actually saw them more than you saw your family so it was a very formative experience how big was the class size we must have had probably 15 to 20 kids maximum in each in each class and and do you still know them do you still hang out with them are they still around yes some of my best friends is still yeah from that year i mean some of them we went to two or three schools together and uh um and then that university role kind of went different ways but yeah we're still in touch okay so you were here until about 11 12 and then what happened next yeah so um yeah so after that um basically i had we had a choice of you could do the zambian um basically the grade seven exams which allow you to kind of go back into the zambian system or you could do uh basically the british curriculum but then you'd have to go to another british school and at the time um you know the options were that you could go to this other other missionary school but it was on the other side of zambia uh it was also a boarding school um or you'd have to go to the uk and i mean both of them were prohibitively expensive um and yeah luckily again um because i was got the best grades from basically when i entered school and left school the community came together and basically set up a fund for me to to go to this school so that i could yeah yeah carry on with with my education okay so uh now you were only 20 kilometers when you were seven to 11 at the boarding school so i imagine your parents would come see you all the time or and now suddenly you're now moving somewhere else so how did that work well actually my parents weren't allowed to come see me and require those quite strict protocol around that really despite them being so close um so yeah basically i'll see them uh we had like a what they called a half term so you'd like a a mini break which is just a couple of days so um i could go home sometimes during half term um but yeah most occasions i wouldn't see them for a couple of months and then see them for a day or two and then yeah that was like sometimes i actually didn't see my dad at all because he was on on doing his business and he was always traveling around and there was always drama somewhere so you know sometimes i'd come home and he was stuck uh on the other side of zambia doing his business and i'd have to go back to school and then he wasn't allowed to come see me so you know and those were the days without phones or you couldn't really communicate easily wow that that's that's really tough to go from growing up with your parents to not seeing them for two or three months at a time but i guess because you did that for four years you were better prepared to go somewhere else for an extended period of time so let's talk about that next school where exactly was it located yeah so the next school was in a small town in zambia called mukushi and it's basically the farming district in in zambia and um yeah so this was set up as a i guess for that farming community they had a lot of kids that needed a school and there wasn't any kind of good school in and around that area and there's also a very strong christian community in that area they decided to found this christian school so the first one i went became almost a feeder um the next one school this is okay and was the curriculum heavily focused on math and science or was it a theological curriculum what was the curriculum yeah that was a purely british system so they did the o levels a levels uh which you do in the uk as well so it was the same same curriculum okay but also yeah very very strict in in terms of um kind of the christian practices uh so were you like your father and a bit of a rebel and uh tried to find ways to get around the system or did you try to comply with it where where were you on this the the spectrum of good student to rebel we know you got good grades right but yeah well uh i'll say somewhere in the middle because i could get away with a lot my mom just cared about the grades so as long as i did well at school then she was willing to overlook um you know other things so yeah so i could get away with with a lot but yeah i would say only really at university that was really the first time we got exposed to kind of the outside world because i'd say till i was 16 17 you you know you kind of lived in this bubble which was your your school because of the body school and you'd be there for nine months of the year now did you sneak out or anything like that well not many places to go to because you had a couple of fields and you could go climb the hill and you could um well what we could do because this other good friend of mine where we had grown up together and gone through this first school together his his dad actually had a farm very close to this other school um so on weekends i was allowed to actually go and stay with him and then yeah that was kind of the fun time that we would have and misbehaviors as normal high school kids would okay and so on the farm side do they have horses and pigs and stand standard farm animals and things like that yeah meals it was a big commercial farm so they they grew a lot of crops and had a huge herd of cattle as well did you play with the cattle um not really that much i mean we were more into i mean he had a um a farm bike so you know we had a lot of fun with that you know waiting on track and riding around and uh you know we used to make some of our own local brew as well that we would at a young age thankfully we were not blind but [Laughter] [Music] you you figured out how to do moonshine reasonably all right okay so now now you're getting 16 17. you're starting to think about what's next and there's the family business there's the chance to do university there's a chance to go abroad and because you're part of the english system maybe go to london so what were the influences there as you you were looking to the next step of your life what what was really appealing to a 16 year old than al patel um well actually at that time my dad was like you can be one of two things so you can either be a doctor or computer scientist those those are your options so um yeah i didn't actually want to do either i wanted actually to uh to be an aerospace engineer and so i'd applied actually to study um aerospace engineering um in the uk and actually got into bath university to do that but it was just way too expensive to do that then i'd looked actually in um so i'm a big formula one fan so this is actually my way to try and get to formula one but and then i looked at south african universities that did that course but then it wasn't it was in port elizabeth which is a bit of a sleepy town so yeah so my options started to dwindle a little bit and then um actually because i was on the british system so i finished school in in june um and then the university actually only starts in february so i've gone with another friend south africa just to kind of check it out so my first time traveling there and um and so we did road trips and and we're trying to just finding ourselves so finally we were free so you know going to clubs and doing the things that teenagers do um and yeah kind of forgot to apply for university on time because we occupied doing other things and um yeah and luckily um the cape town university application program was still on so and you know i had the choice of electrical engineering or computer science so i just kind of applied for both i got both and initially started off actually with thinking that i was going to go and be more of an electrical engineer but um when i started the course it just yeah it didn't appeal to me as much it was more the software side it was like actually you can emulate all of that stuff in software so if you just give me a generic board i can do everything that you can do there and um yeah then ended up focusing on on computer science at cape town university so this is your first time going to south africa where did did you go to the bush where did you go i mean what was south africa like as a as this new universe i mean coming from you know the village and the rainforest i mean zambia has some towns and so on but like but yeah this was another scale i mean johannesburg is huge uh you know got a lot to offer uh you know we went did a road trip down to durban and um you know that that's also a lovely city very warm um and um you know spend some time down there so i actually didn't even go to cape town before um i started university i just kind of applied and everyone's like yeah cape town is the best place and it was really the right choice it was actually the best university and and actually the story gets better because um my so i walk into my first computer science uh um lecture and so i have to take you back now to to the high school in in in zambia um chingalo so um one of my maths teachers there so he came out uh for i think two semesters and um he was basically quoting uh this other girl that happened to be in the area and so he decided to come to zambia and and donate some of his time so he was running the computer science lab and teaching maths and he was actually the best teacher there there was everyone really loved him and we were all sad to see him leave kind of after two you know two terms and um so i didn't really hear from him after that and um and then i walk into this computer science lecture and and there he is so yeah it was um you know uh i don't know it's one of these things i guess it's god or whatever you want to call it right kind of just made this happen i've got no other way of explaining it really and um and so i had this person actually who could guide me through uh university and uh you know he won like best teacher awards he was by far the best lecturer at the university and um i had a personal connection with him because he had basically married um the niece of um my next door neighbor back in munilonga right so going back to actually where my mom and dad lived in zambia so it was you know fascinating to have such a mentor there for me uh you know through these years and you know and i think it was mainly because of him that i also developed this strong interest for computer science and decided to to sign up even for more computer science classes than than maths and other topics okay that's that's just incredible uh having this uh serendipity uh in in your life your dad and you um okay so you're in university at cape town you're an undergraduate in computer science you're starting to take these classes you're very engaged very interested there's obviously the applied way you can go graduate you go into industry get a job and then there's the academic route you go get a master's or a phd where were you at as you were traveling that did you always know that you wanted to go get a phd and or did you have this idea that maybe it takes some time off and get a job and work in industry and see where it goes um i was always keen to go work in industry to to be honest and i'd say it was more this professor that kind of guided me in in this direction i think was at the end of my honors degree which in zambia which in south africa is cafe after your fourth year of university um and you know at the time um he had a sabbatical in new zealand and i was like well i could do with uh you know having a great computer science student to come with me and help me with some research programs um uh so so yeah basically offered me an opportunity to travel with him for uh half a year and go to new zealand and do some research uh there with him and um yeah it was i think during that time in new zealand that um really fell in love with research and got to understand how that whole world works and we had you know some fascinating projects with with vodafone that they were sponsoring um and um yeah this lab also in new zealand was actually doing they were developing this um digital library um software um so it's called the it was actually open source software um the greenstone digital uh library uh suite and um so i learned a lot about that and my project was about making it mobile friendly so initially it was um just web-based and uh you know i was working with style sheets and just making it a bit more kind of friendly so it will look nice on on what did we have in those days those pocket pieces uh making it look good on there and where in new zealand was this north island or south island um it was the north island so in hamilton hamilton okay so that that's a bit of a culture shift to go from south africa and cape town all the way over to new zealand i mean first it was i ended up so well i ended up in this residence and it was basically for all the asian students um and i was kind of the one token african guy there and was yeah super fascinating you know everyone would cook for them skulls because it was a self-catering kind of residence and they're not there i was cooking my afghan food and everyone's fascinated what's this what are you cooking and uh but yeah i made some really good friends there and um yeah the time went so quickly i mean new zealand's so so beautiful i mean you could spend your time kind of traveling and um i think per square inch it's definitely the most beautiful place i've been to uh maybe actually norway competes to yeah norwegian but you see a lot of cool stuff i mean you drive for 15 minutes and you've got steam vents and mud boiling and you know volcano and black sand beaches and pristine blue lakes it's just yeah fascinating and did the other students keep you around to keep the snakes away because you've developed that point years ago i don't think there's anything there that can kill you so i felt pretty safe right which is so strange because they're next-door neighbor australia everything yes but everything else okay so you were there for about six months in new zealand uh and you're the professor that you went along with he went back to south africa to cape town or yeah so he went back and um so i'd kind of learned about this digital library software and one of my passion projects is actually about preserving african culture and it's um i'll tell you a bit more about that but so i actually just applied for grant uh to unesco saying i'm this at that time a master's student uh you know and said look i'm passionate about preserving african culture and there's a lot of it in these museums and it's you know it's rotting and you know no future generations won't have access to this so can we kind of work together with them to digitize these artifacts and tell the stories and make that available online so you know american universities can pay for it and um um yeah so i started using this digital library so i applied for that grant and i actually got the grant and then i was basically doing these uh capacity building uh training programs with universities and museums and national archives across uh africa so that was quite a fascinating time too so i got completely distracted from all my academic research and you know um started actually promoting this digital library um software in in africa what was the digital library software called uh greenstone i think it's still still around yeah okay and did you actually physically have to travel to the uh to the museums to archive it or did you do it remotely yes well i was doing more so the deal was that i'd do training programs or teach capacity builders or teach university students and lecturers how to use it and work together and they would work together with kind of local museums and help them customize the software for for for that museum or for the university wow but did you did you er that's kind of depressing did you didn't get to actually go to the museum itself and travel all throughout africa you know sometimes i would but most of the time i was kind of stuck in a room doing the training training program and then but it was fascinating all the same because you'd have you know all these um you know you'd get to do all the tourist stuff and then meet meet everyone after work after the training programs and socialize so let's talk about that that's kind of a nomadic era so where did you go in africa yeah so it was uh namibia zimbabwe um and actually the most fascinating time was in uh senegal in um in dhaka i think i told you that story before when when i was in a plane crash uh let's go there let's go there with the plane crash and senegal yeah so basically i was just doing um this this training program had flown out and were there for a week and actually um the guy that gave him giving me the grant or was leading this program in unesco decided to come out as well and just see the work and it was he was retiring so he just wanted this to be one of the last things that that he did to come and help out so we had a great week with all the capacity building i mean if you want to see a lot of african culture and history and yeah definitely go to to deca it's it's rich in culture um yes i was there for the week and then was heading back to university in south africa and um yeah it was the 6 6 a.m flight um so it flies i don't know if it's still there but it was flies from new york um stops off in dakar refuels picks up a few more people and then flies over to to johannesburg um and um yeah so everything was normal you know go through check-in passport control you know half the people on the plane were still sleeping so he managed to find a seat sit down um and then you know taxi and we were just all sitting on the wing actually and we were just taking off and um i remember this so vividly i just remember hearing a bang and then the next thing everything went in slow motion and my life flashed past me all that stuff that people say is true and uh you know and there's literally this huge fire ball um that i saw it just really just light up all all the windows and the whole plane just started you know kind of doing that type of motion everyone was screaming you know there was this was keeping praise for his praise and um we must have been like 20 feet up and and you know probably like about 10-15 seconds later we crash landed at the end of the runway the plane was spinning came to a halt um you know the slides came down and we slid down and then um you know came came running out and um yeah and then we looked through you know i looked back at the plane and basically three of the engines that completely collapsed and um and everyone was wondering though the pilot had lost his voice uh completely and um and yeah basically what happened was um you know that time of year you know a lot of birds migrate from europe to africa and yeah they didn't have any predators to chase any of the birds in senegal or was too cold that morning i'm not sure what happened but basically yeah the plane flew through a flock of birds and three engines disintegrated it's just uh unreal that um you know birds can have that impact on on a plane and uh thankfully um yeah no one was killed um i think there's one lady who took off her seatbelt and she was flung up around a bit but besides that you know everyone everyone was fine and yeah and then we had to stay in a hotel without any electricity or water and you know i remember just going to the bar getting a bottle of whiskey and drank that whole thing and just didn't have zero effect zero effect it might have also been bootleg whiskey i don't know you're like so how you doing i had a day wow wow how how big what was it like a boeing 737 or what type of plane yeah seven four seven seven four seven seven forty seven so that's a big plane yeah yeah wow oh my gosh that's that's terrifying so how long was it before you flew again well that's where the story gets better right because then um so i flew back to south africa and i was there for like two months and uh um i had to go and present a paper in glasgow um and um so yeah just um yeah thankfully those days they pay for your flights and everything so took the flight and they were coming into glasgow and uh you know i was terrified of flying literally i was counting the minutes and um holding my seaters were coming down like okay five more minutes to go three more minutes to go and i look outside and there's still clouds two more minutes to go one more minute to go look outside and there's still clouds everywhere 30 seconds to go i'm like okay we should we should have kind of broken through there's something wrong here uh 20 seconds to go there's still clouds and we literally broke through and then the next thing i saw was water and i just shrieked like a girl because i i i thought we're landing on a lake i was like what's the chance of this and everyone around what's wrong with this guy put an african on a plane and look what happened and um literally the the air the airport was waterlogged so but i just thought we were landing on a lake because you couldn't see anything literally broke through the clouds you didn't have time to kind of mentally prepare i just saw water everywhere i had just screamed but yeah thankfully we touched down and everything was it was fine but uh yeah i i i fly easier now but yeah it's it's taken taking a while yeah i was going to say i feel terrible about having you fly out to colorado now okay so uh so you you had this interesting experience in senegal and and despite that you're still traveling all around you're you're archiving all these artifacts and what was your master's thesis on what were you doing research in was it in this area or were you interested in a different topic um yeah so it was basically looking at um different ways of navigating content on resource constrained devices so those were the days when um i mean you had those pocket pcs it was you know really hard to kind of browse any content because it was structured um for more desktop type screens and we were wondering okay if you start to look at content on these what type of interaction techniques naturally lend themselves for these type of devices and then we started looking at kind of new uh interaction techniques so if you're browsing maps or photos or different types of documents you know what type of interaction techniques naturally lend themselves so it was quite fun we got to invent like you know uh zoomable interfaces squeezable interfaces no tilt using tilt to navigate and then um testing that against different type different document types and this was in the mid 90s or when was this just trying to understand how this would have been in 2004 oh okay so this was this was a little bit later all right so so you you already had a blackberry and a palm pilot in these types of devices as a reference yes yes yes okay um but yeah still it took like to kind of make these things work yet to kind of build a graphics library from the ground up and do a lot of stuff in assembly to kind of make it work smoothly so you know a lot of the computer science work was around that just you know optimizing different algorithms so that it you know you have kind of a fluid interaction um so you know to the end user it just feels natural and i mean today you have this on your in your iphone now you know you've got uh you can easily zoom zoom and this was the precursor for for a lot of that research and um yeah and and actually you know if we fast forward like six or seven years later um um you know i had uh a bunch of samsung lawyers actually um call me actually they sent an email saying like uh would like um you know to understand more about your phd research and uh um you know we've got this case in the us and uh you know would you would you mind if we fly over and ask you a few questions and you know it's like okay well why not and there's no we're willing to pay you as well and it's like oh well that day rate is amazing so of course come over i'm happy to do this and you know we spent a lot of time kind of going back and forth and explained the the phd research and i found out afterwards that um there were basically you know was one of the cases with with apple basically between samsung and apple they were trying to feel that you had prior art before yes that was exactly it and it just happened that some guy in africa had done it before apple had it and uh yeah then they were able to kind of dismiss part of the case but i'll claim more than that for the african culture that's great you beat steve jobs the punch so all right so where'd you do your phd was it also cape town that you wrote your dissertation yeah it was it was in cape town um but it was a an arrangement with three universities so i got um basically three supervisors one was in new zealand at the university that i was and then the other was in wales in swansea and all of them were actually specialists in this area and i decided to to work with all three of them i mean the actual phd itself is from the university of cape town but it actually collaborated with uh university of waikato in new zealand and swansea and wales and a lot of the you know peer-reviewed research papers of from the three three universities okay so after you finish you you're actually fortuitously finished at a really good time right when the iphone's coming out all these interfaces are coming out so you were probably a hot commodity on the market so what what happened next it was quite quite interesting because like i've done this research and basically um nokia was interested in it and they wanted to have a discussion around you know could we license this um and then the the google actually picasa team because we've shown uh that to uh scott jensen who was um working for for google at the time here so he was there kind of head of ux at the time so and he he was really interested in having me over there as well to um to see if i could build this into like picasso uh um photo um software um and then so then we decided um to see if we could set up a company basically to to kind of develop this and then license this to uh to to to these kind of interested parties uh but then the universities couldn't agree on on the ip which was the funny part and took each other to court and uh we lost the window of opportunity and uh you know it's a sad story but uh um yeah i think we could have done done a lot with it and it's unfortunately something i had to to let go and um and it was just really after that i was kind of disillusioned with all of that and i thought well i just kind of need a break from academia and um and actually got a call from a hedge fund in in the u.s and um um and they owned basically uh a content business and a mobile phone distributor and uh and and it was the time when kind of wallpapers and ringtones were getting a bit old and they were wondering about kind of what's the next innovation and uh you know what what new services can we uh can we build and and so on and um yeah they decided to bring me on board to kind of help them uh with that to think about but what new um services might be able to kind of launch and it was quite an interesting setup they had um you know kind of the tier two carriers in the in the us in the caribbean uh some of the tier ones in in canada um and um yeah so i got to kind of scout dif work with lots of different startups and to scout kind of new new services that we could bundle on on these phones for these carriers so we were doing um you know groupon before groupon school and um you know instant messaging uh before you know um skype or whatsapp was cool but i think it was just too early so we weren't really uh i mean most of that came kind of three or four years later when the computing platform and data costs were kind of at the right price point so and at the time we were dealing with uh java i don't know j2me i don't if you remember that and it was just a nightmare to get software working across our phones in a consistent way and um but yeah we tried it and uh but i think that the best work i did there was um actually on on on the other side of the company which was um uh the distributor so they would get buy these end-of-life phones um and they'll need to then um so most of them you didn't get any support from samsung or some of the part uh the manufacturers anymore and then they had to rework them so i'd kind of reverse engineer the firmware so that you could put in um you know wallpapers and new ringtones for the carriers and so that was quite fun kind of downloading that firmware i'm trying to figure out you know doing a lot of um content were you doing the solo or did they give you a team uh um initially i started doing that by myself and then i found another fellow hacker in the uk who was actually doing it for more hardware uh based approach and we decided to work together and we basically developed this little clip where you could plug like six or seven phones and you press a button and reflash them in like seven seconds and then you know dude go down the assembly line but that i mean normally it would take them like 10 to 20 minutes to flash your phone so just the productivity gains that they got in that just made them millions um yeah so and um yeah that's when yeah i was trying to figure out okay what do i do next and um yeah at that point in time um i had actually gotten married uh it was over to my uh high school uh oh actually university sweetheart um from when you were down at cape town in cape town yeah in the us and we got stuck in in the green card application issues and you know i had my own my green card and she couldn't come on mine and it was and then it was just easier to leave the us so hang on hang on so your wife was an international student from the united states in cape town or let's let's go there she was german she was german german yeah yeah yeah okay she was a german student at uh cape town so she was born in her undergraduate at cape town yeah so we would met there and then got married in the us and then um yeah just the whole visa thing didn't really work out and then um then we decided just to leave the us it was just easier to go and um just to a new start completely uh in in germany um and then it was yeah it was quite quite interesting actually that relationship didn't last unfortunately because when we got back to germany she realized that she didn't actually want to be in germany and she wanted to be back in africa and i was like i just got to germany and i just got to learn the language and i you know just managed to get i find the only telecom that allows you to speak english which was vodafone at the time and um you know was fascinating projects there as well and you know she she was in the development aid field so she wanted to go in deep dark congo and run these pilots and programs so our lives were just in different phases at that time that's just so incredible that the the african guy like no i want to stay in germany and you you literally grew up right next to the country that she wanted to aid in and she went back yes so she ended up actually a mozambique and been doing like great work there for bill and melinda gates foundation and others doing all these phenomenal studies um yeah and then i ended up kind of in the first world so we actually crossed paths yeah well it was good for the time so you're you're in germany now where whereabouts in germany was in munich or hamburg or frankfurt or what city were you in yeah we went around quite a bit so we started off in berlin uh one of my favorite cities i i absolutely love love berlin that's so berlin and cape town are my two spots in the world um so we started there and then uh went to hamburg and then um yeah in dusseldorf so yeah spent probably the most time in in dusseldorf wherever the phone were okay and so what was vodafone like so you were you were working at this hedge fund you were working at uh you know in the academic world you've done artifact archiving so you've had a very diverse life uh then suddenly you're at this big company vodafone was this the first large company that you'd work for um yeah it means the stinthouse actually did some work as well for microsoft research it was like an internship but an extended internship um yeah so then with vodafone it was quite fascinating i mean it was the the group company and uh they owned um i think at the time was about 40 operators around the world uh so many across europe some voter.com in um in africa who also have their own satellite companies uh you know they also had a big stake in in verizon uh in in the u.s um so yeah it was it was quite fascinating so we got to basically develop products for uh then group com within the group company but for all these uh satellite companies so the first project i did there was um technology road mapping so i was looking at kind of marketing and technology trends uh you know what's coming up in the industry for the next five years and really putting kind of positioning statements for the ceos and all these satellite companies that would have a handbook so if someone comes to them and says what's our strategy on battery or what's our strategy antennas or uh whatever cellular technology um they would have kind of the company line around that so and it was quite a nice document that they would kind of give out to show thought leadership um so initially started on that and then moved into their what they call the kind of the terminal business which was uh the business that would develop basically handsets um cpe devices uh um among other things um so it was quite a fun unit i mean we had basically everything in-house to design our own handsets would work with a lot of chinese manufacturers to actually make them um and then you know customize them for these 40 markets so hugely complex trying to get you know a portfolio of 20 phones agreed uh with all these different markets um you know because they've all got different needs and different price points that they need to hit and um so just getting to rationalize that portfolio and the negotiations that went into it um but yeah it was it was super fascinating so some we would make our own sort of before the phone uh branded or fulfill made others you know were from other manufacturers and would also build services on them so there's a suite of vodafone services that would put on these devices so you know we uh vodafone 360 you know that was um yeah it was vodafone trying to get into social networking i think they got in a bit early as well but um you know we're looking at doing something quite innovative there um i think my most fascinating years were actually the last five years of vodafone when i moved from that terminal business to the iot uh business and um so then i was i was working in in their commercial strategy uh team um and you know we got to think about what you know what are kind of future propositions for for the telecom industry you know minutes and dates kind of getting old and what does the future of telecom look like and yeah that was really fascinating for me because we really got to think about okay where's the car industry going in terms of connected cars the drone use case was was a great one because we're looking for you know what use cases could we have to drive a rollout of 5g you know you needed a use case that was data hungry low latency um and drones was just the perfect use case but so we're trying to kind of lobby the european union and work with others to to see if we could get a sim card mandated you know in in in the drone so we could bring telecom propositions to the industry and work with the gsma around that and um so that was fascinating time um and it was actually quite collaborative as well so we got basically all the telecom operators because everyone was trying to jointly work together to create this future market so um you know to work with them um to kind of craft this and one of the other areas we're looking at was also the esim so this reprogrammable sim um and uh yeah we did one of the first products there with amazon on uh it was actually the i think the the first implementation of vsim um and being able to kind of program your sim over the air and you know be able to select your telecom operator over the air and switch um so we did that with the kindle fire product so that was quite innovative and being able to buy like a bundle with one click it sounds silly now but it was super complex systems to actually make that work um and um yeah and then looking at just different so the core of what we're developing was this managed connectivity platform uh and uh you know that platform basically aggregated data from uh you know different bearers so you know you had your 3gpp technologies your 2g 3g 4g you had wi-fi you had satellite and you needed to kind of harmonize access to all this connectivity and you know make sure that you could build bill and you know provide value-added services so that was kind of the core product um and um and then we got to build on that different um you know vertical propositions so would partner and and develop you know specific products for um healthcare industry or the transport industry um and and and some we got to build internally um actually so view and when you get to speak to him you'll be able to talk about one of the products that we worked on together which was this internet in the car um bmw right yeah so with daimler and bmw um so enabling consumers to kind of have wi-fi in the car but then also on the b2b side use that connectivity for telematics and you know have that so that the manufacturers had real-time data and and they could create new innovative business models as well so we evolved that product and had a lot of interest actually we rebranded that for other partner organizations um as well yeah so that was fascinating and actually the other one of the projects that i was looking at was um big data as well and looking at uh you know what's kind of the telecom role in this space i mean iot has massive amounts of data and you know how could telecoms uh leverage that and how do they kind of position themselves almost as like the visa of iot you know so every transaction that goes through the network they they get they get the cut and that was looking at you know how do you know who who owns the data what rights associated with that data how can you kind of monetize that data and um and i was looking around i mean we assessed kind of the platforms we had definitely we didn't have the infrastructure to be able to kind of do that use case we looked around the industry and and um there really wasn't anything there and what was that was it hadoop out yet or was this right around that time that was coming yeah i think that hadn't come out yet at that time yeah and um yeah and that's my curiosity for blockchain basically i think i found some papers around that and that's what got me interested and then i think around that time was 2017 with the whole hype around blockchains and and i happened to find a company that was promoting themselves as kind of the the internet of blockchains uh which was uh one chain actually um and um yeah ironically they're very much uh like ioh ihk iog in that they they're also very research based so they get like the best cryptographers and phd students from peking university uh and you know they they come in and build out the tech and um so they're very research driven i mean they were able to kind of turn stuff around really quickly and and the students would also be part of kind of implementing the the code so initially i just came on as a just it's i'm just fascinated by blockchain i just want to come on and and be useful and just bring my expertise in product and so i can help what part of blockchain was most fascinating to you i mean everybody comes from a different perspective was it the houston utility or was it a philosophical thing what did you really like about blockchain technology when you first discovered it well for me it was always about uh kind of this democratizing kind of access to things because i'd kind of grown up uh in an area where even coming from zambia you never had access to many of the services that you know everyone else in developing markets had access to and um and you know even i mean even things like bank accounts and and uh getting a phone basic services were really hard just even in zambia to access yet alone i guess when the internet came and all these other things i mean first the data was way too expensive so you couldn't afford to spend enough that time there and and i think for me it was more this suddenly you had this uh platform where um you know anybody could begin to access this and it was in in a more kind of democratic way uh so i think that's what fascinated me and um and then you know that read um uh some some research about like you know the potential for it in with financial inclusion and i think a lot of that messaging really resonated uh well with me um and you know when i went to wan chain again it was initially just to kind of help out and um and you know i just got sucked into it it was just like i've always been hungry for knowledge so i've always had that personality so you throw me in an area i'll just dig dig dig uh suck it all up and and um so it wasn't long before i kind of got on top of it and then started to to to help them also on the product side and they they you know they were looking at trade finance and that was a use case that that fascinated me as well and what was it like working for a chinese company so you go from the bureaucracy of msr you work for some of the small guys the hedge funds now you're in germany you're speaking german and then suddenly you're now working for the chinese company uh so were you the the only german african guy there or what what was the team well we actually started off with um an american uh ceo that was running the company at the time right and so we had a very western mindset to to begin with and um you know very entrepreneurial um the founder jack lew who's actually also behind factom um so he's been in the space for a while he's just he just had a successful project and he was looking to solve the blockchain interoperability problem and so you know you've got the peaking university guys come up with this white paper and they've done a decent job kind of defining it and um but what we found was that it was um yeah it was would develop strategies but was really hard to to execute any initiative that came from kind of the west uh because with the engineering was all in in china um so would kind of develop it and get it to a point and then we were never able to really kind of get it implemented and the things that seemed to get more traction were uh things that kind of were more embryonic from the china side that were then kind of making it into the rest of the world so um i think that was the way that we found those most productive to to to kind of work so what was that culture like uh you know it wasn't that there were silos and there was the western guys and the chinese the chinese would speak chinese and the western guys were speaking english how did that actually work in practice with everybody mixing yeah it was just a big information gap so like you know you would dream up all these things that we could do all these use cases we could work on have the partners and then you might just get like one word answers back yes no but we explained this and and most of the the team didn't speak english for example most of the engineers so it took some time to actually get people in place that could help translate um and um and actually actually when it started working well was when the team started to blend a little bit more and i was able to travel there even and meet the team and build some of those relationships was that the first time in china um it was actually the second time the second time i've been to china i'd actually traveled there just was with a group of friends before um but yeah it was also interesting to kind of see the work ethic i mean uh my counterparts there would you know would work easily in 12 14 hour days and then that was just accepted and i guess they were also part of this new thing so they were just driven by it as well okay so you're at one chain for how long um yeah that's a good question i think about a year year and about a year year and a half because i wasn't kind of formally on because initially i was just helping out and then later i started actually just to to work with the product teams there and help them to to to kind of evolve the proposition and then they had basically an enterprise proposition and also their public blockchain and they were getting a lot of traction actually on the on the enterprise side um so um and the public blockchain yeah we that leveraged a lot of things from ethereum and added their um their bridging technologies to lock up assets in other blockchains and bring them onto one chain and the idea was to have these private smart contracts as well on their platform but we were still kind of building out that that deck at the time and then comes iwitch hey we poached you yes yes yes yes so how did that happen um don't remember the exact sequence of events so i'd met um i think it was chris cleverly in in um in cape town uh it was actually through a mutual friend andre cronier who was actually a big shot in the d5 industry and he's based in cape town and we were having breakfast and chris just happened to walk past actually he's like um and then we just sat down and introduced each other and then i think it was a couple weeks later um we bumped into each other again and uh i was telling him yeah i'm looking for kind of new challenges and new new opportunities and he happened to know diane at the time so uh she was leading uh i think the commercial area in iug at the time and um and then he was trying to kind of work a deal with her and they said i have the guy who's going to help you and this is the guy you guys need to hire and uh so so um so he actually made the intro to diana and then she recommended me internally and then yeah i mean the process kicked off there i think i had like 10 interviews i think i must have broken the record we just kept passing you around we're like yeah this person i i think i also interviewed you as well yeah i got you at the airport i think you were just in between flights and uh yeah we managed to have a chat yeah gosh that was uh it feels like it was so long ago but um it really wasn't uh you know all things considered just so so much passes okay so you come on board iohk and uh i believe we hired you originally for the atala project you were replacing bruno um that's that's where we first put you yeah that was it it was just around the summit that we we had in my miami so i'd come out and met the team and just get a feel of of the company and um and yeah at the time we did kind of a soft soft launch for fortala at the time um you know was being positioned as um as more kind of a hyper ledger competitor but i think bruno had actually the vision already at that time which was really you know bitcoins there for value we need to do something for data and managing data and um so he didn't i don't know if it was him or carlos had coined the term uh to do for money what what what to do for was if to look for data what bitcoin does for money right so that was kind of the the tagline that they had at the conference um yeah so really that was my entry into iohk and then you know one of the first things that we did actually was then just a competitor analysis just to look at uh where we were at that point in time versus hyper ledger quorum and so you know some of the other permission chains that were out there and i think at the time uh we then felt you know just to catch up and and then differentiate beyond then it would take us quite a lot of time and a lot of effort and actually the cardano nodes were actually also going to work in a permission mode so we were probably better off waiting for that tech to kind of be ready and then building our permissioned offering around you know tech that was coming out of cardano that we could reuse so then we started to look at actually if we're looking at solving the data problem how do we go about doing that and and and that's when we started kind of looking at you know where's the identity market today and looking at you know some of the problems that um that you have with i mean at that point in time i guess federated identity is what most people know so log in with google login with facebook or with apple uh but we saw the consequences of that with cambridge analytica and so on where you you entrust your data and all these interaction digital interactions you have with with a third party and you know they can abuse that and you don't even know that that's happening behind the scenes and um and then we started looking at okay what's happening in the industry and uh there's definitely traction happening uh within the w3c about this concept of self-sovereign identity and um yeah that's when i imagine started to kind of immerse myself in that and we just understood it and figured out actually this is the direction that we should be going in because um you know one it leverages kind of the the properties of of the blockchain to provide basically a more secure more customer-centric uh form of identity with privacy built in by design and you know and it's beyond identity it can also give it's a robust framework for how people can actually manage their data as well so it was kind of continuing this vision that bruno and carlos and others had and kind of bring it into a new paradigm that was more future proof more standardized and we looked at it and we thought okay maybe should we just start because those hyperledger india at the time and they were already experimenting with some of these concepts and and and we looked at it um and um you know initially we thought should we just contribute to that and build up on top of it um and we didn't think that they were architected well enough to kind of scale and you know because our premise was like any piece of data any iot device should be able to have an identity and we should be able to deal with you know billions of things and and that's when we uh started to consider kind of building our own protocol and at that time actually microsoft came up with a white paper around side tree so they were also thinking about similar things and they beat us to it um but they thought about it just from the did perspective um not really considering verifiable credentials as part of that so what we did was really take that as a starting point because it it had many of the elements we needed we added verifiable credentials to that protocol so you could have dids and then be able to kind of issue claims about those dids and we actually then worked on several versions of that protocol the first was a layer two and the latest one is actually quite tightly coupled with with cardano because what we saw with um the microsoft protocol was that you you run into issues around data availability right um because you know some of your data stored um either in ipfs or in another permission blockchain and if that's not available then you can't really do much with it so there were late published attacks and and various things so so we were able to kind of actually ziko did a phenomenal job um around the protocol design so we're able to kind of eliminate uh all those kind of attack vectors and have something that could leverage cardano's properties and the metadata field to to do this so we didn't need this other layer that the competitors had around this content addressable storage so hang on so so one of the really cool things that's that this this dialogue is showing is how product evolution happens so when you entered atala it was a permission blockchain kind of again to a fabric competitor and the idea was okay well there's all this stuff going on in permission blockchain let's go do some stuff there and figure it out now meanwhile duncan because he's just such a brilliant architect he's a brilliant engineer he was oh yeah permission blockchain is super easy we'll just make it a flag you have a permission mode of cardano and a permissionless mode of cardano and you're like okay if that's the case maybe we shouldn't go full into that because you guys are doing that over there but then you know hyper ledger's thinking about identity the whole industry is thinking about identity all the people are working and you say hang on a second here identity is the core of all of this and we should probably do something there and they said well they're doing it at the w3c they have did menu sporney and chris allen they've been working on it forever let's go do something there and we say initially let's go borrow something so we look at hyperledger indeed we borrow that and say oh it's not quite fit for purpose and then suddenly microsoft has side trees and there's this ion product they have oh well there's some good ideas there but then because you guys had the blockchain experience and because you guys have been kind of playing around all these different pawns you realize that there needed to be tighter coupling for data availability and verifiability so you say well actually let's go it alone but let's do so with all the wisdom of the entire industry now there's no way that anybody could have taken a step back and oh yeah this is exactly what we're going to do it was more you had to go down this serpentine winding road to get to this end point but now we actually have a beautiful product that can scale and service the needs of millions of people and that's prism so let's let's talk about prism let's talk about the actual commercial deployment of prism because that's just so damn exciting you know a real blockchain based product for real people not thousands but actually millions you know how did we get there what's what's happening next with that yeah so we actually in december um last year we had a major milestone at that point so we were able to have we had everything in working end to end so when people see prism they think of it just as kind of an app that you download from the app store but there's many services behind that to actually make it look that simple and so we had this infrastructure working end-to-end uh plugging into the cardinal test net so that was kind of the major milestone and um the what the team has been focusing on is uh now kind of all the non-functional stuff so um you know now let's let's do scalability testing and make sure that this thing really scales to to to handle millions of users um let's do security testing and uh you know making sure we're going to do those audits and also look at you know privacy as well and make sure that uh you know certain databases that we have and the architecture doesn't compromise the kind of key principles so we've been and also on the user experience side so we've been making sure that uh we're optimizing this as as much as possible to make it seamless not just the user side but also the developer side so we've been thinking about all these components we've built and also think about okay how do how can third parties also start to leverage uh the the prism platform and um so we've created this um sdk and in kotlin um that um that will be releasing soon and would love to get you know a lot of feedback on this but really people are going to be able to develop using the whatever language that they want and they don't need to really know about the underlying platform they can use javascript they can use scotland they can use scala and you know we've got different components using elements of this we've got a browser wallet that's very scalar developed independent we've got the mobile apps we've got uh the management console which is browser-based as well so we're basically dog fooding uh internally just to showcase that actually you can use this sdk and you can build this um you know great experience um and um so the next step really um is we we've actually got a stable release of it and we're playing around with that internally so our professional service team is is playing around with this and uh you know some of the initial clients uh that um will be announcing soon um you know um very soon yeah and um you know so they're basically testing it out to make sure that we can meet all these requirements that the clients have and and looking for any bespoke features that we'll need to to support for specific clients um the other thing is we've got um some system integration partners that we want to work with initially that you know they've got their own clients and their own user base and they're looking for an identity platform so work with them so that you know they can go and serve their customer base but we want to do this kind of in a in a structured way so we've been really released it internally releasing this to a small group of system integrators that can give us this feedback um would love to do something like the plutus pioneer program for for prism so uh work with maybe our education team to talk about how to build applications we've actually got a tutorial already around this but to allow people to figure out how to build on top of prism and then do hackathons so people can uh can easily create their their own services on top we've had so much interest from people that want to build on on on top of prism so what we're thinking about as well is how can we make this as seamless as possible so that you know this infrastructure is hosted in the cloud so that people can spin up an instance easily and and not have to worry about how do they run all these components but just focus on building their um their solution on top of prism so that's what the team is focused on and over the course of this year we'll we'll basically be rolling this out uh okay so you know here with the ceo of the company prison pioneers when should we do it uh you know july august uh when does the plutus pioneers program come down i know it's ten weeks but i can't remember where it ends um yeah they've still got like i think another month or so to go so um yeah i mean i would love that we can do this in the july time frame okay uh august time frame so uh yeah i hope i mean to be honest we've got the the the documentation there so we just need to work with our education team to make some nice courses um so that's gonna take a couple months to to make it a little bit more digestible and have maybe a few case studies that people going through the program can can go through um and then yeah why not um then sign up as many people um around the world um another thing that we want to explore as well is if we can work a little bit like how google and microsoft um kind of get startups to work with their technology so we can maybe work with some vc companies where they work with some startups and say you know we'll give you access to prism and give you you know all these tools and go and build wonderful uh solutions on top and you know will give you kind of hosting credits or whatever it is so that they don't need to worry about that that they can just worry about building their specific solution yeah so it's all right it september 1st we're doing prison pioneers there we go let's do it all right we're going to figure it out um taking a step back identity is i would argue as or more important than the money component so we started the cryptocurrency space with bitcoin so everybody got very token and money focused but identity in blockchain is also an insanely important part because you have to know who people are to do business with people you have to know who's credible who's not credible is someone qualified to do this someone illegally allowed to do this uh and in traditional legacy systems we have kyc we have aml we have credit scores we have reputation we have this notion of counterparty you know if your counterparty is a business versus an individual and how to treat those counterparties based upon their identity and this is lacking right now in the cryptocurrency space and what we've been trying with the prism program has been a first principles approach a reinvention of this concept and saying instead of having it controlled by a top-down curation one actor and said bob gets to decide who's who it's bottom-up but the problem when you do anything bottom-up is all the old stuff all the old protocols they don't map one to one as certain problems become exacerbated like for example revocation uh and uh you know what do you do when you lose an identity or identity is compromised when you have bob you go to bob and be like bob i lost my credential oh okay here's another card thank you uh but when there's no bob anymore you know that's an issue and then you also have this issue of privacy and what level of privacy and uh and also portability how do you move these credentials from one system to another system because it's clear there's not going to be one system to control them all so in many ways this was one of our most complex products which is why we felt so comfortable with you know you doing that product but the other way this is a necessary product for us to actually pursue the mission of the company when we say we're going after economic identity we want people to actually have one marketplace we want everybody to have equal access and it's not good enough just to give them a token or a phone or something to connect if they're actually going to participate in global congress they have to have an identity that is as recognized in america as it is in zambia as it is in china as it is in germany so it's a great unifier in a service so let's go to the next thing so there's prism but recently you've become the chief product officer of input output so what the hell is a chief product officer what do you do yeah so do less things well which is what i'm trying to focus on uh at the moment and but i i think at the core it's just to go back and understand who are we solving this for right so for me i guess coming from africa um the the i mean cardano addresses many stakeholders but the one i'm most passionate about is is the subsistence farmer um mainly because if you look at the unbanked segment um the the majority of people that are unbanked uh are subsistence farmers and they're doing that because that's how they basically able to take care of themselves and and you know what i'm passionate about is you know how can our technology uh really you know help this stakeholder who might not be literate uh who might have you know poor access to uh connectivity or little or no electricity um you know so so how how can this technology you know help this person so that you know they can help their kids and their family make sure that they're educated and actually just bottom up help uplift the the community i think in many ways my life is demonstrates what happens when you can invest in education and invest in a person and um and really shouldn't take a whole community to kind of get just one person educated we should find a way to kind of make it a lot easier and what i'd like is really to give the subsistence pharma really the tools so that uh you know they they can find economic freedom so they can you know access loans um so that you know they can get inputs for for um for their farms um that uh you know in many of these areas there's uh droughts and uh you know global warming is impacting them so you know can they get um you know insurance at a cost effective level that uh protects them um you know from that as well um can they access actually marketplaces where they can maybe even sell the goods even before they've planted them and with ford contracts and and so on so what i would like us to do is really kind of fixate um understand really deeply the problem that subsistence farmers face look understand look look at the current solutions in the market and look at how cardano can can solve those in a way that's kind of 10 times better than what they currently have and i i think we have all the ingredients um so typically in the cardana community we're talking about eras of you know gogan voltaire basho um these are kind of the lego bricks that are providing really the enabling infrastructure so with pluto's coming now we can create decentralized versions of many businesses that exist in the local market but uh enable kind of democratize access to them so you can create new uh lending businesses new insurance businesses that these people are able to to access uh you know right now they can get lending but from a loan shark at you know with a crazy interest rate that they can't really pay back and you know can we create more fair systems um um and um you know right now i think drought insurance very few people are able to to access that even if you look at kind of ethiopia in terms of uh the loans people are able to access in the market there you know only i think it was like about five or six percent were able to kind of get the capital so what happens when you kind of open that up and and um you you create a platform that kind of de-risks this um so that institutional money can come in and we can help the whole the whole nation and um i think one of the interesting things that a lot of people forget the typical thing our unbanked is charity uh and so on but it's not really charity i mean if you look at kiva.org the repayment rates for the unbanked uh just as high if not better than the bank segment so um i actually get paid almost all of them pay back yeah and if we can provide really the infrastructure that de-risks this so that um you know institutional players feel confident enough that the frameworks are in place for their their money to come in and they can collect a return and we can work together with governments and other oversight committees around how that money is managed and how it flows but i think that's what we need to kind of do and make sure that our technology roadmap is incrementally delivering towards that vision so for me as cpo that's what i want to deliver is really our core vision and mandate as a company but make sure that you know as we kind of build up these eras we don't forget about our key stakeholder that we can make sure this technology is really applicable for them but of course there are other stakeholders as well and make sure that uh we address their needs as well but the key thing is if we make it work for this unbanked user who's illiterate who's in a place where there's poor connectivity um you know you know then our technology can scale and really work everywhere and i think that's our premise and that's also part of the reason where we're starting in africa yeah it's it's just a beautiful competitive advantage because if you can get it to work at that level and at that scale it's probably going to be the most resilient and cheapest option for the developed world uh and so that's it so it's like designing something to work in space it's such a harsh environment it's probably pretty easy to work anywhere else so it's nice it's nice to have that but one of the things people understand is africa is not a monolith as you're aware it's many many different cultures and many many different countries and there's a world of difference from chad to zambia to south africa and so forth so each and every one of these markets has uh very different dynamics dude i had to learn this hard way just doing business in ethiopia it was it was one of those markets like we're a very old country uh you know we've been around since christianity was born and since before we do things our way and you guys just have to accept that okay uh so you know took a few years we we we we took a um a more relaxed pace but we got it done uh so let's talk about 2022 and when we look at aligning the product portfolio what type of experiments would you like to see across all of africa and what particular different zones do you think we could do some cool and interesting some fascinating things then yeah so so the next kind of lego brick i mean we've got prism so that's the basic identity framework uh and i think where we want to get to is kind of initially giving the the subsistence farmer access to these loans that are competitive equitable and so on i think the missing bit in between is actually creating this framework or this platform where um they can kind of de-risk this for the institutional players and and what does that mean it's really about uh looking at how we can do credit ratings uh and and enable that and um so we there's really two two ideas that that we want to explore uh one of them um is you know there's a lot of telecom operators that that are interested in working with us and and you know they're sitting on um a host of data and one of the things that we can do is look at uh ai based credit scoring so um when someone has a prepaid account how frequently they top up and you know how much and so on can tell you a little bit about how liquid they are and that might be a already a good basis to form a credit score that we can use as a base the other approach which is actually my preferred approach is you know prism is quite an open uh data sharing platform so what we're doing really is enabling um governments to be able to issue an additional identity for for financial access and what we're doing is you know once the government is able to issue this id prism is open in that it allows you know other ecosystem players to connect to that same installation and say something more about about that identity so um you know right now what you have a lot lots of siloed um you know microlending institutions community banks uh cooperatives that are lending things most of them are just writing it in a log book or in databases that are kind of ring fenced so just creating a more open platform that allows basically all these existing players to plug in and be able to to to provide basically this financial history as well so uh the lady who's been going to the local cooperative and got her farming inputs and maybe even sold back certainly that data exists somewhere and you know she might have been a great farmer for 10 years but there's no record of that but now we're actually providing a way where the cooperative can write this and she can now have this information and be able to present that to to her bank and we can expand that out and actually um if we do a good enough job it actually helps the small micro lender as well because now they know how risky uh an individual is and maybe they might lower their their rates um so uh actually we're not even the first to to think of this um kiva is starting to explore uh this idea in in sierra leone so they're as part of the kiva protocol they started working with the government there to see if this is a model that will that can work in in that particular market and one of the key things that we need to address as well as coming back to the unbanked farmer is you know a lot of them don't have the smartphone they don't have data they don't have electricity you know so our current solution is smartphone based so you know how do we kind of democratize our technology further um so that um you know people can maybe interface with our systems using their their biometrics so as we work together with governments and the onboard users uh the government can be a trusted party to capture that or ngos can be a trusted party to capture that and then what happens is within this system we can have prism work in a mode where you have uh initially a data custodian so a trusted party who hosts the data on on behalf of of the user and um and and then the user actually just needs to go to points of interaction so they can go to their local shopkeeper who probably has internet access uh the the local bank and uh the micro lender who've got some infrastructure around them they authenticate themselves using biometrics and then this credit history is basically pulled from the secure personal data faults as hosted by this data custodian and then at that point the bank can leverage that data and make a decision on whether or not they can lend to this um individual and if they do then all the repayment history goes back into this platform again so over time you build a richer credit history so this is a model would like to explore of course it requires government engagement it requires buy-in from the the microlending institutions but i think it's there because we're helping de-risk their businesses we're also enabling kind of additional capital to to come into the market so there's um definitely a case to be made for for for that model yeah so i i talked to john o'connor specifically about this and uh when after we were discussing closing a certain deal i and i said hey you know next year i'm probably going to spend 10 to 15 million dollars in just in africa you know and those are going to be running experiments seeding businesses building relationships opening new marketplaces and we have a lot of great partners like isatis and others i think they have effort access to more than 25 countries and you're absolutely right identity is the base layer in this respect but once you have it you know history and what i see is this amazing uh the end is the beginning in the beginning is the end in your life where you when you were getting your masters you were archiving african artifacts to make sure you didn't lose history and now here archiving people so that their history is not lost so that they can be used in uh in commerce and that's a really cool concept and what's really nice about all this is that these are platforms prism is a platform cardano is a platform so it's not so much about what we build we're building toolboxes and capabilities it's more well once we train people those people can build on top of these things and then suddenly you have all these bottom-up applications that crop up uh and there's tons of opportunities that these bottom-up applications produce i think you call that um when we were discussing this the pole model instead of the push yeah i mean that's what we've been doing which is um you know working with governments and then trying to get a government level program to ensure everyone has an id um the other approach we can do is um yeah also to to find engaging use cases that uh people are asking for today um and um yeah the story i always tell is like if you go to zambia you'll find a shack and it's got a satellite dish and you know they've got to watch that chelsea game and um you know people make sure that they've got money for for good content um so i think that's one thing um and um yeah so if we can find those type of use cases where there's natural demand um for services and and we can embed our technology in them uh this will just drive demand and this way maybe we can sign up you know a lot more users and even capture the country uh much quicker um you know there's also you know lots of telecom operators people are most of them even here in south africa you're paying double the price you'd normally pay in in europe and people earn far less here um but still people have two or three phones with them and they're constantly switching between mobile operators to try and get the best deal so if we can democratize access to to connectivity as well and leverage our technology in that space as well i think that will really help us with this pro model and get really broad-based adoption you know wrap content around that um and then enable seamless access using our identity product to that connectivity to this content and then the umbrella with that is all the government initiatives right so um and and all this data actually can then live back with the user so they have an even richer history about themselves and and uh that can even build better and more accurate credit scores that that are private by design or they they have privacy built in by design so the user's always in control of their data so it's a much better paradigm they choose how they share this data with with other parties they have uh controls in there where they can revoke access to to that data as well it's pretty cool okay so somewhere along the way i think you picked up a few kids how many children do you have i've got one son i'd love a few more but uh i i don't know if i'm going to find the time yeah how how your son um he's three okay so if you look to the future let's say when your son turns 20. what type of africa what type of world would you like him to be in um well i'm hoping at that point china's kind of the new the new africa and um it's uh you know it's a very young we've got very young population here and i think many of the things that we're working on are kind of the foundational rails there's a big industry 4.0 initiatives across many countries it's about kind of providing these rails that will start kick off the next um kind of industrial revolution and um you know i really hope that this will the things that we're working on provide the foundation and a really great opportunity bringing capital so people can innovate build new businesses um and um you know people don't need to look at the silicon valley uh or china for for innovation that it's home bred here in africa and people have access to the capital they really need you know everyone i talk to has many ideas they just lack a way of getting capital um so i'm hoping that we can do this and i guess my son lives in this world where you know there's endless opportunities and you know he can uh really have the choice i'm starting to have now uh in my life but from an early age and uh i think having that platform to build from um you know will only elevate africa uh you know beyond china and beyond the us there you have it folks started in zambia in a humble little town uh ant hives that go up six meters and then you went to a school where you had to ward off the lions check the lakes for snakes and kind of like a monastery and after the monastic days you got a bit of freedom and went a bit wild uh in south africa uh then had a chance to start traveling all around the world how many countries have you been to have you lost count or did you keep score yeah i think i was close to 50 50 countries and how many languages do you speak now oh it's way less so german english french very badly lunda bemba nyanja so six six languages and uh know the place for the first time it's an absolute honor to have you here as our chief product officer and i'm so glad you took some time to share your story with the whole world and inspire people you'll probably be the busiest guy in the company especially as we start building products because the problem with cardano is it's the product that spawns a thousand products and each and every one of those needs a little bit of tender love and care to get to the next level but i think the next wave of great entrepreneurs in our industry are definitely not going to come from america or europe i think they're definitely going to come from africa and my hope is that they build on cardano as opposed to other platforms because we built it for them and it's going to be fun to see that happen so thank you so much for coming this was great thanks everyone see you next time any closing thoughts um yeah what i'll say is i'm just fascinated with um what i'm seeing on on catalyst really kind of this bottom up uh effort and really the amazing ideas and and you know how the communities even with the little resources and the little incentives we have right now coming up with these grand grand ideas so i'm positive really for the future of of cardano and we're looking to give you better tools we're looking to give you better support so you guys can build these things cheaper better faster on on the best platform out there so watch this space and i'm always open so please hit me up if you've got ideas and how we can improve cardano better and markets we're not serving and so on uh how do people reach you if they're interested well i just started my twitter account i'm very private actually but i just started a twitter account so i'll let everyone see if they can find it okay all right until next time everyone have a wonderful day
