WEBVTT
00:01.995 --> 00:25.635
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a very nontraditional thing that we're building because it's part web protocol and it's part consumer application and those two things are very different things right like a core web protocol it's job is to be perfect and to never ever change and a consumer apps job is to iterate
00:26.149 --> 00:32.394
[SPEAKER_01]: almost hourly daily based on user feedback and adapting and really having an incredible user experience.
00:33.215 --> 00:38.198
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, doing those two things together has really been the core challenge.
00:39.379 --> 00:41.641
[SPEAKER_01]: My name is Yenif Talm and I'm the founder of Gia.
00:44.904 --> 00:46.144
[SPEAKER_03]: This is Code Story.
00:47.428 --> 00:50.093
[SPEAKER_03]: a podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries.
00:50.233 --> 00:51.876
[SPEAKER_03]: Six, six months moonlighting goes.
00:51.936 --> 00:53.298
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm lost in all the backgrounds.
00:53.739 --> 00:56.244
[SPEAKER_03]: Who share what it takes to change an industry?
00:56.324 --> 00:57.907
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't exactly know what to do.
00:57.967 --> 00:59.349
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the same goes to get right.
01:00.200 --> 01:06.986
[SPEAKER_02]: Who built the teams that have their bad company, is it's that teams help each other achieve this proud of our team.
01:07.026 --> 01:12.350
[SPEAKER_03]: Keeping scalability top of mind, all that infrastructure was that we had been fighting it as we grew up.
01:12.490 --> 01:13.471
[SPEAKER_03]: Total waste of time.
01:13.871 --> 01:16.053
[SPEAKER_02]: The stories you don't read in the headlines.
01:16.573 --> 01:23.839
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not an easy thing to achieve, to get yourself a deficit of off and try to begin to ride the ups and downs of the start-up line.
01:24.020 --> 01:25.581
[SPEAKER_02]: Need to really want it.
01:25.661 --> 01:26.962
[SPEAKER_03]: Not just about technology.
01:27.022 --> 01:29.104
[SPEAKER_03]: All this and more on code the story.
01:30.679 --> 01:31.841
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm your host, Noel Abhart.
01:32.502 --> 01:41.374
[SPEAKER_03]: And today, how Janineve Tall has built the network for organizing knowledge that we can collectively govern and most importantly trust.
01:47.605 --> 01:51.347
[SPEAKER_03]: On Eftall grew up in the Bay Area in the 90s with parents who were engineers.
01:51.747 --> 01:55.629
[SPEAKER_03]: They were both in electrical engineering specifically digital signal processing.
01:56.189 --> 01:58.830
[SPEAKER_03]: He really saw the internet spin up into a massive thing.
01:59.190 --> 02:06.954
[SPEAKER_03]: He studied the hard sciences, electrical engineering, math, and physics, and his first job at a college was at HP doing board bring up for printers.
02:07.514 --> 02:11.496
[SPEAKER_03]: But outside of tech, he's recently married having a lovely wedding on the beach in Mexico.
02:11.976 --> 02:20.680
[SPEAKER_03]: When asked, what do you do for fun, he can't answer it, because he's a bit of a workaholic and loves what he does, but he does make sure he spends quality time with his new bride.
02:23.121 --> 02:28.284
[SPEAKER_03]: In 2017, Yannie founded a protocol called The Graph, one of the core web three protocols.
02:28.944 --> 02:36.428
[SPEAKER_03]: After many years on this journey, he started to have a vision around the world's broader knowledge in a decentralized, verifiable way.
02:37.318 --> 02:46.126
[SPEAKER_03]: Eventually, he and his team set out to launch a solution around this vision, designed to solve fragmentation of knowledge, vulnerable to centralization, silos, and misinformation.
02:48.648 --> 02:50.690
[SPEAKER_03]: This is the creation story of GEO.
02:54.753 --> 02:58.016
[SPEAKER_01]: GEO is a network for organizing knowledge that we can trust.
02:58.877 --> 03:04.482
[SPEAKER_01]: And the problem we want to solve is it's so difficult to know today what is true.
03:05.480 --> 03:16.224
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're constantly bombarded with information, social media is a very chaotic environment and our systems for organizing and making sense of what's happening in the world.
03:16.544 --> 03:18.205
[SPEAKER_01]: It feels like a really broken down.
03:19.825 --> 03:33.030
[SPEAKER_01]: What Geo does is we organize knowledge into a knowledge graph and it's a really flexible way of representing information where you can structure and add free form relationships between different things.
03:33.630 --> 03:36.792
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we have a governance process on top.
03:37.273 --> 03:42.857
[SPEAKER_01]: And the way of organizing that to that communities can collaboratively organize knowledge together.
03:43.417 --> 03:51.043
[SPEAKER_01]: And what that does is it creates a global interconnected graph of knowledge and information where you have the full provenance.
03:51.063 --> 03:52.544
[SPEAKER_01]: You can see where things came from.
03:52.684 --> 03:55.166
[SPEAKER_01]: You get more context.
03:55.226 --> 03:58.809
[SPEAKER_01]: And we think is really a solution to this information problem that we're facing.
03:59.918 --> 04:05.222
[SPEAKER_01]: All of this actually started for me closer to 2016 into 2017.
04:05.882 --> 04:12.047
[SPEAKER_01]: I founded a protocol called the graph, which is one of the core web's three protocols.
04:12.327 --> 04:21.694
[SPEAKER_01]: At the time Ethereum was taking off, and it was a really exciting time to start tinkering around with blockchains and diving into this new world.
04:22.094 --> 04:27.779
[SPEAKER_01]: There were some really great ideas, but the reality is all of this stuff was still super early.
04:30.102 --> 04:34.283
[SPEAKER_01]: this journey that started back then, was now going on nine years.
04:35.363 --> 04:41.084
[SPEAKER_01]: Really, had the initial vision for what we're building today, really still back then.
04:41.324 --> 04:47.345
[SPEAKER_01]: And it came from actually like a lineage of computer science and really great thinkers.
04:47.885 --> 04:55.807
[SPEAKER_01]: Essentially what we're building is actually the realization of what the original architects of the web actually wanted the web to be.
04:56.780 --> 05:00.961
[SPEAKER_01]: Timbers, Lee, and all of those guys were working on this thing called the semantic web.
05:02.021 --> 05:10.864
[SPEAKER_01]: The idea of the semantic web is that the knowledge and information should live outside the context of anyone application.
05:11.484 --> 05:17.325
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, they wanted the web itself to be this open web, right, an open, interconnected graph.
05:17.525 --> 05:21.586
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what they realized, right, not a web of pages, but a web of data.
05:22.547 --> 05:24.147
[SPEAKER_01]: We have these standards RDF.
05:24.702 --> 05:31.968
[SPEAKER_01]: and sparkle for querying, but there were quite cumbersome, and there were a bunch of problems with the early attempts to do this.
05:32.668 --> 05:49.842
[SPEAKER_01]: You saw graphs becoming popular a little bit later with things like GraphQL, of course from Facebook, and that was adopted through a lot of different companies, but we still kind of had this thing which was the web really re-centralized around these large tech platforms.
05:50.399 --> 05:53.701
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was not what the web was supposed to be, but that's what ended up happening.
05:53.901 --> 06:18.978
[SPEAKER_01]: We had Facebook, Google, Twitter, these large tech platforms, where more and more of the activity that was happening on the web got centralized into these large tech platforms where the value that we're creating is getting trapped and stuck and controlled by these giant databases that were proprietary and internal to these companies.
06:19.737 --> 06:34.922
[SPEAKER_01]: What Ethereum and these blockchain protocols are trying to do is open this stuff up and really re-architect our core coordination systems so that they're more open, transparent, interoperable, and really aligns with actually those original visions of the web.
06:35.923 --> 06:46.086
[SPEAKER_01]: And so as soon as I started tinkering around and trying to build decentralized applications, realize that the infrastructure was not really ready.
06:46.206 --> 06:47.887
[SPEAKER_01]: You couldn't build these apps at scale.
06:48.308 --> 06:52.211
[SPEAKER_01]: And now it's when I started building the graph and then what ultimately led me to GEO.
06:54.653 --> 06:58.276
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's dive into what you would consider the MVP for GEO.
06:58.316 --> 07:03.661
[SPEAKER_03]: So the first version of the product built, how long did they take you to build and what sort of tools we're using to bring this to life?
07:04.581 --> 07:06.003
[SPEAKER_01]: It's been a pretty wild journey.
07:06.183 --> 07:10.967
[SPEAKER_01]: We spun GEO out as a separate project back in 22.
07:11.207 --> 07:14.870
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a whole story there that's actually quite fascinating around.
07:15.230 --> 07:32.182
[SPEAKER_01]: decentralized organization and software engineering and how that came to be, but so it's basically been four years that we've been heads down building now, it's rare to take this amount of time for building any kind of product, but it's really what it's taken.
07:32.682 --> 07:36.405
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I've been self-funding geo for the last four years.
07:37.005 --> 07:40.208
[SPEAKER_01]: We've got a great team that's been working on it, and it's a very
07:45.530 --> 07:49.252
[SPEAKER_01]: web protocol and it's part consumer application.
07:50.052 --> 07:53.294
[SPEAKER_01]: And those two things are very different things, right?
07:53.334 --> 07:59.777
[SPEAKER_01]: Like a core web protocol, its job is to be perfect and to never ever change.
08:00.597 --> 08:13.303
[SPEAKER_01]: And a consumer app's job is to iterate almost hourly daily based on user feedback and adapting and really having an incredible user experience, which can be challenging on its own,
08:15.423 --> 08:17.663
[SPEAKER_01]: a brand new sort of application stack.
08:18.263 --> 08:23.244
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, doing those two things together has really been the core challenge.
08:24.125 --> 08:26.605
[SPEAKER_01]: Geo itself, it's a complex system.
08:26.825 --> 08:37.027
[SPEAKER_01]: And our approach is a little bit like an Apple approach, which also is a little bit different than what you would generally do with a protocol stack.
08:37.327 --> 08:44.288
[SPEAKER_01]: But we think it's been important enough to really think of it as an integrated system and to get all of the pieces working well together.
08:44.974 --> 08:51.858
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the pieces of the stack is first, you need like a knowledge graph standard, right?
08:51.878 --> 09:02.844
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that could replace RDF as almost a serialization format, but really it's like a graph data model and getting the specifics of how you actually structure this graph, getting that right?
09:03.164 --> 09:11.049
[SPEAKER_01]: Then you have this on chain layer and the infrastructure and the on chain layer does a few different things.
09:11.109 --> 09:13.130
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of them is this governance system.
09:13.760 --> 09:23.748
[SPEAKER_01]: and so you have different participants that can perform different actions and it's essentially think of voting, signaling, up-boding, down-boding, approving, rejecting all this kind of stuff.
09:24.529 --> 09:29.092
[SPEAKER_01]: So you have this, it's almost like a social layer that is happening through governance.
09:29.873 --> 09:34.537
[SPEAKER_01]: You need to index all of this and the database and indexing aspects of this.
09:35.177 --> 09:36.558
[SPEAKER_01]: are really quite interesting.
09:36.938 --> 09:48.084
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot to be said about taking essentially an immutable blockchain and making that queryable over history and how you structure this really across space and time.
09:48.825 --> 09:58.850
[SPEAKER_01]: On top of that you got to build an SDK so the people can build custom applications and so it's a whole development environment for building apps on top of this
10:02.238 --> 10:08.339
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we ourselves actually started with this thing, which is the geobrowser.
10:09.220 --> 10:24.603
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was always a kind of a controversial concept, but a browser of this new verifiable web, where everything that you see inside of this browser is attributable, right?
10:24.643 --> 10:25.984
[SPEAKER_01]: That there's the full prop and on.
10:26.004 --> 10:29.825
[SPEAKER_01]: So you can see exactly who published what went, right?
10:31.888 --> 10:40.215
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you can do full verification of every single thing that you see in the browser, along with this history.
10:40.335 --> 10:44.659
[SPEAKER_01]: So you start to see like a git for data, right?
10:44.679 --> 10:53.726
[SPEAKER_01]: So imagine if you're browsing the web and every single thing that you see, you can see the full lineage, the full prop and odd to like git and all of that is available through this browser.
10:54.266 --> 10:56.568
[SPEAKER_01]: So those were all of the different components.
10:56.849 --> 10:58.830
[SPEAKER_01]: And really, we've focused on different components
11:01.425 --> 11:12.367
[SPEAKER_01]: getting cohorts of users and we've had plenty of different cohorts throughout the last four years where we build a piece of it, we put it out there, we get people using it, and then we'd learn and iterate.
11:12.747 --> 11:24.830
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's really been this really long process and we're now at this beautiful point of convergence where the pieces are really snapping together and we're really excited for where things can go from here.
11:27.868 --> 11:29.709
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, that's actually a perfect segue.
11:30.109 --> 11:31.950
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to dive into some of those components.
11:31.970 --> 11:38.693
[SPEAKER_03]: And what you mentioned about how you decided and to build those at different times and kind of wrapped that in a box and looking for a roadmap.
11:38.753 --> 11:41.014
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you build your roadmap for Geo?
11:41.074 --> 11:47.097
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you decide that, okay, this is the next component or this is the next most important thing to build or to address?
11:48.418 --> 11:52.480
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm definitely a believer that you want to get things in front of users as soon as you can.
11:53.641 --> 11:56.342
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's only so much that you can build in a vacuum.
11:57.488 --> 12:07.014
[SPEAKER_01]: The one place where it first system like this that is this complex, that fortunately I had the luxury to do, was to take time before scaling it.
12:07.634 --> 12:14.638
[SPEAKER_01]: To me there's a big difference between getting user feedback and essentially locking something in and scaling it.
12:15.419 --> 12:21.903
[SPEAKER_01]: Once you have thousands of users, hundreds of thousands of users, it becomes really hard to make structural changes.
12:24.410 --> 12:33.134
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's the part that I really wanted to take our time before doing, but we had real users using the product within six months.
12:34.195 --> 12:41.578
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're looking at about six months, ration cycles, right, from applying our learnings and then making changes.
12:41.718 --> 12:46.761
[SPEAKER_01]: So where we started our first version was actually a native app.
12:47.161 --> 12:49.042
[SPEAKER_01]: It was actually the first one was react native.
12:54.583 --> 13:03.405
[SPEAKER_01]: We started with this kind of just UI-only browser to try to understand, create like a block-based editor, similar to Notion.
13:03.825 --> 13:06.825
[SPEAKER_01]: Notion was big, but not even as big as it is now.
13:07.346 --> 13:21.969
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like Notion did something that was really big in the world of user interfaces, which is something that people are tried to do for even decades, which is create a generalized application
13:24.597 --> 13:26.458
[SPEAKER_01]: But started out is almost like a notes app.
13:26.998 --> 13:44.623
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you see how notions used in different organizations and personally, for a lot of people, notion I have replaced their CRM, their project management tool, all sorts of different things that would have been specialized apps into this one generalized app.
13:45.083 --> 13:49.684
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think what they really proved was the power of this block-based editor model.
13:50.244 --> 13:53.145
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we kind of started there,
13:53.980 --> 13:57.521
[SPEAKER_01]: And then from there, it erated on the data layer.
13:58.001 --> 14:01.182
[SPEAKER_01]: And our first version had a relational model.
14:01.582 --> 14:05.462
[SPEAKER_01]: I always suspected that the graph data model was the right one.
14:06.223 --> 14:13.224
[SPEAKER_01]: And there were all kinds of interesting things to figure out around the type system that you would use for something like that.
14:13.464 --> 14:17.905
[SPEAKER_01]: How you define the ontologies, how rigid or strict to make different things.
14:18.745 --> 14:22.426
[SPEAKER_01]: All of this was really through a process of exploration,
14:22.927 --> 14:43.858
[SPEAKER_01]: where we started with the users first and then put something in front of them and the direction that we took with this was to try to find a nice cross-section of use cases because having a personal application is different maybe than a business application or a community based application.
14:44.539 --> 14:49.321
[SPEAKER_01]: And so trying to have a wide cross-section of different use cases where we can test
14:51.277 --> 14:52.738
[SPEAKER_01]: That was basically the process.
14:54.939 --> 14:56.539
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm curious about team, right?
14:56.559 --> 15:01.942
[SPEAKER_03]: You got to have the right team at the helm to do something big, like, like, like, geo, and the graph and those things.
15:01.982 --> 15:05.844
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm curious about what you look for in those people to indicate that they're the winning horses to join you.
15:07.104 --> 15:10.306
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that the biggest thing that I start with is mission alignment.
15:10.986 --> 15:18.089
[SPEAKER_01]: It has to be someone who through their own journey has come across the core problem that we're solving.
15:18.867 --> 15:21.248
[SPEAKER_01]: and really believes that it's a problem we're solving.
15:21.628 --> 15:30.672
[SPEAKER_01]: And then from there, I look at someone who has really been on their own journey where they've just pushed their own limits every step of the way.
15:31.113 --> 15:36.575
[SPEAKER_01]: I love to understand where people started, what their journey was, that they weren't just going through the motions, right?
15:36.595 --> 15:47.520
[SPEAKER_01]: But that they were actually a triven by something inside themselves to continuously push and improve and discover new things, and I think you can tell that by really hearing people's stories.
15:48.529 --> 15:52.490
[SPEAKER_01]: Skill actually find is pretty easy to evaluate for it.
15:52.590 --> 15:54.711
[SPEAKER_01]: It really falls out of those things.
15:54.951 --> 16:02.673
[SPEAKER_01]: If someone's really driven and has a purpose and is smart and thinks through things while usually they can it learn the skills through that process.
16:03.413 --> 16:10.575
[SPEAKER_01]: And then someone who's great to work with that cares about other people that wants to be helpful so you get a little bit of that and those are the kind of things I look for.
16:13.812 --> 16:21.036
[SPEAKER_03]: This will be super interesting because I'm not sure in my mind how to approach the question, so I'm just going to ask it broadly.
16:21.176 --> 16:23.277
[SPEAKER_03]: How did you approach scale in the beginning?
16:23.417 --> 16:30.801
[SPEAKER_03]: When that's technological scale, it's team scales, all the things for G.O., and have there been interesting areas where you've had to fight that as you've grown?
16:32.983 --> 16:35.444
[SPEAKER_01]: I wouldn't say that we're at the scaling portion yet.
16:35.944 --> 16:37.385
[SPEAKER_01]: The graph definitely went through scale,
16:42.935 --> 16:44.616
[SPEAKER_01]: People remember the early days of Twitter.
16:45.076 --> 16:50.138
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, the site would go down every once in a while and they would just put up this hilarious whale.
16:50.678 --> 16:56.860
[SPEAKER_01]: We had those times where we brought down the entire web three industries, several times where the ducks just stopped running.
16:56.900 --> 17:02.122
[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone was building on the grass and so their apps would stop loading and just because things were growing so rapidly.
17:02.642 --> 17:10.065
[SPEAKER_01]: But to you learn about the architecture as you go, a lot of the things now, it's a very parallel first mentality
17:10.781 --> 17:19.147
[SPEAKER_01]: and there are a lot of things in the architecture itself to make sure that you can shard things properly and so you don't hit these bottlenecks.
17:20.068 --> 17:25.552
[SPEAKER_01]: But I would say that aspect of taking our time to get the foundations right.
17:25.712 --> 17:31.076
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not always the right thing to do in a lot of times, it's better to just ship and get it out there and grow.
17:31.837 --> 17:36.800
[SPEAKER_01]: But I do think that if you're building a core protocol, your job is to get it right.
17:37.361 --> 17:38.882
[SPEAKER_01]: And we haven't scaled it yet.
17:39.347 --> 17:45.191
[SPEAKER_01]: but pretty confident that the time we spent to get the foundations right are the thing that's going to allow us to scale.
17:47.232 --> 17:56.739
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm curious, as you step on the balcony and you look across all that you've built thus far and I'll include Gio and the graph and all of the things you've built, what do you most proud of?
17:58.000 --> 18:08.567
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm most proud of the fact that we never compromise the vision and I think that can be really hard when you're doing things that are
18:10.013 --> 18:13.134
[SPEAKER_01]: It's very natural to want validation, right?
18:13.154 --> 18:19.495
[SPEAKER_01]: We all want validation, the market wants validation, your Vester's want validation, everybody wants validation.
18:20.435 --> 18:25.477
[SPEAKER_01]: But validation is hard to get if you're creating something that's genuinely new.
18:26.677 --> 18:31.638
[SPEAKER_01]: By definition, if you're creating something that's never been done before, it is not validated.
18:32.718 --> 18:36.819
[SPEAKER_01]: And somehow you have to maintain its balance
18:40.425 --> 18:43.887
[SPEAKER_01]: while also actually being like ruthlessly pragmatic.
18:44.367 --> 18:48.248
[SPEAKER_01]: Because if you're too far on the cloud, you're gonna miss it.
18:48.869 --> 19:07.877
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you have to constantly be checking yourself against reality, but somehow holding the principles and the ideals and the destination firmly in mind and not compromising on the things that will allow you to get to a place where something that is genuinely new really exists.
19:08.427 --> 19:12.811
[SPEAKER_01]: And for us, that's been compounded across a few different dimensions.
19:12.831 --> 19:18.835
[SPEAKER_01]: We have the core technology, and you have a question, can something like the semantic web actually exist, right?
19:19.216 --> 19:24.380
[SPEAKER_01]: Or is it just a failed idea that there's a good reason why it can't happen and won't happen?
19:24.980 --> 19:27.082
[SPEAKER_01]: So that takes some belief, right?
19:27.222 --> 19:29.184
[SPEAKER_01]: Can decentralized coordination work?
19:29.784 --> 19:34.768
[SPEAKER_01]: Or is everything going to be concentrated inside a few, you know, handfuls of companies?
19:35.417 --> 19:42.961
[SPEAKER_01]: When it comes to crypto and web 3, can we create new economic systems that incentivize behavior in new ways?
19:43.702 --> 19:48.464
[SPEAKER_01]: Or is the pure or profit company model the only model that can work?
19:49.185 --> 19:50.946
[SPEAKER_01]: All of these are really big questions.
19:52.006 --> 20:01.131
[SPEAKER_01]: And you have to have a little bit of belief and I think the fact that we've maintained that belief through a decade now and continue to build continued to charge forward.
20:01.151 --> 20:02.372
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's the thing on those proud of them.
20:05.061 --> 20:06.322
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's flip the script a little bit.
20:06.362 --> 20:10.044
[SPEAKER_03]: Tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team responded to it.
20:11.765 --> 20:15.508
[SPEAKER_01]: When we started GI mentioned that we'd started with this React Native app.
20:16.408 --> 20:18.690
[SPEAKER_01]: And there were two things that we realized from there.
20:19.210 --> 20:30.137
[SPEAKER_01]: The first was that actually, what we were doing, all native would have been better than React Native because we just really wanted the best possible performance we could get and that was important.
20:30.518 --> 20:32.579
[SPEAKER_01]: But then the second thing we realized at the same time,
20:33.299 --> 20:38.443
[SPEAKER_01]: was that the development velocity was too slow for any type of native compared to web.
20:39.464 --> 20:45.668
[SPEAKER_01]: And we wanted to be iterating and shipping new updates to users and we needed to be able to rapidly iterate.
20:46.409 --> 20:48.851
[SPEAKER_01]: The web was actually the right platform to start.
20:50.012 --> 20:54.055
[SPEAKER_01]: That was a difficult decision in which we spent six months on the initial version.
20:54.675 --> 20:57.778
[SPEAKER_01]: And we realized we had to start over from scratch.
20:58.478 --> 21:00.860
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think that was a right decision to make.
21:01.453 --> 21:06.955
[SPEAKER_01]: and sometimes you have to take those and you learn a lot from every iteration.
21:07.755 --> 21:11.296
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got the artist mentality and you've got the business person's mentality.
21:11.897 --> 21:24.321
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the artist in you has to always be ready to start from scratch, to not be too attached to anything that you've done, and that's probably necessary to achieve perfection.
21:25.064 --> 21:33.068
[SPEAKER_01]: The business person in you probably just wants to ship the thing and it's good enough and no rewrites and there's certainly a time in a place for that too.
21:33.928 --> 21:40.531
[SPEAKER_01]: Plenty of companies I think are probably guilty of maybe rewriting something to some new framework but with questionable business value.
21:40.551 --> 21:47.834
[SPEAKER_01]: So you don't want to do those all the time, but I think that was an example of a time where we recognized it, we made the course correction and I'm that we did.
21:52.139 --> 21:53.819
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, let's move into the future.
21:53.880 --> 21:54.800
[SPEAKER_03]: This will be exciting.
21:54.880 --> 22:00.981
[SPEAKER_03]: Why you built Geo and what you're excited about doing in this decentralized knowledge graph?
22:01.182 --> 22:02.242
[SPEAKER_03]: What does the future look like?
22:02.462 --> 22:11.064
[SPEAKER_03]: For what you're building for, where the industry is going, where does the buzzword AI fit into this and all the things, something what the future looks like?
22:12.605 --> 22:17.966
[SPEAKER_01]: The North Star that I'd be looking to is can we improve the quality of discourse?
22:18.686 --> 22:20.547
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like things are so polarized
22:21.328 --> 22:31.692
[SPEAKER_01]: and that shows in my friend groups, with my family, with all kinds of people where people have just splintered, and it's hard for them to even talk to each other sometimes on political issues.
22:31.992 --> 22:39.915
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you see it at a local level where I think we're living at a time where resources are no longer in strength.
22:40.096 --> 22:44.257
[SPEAKER_01]: We have the capital, it's really coordination, it's alignment, right?
22:44.377 --> 22:48.699
[SPEAKER_01]: It's can you get people to agree and can allow people to move faster?
22:49.481 --> 22:53.664
[SPEAKER_01]: So that we can build more, and we can solve our problems and move faster.
22:53.744 --> 23:08.315
[SPEAKER_01]: To me, what I would love to see is improving the quality of discourse, helping to get back to some foundation of shared facts, shared reality, and balancing still freedom, right?
23:08.335 --> 23:17.661
[SPEAKER_01]: A freedom to also disagree, and we believe in pluralism, so that the system should allow for different points of views to coexist.
23:19.085 --> 23:27.968
[SPEAKER_01]: having a structure within that for things to converge over time for people to better understand each other's differences, maybe resolve some of those differences.
23:28.588 --> 23:37.290
[SPEAKER_01]: If you start with more of a shared language, you get back to more shared facts, I think it improves that ability to have that heart-quality discourse.
23:37.951 --> 23:40.071
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's a big piece of what we'd love to see.
23:40.731 --> 23:41.632
[SPEAKER_01]: And if from there,
23:42.825 --> 23:57.794
[SPEAKER_01]: companies work better, industries work better, and even get into things that touch on government, local government, national governments to assist in policy and these sorts of areas we'd love to be helpful there.
23:58.494 --> 24:03.017
[SPEAKER_01]: And so those are the sorts of things that if I see in our future and where I think we can make a lot of impact.
24:03.777 --> 24:07.499
[SPEAKER_01]: And AI is obviously a really exciting place.
24:07.820 --> 24:12.122
[SPEAKER_01]: And I feel AI touches on every unit of organization.
24:12.774 --> 24:20.036
[SPEAKER_01]: your own personal productivity, your company's productivity, the industry level, of course, up to governments.
24:21.097 --> 24:29.139
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think there's a bunch of ways that a global interconnected verifiable knowledge graph really intersects with AI.
24:30.200 --> 24:36.242
[SPEAKER_01]: One way that you could see this sort of a knowledge graph is as being like a collective memory system.
24:37.282 --> 24:40.103
[SPEAKER_01]: I think intelligence is no longer
24:41.263 --> 24:49.465
[SPEAKER_01]: I love seeing the new models come out and they keep getting faster and smarter, but we're already getting to a point where these models are really good.
24:50.125 --> 24:54.707
[SPEAKER_01]: And the question becomes, what are you feeding into these models?
24:54.767 --> 24:56.047
[SPEAKER_01]: What are they being trained on?
24:56.447 --> 24:58.408
[SPEAKER_01]: What are they answering their questions against?
24:58.668 --> 24:58.848
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
24:58.868 --> 25:02.389
[SPEAKER_01]: If you ask something, is it getting the most up-to-date information?
25:03.029 --> 25:04.309
[SPEAKER_01]: Is the information accurate?
25:04.329 --> 25:05.990
[SPEAKER_01]: Does it have the full context?
25:06.690 --> 25:09.271
[SPEAKER_01]: And that applies with your own workflows as well.
25:11.384 --> 25:19.310
[SPEAKER_01]: using AI to write code, you know that the context that you feed your AI is super important through giving it out to date, out of date docs.
25:19.850 --> 25:25.594
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going to give you the wrong answer and how you structure the knowledge and information make sure that it's accurate up to date.
25:26.154 --> 25:27.776
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really important all of these levels.
25:28.036 --> 25:30.818
[SPEAKER_01]: Your personal memory systems, the collective memory.
25:30.878 --> 25:35.421
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's really important that we get the structure and the organization of that right.
25:37.282 --> 25:39.823
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's switch to you, who influences the way that you work.
25:40.143 --> 25:42.283
[SPEAKER_03]: Name a person or many persons or something.
25:42.303 --> 25:42.944
[SPEAKER_03]: You look up to him.
25:42.984 --> 25:43.224
[SPEAKER_03]: Why?
25:44.524 --> 25:53.947
[SPEAKER_01]: This one's is going to take me back to 2015 with an engineer in our context, Rich Hikki, was a huge influence on me.
25:54.627 --> 25:57.588
[SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of the ideas that we're still working on.
25:58.348 --> 26:04.450
[SPEAKER_01]: And I loved his talks where, you know, it was part great software engineering
26:06.813 --> 26:12.436
[SPEAKER_01]: I would say Rich Hickey as an engineer has been one of my greatest influences.
26:12.456 --> 26:22.261
[SPEAKER_01]: And today, I think there are some really great entrepreneurs out there, and I'm just really amazed at just the pace of progress.
26:22.821 --> 26:33.807
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the thing that I keep coming back to those is kind of alignment because I feel like there's this separation between the front here and the everyday person.
26:34.337 --> 26:52.903
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, you have the Elon Musk and the Sam Altman and all of these folks that are really at the frontier pushing things and then you've got everyone else that feels like more more and more either not bought in or not keeping up and I would love to try to see some of that divide clothes a little bit.
26:53.597 --> 27:12.411
[SPEAKER_01]: and arming people to be more knowledgeable, to participate in a process, to be part of the conversation, so that we can move society forward together, that's something that I see because I think, we gotta keep pushing forward, but I really hope we can bring everyone along to the right.
27:13.729 --> 27:19.853
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, any last question, so you're kidding on a plane, and you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing.
27:20.313 --> 27:21.013
[SPEAKER_03]: They're jazzed about it.
27:21.033 --> 27:24.215
[SPEAKER_03]: They can't wait to shoot off to the world and can we shoot off to you right there on the plane?
27:24.816 --> 27:27.497
[SPEAKER_03]: What advice do you give that person having gone down this road a bit?
27:28.898 --> 27:31.499
[SPEAKER_01]: Get your stuff in front of users as soon as you can.
27:31.519 --> 27:33.020
[SPEAKER_01]: That's number one.
27:33.781 --> 27:38.223
[SPEAKER_01]: And number two is make sure that you're working on the right problem.
27:39.084 --> 27:40.685
[SPEAKER_01]: I think when you build something,
27:41.447 --> 27:55.974
[SPEAKER_01]: you're going to be dedicating many years to it if it goes well and you really want to have a problem that if this was all you did for the next 10 years, 20 years, you would be happy that you spent that time on that problem.
27:56.074 --> 28:09.260
[SPEAKER_01]: To me, the problem selection of making sure that it's a real problem, right, that it's worthy of your time and that it is the right fit for you, right, that there's something really deeply about you, why like this is the right one for you.
28:10.003 --> 28:13.745
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you get that right, I think everything else snaps into place.
28:14.125 --> 28:14.905
[SPEAKER_03]: That's fantastic.
28:14.945 --> 28:19.947
[SPEAKER_03]: Advising me, if thank you for being on the show today, and thank you for telling the creation story of Geo.
28:20.468 --> 28:21.548
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you so much.
28:21.568 --> 28:22.689
[SPEAKER_01]: It's great being on here with you.
28:22.709 --> 28:23.189
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, Noah.
28:25.510 --> 28:27.991
[SPEAKER_03]: And this concludes another chapter of Coat Story.
28:35.893 --> 28:38.616
[SPEAKER_03]: code story is hosted and produced by no a lab part.
28:39.097 --> 28:43.522
[SPEAKER_03]: Be sure to subscribe on Apple podcast, Spotify, or the podcasting app at your choice.
28:44.503 --> 28:46.425
[SPEAKER_03]: And when you get a chance, leave us a review.
28:46.945 --> 28:48.988
[SPEAKER_03]: Both things help us out tremendously.
28:51.891 --> 28:52.992
[SPEAKER_03]: And thanks again for listening.
00:01.995 --> 00:25.635
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a very nontraditional thing that we're building because it's part web protocol and it's part consumer application and those two things are very different things right like a core web protocol it's job is to be perfect and to never ever change and a consumer apps job is to iterate
00:26.149 --> 00:32.394
[SPEAKER_01]: almost hourly daily based on user feedback and adapting and really having an incredible user experience.
00:33.215 --> 00:38.198
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, doing those two things together has really been the core challenge.
00:39.379 --> 00:41.641
[SPEAKER_01]: My name is Yenif Talm and I'm the founder of Gia.
00:44.904 --> 00:46.144
[SPEAKER_03]: This is Code Story.
00:47.428 --> 00:50.093
[SPEAKER_03]: a podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries.
00:50.233 --> 00:51.876
[SPEAKER_03]: Six, six months moonlighting goes.
00:51.936 --> 00:53.298
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm lost in all the backgrounds.
00:53.739 --> 00:56.244
[SPEAKER_03]: Who share what it takes to change an industry?
00:56.324 --> 00:57.907
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't exactly know what to do.
00:57.967 --> 00:59.349
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the same goes to get right.
01:00.200 --> 01:06.986
[SPEAKER_02]: Who built the teams that have their bad company, is it's that teams help each other achieve this proud of our team.
01:07.026 --> 01:12.350
[SPEAKER_03]: Keeping scalability top of mind, all that infrastructure was that we had been fighting it as we grew up.
01:12.490 --> 01:13.471
[SPEAKER_03]: Total waste of time.
01:13.871 --> 01:16.053
[SPEAKER_02]: The stories you don't read in the headlines.
01:16.573 --> 01:23.839
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not an easy thing to achieve, to get yourself a deficit of off and try to begin to ride the ups and downs of the start-up line.
01:24.020 --> 01:25.581
[SPEAKER_02]: Need to really want it.
01:25.661 --> 01:26.962
[SPEAKER_03]: Not just about technology.
01:27.022 --> 01:29.104
[SPEAKER_03]: All this and more on code the story.
01:30.679 --> 01:31.841
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm your host, Noel Abhart.
01:32.502 --> 01:41.374
[SPEAKER_03]: And today, how Janineve Tall has built the network for organizing knowledge that we can collectively govern and most importantly trust.
01:47.605 --> 01:51.347
[SPEAKER_03]: On Eftall grew up in the Bay Area in the 90s with parents who were engineers.
01:51.747 --> 01:55.629
[SPEAKER_03]: They were both in electrical engineering specifically digital signal processing.
01:56.189 --> 01:58.830
[SPEAKER_03]: He really saw the internet spin up into a massive thing.
01:59.190 --> 02:06.954
[SPEAKER_03]: He studied the hard sciences, electrical engineering, math, and physics, and his first job at a college was at HP doing board bring up for printers.
02:07.514 --> 02:11.496
[SPEAKER_03]: But outside of tech, he's recently married having a lovely wedding on the beach in Mexico.
02:11.976 --> 02:20.680
[SPEAKER_03]: When asked, what do you do for fun, he can't answer it, because he's a bit of a workaholic and loves what he does, but he does make sure he spends quality time with his new bride.
02:23.121 --> 02:28.284
[SPEAKER_03]: In 2017, Yannie founded a protocol called The Graph, one of the core web three protocols.
02:28.944 --> 02:36.428
[SPEAKER_03]: After many years on this journey, he started to have a vision around the world's broader knowledge in a decentralized, verifiable way.
02:37.318 --> 02:46.126
[SPEAKER_03]: Eventually, he and his team set out to launch a solution around this vision, designed to solve fragmentation of knowledge, vulnerable to centralization, silos, and misinformation.
02:48.648 --> 02:50.690
[SPEAKER_03]: This is the creation story of GEO.
02:54.753 --> 02:58.016
[SPEAKER_01]: GEO is a network for organizing knowledge that we can trust.
02:58.877 --> 03:04.482
[SPEAKER_01]: And the problem we want to solve is it's so difficult to know today what is true.
03:05.480 --> 03:16.224
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're constantly bombarded with information, social media is a very chaotic environment and our systems for organizing and making sense of what's happening in the world.
03:16.544 --> 03:18.205
[SPEAKER_01]: It feels like a really broken down.
03:19.825 --> 03:33.030
[SPEAKER_01]: What Geo does is we organize knowledge into a knowledge graph and it's a really flexible way of representing information where you can structure and add free form relationships between different things.
03:33.630 --> 03:36.792
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we have a governance process on top.
03:37.273 --> 03:42.857
[SPEAKER_01]: And the way of organizing that to that communities can collaboratively organize knowledge together.
03:43.417 --> 03:51.043
[SPEAKER_01]: And what that does is it creates a global interconnected graph of knowledge and information where you have the full provenance.
03:51.063 --> 03:52.544
[SPEAKER_01]: You can see where things came from.
03:52.684 --> 03:55.166
[SPEAKER_01]: You get more context.
03:55.226 --> 03:58.809
[SPEAKER_01]: And we think is really a solution to this information problem that we're facing.
03:59.918 --> 04:05.222
[SPEAKER_01]: All of this actually started for me closer to 2016 into 2017.
04:05.882 --> 04:12.047
[SPEAKER_01]: I founded a protocol called the graph, which is one of the core web's three protocols.
04:12.327 --> 04:21.694
[SPEAKER_01]: At the time Ethereum was taking off, and it was a really exciting time to start tinkering around with blockchains and diving into this new world.
04:22.094 --> 04:27.779
[SPEAKER_01]: There were some really great ideas, but the reality is all of this stuff was still super early.
04:30.102 --> 04:34.283
[SPEAKER_01]: this journey that started back then, was now going on nine years.
04:35.363 --> 04:41.084
[SPEAKER_01]: Really, had the initial vision for what we're building today, really still back then.
04:41.324 --> 04:47.345
[SPEAKER_01]: And it came from actually like a lineage of computer science and really great thinkers.
04:47.885 --> 04:55.807
[SPEAKER_01]: Essentially what we're building is actually the realization of what the original architects of the web actually wanted the web to be.
04:56.780 --> 05:00.961
[SPEAKER_01]: Timbers, Lee, and all of those guys were working on this thing called the semantic web.
05:02.021 --> 05:10.864
[SPEAKER_01]: The idea of the semantic web is that the knowledge and information should live outside the context of anyone application.
05:11.484 --> 05:17.325
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, they wanted the web itself to be this open web, right, an open, interconnected graph.
05:17.525 --> 05:21.586
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what they realized, right, not a web of pages, but a web of data.
05:22.547 --> 05:24.147
[SPEAKER_01]: We have these standards RDF.
05:24.702 --> 05:31.968
[SPEAKER_01]: and sparkle for querying, but there were quite cumbersome, and there were a bunch of problems with the early attempts to do this.
05:32.668 --> 05:49.842
[SPEAKER_01]: You saw graphs becoming popular a little bit later with things like GraphQL, of course from Facebook, and that was adopted through a lot of different companies, but we still kind of had this thing which was the web really re-centralized around these large tech platforms.
05:50.399 --> 05:53.701
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was not what the web was supposed to be, but that's what ended up happening.
05:53.901 --> 06:18.978
[SPEAKER_01]: We had Facebook, Google, Twitter, these large tech platforms, where more and more of the activity that was happening on the web got centralized into these large tech platforms where the value that we're creating is getting trapped and stuck and controlled by these giant databases that were proprietary and internal to these companies.
06:19.737 --> 06:34.922
[SPEAKER_01]: What Ethereum and these blockchain protocols are trying to do is open this stuff up and really re-architect our core coordination systems so that they're more open, transparent, interoperable, and really aligns with actually those original visions of the web.
06:35.923 --> 06:46.086
[SPEAKER_01]: And so as soon as I started tinkering around and trying to build decentralized applications, realize that the infrastructure was not really ready.
06:46.206 --> 06:47.887
[SPEAKER_01]: You couldn't build these apps at scale.
06:48.308 --> 06:52.211
[SPEAKER_01]: And now it's when I started building the graph and then what ultimately led me to GEO.
06:54.653 --> 06:58.276
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's dive into what you would consider the MVP for GEO.
06:58.316 --> 07:03.661
[SPEAKER_03]: So the first version of the product built, how long did they take you to build and what sort of tools we're using to bring this to life?
07:04.581 --> 07:06.003
[SPEAKER_01]: It's been a pretty wild journey.
07:06.183 --> 07:10.967
[SPEAKER_01]: We spun GEO out as a separate project back in 22.
07:11.207 --> 07:14.870
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a whole story there that's actually quite fascinating around.
07:15.230 --> 07:32.182
[SPEAKER_01]: decentralized organization and software engineering and how that came to be, but so it's basically been four years that we've been heads down building now, it's rare to take this amount of time for building any kind of product, but it's really what it's taken.
07:32.682 --> 07:36.405
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I've been self-funding geo for the last four years.
07:37.005 --> 07:40.208
[SPEAKER_01]: We've got a great team that's been working on it, and it's a very
07:45.530 --> 07:49.252
[SPEAKER_01]: web protocol and it's part consumer application.
07:50.052 --> 07:53.294
[SPEAKER_01]: And those two things are very different things, right?
07:53.334 --> 07:59.777
[SPEAKER_01]: Like a core web protocol, its job is to be perfect and to never ever change.
08:00.597 --> 08:13.303
[SPEAKER_01]: And a consumer app's job is to iterate almost hourly daily based on user feedback and adapting and really having an incredible user experience, which can be challenging on its own,
08:15.423 --> 08:17.663
[SPEAKER_01]: a brand new sort of application stack.
08:18.263 --> 08:23.244
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, doing those two things together has really been the core challenge.
08:24.125 --> 08:26.605
[SPEAKER_01]: Geo itself, it's a complex system.
08:26.825 --> 08:37.027
[SPEAKER_01]: And our approach is a little bit like an Apple approach, which also is a little bit different than what you would generally do with a protocol stack.
08:37.327 --> 08:44.288
[SPEAKER_01]: But we think it's been important enough to really think of it as an integrated system and to get all of the pieces working well together.
08:44.974 --> 08:51.858
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the pieces of the stack is first, you need like a knowledge graph standard, right?
08:51.878 --> 09:02.844
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that could replace RDF as almost a serialization format, but really it's like a graph data model and getting the specifics of how you actually structure this graph, getting that right?
09:03.164 --> 09:11.049
[SPEAKER_01]: Then you have this on chain layer and the infrastructure and the on chain layer does a few different things.
09:11.109 --> 09:13.130
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of them is this governance system.
09:13.760 --> 09:23.748
[SPEAKER_01]: and so you have different participants that can perform different actions and it's essentially think of voting, signaling, up-boding, down-boding, approving, rejecting all this kind of stuff.
09:24.529 --> 09:29.092
[SPEAKER_01]: So you have this, it's almost like a social layer that is happening through governance.
09:29.873 --> 09:34.537
[SPEAKER_01]: You need to index all of this and the database and indexing aspects of this.
09:35.177 --> 09:36.558
[SPEAKER_01]: are really quite interesting.
09:36.938 --> 09:48.084
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot to be said about taking essentially an immutable blockchain and making that queryable over history and how you structure this really across space and time.
09:48.825 --> 09:58.850
[SPEAKER_01]: On top of that you got to build an SDK so the people can build custom applications and so it's a whole development environment for building apps on top of this
10:02.238 --> 10:08.339
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we ourselves actually started with this thing, which is the geobrowser.
10:09.220 --> 10:24.603
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was always a kind of a controversial concept, but a browser of this new verifiable web, where everything that you see inside of this browser is attributable, right?
10:24.643 --> 10:25.984
[SPEAKER_01]: That there's the full prop and on.
10:26.004 --> 10:29.825
[SPEAKER_01]: So you can see exactly who published what went, right?
10:31.888 --> 10:40.215
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you can do full verification of every single thing that you see in the browser, along with this history.
10:40.335 --> 10:44.659
[SPEAKER_01]: So you start to see like a git for data, right?
10:44.679 --> 10:53.726
[SPEAKER_01]: So imagine if you're browsing the web and every single thing that you see, you can see the full lineage, the full prop and odd to like git and all of that is available through this browser.
10:54.266 --> 10:56.568
[SPEAKER_01]: So those were all of the different components.
10:56.849 --> 10:58.830
[SPEAKER_01]: And really, we've focused on different components
11:01.425 --> 11:12.367
[SPEAKER_01]: getting cohorts of users and we've had plenty of different cohorts throughout the last four years where we build a piece of it, we put it out there, we get people using it, and then we'd learn and iterate.
11:12.747 --> 11:24.830
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's really been this really long process and we're now at this beautiful point of convergence where the pieces are really snapping together and we're really excited for where things can go from here.
11:27.868 --> 11:29.709
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, that's actually a perfect segue.
11:30.109 --> 11:31.950
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to dive into some of those components.
11:31.970 --> 11:38.693
[SPEAKER_03]: And what you mentioned about how you decided and to build those at different times and kind of wrapped that in a box and looking for a roadmap.
11:38.753 --> 11:41.014
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you build your roadmap for Geo?
11:41.074 --> 11:47.097
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you decide that, okay, this is the next component or this is the next most important thing to build or to address?
11:48.418 --> 11:52.480
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm definitely a believer that you want to get things in front of users as soon as you can.
11:53.641 --> 11:56.342
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's only so much that you can build in a vacuum.
11:57.488 --> 12:07.014
[SPEAKER_01]: The one place where it first system like this that is this complex, that fortunately I had the luxury to do, was to take time before scaling it.
12:07.634 --> 12:14.638
[SPEAKER_01]: To me there's a big difference between getting user feedback and essentially locking something in and scaling it.
12:15.419 --> 12:21.903
[SPEAKER_01]: Once you have thousands of users, hundreds of thousands of users, it becomes really hard to make structural changes.
12:24.410 --> 12:33.134
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's the part that I really wanted to take our time before doing, but we had real users using the product within six months.
12:34.195 --> 12:41.578
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're looking at about six months, ration cycles, right, from applying our learnings and then making changes.
12:41.718 --> 12:46.761
[SPEAKER_01]: So where we started our first version was actually a native app.
12:47.161 --> 12:49.042
[SPEAKER_01]: It was actually the first one was react native.
12:54.583 --> 13:03.405
[SPEAKER_01]: We started with this kind of just UI-only browser to try to understand, create like a block-based editor, similar to Notion.
13:03.825 --> 13:06.825
[SPEAKER_01]: Notion was big, but not even as big as it is now.
13:07.346 --> 13:21.969
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like Notion did something that was really big in the world of user interfaces, which is something that people are tried to do for even decades, which is create a generalized application
13:24.597 --> 13:26.458
[SPEAKER_01]: But started out is almost like a notes app.
13:26.998 --> 13:44.623
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you see how notions used in different organizations and personally, for a lot of people, notion I have replaced their CRM, their project management tool, all sorts of different things that would have been specialized apps into this one generalized app.
13:45.083 --> 13:49.684
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think what they really proved was the power of this block-based editor model.
13:50.244 --> 13:53.145
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we kind of started there,
13:53.980 --> 13:57.521
[SPEAKER_01]: And then from there, it erated on the data layer.
13:58.001 --> 14:01.182
[SPEAKER_01]: And our first version had a relational model.
14:01.582 --> 14:05.462
[SPEAKER_01]: I always suspected that the graph data model was the right one.
14:06.223 --> 14:13.224
[SPEAKER_01]: And there were all kinds of interesting things to figure out around the type system that you would use for something like that.
14:13.464 --> 14:17.905
[SPEAKER_01]: How you define the ontologies, how rigid or strict to make different things.
14:18.745 --> 14:22.426
[SPEAKER_01]: All of this was really through a process of exploration,
14:22.927 --> 14:43.858
[SPEAKER_01]: where we started with the users first and then put something in front of them and the direction that we took with this was to try to find a nice cross-section of use cases because having a personal application is different maybe than a business application or a community based application.
14:44.539 --> 14:49.321
[SPEAKER_01]: And so trying to have a wide cross-section of different use cases where we can test
14:51.277 --> 14:52.738
[SPEAKER_01]: That was basically the process.
14:54.939 --> 14:56.539
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm curious about team, right?
14:56.559 --> 15:01.942
[SPEAKER_03]: You got to have the right team at the helm to do something big, like, like, like, geo, and the graph and those things.
15:01.982 --> 15:05.844
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm curious about what you look for in those people to indicate that they're the winning horses to join you.
15:07.104 --> 15:10.306
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that the biggest thing that I start with is mission alignment.
15:10.986 --> 15:18.089
[SPEAKER_01]: It has to be someone who through their own journey has come across the core problem that we're solving.
15:18.867 --> 15:21.248
[SPEAKER_01]: and really believes that it's a problem we're solving.
15:21.628 --> 15:30.672
[SPEAKER_01]: And then from there, I look at someone who has really been on their own journey where they've just pushed their own limits every step of the way.
15:31.113 --> 15:36.575
[SPEAKER_01]: I love to understand where people started, what their journey was, that they weren't just going through the motions, right?
15:36.595 --> 15:47.520
[SPEAKER_01]: But that they were actually a triven by something inside themselves to continuously push and improve and discover new things, and I think you can tell that by really hearing people's stories.
15:48.529 --> 15:52.490
[SPEAKER_01]: Skill actually find is pretty easy to evaluate for it.
15:52.590 --> 15:54.711
[SPEAKER_01]: It really falls out of those things.
15:54.951 --> 16:02.673
[SPEAKER_01]: If someone's really driven and has a purpose and is smart and thinks through things while usually they can it learn the skills through that process.
16:03.413 --> 16:10.575
[SPEAKER_01]: And then someone who's great to work with that cares about other people that wants to be helpful so you get a little bit of that and those are the kind of things I look for.
16:13.812 --> 16:21.036
[SPEAKER_03]: This will be super interesting because I'm not sure in my mind how to approach the question, so I'm just going to ask it broadly.
16:21.176 --> 16:23.277
[SPEAKER_03]: How did you approach scale in the beginning?
16:23.417 --> 16:30.801
[SPEAKER_03]: When that's technological scale, it's team scales, all the things for G.O., and have there been interesting areas where you've had to fight that as you've grown?
16:32.983 --> 16:35.444
[SPEAKER_01]: I wouldn't say that we're at the scaling portion yet.
16:35.944 --> 16:37.385
[SPEAKER_01]: The graph definitely went through scale,
16:42.935 --> 16:44.616
[SPEAKER_01]: People remember the early days of Twitter.
16:45.076 --> 16:50.138
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, the site would go down every once in a while and they would just put up this hilarious whale.
16:50.678 --> 16:56.860
[SPEAKER_01]: We had those times where we brought down the entire web three industries, several times where the ducks just stopped running.
16:56.900 --> 17:02.122
[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone was building on the grass and so their apps would stop loading and just because things were growing so rapidly.
17:02.642 --> 17:10.065
[SPEAKER_01]: But to you learn about the architecture as you go, a lot of the things now, it's a very parallel first mentality
17:10.781 --> 17:19.147
[SPEAKER_01]: and there are a lot of things in the architecture itself to make sure that you can shard things properly and so you don't hit these bottlenecks.
17:20.068 --> 17:25.552
[SPEAKER_01]: But I would say that aspect of taking our time to get the foundations right.
17:25.712 --> 17:31.076
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not always the right thing to do in a lot of times, it's better to just ship and get it out there and grow.
17:31.837 --> 17:36.800
[SPEAKER_01]: But I do think that if you're building a core protocol, your job is to get it right.
17:37.361 --> 17:38.882
[SPEAKER_01]: And we haven't scaled it yet.
17:39.347 --> 17:45.191
[SPEAKER_01]: but pretty confident that the time we spent to get the foundations right are the thing that's going to allow us to scale.
17:47.232 --> 17:56.739
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm curious, as you step on the balcony and you look across all that you've built thus far and I'll include Gio and the graph and all of the things you've built, what do you most proud of?
17:58.000 --> 18:08.567
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm most proud of the fact that we never compromise the vision and I think that can be really hard when you're doing things that are
18:10.013 --> 18:13.134
[SPEAKER_01]: It's very natural to want validation, right?
18:13.154 --> 18:19.495
[SPEAKER_01]: We all want validation, the market wants validation, your Vester's want validation, everybody wants validation.
18:20.435 --> 18:25.477
[SPEAKER_01]: But validation is hard to get if you're creating something that's genuinely new.
18:26.677 --> 18:31.638
[SPEAKER_01]: By definition, if you're creating something that's never been done before, it is not validated.
18:32.718 --> 18:36.819
[SPEAKER_01]: And somehow you have to maintain its balance
18:40.425 --> 18:43.887
[SPEAKER_01]: while also actually being like ruthlessly pragmatic.
18:44.367 --> 18:48.248
[SPEAKER_01]: Because if you're too far on the cloud, you're gonna miss it.
18:48.869 --> 19:07.877
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you have to constantly be checking yourself against reality, but somehow holding the principles and the ideals and the destination firmly in mind and not compromising on the things that will allow you to get to a place where something that is genuinely new really exists.
19:08.427 --> 19:12.811
[SPEAKER_01]: And for us, that's been compounded across a few different dimensions.
19:12.831 --> 19:18.835
[SPEAKER_01]: We have the core technology, and you have a question, can something like the semantic web actually exist, right?
19:19.216 --> 19:24.380
[SPEAKER_01]: Or is it just a failed idea that there's a good reason why it can't happen and won't happen?
19:24.980 --> 19:27.082
[SPEAKER_01]: So that takes some belief, right?
19:27.222 --> 19:29.184
[SPEAKER_01]: Can decentralized coordination work?
19:29.784 --> 19:34.768
[SPEAKER_01]: Or is everything going to be concentrated inside a few, you know, handfuls of companies?
19:35.417 --> 19:42.961
[SPEAKER_01]: When it comes to crypto and web 3, can we create new economic systems that incentivize behavior in new ways?
19:43.702 --> 19:48.464
[SPEAKER_01]: Or is the pure or profit company model the only model that can work?
19:49.185 --> 19:50.946
[SPEAKER_01]: All of these are really big questions.
19:52.006 --> 20:01.131
[SPEAKER_01]: And you have to have a little bit of belief and I think the fact that we've maintained that belief through a decade now and continue to build continued to charge forward.
20:01.151 --> 20:02.372
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's the thing on those proud of them.
20:05.061 --> 20:06.322
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's flip the script a little bit.
20:06.362 --> 20:10.044
[SPEAKER_03]: Tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team responded to it.
20:11.765 --> 20:15.508
[SPEAKER_01]: When we started GI mentioned that we'd started with this React Native app.
20:16.408 --> 20:18.690
[SPEAKER_01]: And there were two things that we realized from there.
20:19.210 --> 20:30.137
[SPEAKER_01]: The first was that actually, what we were doing, all native would have been better than React Native because we just really wanted the best possible performance we could get and that was important.
20:30.518 --> 20:32.579
[SPEAKER_01]: But then the second thing we realized at the same time,
20:33.299 --> 20:38.443
[SPEAKER_01]: was that the development velocity was too slow for any type of native compared to web.
20:39.464 --> 20:45.668
[SPEAKER_01]: And we wanted to be iterating and shipping new updates to users and we needed to be able to rapidly iterate.
20:46.409 --> 20:48.851
[SPEAKER_01]: The web was actually the right platform to start.
20:50.012 --> 20:54.055
[SPEAKER_01]: That was a difficult decision in which we spent six months on the initial version.
20:54.675 --> 20:57.778
[SPEAKER_01]: And we realized we had to start over from scratch.
20:58.478 --> 21:00.860
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think that was a right decision to make.
21:01.453 --> 21:06.955
[SPEAKER_01]: and sometimes you have to take those and you learn a lot from every iteration.
21:07.755 --> 21:11.296
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got the artist mentality and you've got the business person's mentality.
21:11.897 --> 21:24.321
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the artist in you has to always be ready to start from scratch, to not be too attached to anything that you've done, and that's probably necessary to achieve perfection.
21:25.064 --> 21:33.068
[SPEAKER_01]: The business person in you probably just wants to ship the thing and it's good enough and no rewrites and there's certainly a time in a place for that too.
21:33.928 --> 21:40.531
[SPEAKER_01]: Plenty of companies I think are probably guilty of maybe rewriting something to some new framework but with questionable business value.
21:40.551 --> 21:47.834
[SPEAKER_01]: So you don't want to do those all the time, but I think that was an example of a time where we recognized it, we made the course correction and I'm that we did.
21:52.139 --> 21:53.819
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, let's move into the future.
21:53.880 --> 21:54.800
[SPEAKER_03]: This will be exciting.
21:54.880 --> 22:00.981
[SPEAKER_03]: Why you built Geo and what you're excited about doing in this decentralized knowledge graph?
22:01.182 --> 22:02.242
[SPEAKER_03]: What does the future look like?
22:02.462 --> 22:11.064
[SPEAKER_03]: For what you're building for, where the industry is going, where does the buzzword AI fit into this and all the things, something what the future looks like?
22:12.605 --> 22:17.966
[SPEAKER_01]: The North Star that I'd be looking to is can we improve the quality of discourse?
22:18.686 --> 22:20.547
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like things are so polarized
22:21.328 --> 22:31.692
[SPEAKER_01]: and that shows in my friend groups, with my family, with all kinds of people where people have just splintered, and it's hard for them to even talk to each other sometimes on political issues.
22:31.992 --> 22:39.915
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you see it at a local level where I think we're living at a time where resources are no longer in strength.
22:40.096 --> 22:44.257
[SPEAKER_01]: We have the capital, it's really coordination, it's alignment, right?
22:44.377 --> 22:48.699
[SPEAKER_01]: It's can you get people to agree and can allow people to move faster?
22:49.481 --> 22:53.664
[SPEAKER_01]: So that we can build more, and we can solve our problems and move faster.
22:53.744 --> 23:08.315
[SPEAKER_01]: To me, what I would love to see is improving the quality of discourse, helping to get back to some foundation of shared facts, shared reality, and balancing still freedom, right?
23:08.335 --> 23:17.661
[SPEAKER_01]: A freedom to also disagree, and we believe in pluralism, so that the system should allow for different points of views to coexist.
23:19.085 --> 23:27.968
[SPEAKER_01]: having a structure within that for things to converge over time for people to better understand each other's differences, maybe resolve some of those differences.
23:28.588 --> 23:37.290
[SPEAKER_01]: If you start with more of a shared language, you get back to more shared facts, I think it improves that ability to have that heart-quality discourse.
23:37.951 --> 23:40.071
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's a big piece of what we'd love to see.
23:40.731 --> 23:41.632
[SPEAKER_01]: And if from there,
23:42.825 --> 23:57.794
[SPEAKER_01]: companies work better, industries work better, and even get into things that touch on government, local government, national governments to assist in policy and these sorts of areas we'd love to be helpful there.
23:58.494 --> 24:03.017
[SPEAKER_01]: And so those are the sorts of things that if I see in our future and where I think we can make a lot of impact.
24:03.777 --> 24:07.499
[SPEAKER_01]: And AI is obviously a really exciting place.
24:07.820 --> 24:12.122
[SPEAKER_01]: And I feel AI touches on every unit of organization.
24:12.774 --> 24:20.036
[SPEAKER_01]: your own personal productivity, your company's productivity, the industry level, of course, up to governments.
24:21.097 --> 24:29.139
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think there's a bunch of ways that a global interconnected verifiable knowledge graph really intersects with AI.
24:30.200 --> 24:36.242
[SPEAKER_01]: One way that you could see this sort of a knowledge graph is as being like a collective memory system.
24:37.282 --> 24:40.103
[SPEAKER_01]: I think intelligence is no longer
24:41.263 --> 24:49.465
[SPEAKER_01]: I love seeing the new models come out and they keep getting faster and smarter, but we're already getting to a point where these models are really good.
24:50.125 --> 24:54.707
[SPEAKER_01]: And the question becomes, what are you feeding into these models?
24:54.767 --> 24:56.047
[SPEAKER_01]: What are they being trained on?
24:56.447 --> 24:58.408
[SPEAKER_01]: What are they answering their questions against?
24:58.668 --> 24:58.848
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
24:58.868 --> 25:02.389
[SPEAKER_01]: If you ask something, is it getting the most up-to-date information?
25:03.029 --> 25:04.309
[SPEAKER_01]: Is the information accurate?
25:04.329 --> 25:05.990
[SPEAKER_01]: Does it have the full context?
25:06.690 --> 25:09.271
[SPEAKER_01]: And that applies with your own workflows as well.
25:11.384 --> 25:19.310
[SPEAKER_01]: using AI to write code, you know that the context that you feed your AI is super important through giving it out to date, out of date docs.
25:19.850 --> 25:25.594
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going to give you the wrong answer and how you structure the knowledge and information make sure that it's accurate up to date.
25:26.154 --> 25:27.776
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really important all of these levels.
25:28.036 --> 25:30.818
[SPEAKER_01]: Your personal memory systems, the collective memory.
25:30.878 --> 25:35.421
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's really important that we get the structure and the organization of that right.
25:37.282 --> 25:39.823
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's switch to you, who influences the way that you work.
25:40.143 --> 25:42.283
[SPEAKER_03]: Name a person or many persons or something.
25:42.303 --> 25:42.944
[SPEAKER_03]: You look up to him.
25:42.984 --> 25:43.224
[SPEAKER_03]: Why?
25:44.524 --> 25:53.947
[SPEAKER_01]: This one's is going to take me back to 2015 with an engineer in our context, Rich Hikki, was a huge influence on me.
25:54.627 --> 25:57.588
[SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of the ideas that we're still working on.
25:58.348 --> 26:04.450
[SPEAKER_01]: And I loved his talks where, you know, it was part great software engineering
26:06.813 --> 26:12.436
[SPEAKER_01]: I would say Rich Hickey as an engineer has been one of my greatest influences.
26:12.456 --> 26:22.261
[SPEAKER_01]: And today, I think there are some really great entrepreneurs out there, and I'm just really amazed at just the pace of progress.
26:22.821 --> 26:33.807
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the thing that I keep coming back to those is kind of alignment because I feel like there's this separation between the front here and the everyday person.
26:34.337 --> 26:52.903
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, you have the Elon Musk and the Sam Altman and all of these folks that are really at the frontier pushing things and then you've got everyone else that feels like more more and more either not bought in or not keeping up and I would love to try to see some of that divide clothes a little bit.
26:53.597 --> 27:12.411
[SPEAKER_01]: and arming people to be more knowledgeable, to participate in a process, to be part of the conversation, so that we can move society forward together, that's something that I see because I think, we gotta keep pushing forward, but I really hope we can bring everyone along to the right.
27:13.729 --> 27:19.853
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, any last question, so you're kidding on a plane, and you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing.
27:20.313 --> 27:21.013
[SPEAKER_03]: They're jazzed about it.
27:21.033 --> 27:24.215
[SPEAKER_03]: They can't wait to shoot off to the world and can we shoot off to you right there on the plane?
27:24.816 --> 27:27.497
[SPEAKER_03]: What advice do you give that person having gone down this road a bit?
27:28.898 --> 27:31.499
[SPEAKER_01]: Get your stuff in front of users as soon as you can.
27:31.519 --> 27:33.020
[SPEAKER_01]: That's number one.
27:33.781 --> 27:38.223
[SPEAKER_01]: And number two is make sure that you're working on the right problem.
27:39.084 --> 27:40.685
[SPEAKER_01]: I think when you build something,
27:41.447 --> 27:55.974
[SPEAKER_01]: you're going to be dedicating many years to it if it goes well and you really want to have a problem that if this was all you did for the next 10 years, 20 years, you would be happy that you spent that time on that problem.
27:56.074 --> 28:09.260
[SPEAKER_01]: To me, the problem selection of making sure that it's a real problem, right, that it's worthy of your time and that it is the right fit for you, right, that there's something really deeply about you, why like this is the right one for you.
28:10.003 --> 28:13.745
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you get that right, I think everything else snaps into place.
28:14.125 --> 28:14.905
[SPEAKER_03]: That's fantastic.
28:14.945 --> 28:19.947
[SPEAKER_03]: Advising me, if thank you for being on the show today, and thank you for telling the creation story of Geo.
28:20.468 --> 28:21.548
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you so much.
28:21.568 --> 28:22.689
[SPEAKER_01]: It's great being on here with you.
28:22.709 --> 28:23.189
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, Noah.
28:25.510 --> 28:27.991
[SPEAKER_03]: And this concludes another chapter of Coat Story.
28:35.893 --> 28:38.616
[SPEAKER_03]: code story is hosted and produced by no a lab part.
28:39.097 --> 28:43.522
[SPEAKER_03]: Be sure to subscribe on Apple podcast, Spotify, or the podcasting app at your choice.
28:44.503 --> 28:46.425
[SPEAKER_03]: And when you get a chance, leave us a review.
28:46.945 --> 28:48.988
[SPEAKER_03]: Both things help us out tremendously.
28:51.891 --> 28:52.992
[SPEAKER_03]: And thanks again for listening.
