The Outlier Ventures Podcast

As a serial entrepreneur Matt has two decades of scaling cloud infrastructure selling his first company in 2016 which at its peak was handling 1% of all UK web traffic. During that time he saw huge inefficiencies in both how new cloud infrastructure was being built and operated, founding Cudo to bring The Cloud to blockchain, designed to offload any kind of compute to a distributed network of idle...

Gilbert is a serial entrepreneur and pioneer of Privacy Tech for over two decades advising large corporations, advertising agencies and governments on data ethics and their execution, exiting his first startup to the leading Priv Tech Unicorn, One Trust. At TapMyData he is taking The Trust Economy mainstream, repurposing and making usable digital asset infrastructure like crypto wallets and exchan...

We talk to Dominic Williams CEO of DFinity about his vision for 'The Internet Computer', inspired by the Ethereum world computer, but fundamentally architected in a different way to allow for what he calls Open Internet Services: the ability for entrepreneurs and coders to build applications directly into the internet to remove dependencies on AWS, for truly unstoppable code. We explore his journe...

Yaniv, co-founder of The Graph Protocol, talks about the importance of making sure the full Web 3 stack is as decentralised as possible, the indexing and querying of data, and how The Graph as a solution also removes the burden for DApp builders of hosting their own data infrastructure - therefore ultimately improving the DApp user experience to a Web 2 equivalence. 

We talk to one of the legendary founding fathers of the internet Mark Miller, about his 40+ year career as leading researcher at Xerox PARC, Google, Xanadu, core contributor to Javascript and creator of the ‘E’ Language. We discuss how he was inspired in the 80s by the economist Hayek’s ‘utility of property rights’ and object oriented programming to found Agorics (in ‘94) to create secure distribu...

We talk with Tascha Punyaneramitdee (Pan Pan) about Alpha Finance Lab’s, Bangkok-based, DeFi Studio and how they identify, appraise and execute upon opportunities for new DeFi products, whilst managing risk. We also look at how they, as an early stage company, engage with the spectrum of institutions, from Binance and their BNB chain, through to their collaboration with SCB 10 x - the venture arm...

We talk with Anatoly founder of Solona which claims to be the fastest unpermissioned blockchain in the world (without using sharding) and his 18 year career working as a senior engineer at Qualcomm, scaling distributed systems used by millions of people. We explore the ‘blockchain trilemma’, its history, and what he proposes is it’s false trade-off between security, speed and security and why by s...

Alex has made major contributions to OSS (Open Source Software) for over 20 years and launched HCAPTCHA, a CAPTCHA tool which now blocks malicious bots for more than 14% of the world’s traffic. What most people don’t know is that it is powered by Human Protocol, a knowledge marketplace leveraging crypto for 100m users worldwide, where machines post jobs for humans. We talk about how they’ve achiev...

To Celebrate our 50th Episode, we enjoy a joint podcast with Tor Bair, Founder of The Secret Network, and host of Sharing Secrets Podcast, where we first explore why privacy is important to both citizens and institutions in Web 3, and in particular DeFi, and how ‘Programmable Privacy’ is now possible across blockchains for both data and computation through ‘secret contracts’. The second part sees...

We speak with Henri, founder of Streamr, and serial entrepreneur in the data economy. We explore how his career in algorithmic trading in capital markets helped him understand the importance of ‘real-time data’ and why the promise of blockchain + IoT in domains like Smart Cities despite its early promise still hasn't happened. We ask if data policy like GDPR is already out of date with regards to...

Dr. Gavin Wood needs no introduction. Cofounder and CTO of Ethereum, inventor of the Solidity programming language and now Founder of The Web 3 Foundation, Parity Labs, and the Polkadot network. We talk about his mission to re-decentralise The Web as a ‘free trust technologist’, giving the Internet native law, and how Polkadot is a bet against blockchain maximalism with a focus on ‘full agency’ fo...

Michael O’Rourke is founder of Pocket Network, a decentralized API protocol, and marketplace. We talk about the history of node infrastructure in public blockchain networks, the problem of increasing centralisation and the importance of democratising the use of full nodes. We address; could Jeff Bezos switch off crypto via AWS (Amazon Web Services), due to its reliance on cloud infrastructure, why...

Jordan is a serial founder, digital advertising and product designer that has a history of making digital viral hits. This time, he half-jokingly birthed a parody on the craziness of permissionless innovation in DeFi, ‘degen culture’ and the various food protocols of 2020. In the process, he started a crazy community experiment in collectibles and NFT (Non Fungible Token) food farming, which raise...

Hugh is a 15 year insurance industry veteran who launched Nexus Mutual, a decentralised insurance protocol, back in 2017 and, with the advent of DeFi, whose time has come. We talk about how insurance has historically enabled risk taking and innovation, forms of risk in DeFi, and how innovations in oracles & NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) make the industry unstoppable in delivering highly disruptive, b...

Justin, a physicist and seasoned executive from the loyalty industry (where he built a billion dollar unicorn), has developed a novel cryptographic game and foundational primitive for Web 3 using ‘stateful NFTs’, with some of the world’s leading game theorists, that removes the need for arbitration in the fulfilment of digital to physical redemption. We discuss NFTs as loyalty mechanisms, and how...

Sebastien, a serial entrepreneur and gaming veteran talks about his vision for an Open Metaverse. Enabled by blockchain and new models, like play-to-earn, to allow economics between creator supply, user demand and virtual consumption. We discuss the idea of content-as-the-platform and user created, and owned, NFTs as virtual goods, how that interacts with DeFi (Decentralised Finance) and how it pr...

Whale Shark is the pseudo-anonymous founder of the $WHALE NFT collector community, with the largest social currency by market cap in the world, built in just 12 months, and backed by the world's largest collection of non-fungible tokens. We talk about the difference between NFTs, from gaming collectibles to digital fine art, how they can be used to collateralize an asset backed crypto currency, an...

Joseph Lubin, Co-Founder of Ethereum and Founder & CEO of Consensys, talks about his continuous mission to improve Web 3’s fledgling but critical ‘trust layer’ for the Internet and how it can bring about ‘granular governance’. We cover his early background in machine learning and autonomous systems research and why he believes creating ‘AI Lego’ is as important to Web 3 as Money Lego. As well as t...

Dawn is founder & CEO of Oasis Lab & Network, as well as an award-winning professor at Berkeley, working on world leading research in applied cryptography, security, blockchain and machine learning - as well as being a serial entrepreneur. We talk about spinning out deep tech startups from academia as well as her important mission to create a more responsible data economy based on privacy and user...

Bette co-founder of Acala Network talks us through her teams passionate belief in a multichain universe, being inspired by Gavin Wood, and why they believe Polkadot will both relieve Ethereum of some of its economic load and allow a greater democratisation of DeFi to grow the pie for Web 3. We talk about the DeFi paradox of yield vs efficiency, the challenges and sustainability of yield farming, ‘...

Join some of the world’s most exciting elements of the Web 3 ecosystem, for one-day virtual demos, panels, and more, September 15th & 16th 2020: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/diffusion-digital-september We talk to John Craine about the mission, purpose and growing pains of scaling the world’s leading NFT (Non Fungible Token) platform. We explore how they are breaking out of the ‘crypto art’ niche to...

Bermuda is one of the only environments with regulatory equivalence with the US and EU and the ‘Risk capital’ of the world, for insurance and reinsurance. Their Premier, the youngest in his country's history, and with a masters in IT from George Washington, holds a uniquely high level of technical literacy talks with refreshing nuance about creating an innovation first environment to evolve Web 3...

Stani talks about why coming out of the Nordics so early Aave (previously ETh Lend) they had no choice but to be community financed and therefore driven as well as the challenges and benefits of being a first mover in Web 3, and why in DeFi there are no competitors only direct or indirect cooperation. We explore how they evolved their token, its features and governance over time and their Vertical...

Jake Brukhman is Founder of CoinFund which has been investing in blockchain since 2016. Through his unique experience in computer science, quantitative trading and product management at places like Amazon, he and his team have developed an approach to Web 3 called ‘Network Lifecycle Investing’, where they work with startups in both an early stage venture capacity but also helping bootstrap network...

Toby Simpson is co-founder and COO of Fetch.ai, an open decentralised machine learning network. We talk about his three decades of work in agent based systems: creating MMORGs (massively multiplayer online role playing games) in the 90’s, to biologically inspired systems as Head of Software Design at DeepMind, which went on to be acquired by Google.   We look at how these experiences led him to cr...