#18 - Jesse Pollak

24:59Base is interesting because it's a coinless coin, right? Or it's a coinless chain, right? Where do you think we're going to go with equity-backed assets, real-world assets, other kinds of things on base or in general, right? Like, I think the legal system is moving quickly in a positive direction. Maybe you have some thoughts on that and whether base supports that, whether base will support that. Go ahead. Yeah. I do think that this is one of the biggest problems in crypto is that because we've had a relative dearth of high quality assets on chain, there's been a fair amount of confusion around what's actually valuable and why is it valuable.

25:35And that's led to astronomical valuations for things that don't really make sense and aren't really driven by kind of market fundamentals. And I think one of the things I'm most excited about is everything coming on chain over the next few years. And what's going to happen when everything comes on chain is A, all of those assets are going to become a lot more powerful. Because when you can do 24-7 fully global trading of equities on-chain, that's going to be a better product experience for everyone everywhere in the world. And so that's going to be a huge enabler. But the second thing that I'm really excited about is I think it's going to normalize a little bit on-chain as a market, where instead of having this bifurcation where you have like the on-chain assets that are valued in a totally different way and the off-chain assets that are valued in another way, you're just going to have one market and it's going to run on a new technology platform, but we can look at all of them as one holistic market and make value-based judgments against them.

26:25And one of the things I'm actually expecting will be kind of a forerunner of this is, and Brian talked about this and we talked about this, the team has been exploring what does it look like to bring coin on-chain. And one of the things I'm really curious about is if coin comes on-chain, does it get massively marked up like every other kind of token that lives on-chain? Or does it bring fundamentals into the on-chain space and say, now every other token needs to be compared against coin. Because I think right now people look at the tokens and the coins that are on-chain, and then they look at stocks like coin off-chain, and they're valuing the tokens at a much higher rate.

27:03And I think that that actually has the opportunity to kind of like re-equilibrate us and really force the question of like, why do you value this thing just because it's a token? And is this kind of like emergence of these traditional assets on-chain gonna fix that? So I actually have, if I was still CTO or if I was, you know, I would put that as one of the top three things to get done this year to get coin on chain. And there's a reason for that, which is it's not so much about just the assets, but the legal pathway. Right. Whether it's done as a Wyoming Dow, whether it's done as, you know, a Tennessee Dow, whether it's done in Dubai, whether it's however it's done.

27:44Right. building that legal pathway is a 10 of 10 importance, not just for Coinbase, but actually for the whole space. Because as you say, it puts fundamentals on chain, number one, maybe it brings marks down or what have you. And number two is, it's actually what the future is for tech companies, because I'm actually very bearish on NYSE, NASDAQ, and generally the entire 20th century, I think is ending in terms of US markets. We can go into all that. But I think it's basically like the entire, quote, Western world, Anglo world, English speaking world, and so on. Everything will eventually just go on chain.

28:25That's what the financial system will be. That is the flippening. And it'll be obviously the right way of doing it. Just like, you know, everything that has not yet gone on the internet will go on the internet, you know, like any data structure that isn't yet there will get there. And what puts it there is often a very valuable thing. Let me pause there. No, 100 % agreed. In some ways, you can look at what Coinbase has done with Base and the path we've been paving for other businesses to come on chain. And you can think about Coin as a similar kind of analogy, where it's like Base is putting our technology platform on chain and enabling us to build the next generation of Coinbase products on chain.

29:01And bringing Coin onto Base or Coin on chain will put our governance platform on chain And will require us to solve a bunch of the hard problems around, you know, bringing governance on chain or figuring out that legal pathway that I think can serve as kind of a beacon for other companies around the world to see how much leverage they can get when they use this new technology platform to transform themselves and to provide greater access to operate more efficiently and to participate in this new global market, this new global economy that we're building. Awesome. So, you know, it's funny. I don't know if you remember, there's another diagram that I drew in 2018, 2019, when we were working together, which showed a bunch of boxes.

29:39And it was like fiat currency to cryptocurrency was a much larger market than most people expected it to be. Right. Like USD BTC is a hundred billion dollar. I mean, if you add Coinbase plus Binance plus all the exchanges and so on around the world, it's a multi hundred billion dollar market. right and that's just fiat currency cryptocurrency right so then if you say what is fiat equity to crypto equity look like that's what we're just talking about right taking right these stocks and putting them on chain what does fiat real estate to crypto real estate look like what does fiat identity to crypto identity look like what does fiat x to crypto x look like i think each of those is like a gigantic business um you know fiat dollars to crypto dollars is stable coins

30:55Go ahead. in the world trades and makes markets and every single participant and every single person in the world can access it if they have an internet connection. And that is a massive opportunity, both to obviously build great businesses that aren't possible today and expand businesses that exist today, but I think also make an incredible positive impact on the world because we're going to give everyone around the world the opportunity to participate and to, regardless of where they're born, regardless of where they live, join this new economy, get access to every single asset, and then build whatever they want on top of it.

31:29And that's just going to be an incredible way of making the world better. Did you see the trailer that we had for the Network School Fellowship, where I said at the end, the only connection you need is an internet connection? Yes. Yes. Yeah. I mean, this is like, I love saying this thing of like, all you need is an internet connection. Because I think we've felt that, or people have said that for a while. But But the reality is, if you had an internet connection, you could do certain things, in particular, what the internet enables, it enabled you to transfer information globally. So if you have an internet connection, for the most part, although, of course, there's China and other parts of the world that have kind of secluded themselves off.

32:04But for the most part, you could participate in open and free and global transfer of information. But what the internet missed was open, free and global transfer of value. And with crypto, with this upgrade to the system, we're finally going to have that. That actually means that when you have an internet connection, you have access to not just an open information economy, you have access to an open financial economy and all of the stuff that can be built on top of that. And I think it's going to be way, way better. We're doing something together, actually. Let's talk about that. We're doing base batches.

32:35We're hosting folks at Network School for an upcoming event. Why don't we talk about that? Tell me about that, Jesse. Yeah, absolutely. So our vision for base is to bring the entire world on chain, a billion people all around the world. And the way we think we do that is by giving builders and creators the tools to build incredible use cases, applications, incredible content that actually bring all those people on chain. It's going to be the builders that do it. And so we've been thinking a lot about how do we build a scalable kind of pipeline to enable people to build their first applications, their first communities, their first content on chain and get distribution to the rest of the world.

33:11And so we just started this thing called base batches and we're running batch number one, which is kind of everything you need to get started building on chain. It's a build-a-thon and education. It's mentorship. It's a demo day where you can get more visibility and you can get more distribution. And then it's kind of a pathway to incubation where you're actually going to get hands-on funding and support from some of the best incubators in the world to help you take your product at that point, which you will have gone zero to one on, and turn it into a business where you can actually be working on it around the year, full-time focus.

33:49And so when we were thinking about starting batches, we wanted to make sure that we were working with the best people in the world and the best communities in the world. And at the absolute top of our list was the network school. I got to actually go there in the fall, got to do a fireside chat with Bology and meet a ton of the incredible students that were at the school. My big takeaway from that is I don't think there's anything else like it in the world. Really? Thank you. There is no other place in the world where you have incredibly high agency, motivated people who are making a life decision to oftentimes fly around the world to go to someplace that's a little bit off the beaten path and to be together and try and create something beautiful and to try and think about what does the next era of our society look like and how do we start to break down some of these historical borders and boundaries between us and build something new that's connected by the internet and so getting to be there this fall getting to experience that getting to see how big a bet that Balaji was making on this future and how unafraid he was and all these other people that were there to try something new and to break out of the mold.

35:01That to me and in conversations was then like, that's exactly the kind of boldness that base aspires to. And that when we're thinking about building batches and we're thinking about supporting builders that we want to deliver to them. And so it just made sense for us to reach out topology to figure out how could we do a collaboration to put together this event, to make it so that when folks go through batches, they'll actually have an opportunity to then go to the network school because there's all of that kind of admiration and hopefully collaboration going forward between BASE and the network school.

35:32So that's my quick take. If you are working on BASE, apply to BASE batches, come to network school, also apply for the network school fellowship because we'll be funding things on many different spaces, but in particular people building on base. Maybe this will help be the backbone of network societies, startup societies, network states. I love it. And I want to just dig in a little bit because I think some of the people who are watching this on the Bayside, maybe this is the first time they're hearing about the network school and what you guys are doing with the network school scholarship. So can you just give me like a high level overview?

36:03Like what is the network school? What is the network school scholarship? Totally. Okay. So network school takes, have you heard the term founder market fit? It's basically like the network school is the intersection of about 20 different things I've done over my life, all in like one kind of thing, right? So first and foremost, it's for the dark talent. So many people around the world, whether in the US or outside, certainly outside the US in India and Mongolia, all Africa, all kinds of places, Latin America that now have an Android phone and they're online, but they don't have resources or what have you, right?

36:42So we've just rolled out our first thing for them, the Network School Fellowship. Anyone, anywhere, 100K, where they fill out the application online. And if I think they've got a good project, we bring them out, level them up, right? And we're going to roll out other programs like that, probably an internship program as well, which is for folks who are more junior in their career. They're not yet a tech founder, which is a rare kind of person. But they are, so we'll do other kinds of things. so the never still fellowship anyone anywhere 100k uh and one of the things about that is we're in a place with an enlightened immigration policy so we can bring people from around the world right it's internationalism and capitalism so that right then third is you know i taught at sanford for a long time and uh i i love that environment what it was and it isn't what it was for a variety of reasons funding cuts ai fakery of grades and so on so you have to re-envision that so it's a school in that sense.

37:35Third is it's a startup society. So this is something which, you know, is basically an embryonic form of, you know, rather than arguing about politics endlessly, what if we could do it from scratch? What if we could do something new, right? Okay. And just do something all the way from others, you know, let them do their thing. We do our thing, right? Fourth, it is really, you know, it's funny as tech as I am, you know, actually a good analogy is cars, Right. We're driving cars forward. We have, you know, literally we have electric cars. We have self-driving cars. We even now have flying cars. You know, if you saw the Ehang demo recently, it's also American versions like Archer.

38:18But we also have walkable societies. Right. So we're walkable places. So you pull cars back and you also advance them. So we're pushing the frontiers of tech with, you know, obviously, AI and crypto and social, all this stuff. right? But we're actually a big part of network school is offline offices, right? And basically, for example, we ran this thing recently. I'm not sure I'll tell you about this, a learn-a-thon. Actually, you know what? We could do a learn-a-thon for base. You know why? Let me tell you what a learn-a-thon is. We took like the fast AI course, which is like 10, 11 hours, right?

38:51And problem is people don't complete these online courses. They sign up for it aspirationally. It's like signing up to go and work out and not going and working out, right? Okay. So what we did is we said, okay, people signed up for this Learnathon. They come at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, and basically they go through, so it's like 11-hour course or an 11-hour course, right? So they go through five hours of it on the first day and like phones down. They're literally watching the video, all 20 people, no distractions, no phones, no notifications. They told their significant other. I'll be back Sunday evening.

39:25Okay. Like literally gone. Okay. Focus biology mode. Right. You remember this, right? What would we call it? Yeah. We'd find you at like 1am in a conference room with the wall, just like covered in thoughts and be like, okay, biology is locked in. Yeah. We're locked in, right? We're just, we're, we're doing this. We're not leaving until it's done. Right. Okay. So, uh, so 9am, you know, and so they go video. then when it was time to code everybody would bring out their laptops they would work on them and there's like a ta who's walking around just making sure no one's getting stuck and so on we have a timer boom next right and in this fashion it was like uh it's like a personal trainer but for your brain i call it a personal brainer right so the personal brainer is that fun right so the personal brainer ran this learn-a-thon and uh we had we had we had uh water we had snacks and so and so forth but the goal was just total focus so in two days uh you know we took also before and after videos when should you use a random forest no clue what is a confusion matrix don't know what about collaborative filtering don't know when should you use a random forest tabular data and if you have a lot of noisy features.

40:41What is a confusion matrix? It's like a table of actual answers against the predicted answers and then comparing how often it gets it right and then when and how much it gets it wrong. What is collaborative filtering? Recommendation algorithm by clustering people or items or things by similarity. So actually we should do that with base. I love that. It's like the instant pill. It's like you get on chain pilled in a weekend. Yes, exactly. That's right. And what it is, it's the right combination, in my view, of offline and online, right? Yeah, I love that. Because what's scarce is, like, focus. Okay, so other piece of network tool, it's internet first, and it's Asia.

41:20Asia has a peer, not a guest, right? So Asia, in the sense of China, India, is obviously a big part of tech, right? And it's a big part of Silicon Valley, right? But for a variety of reasons, people are, like, wilding out in the U.S. about that, which is all very unfortunate. And we'll open up other nodes in other places. I want to do one maybe in Dubai or, you know, maybe one in the Americas, depending on what time zone. But we'll start with this one. And then finally, I think this is the thing that makes – I mean, there's a lot of different versions of it, I could say. But this is how the cloud takes land, right?

41:52We're doing all this crazy stuff in the cloud. Amazing, insane amounts of money moves on our coins. It's like actually crazy. And huge numbers of people, you know, what a million people is like online is just – have you ever seen a stadium? like have you seen the the lime thing on crowd sizes have i shown you that right it's like here's what 50 people 100 people 200 400 right so like whenever i go to tweet or whenever you go to tweet it's like uh you know the star spangled banner they go up to the thing and they're like oh you they look at the whole stadium before they go ahead no right i just it's timely i've been having that experience a lot the last week where i'm just like oh man i it's easy sometimes to forget that when you go on Twitter now, like with your audience or my audience, it really is like five stadiums.

42:38Stadium. Yeah. Stadium or multiple stadiums. Right. But the funny thing is that's so large. And then when you materialize even a small fracture that in person, it's like a packed hall. Right. So I think the numbers in the cloud are so mind crushingly massive that when you start materializing them into the physical world, right, you start to realize how big it is what we've built online is, right? You start to actually perceive that, you know? And I think that is sort of the missing piece. You know, obviously tech guys have been wanting to build in the physical world. And so now we're actually doing that, right?

43:11So there's a lot of different things in network school, you know, scratches. I love that. What, you know, we've talked a lot about crypto. How do you think like crypto fits into this vision of network states and the network school? Like why do those two things go hand in hand? Very good question. So I think there's The most unpopular word in the most unpopular, but most important word in the world, I would argue, is re-centralization. OK, why? Basically, centralization, decentralization, re-centralization. In many ways, especially with Bitcoin is, it's like there's a burning building. You hit the fire alarm.

43:50You get your Bitcoin and you get out. Right. And you get out. But if everybody scrambles in every direction, that's crypto anarchy. and I actually don't believe in crypto anarchy. Crypto anarchy is better than pure anarchy because at least there's digital order, but there's physical disorder, right? What I believe in is crypto civilization, right? Ultimately, there's a rebundling. You know, you have bundling, unbundling, rebundling. There's a centralization, decentralization, re-centralization on the other side where we come back together again in a new form. It's like you take a CD, you unbundle it into mp3s you rebundle into playlists right you take a newspaper you unbundle it into articles and you rebundle into twitter feeds for example right so western states are getting unbundled into digital tribes organized by coins and stuff social networks other things online i think they're going to get rebundled into startup societies and network seats and i think that's actually like what people aren't my view is people aren't really yet taking the internet seriously you know in a sense, by the way, most people aren't, this is both a play on words, but I think it's also true.

44:59Most people aren't actually country first. They're internet first. Should I explain what I mean by that? Like, like, for example, when you wake up in the morning, what's the first thing you do? Internet first, right? You're checking your phone or something like that. Or people, even if they're working out, they're checking their, you know, watch their Fitbit. Where are you finding your friends? Internet first, because you're WhatsAppping them or you're messaging them. They're on social networks or an email. How about your business? Internet first. How about your transactions, intranet first? How about your communications, intranet first, right?

45:26Like, basically, an enormous swath of your existence is actually spent on the intranet, right? To an extent, it truly wasn't in 1991. It's a completely different life. But what hasn't yet gone there are some of the institutions. Universities aren't intranet first, right? Politicians aren't, they're on social media, but the decision-making isn't intranet first, right? Right. Laws are Internet first. And that's what crypto represents. Right. Crypto represents property. So that that answers your question. Right. How do you build an Internet for society? It is going to start with, you know, blockchains give you monetary policy to give you property rights to give you contracts.

46:07Right. And my view is like common law that worked for the British and the Constitution. It only scaled up to the Americans. But Bitcoin and blockchain, that's for everyone on the Internet. I love that. Yeah, I think there's a lot of overlap. You know, when we're talking about building a global on-chain economy, it's almost the same thing where we're talking about, OK, we can use this new technology platform to create an economy that, of course, has property rights and has contracts that let people organize in new ways. And I totally agree. I feel like we are at the next turning point where we're going to start to see how do people use this technology, not just to do payments and play games and post on social media, but to fundamentally reorganize the way that society works and that humans connect and that we work together.

46:57That's right. And I think like in, you know, not to sound in the let's call it time of volatility that I think is to ensue. One of the things, you know, the Internet was built to resist a nuclear attack. Right. So even in times of extreme instability, the Internet is there. It's funny. You know, remember, people used to talk about the digital divide and they feared that people would lack the Internet or actually it's the opposite. Often the Internet is the only thing they have. Right. Right. Right. So so essentially, can you you know, in a server, have you seen a server rack? You can reboot a server from the Internet.

47:32Right. So the reboot will be from the Internet. Yeah. And what network school is about is is that it's like I'll give one more analogy. Have you seen every read Foundation by Isaac Asimov? Yeah. Yeah. So like Terminus is the school on the edge of the universe. Right. Which is set up so that when the Galactic Empire collapses, it can be rebooted in a shorter period of time. than it was before, right? I love that. Okay, here's maybe a last question for you. We're entering this world of obviously massive change, the network states and on-chain economies, all this starting to happen. What's your advice for young builders, people who are coming up right now?

48:15How should they be thinking about this world? How should they be thinking about making their mark, whether that's on base or as part of the network school or in whatever way they want to? Great question. First, oh, but there's tons of stuff. First is apply to network school. We're going to actually have an internship program. So even if you don't know what you're doing in life, if you're smart and you want to work hard, we'll host you on site, train you up, hire you out. I'll talk about that soon. So that's my first thing, just go and apply. Okay. But then more specifically, I'd say, A, you, so what should you learn?

48:52You should learn statistics and computer science, because from those two primitives, you can rebuild almost everything else, right? That's equivalent of like learning physics and math. Obviously, you should still learn math and physics, you know, those are very good. But if you, if those come at the right angle of attack, from stats and computer science, you can rebuild all of AI, all of machine learning, and so on and so forth. From the computer science part, you can get to cryptography. And from computer science, you can do simulations of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering. And from both stats, computer science and AI, you can get to actually the humanities, right?

49:25Like AI art and this and that. And of course, from crypto, you can have the crypto angle on art with NFTs, right? So from a foundational learning standpoint, from a jurisdiction standpoint, I would reconsider being based in the US. I think it's like just less friendly as an environment. I think lots of other countries, lots of other places. There's dozens of countries with digital nomad visas. If you come to network school, we can upgrade your fiat identity, like help you get better residencies. That's actually an important part of things. Just like one of the reasons people buy cryptocurrencies to upgrade their fiat currency.

49:57They buy Bitcoin at$100 per coin and they sell it at$100 ,000. They shouldn't sell, but if they did, if they've made such a poor decision to ever sell their Bitcoin, right? So they use cryptocurrency to upgrade their fiat currency. And one of the things I think about a lot is their crypto identity could upgrade their fiat identity, their crypto identity of their NS ID, then we can get them a better residency permit, then we can get them a better passport or something like that, right? A few more things. I would say they should think about things internet first, not country first. And by the way, there's a totally different, I think if you're in China, there's a totally different set of things one would do.

50:36But if you're non-China, then this is what you do. And if you're in China, you can be both, there's a whole China stack or the internet stack. If you're outside China, really the internet stack. I would say to be very concerned about doing anything in hardware if you don't fully understand the Chinese hardware ecosystem. This is something people don't yet fully understand, but basically Chinese hardware has gotten so good and they're so much better than everybody else that if you are, even Elon is amazing and our greatest entrepreneur of all time, has BYD really giving him a run for his money abroad.

51:10It's outselling him in many jurisdictions, right? So Chinese hardware has gotten so good that basically competing directly against Chinese hardware will be very difficult, right? So at least be aware of that. So if you're a young builder, but in software, you can be competitive in creating content. You can be competitive. Um, but it'll be, it'll be something where, uh, I can't give a specific, you know, thing for any interest person. Those are the general things. The last thing I'll say is not everybody needs to be a founder. This is actually going to be one of the messages in a coming post. You ready for this one?

51:39ready yeah did you know that it's actually by some measures harder to become a unicorn founder than to become a pro athlete okay there's only 1500 tech unicorns globally and there's like several thousand pro athletes right if you add up nba nfl european soccer cricket whatever there's like thousands of pro athletes there's like about a thousand to two thousand unicorn founders right so like to be a unicorn is like being a pro athlete not everybody needs to be a founder. In fact, they shouldn't be. You know how hard it is. I know how hard it is. Most people actually will do better as part of a larger vehicle, right?

52:16And they don't have to figure out everything for themselves. There's some degree, you know, so we will have a program for the thousand X, the 10 ,000 X number of people would be great tech employees, tech interns, and so on and so forth. And then they do really well there. And then maybe they can become a founder or something later, or they can realize if they, if they tell me how hard it is to be a founder, then I might actually listen to them about why they want to be a founder. But only, right? So that's the other thing I'd say for builders. Builders includes founders and employees and execs and so on.

52:42Okay, let me pause there. And open source developers. I was going to say that not everyone needs to be a founder, but I think everyone can be a builder. And I think this is actually one of the shared philosophies that the network school and base really has is that regardless of what industry you're in, regardless of what your skill set That is, you can bring this builder identity and mentality, which is about showing up. It's about working hard. It's about not giving up. It's about being resourceful and using all the tools that you have at your disposal in order to get things done. It's about working together with other people.

53:14And I think that mentality, it's one of the great superpowers that people can have. And I think it's one of the things that has, again, brought base to the network school because it feels like there's so much shared alignment around this idea of everyone, everywhere in the world. if you have an internet connection, you can be a builder and you can make positive change on the internet and thereby make positive change on the world. Awesome. Okay, with that, Jesse, let's wrap. I love it. And so we're base for builders at Denver School. Check out base APIs and apply for Denver School Fellowship. All right, thanks guys.

53:46And join base batches, number one. Join base batches. See everyone there. Okay. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, guys.