(bright samba music) >> Narrator: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico. It's The Cube. Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (bright samba music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to The Cube's exclusive coverage here in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound global conference where leaders from around the world, Silicon Valley, Miami, New York, all over the United States and Puerto Rico and Moscow and South Africa, all over the world come together to talk about the impact of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and a decentralized internet and the impact on society. Our next guest is David Orban. He's the managing director of Networking Society Ventures. Also does some investing. On the keynote speech of the closing session here on Day 1 of Blockchain Unbound. Thanks for joining me. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> So one of the big things that we're seeing in this revolution with blockchain and cryptocurrency is an awareness of how to reimagine democracy, society, and among other things, money transfer, and how that's impacting the world, from entrepreneurship to NGO's and society for good, AI for good, technology for good. So I got to ask ya, I heard some of your presentation, is there's some good tailwinds and some good headwinds in this industry, what's your assessment right now of the state of the globe with respect to how a network society will evolve and what are some of your observations and conclusions? >> One of our fundamental assumptions is that social change is only possible if sustainable technologies emerge to catalyze it. You know, if a slave rebellion won under the Roman Empire, the night of the victory, the slaves would be around the fire to decide who would be the slave the next morning, because they needed slaves to do everything. Today, not only we have achieved a level in our human civilization to outlaw slavery, we have incredible new inventions, like blockchain, to imagine a new social contract that is going to unstoppably come. >> This social contract is interesting, because now you have, I mean, democratization in digital transformation has been kicked around for a long time. Where are some real good examples that you can point to where you see really bright lights of innovation around democratization and digital transformation where it's working, and also where it's not working and what we need to do better? >> Certainly it is fashionable to pretend that technology hasn't helped. And one of the reasons why many people take that stance, is because they are confused. Too many simultaneous changes make the future even harder to predict today that it used to be the case 10, 20 or a hundred years ago. This is especially hard for those who are in charge of making those predictions, politicians, regulators, policy makers. We appointed or elected them in order to make decisions for everybody else. It is an impossible job, but they cannot afford to say that is the case. >> Yeah, and certainly we're in the media business and our model is open media, and even in the media you still have these gate keepers. So we see interesting trends, right so we're seeing disruption horizontally across all industries. If you look at blockchain and some of the things that are coming out, it's spurring real creativity from entrepreneurs as well as leaders, progressives if you will, that are being focused on efficiencies, which is spawning these little spots of innovation. I saw your use case around the solar panel. It was working. They killed it. So, you know, this is examples of where you see people get the value of really fast. So where are the efficiencies? Where's the value of creation coming from? What is blockchain? What is crypto? What is decentralized apps enabling? Is it, are we running too fast? Is it an enabling technology? What's your reaction, the thoughts? >> Some of us have been around in the first internet boom, 20 years ago, and the big three trillion dollars of value have been achieved by the dot-coms as measured by their market capitalization. And you would say, well, that bubble burst, and it all disappeared, but it didn't. We are still using the transatlantic fiber optic cables that were laid down then, and that created the premise for the next 20 years of technology based economic growth. So with blockchain, we are seeing the same, except that contrary to that, which was a quite provincial Silicon Valley phenomenon, blockchain innovation is today, global. So it is going to incredible places incredibly fast, and it is extremely competitive. There are projects that are doing the same thing, addressing the same challenge, all over the world. And it is fantastic. We even have a name for it. It's called forking or ray forking. >> Yeah, forking creates competition, but also faster time the value. Let's talk about the bubble. The dot-com bubble, which I lived through, and you have as well, was again, a Silicon Valley phenomenon, some New York, mostly America, basically, but everything happened. So everything that was talked about actually happened. But at that time, we didn't have a very wired community. Today we have organic communities in place, whether it's from open source communities online to actually a connected global network, AKA mobile internet. The role of communities now, seems to be that counter balancing self-governing opportunity. So I want to get your thoughts. Is the bubble going to be predicated, or letting some air out of that bubble, can it come from the communities? Because you could argue that efficiency in the communities with sourcing the truth if exposing the data can create very fast efficiencies around the transparency, so the thesis is, with the bubble behavior, also comes a connected community. So what's your view on the role of the community as a mechanism to continue to clean up or sanitize or whatever word we want to use to manage and help the self-governing? Because if it's organic ground swell, the communities should theoretically be monitoring and self-governing the growth. You thoughts. >> Those that are afraid of what is happening are incredibly capable of accusing the blockchain world of a thing and its opposite. Because they are saying, oh my god, the value, the metric value, which some mistakenly call the market capitalization, of tokens is increasing too fast, this is a bubble. And then maybe a month later, they will say, oh look it, everything is going to zero, I told you so. Well, either one is the problem or the other is the problem, but not both. The answer to your question is that yes, the community is expressing what is going on at the fine granularity that was not possible before because you would measure that by the subsequent venture funding stages of a startup, and maybe there would be a year or two years or more between one or the other of the stages. Today with tokens, every minute we are measuring the heartbeat of the project and the sentiment of the community around it. And everybody can vote with their tokens. Do I want to be part of this? Or I don't feel aligned anymore. And it is beautiful. But an even more important fact is that yes, today the community is global. When in 1976, Richard Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene and the last chapter defined memes, which were the unit of the evolution of culture, he didn't mean silly images on the internet with captions. What he meant is, we should really be able to build a new science here. Memetic Engineering is what is fake news, and it is up to people like you and me who believe in the positive role of technology to show that we can actually have memetic engineering that benefits society and the markets. >> I mean, who'd have fake news is two things, the payload of fake news and actually the infrastructure gamification of what it did. I postulate that for, on one end of the spectrum is fake news, you could almost move to the other side of the spectrum and say, this good news. So clickbait equals fake news equals bad behavior, real bait, content, equals real news, real community. So there's a spectrum that you can almost say, we could actually weaponize content for good. >> Evolving our tool set in order to make sure that the wisdom of the crowds creates incredible investment and wealth creation opportunities for billions, not only for the gate keepers is what should be the regulators' best job, and they should be excited to have it rather than panicking. >> I want to ask you a question, philosophically. You mentioned tokens and governance, what we can vote for what people can vote with their coins and or some sort of consensus, gesture, or actually, real token transfer, as a way of voting. This actually, could solve the truth problem, because if you think about it, this is a new mechanism to understand sentiment within, whether it's a project or society, this new mechanism could be a source of truth, hence, but no centralized control, so you got the decentralization thing happening, but that's all predicated on going around a central authority, but the token dynamic, actually if you think about it, could be a token of truth, because statistically, it should work that way. Is that how you see it happening? And is that a directional correct statement? >> For too many years, we believed that Churchill's quip, democracy's the worst kind of government, except every other kind of government, was just a joke. He was giving us a challenge. And we were too weak to step up to that challenge and to design better governance mechanisms, better political instruments, and that is what is happening today. More and more people realize that they are freed up by technology where their relationship with the nation state that pretends to own them through citizenship and taxation can and will be renegotiated. >> I got to ask you a question. I love your logo, you've got a network graph up there that show the network society, implying that we're all connected, almost, you can argue, border-less nations, if you will. But I got to ask you, as that vision of a network society implies we're all connected, so we're all in one big tribe, although maybe, with different characteristics, but how do you see the future as we look at the current internet as almost a 30 year old stack, I mean, we're talkin' ancient relic by today's standards. So how do you see the stack evolving to match this criteria of a network society where the expectations of users and communities in society, whether it's government or groups are expecting new kinds of experiences, new kinds of outcomes? What in the stack is evolving? I mean, blockchain is one piece of it, but we're dealing with an old stack. I mean, it's old guard stuff, keep company's legacy. But the stack needs to be modernized. How does a stack modernize to intersect with your vision of a network society? >> Biological evolution has never been able to go meta. Our eyes are still so badly designed that the nerves bringing signals to our brain puncture the screen on which the images are projected. It's so stupid. We are able to understand when our designs are bad, and we are able to go deep, and actually rip out what has been the best way of going about certain things. This has happened in energy, where we are still in the process of electrifying a lot of things, many stoves are still gas stoves rather than electric as they should be. Or in transportation where we went from horses to cars and now we going to rapidly go to electric transportation. The internet is very young. It's just 30 years old, and the consumer space, just 50, 60 years old as a technology, but it must be fundamentally rebuilt and rethought. >> Yeah, it needs an engine change. It needs a tune up. >> What is dangerous is that there are very powerfully faulty memes being planted into the brains of too many people bringing desirable vulnerabilities in our infrastructure. And too few understand that those vulnerabilities caught everyone, whether they are friends, or real or pretend enemies. We have to build sustainable human civilization on a solid foundation. Nobody is served by maintaining those vulnerabilities that are still poking holes in vital infrastructure around us. >> Yeah, I mean, vital infrastructure and also the soft infrastructure, AKA the human psyche, AK memes in one tactic, to control the belief system and the narrative. But that's an attention driven mindset, so we're seeing that that fake news weaponizing content really prayed on the attention aspect of people where the reputation piece wasn't there. A lot of people now realizing that. How important is reputation in this new era of society, because there's something that's been challenging. We've seen every project, I mean, every project that I've seen, that I like, has an element of reputation in it. So there's a, because you have identity. Identity is super important. Attention, we know what does there. Get my attention. But the new discovery, the new navigation, the new progression to proficiency or value needs to be trusted. Reputation is an important part. Your reaction. >> Blockchain is making a lot of things measurable that were not before, and measuring them, it is able to assign value to them, and wherever there is value, new markets are being born. That is how incredible resources are now being poured in problems that were ignored for many, many years. And what is beautiful, is that blockchain is doing it open source. That is why new sustainable business models are evolving so fast. Back in the days, we would say an internet year is 3 months. I am now saying a blockchain year is 3 weeks. >> So that's fundamental, this value piece. That seems to be the equation that seems to be consistent. That's what you're saying, this value measurement seems to be a key metric and store, that's what the value is going to circulate around? Is that? >> So um, for the moment, our lives are bounded, limited. We have a given number of years to live, and more and more people realize that what they need to maximize is their benefit together with everybody else's benefit, because that is what makes human society valuable to its components and as a whole. So that kind of new outlook is being driven in the blockchain industry by people who don't necessarily need the second billion or the second million, but there are too many people who need to make ends meet, and it is just plain unacceptable that we let them live a life that does not fulfill their potential. >> This is a new opportunity to reimagine that equation. So I got to ask you, I love your work on social economic impact with blockchain, one of the things that we're observing in our reporting and analysis is, societal entrepreneurship is now emerging, what used to be a waterfall philanthropy exercise of NGO's and whatnot, fund something, stand up some servers, build a data center, uh, funding's over, project's over, start all over again. You're kind of chasing this tail. We're seeing real action with people who understand the businesses of nonprofits. We're turning that domain expertise into real, viable ventures. This is now an emerging trend, we're seeing certainly in Washington DC, where they have networks of people that they know, and now building on a tech stack is easier than it every was, so you're starting to see these real business opportunities getting funded and growing, that never would have gotten funding before, whether it's a, you know, an app for missing and exploited children, human trafficking, battered women, to water saving, water purification, all these things are now happening. What's your view on this, because this is kind of an unreported area around this entrepreneurship trend that things are getting to value faster? Do you see the same thing? >> If you ask the founder of the Ford Motor Company if he believed that damaging a community was a good business practice, he would have probably punched you, or at least laughed. Because today, those who feel that maximizing profit is a sacred duty of any capitalistic enterprise, even if it does include extracting and harming communities, employees, stakeholders, is extremely misguided. Positive impact is not counter to profit. They go hand in hand. >> Mission driven enterprises can exist. It's not just for the philanthropy. >> There is nothing else, but a sustainable business. In a long term an unsustainable business cannot be sustained. So if you want to build a business that lasts, you must build it sustainably, ecologically, socially, but of course, also in terms of it being profitable. And what is beautiful about the blockchain is that it completely decoupled the long term sustainability of a project from this silly decision. Should it be a for profit? Should it be a nonprofit? Who cares? What it should be is an inspiration for millions of people to align their creativity and passion with that project. And profits and sustainability will follow. >> And the funding's there and the opportunity time to value is shorter than ever before. Thank you so much for spending the time coming on The Cube and sharing your ideas and your mission and vision. And thanks for coming on. The Cube appreciate it. Okay, we are here with Dave Orban, managing director, Network Society Ventures, changing the world, societal economic impact. I'm John Furrier, your Washington Cube. More live coverage, day 2 tomorrow. We're here both days, Thursday and Friday. Here in Puerto Rico, for Blockchain Unbound, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (light techno music) (light techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico. It's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound. This is where global event from Silicon Valley, New York, all around the world, investors, entrepreneurs, all coming together to build this industry. A lot of great conversations, a lot of conversations around Puerto Rico as a place to domicile all these great investments and companies. Obviously post-hurricane, lot of action here, lot of interest. Blockchain for good, crypto for good, also for money making. Our next guest is Scott Mize, who's with Network Society Labs. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Scott: Thank you. >> John: Good to see you again. >> You, too. >> You have a knack for being in real inflection-point markets. When we first met, almost 15 years ago in Silicon Valley, nanotech was a field that was a great track, it's doing great work, has great impact. We see each other around. Hey birds of a feather flock together. You're doing crypto, doing some work. Take a minute to talk about what you're doing Scott. What's the work? Network Society Lab, what's that about? >> Right. I guess we're both living on the bleeding edge. I'm the C.E.O. of Network Society Lab, and we're a venture development firm, so we provide the same services as an incubator or accelerator, but primarily for the portfolio companies of Network Society Ventures, which is another company that's in the Network Society keiretsu, which is headed by David Orban, who's speaking here today. >> Is that a investment group? Or is that more of an advisory service? >> The fund is a seed stage venture capital fund. >> John: The deploy capital. >> Yeah, that focuses on exponential technologies in decentralized networks, companies that are driven by that. We work with those companies to help them be successful. >> Great, so two different groups. >> Scott: Two different-- >> The lab team is get down and dirty help advisory, accelerate the mission? >> Right. And in that same keiretsu there's also Network Society Research, which is a think tank, and Network Society Media, which is a media company. >> All right so what are the things you're working on? Give us a taste of the kind of ventures and projects you're working on right now. Most of the work we're doing right now is what we call token sale management, and that's basically taking responsibility for executing a token sale from beginning to end, all of the activities, and bringing together service providers that are world-class in each one of the responsibilities that you need to be executed, in order to have a successful token event. We manage them the same way a general contractor in a construction environment manages subcontractors. >> Is that because there's too many moving parts? There's a lot of lawyerly going on, you got tax advice. Is that the reason? Or-- >> Why we structure it that way? >> Well we want to keep a lean internal staff, so we don't want to have a huge head count, and also this allows us to work with world-class people, like for instance, on two of the projects we're doing now, Michael Turpin's the P.R. guy, so that automatically means that among the team, there's over 50 ICO's under the belt, and it's the same for every service provider. They've done some significant number of these, and the combined experience, the combined capability, is really the best team you could get together in the world. >> So talk about the global impact of this, cause we were talking last night, we were saying, "Hey, you know, killer app is money." And that's what Blockchain, cryptocurrency, essentially decentralized apps are all going to have flowing through them. >> Scott: Right. >> Value creation, value capture with money is the killer app. What kind of projects you working on that go outside the U.S? And is it a global phenomenon? And what's your take on that? >> I'll give you a specific example, one example, which is called Wealth Migrate, and they have a coin called the WealthE coin, wealth with a capital E on the end, and what they are is a fractional real estate ownership company. So if you're someone who's in the emerging developing world, and you want to begin to build wealth, and you'd like to own a piece of first-world real estate in the U.S. or Australia or UK, you can go to this website, and today the minimum is about $1,000, but by implementing the Blockchain further, they want to eventually get down to $1, you can buy a piece of real estate and enjoy the returns on that. So this is closing the wealth gap, it's giving people who are just getting into the middle class the ability to own real estate and build wealth. >> What's going on in Puerto Rico here? If folks couldn't make it here, what's the dynamic here? Obviously the hurricane pretty much crushed the island. It's well documented, but the entrepreneurial culture here is coming together with outside ecosystem communities. What are you seeing here in Puerto Rico? What's your observation? >> Well it's actually a pretty fascinating experiment. Michael Turpin of the Transform Group has been living in Puerto Rico for quite some time, and he was kind of the Pied Piper, evangelizing this place, and saying, "Hey, this is a great place to come live, it's got a favorable tax structure, etcetera." And I think it's fantastic that the crypto community is essentially adopting Puerto Rico, and also moving here. All this activity is really going to give a shot in the arm to the Puerto Rican economy, and people are doing that very intentionally, as a way to give back and help to rebuild the island. >> So what do you say to the folks out there that say, "Well it's not just Puerto Rico, there's other domicile digital nations out there." I mean today the U.K. announced, or yesterday announced, that they are going to convert to Fiat currency, with a faster payment system, with Coinbase. It's a significant, radical move. So can Puerto Rico maintain a position, and countries like Bahrain which Amazon works with, you got Armenia, you got China, you got all these, Estonia. You have people who are jockeying for similar positions. Is it going to be a new digital nation sovereignty structure? >> I think Puerto Rico has a particular advantage in this part of the United States, so if you're a U.S. citizen, then this is the only place where you can go and stay in the U.S. and get this special treatment. So I think it's always going to have a little bit of a niche there, but this is truly a competitive environment. It's global, it's very competitive. There are certain nations that are very anti-crypto, like the United States for instance, and there are certain nations that embrace it. The one that we like best, and we're doing a couple of token sale events or ICO's, is Malta. And Malta has a history of creating a regulatory environment that's very favorable to things like financial services and iGaming, so doing digital currency is something that's a natural for them, and the government and the regulatory agencies are all in. So they're a competitor, and there are many others as you said, but I think that's all good because competition will bring down prices, spur innovation, etcetera, and that's fantastic. >> John: But regulatory posture and policy will be the gating factor for competitiveness for nations. >> Yeah, that's one of the major factors, It wouldn't be the only one, but absolutely. When you've got a situation where the regulators are saying, "Our mission in life is to have a light touch. We want it to be regulated, we don't want a lot of fraud going on, but we want to make it easy for you guys to be doing these things." It makes a huge difference. >> So what do you say to the folks out there that would say, "Okay you know, Michael Turpin, he's got so many ICO's, he's just pumping and dumping these things, he's got so many ICO's." He's a promoter, basically. He's not really-- >> Yeah I mean he started out as a P.R. firm. >> Yes. >> John: He's a P.R. firm. You got a P.R. firm as a leader in the industry. Some people will say, "Hey, I want to see Goldman Sachs come in. I want to see real players come in, I want to see more validation." The P.R. messaging is not going well, look at Brock Pierce, he got taken down by John Oliver. New York Times wrapped it up-- >> Scott: Bad timing. >> So you have a lot of kind of thud out there. >> Yeah, yes. >> So what do you say to that? What do people say to that? I have my own opinion, but I'll share it after you share yours. >> I mean just one observation is, you can tell a lot about a person's personality type by what their initial reaction is to cryptocurrency. It's almost like a Meyers-Briggs, right? >> Explain that. >> Well just in my experience, I've introduced the idea of crypto, or now that I'm in the field, a lot of people have approached me, friends. >> John: Who want to learn. >> Who want to learn but they come into it with certain biases, and for some reason, crypto really pokes at people's biases, and some people can't get over the fact that well, "Why does it have any value?" And I go, "Well, why does the United States dollar have any value?" I mean you've got full faith in credit of the government that's in debt by 20 trillion dollars, is that a good idea? But they don't understand-- >> What are some of the reactions you get? across the board what's the spectrum of reactions? You've got the one end which is fraud, it's bad-- >> Scott: It's got to be a scam. >> John: The next revolution is here. >> It's the entire spectrum. Again like I said, it has a lot to do with what people's personalities, If people are very conservative and skeptical, they're going to be conservative and skeptical about it, and look for the negative. If they're very innovative and cutting-edge and open to new ideas, they're going to think it's cool and interesting, and is an agent for change. >> Well a lot of people I talk to, and here's my opinion, I personally believe that you can't P.R. your way to industry momentum. That's the old way, so I'm down on the whole press release model, just pump and dump, and you're seeing a lot of that, and it's not just the Transform Group, it's just P.R. in general. There's also people misrepresentation. So to me that's a communication vehicle, not primary. The key is value creation. Which companies are creating value? Which one's communities are endorsing? Who has real communities? Who doesn't? So I think as investors come in, the thing that I'm hearing is, smart money saying, "I want quality deals, and I got to peel away the promotional layer, and look at the core data." >> Scott: Right. >> That seems to be a flight-to-quality right now in this market. >> There's a major flight-to-quality. We're probably in the third or fourth era of ICO's, and there is a flight-to-quality because people realize, what I call these deals are vaporware or field of dreams. These are the ones where there's really nothing there and it's, "give me $30 million, and I'll build this, I'll boil the ocean for you." That's why we like to work with companies like Wealth Migrate, because what they've done is, on relatively small capital, proven a business model and started a business, and now what they need is money to scale that model, and those are the ones that we prefer, and that's when people can look and say, "I can see that this business model's working, and that's where a lot of the risk is factored out, and now it's just about making that a bigger business." >> The thing I tell people is when you look at selecting service providers or partners, whether it's P.R., strategy, advisory, it's not so much the function. I'm against a P.R. angle, but let's take Transform Group, They have a great social network, so the signaling is, if they are involved, so it's about the network you're choosing, right? So to me it's not so much the functional P.R., or the functional advisory, it's really who's bringing the network effect, investors to the table, partners to the table? >> And that's good and bad actually, because you're talking about hype. There's no more fertile hype environment than social media. One of the things I find to be really scary, is that a proxy for the quality of the ICO is how many telegram followers does the chat group have, which I think is just insane. >> John: You can game that. >> Yeah. >> Well Scott, what are you working on now? What's next for you? What's some of the things that you see happening in the next year? >> Well we're just staying heads down, executing several of these token sales or ICO's, and that's what we're going to do. We're also going to get back to the original knitting, which was our mission, which is expand our venture-development services, so have a full palette of things that the startups from Network Society Ventures can choose from, so that we can help them make successful. >> Token economics is a critical decision every company has to make, >> Scott: Yes. >> And having advisory help is great. Thanks for sharing your opinion here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Puerto Rico, for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of BlockChain Unbound. Back with more coverage after the short break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)