Road Work Ahead
We stand on the brink of disruption that will change the world in ways we could never imagine. Artificial Intelligence, Data Privacy, Cybersecurity, and the Future of Work have converged to create a perfect storm of fear and hope.
How do we respond as business owners, workers, and humans? This podcast explores the many answers to that question. This is not a forum for wild speculation or doom-and-gloom, end-of-the-world posturing. Instead, we are navigating disruption the same way we navigate a freeway under construction: When you see the bright orange sign that shouts "ROAD WORK AHEAD" you slow down, pay attention, and look out for the drivers around you.
Join me as I seek out and interview the people who are embracing disruption and committing themselves and their organizations to a brighter future.
Road Work Ahead
#9 - Harold Hughes: Proof of Experience, Blockchain, Collaboration, Entrepreneurship
We have a bad habit that we need to talk about. We tend to think that everybody has the same problems that we have. And every time we have a problem, we tend to go to the same places to find a solution. It's a bad habit for two reasons. First, we're limiting the kinds of solutions that we're going to get; and second, we're missing out on hearing from a lot of incredible problem solvers - people who would bring new and innovative perspectives if we took the time to find them and listen to them.
This is one of the topics for discussion in this week's interview with Harold Hughes. Harold is a founder from a very different background than the typical ivy league, Silicon Valley scene, but his company, Bandwagon, is making no less of an impact. Bandwagon is an experience technology company using blockchain to authenticate experiences and bring communities of all kinds closer together.
Bandwagon's Proof of Experience technology is an idea that could revolutionize the entertainment industry and possibly provide an easy solution to the problem of AI-fabricated news, but Harold isn't interested in talking about "disruption". Instead, he says collaboration is the way to move us forward and amplify the quieter voices in our community.
When Harold isn't running Bandwagon, he's advocating for minority entrepreneurs and equipping a more diverse generation of solution providers. Our conversation was an encouragement to me. I hope you enjoy it.
Welcome everybody to Roadwork Ahead, a podcast that explores the unmapped future of business and technology. My name is Sam Gert and I am your host. We have a bad habit that we need to talk about. We tend to think that everybody has the same problems that we have, and every time we have a problem, we tend to go to the same places to find a solution. It's a bad habit for two reasons. First, we're limiting the kinds of solutions that we're going to get and, second, we're missing out on hearing from a lot of incredible problem solvers, people who would bring new and innovative perspectives if we took the time to find them and listen to them. This is one of the topics for discussion in this week's interview with Harold Hughes. Harold is a founder from a very different background than the typical Ivy League Silicon Valley scene, but his company, bandwagon, is making no less of an impact.
Speaker 1:Bandwagon is an experienced technology company that's using blockchain to authenticate experiences and bring communities of all kinds closer together. Bandwagon's proof of experience technology is an idea that could revolutionize the entertainment industry and possibly provide an easy solution to the problem of AI fabricated news. But Harold isn't interested in talking about disruption. Instead, he says collaboration is the way to move us forward and amplify the quieter voices in our community. When Harold isn't running Bandwagon, he's advocating for minority entrepreneurs and equipping a more diverse generation of solution providers. Our conversation was an incredible encouragement to me and I hope you enjoy it, harold. Just to start, I'm really interested to hear about Bandwagon and what you're doing, but I'd really be curious to know how that came about. What was the driving force behind founding such a unique company? What needs were you solving for, and is there a big disruption that you're planning for?
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, first off, that's perfect that you started with disruption, because I intentionally tried to avoid that word. I find that it is more often than not it puts a big target on your back when you really don't need it. You think about any idea that you've come up with and you're thinking about trying something. That's really, really, really hard and it's going to be harder than you even imagine, but you know it's going to be hard. The idea of saying we're going to disrupt healthcare, we're going to disrupt ticketing, probably creates more competitors for you and more challenges for you than opportunities.
Speaker 2:When we started Bandwagon, it was really straightforward and simple. I'm a big Clemson fan, first generation college grad, first one in my family to go to school, and Clemson was where I went. I remember getting there and not really knowing that many people, despite being from South Carolina, and seeing how, on a game day, you've got strangers hugging and high-fiving because your star quarterback just scored a touchdown, I was like, wow, this is crazy. Look at how connected we are. The next day, which is Sunday, in the South is segregated by race, religion, socioeconomic status. People live in different communities. You're like, wow, the same people you were hugging and high-fiving on Saturday you're crossing the street for on Sundays.
Speaker 2:I wanted to find a way, when I started Bandwagon, to connect more fans of their same teams, to hope that we'd be closer together. This was coming into 2016 or 2014, and so understanding that the country was changing in its ways and so thinking through how do we create more community at these live events? That's why we started Bandwagon not really to disrupt anything, but really to bring more people together in hopes that the person that you hug and high-five at the game may be someone you may grab a beer with or grab a meal with. Then that type of emotion rolls over to Sunday and then Monday in your co-working and in your office relationship. So that was why we started Bandwagon.
Speaker 1:I think community plays into a lot of what you do. It's not just your company. Community is, I think, more broadly. The Harold Hughes brand is. You're outspoken about building those communities. I want to spend a lot of time talking about that, but just very quickly I'm Bandwagon. I'm curious was it always a blockchain company?
Speaker 2:It wasn't, we ended up stumbling the blockchain. So in 2014, we started Bandwagon. I was coming off of my MBA at Clemson at the time. I think I graduated on May 9th of 2014 and then incorporated the company as an LLC on May 11th, and I took all the hours that I had spent in class and homework time so maybe around 20 or 30 hours a week to try to think through if this idea could be a company. So I spent the next year and a half just kicking the idea around of what we could build because, again, we wanted to be additive.
Speaker 2:We didn't want to eliminate Ticketmaster or StubHub. We wanted to figure out a way to complement, and so the idea was really straightforward in 2014 was how do we help fans of Clemson resell their tickets to fans of Clemson with frictionless and so right now, if you're a Clemson fan, you want to sell to a Clemson fan, you can sell to your buddies directly, but you're not going to get market value. Or you get listed on StubHub, which is going to take a lot of fees and you can't guarantee that a Clemson fan is going to buy it. Or the third way which is a bit unsavory but it still happens is that you'd go into these message boards and say, hey, I've got four tickets, and then someone replies and you're meeting a stranger in a Starbucks parking lot and exchanging cash, hoping that the ticket that they're giving you are real, and for us, we're just like, okay, we've got to figure out a way to do this, and so we were trying to think through the databases, and it was a big challenge in understanding how information moved from the primary market to the secondary market, and that's when we realized that blockchain could solve it.
Speaker 2:So blockchain ended up just being the hammer to the nail that we were trying to address, and that's how we ended up using it. And so since then, the company has since pivoted, especially due to the COVID-19, the pandemic. There weren't live events, and so we actually ended up pivoting in 2020 to what we are today, which is an experienced technology company where we lean more into digital experiences and connecting those fan bases with their favorite artists, athletes, teams, entertainers for that community to be longer than just that two and a half or three and a half hours. So we learned a lot in the beginning, but blockchain kind of found us.
Speaker 1:I think that's what's most interesting to me about the whole story is that you started with this vision. You then blockchain became a really good application for accomplishing it, but then, in that pivot, the whole proof of experience concept doesn't work without blockchain. It's almost like the blockchain came out of the need for this one thing and then your new pivot came out of your experience with blockchain. Yeah, exactly Now we're going to avoid the word disruption, but what do you see happening in the future with this proof of experience idea, with blockchain more broadly? That's going to change the way that we think about well, about community.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there's two things. Number one, we're seeing that generations like ours and the ones that'll come after us care a lot about experiences and care a lot about unique experiences, and so being able to earn that experience is something that I think we're all taking more and more pride in. And then, secondly, when we look at how experiences or our entertainment changing like when was the last time you had a physical ticket to anything, your flights boarding passes digital, the concerts tickets digital, the sporting events tickets digital and so when you think about how big the collectible space has become and how much commemoration commemorative items are going for, the idea is how do you prove that you were somewhere? How do you prove that you did something? We've all heard stories where someone says like oh yeah, you know, my uncle went to Woodstock and it's just like okay, if everybody's uncles went to Woodstock, there's a way more people there than they were there.
Speaker 2:And so the part that we're excited about with how blockchain plays into this, is that I can immediately say oh wait, you went to that concert, I was there too and being able to have valid photos. The way we think about it is is that you can look at like a Honest Wagner baseball card and you have to believe that that is certified by an entity that it is real and authentic. Well, as you look at an era where you're dealing with misappropriation of content, false attribution of content and people creating things with AI, it's going to be really really difficult to know when a person was somewhere when something really did happen, and so we're really excited about how we'll be able to connect people with true and real life experiences and using the blockchain to prove them in a global way, in a transparent way.
Speaker 1:You mentioned proving an experience in light of AI generated content. Is that something where you feel like this could be applied to building trust, say like with news outlets or these other organizations where you have essentially a digital file of someone saying something and there needs to be some kind of validation in this day and age that that actually took place? Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. There was an example and I wish I had it on the like, actually knew the example by name, but there was an example of I want to say it might have been the Pentagon, but there was some building that was on fire and there was posted on social, and so then the markets took a crazy swing because they thought that there was some type of terrorist type activity. Turns out it was an AI generated image and the people who shorted it obviously made a bunch of money and people lost money in that time. And so it was kind of crazy because for us, as we started off thinking about entertainment and creating digital fan clubs and say, hey, I want to prove I'm the biggest Beyonce fan there is. I've listened to her music for 5,000 hours. I was at this show when she first performed in Houston decades ago Like I want to be able to prove that that was great. That was how we started.
Speaker 2:But as we started to talk more people, they were just like well, what do you do about news applications? Because you think about a lot of the content we capture. There's a lot of AI like regular civilians recording things and submitting it to the news, and then it becomes a thing. And now, as you think about how fast things move, the verification isn't happening, the rate we probably should see when it comes to the media, and so being able to know that, oh, this could serve as an oracle of truth of real life events, not only in venue and in stadium and in an entertainment industry, but beyond that. That's what we're super excited. So, as we look at ourselves as a it technology is a platform company. The entertainment side is just one of the biggest applications we see and we're super excited about it. Who wouldn't want to play in that space? But as you look at the application overall, it can be used, obviously, in news and in other ways as well.
Speaker 1:There's so much that is, I think, worrying people right now, right with regards to, you know, the power of the systems that we have and how they don't really have anything raining them in. There's no technology that stops me. You draw parallels to these different periods in time and you look at what happened with, like Napster, yeah, and how file sharing just completely turned the music industry upside down because they didn't have a plan for it, and Then all of the protections that came out in the years following were terrible. They didn't, they didn't work very well. They they were more of a burden on the actual consumer than they were on the person who was sharing files.
Speaker 1:And so, with, with AI, with all these other technologies coming out, we already know that we have this great need for some kind of validation, verification, yeah, but I'm not sure very many people have an idea of what that could look like. It sounds like you are I mean, truly it sounds like you're on the cutting edge of these ideas, and I love the fact that it starts with the idea that we just like to collect things. We love experiences, we like to collect things. We had the. You know that there was that huge NFT I'll call it a bubble. It was a bubble.
Speaker 1:There's a huge fc thing that happened a couple years ago. I'm sure you were very involved in that, because that's, I mean, that's, that's the technology. It's the same technology. How are you? Are there ways apart from entertainment where you're applying this to business today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah for sure. And so before we move to that, I definitely want to talk about the Napster thing, because I hadn't thought about until you mentioned it. But you know, going to college during the Napster roof shark line wire era, you could take your favorite song on the radio right now and back then and a lot of people listening Maybe younger or whatever may not know how crazy it was, where you could type in a song title and the artist and still see Dozens of results and then you're gonna click one or download it and hope that it's the right one, that it's not some bad file. And so then, when you think about what we have today with streaming, with Apple and Spotify and title and all these other ones, well, what it? What actually happened? Well, number one, we got clarity and sent like centralization so this song comes from this entertainer and so we know it. There's nothing blurry there. So we had centralization. Next there was the ability to understand Okay, well, now there's trust here, because I know that Apple wouldn't have put this on here if this was bad. So someone else is doing all of that work.
Speaker 2:And so for us we're saying do we expect that to happen with ticketing? Do we expect ticketmaster and stub hub to merge? Do we expect Instagram and Facebook and Twitter to suddenly start Verifying if photos are real before they're posted on their platform and get hundreds and thousands of lights? Probably not. And so when I think about beyond you know the NFT application, which you know my son and I loved some of them and collected some of them together, and I still have them because why not at this point? They're not worth anymore today. But when I think about the business applications, we think about the extension of the Lifetime value of a customer, and I'll talk about that like we did an activation with VaynerMedia, pepsi, lifewater, and normally, when you go to an event, at a conference or a festival, the brands put their logos all over stuff and they're given away. For what? Cousins, t-shirts and things like that. What happens after the event? Nothing normally like okay, we ordered a thousand shirts, we gave away 800 of them. Now what?
Speaker 2:And so what we love about the way in which the technology can be used is that we're actually creating a dynamic Marketing asset. We're creating a vehicle that can unlock other Experiences, and I love what Nike's doing right now. Nike's partnered or is using blockchain and created the dot swoosh Movement where they said, hey, if you've done this, you get this, and everyone that has the second thing is Eligible to buy the third thing, and everyone that bought the third thing can now have the opportunity to get the fourth thing for free. And so that's what we've been able to do when we work with our partners is being able to say, okay, instead of getting a t-shirt or a coosie at the event, what if you could get a digital collectible?
Speaker 2:What if you could get just a stamp that says, like a password stamp, a stamp that says I was here for this, and then it's assigned to your email address and the next event that we have, if you use the same email address, we're actually gonna give you VIP, so only people that can have VIP. Well, if I already demonstrated some connection to our brand, some affinity for our brand, and then you build from there. So you think about the customer life cycle and LTV and all these user journeys, you're actually able to start saying like, okay, great, like I know, if I create a reward here, x% do the next thing, and then y% do the next thing, and now you're getting into the niche levels of unique Experiences, and that's where we think the opportunity gets really really fun and really really big.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think there's a huge. It sounds like there's a huge opportunity there to really boost the way we think about, uh, personalizing, yeah, content and brand experience, but also gamifying it, giving giving people Almost a one-on-one, unique experience with the brands that they like to interact with. You go back in time. You got like the newspaper ads and you know that's how you interacted with a brand you'd go to the store and you'd buy it, and then Social media changed all of that and people had to figure out okay, now we can actually talk to our customers and this just adds that entirely new level to it. It's absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 2:Anyway, I cut you off. What were you gonna say? No, no, no, I was saying that the gamification is one of the things I think is super exciting. Well, we did an activation with will shipley Clemson's running back Last year, where he basically said I want to see what fancy like, I know what I look like on the espn, but I want to see what it's like from the fans perspective. And so he basically went and created this opportunity with our part, with our technology, and said fans, submit your content from game day. I mean, you go to his website and you're able to upload your pictures and whether that's you at home watching the game, you on the field with him. Afterwards he took all of those pictures and they made one big mosaic and that was a digital collectible that he sold and it was 50 bucks or 100 bucks or whatever it is, and then having that digital collectible got you dinnered with him or access to golf with him or Streaming on twitch with him, and so that was like giving multiple opportunities.
Speaker 2:And but now we're seeing, like one of our brand partners said, we want to do an activation where we see our product at sunset, and so you want to encourage everyone to do this. And so today, you would post that on one maybe instagram and say like okay, okay, follow us on instagram. He falls on instagram we want to see your content. Well then, what happens when people are posting filters over it or they posting big text over it? And so one of the examples we came up with was you know, I'm a Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan. When tom brady came to play for our team, I was like this isn't gonna help us. We're not a quarterback away. Like we, we have many other issues. Well, sure enough, the guy wins a Super Bowl, and then, ultimately, he's gonna retire.
Speaker 2:And so when he did retire, I always thought, man, he's gonna be able to have highlights against all 32 teams. And I said, man, it'd be really cool if whoever wanted to do a brand Um commercial and say you know, we want to take user-generated content from 32 different teams, from fans, how would you do it? And so the idea is like okay, are you gonna have people uploading links on your website? Are you doing this in this, and so on. Our platform is like great, you click it, just like upload an instagram video or an instagram picture, and then you know, because it's on the blockchain, who did it? We have geo location, we have timestamp, we have all those things. Or it's like oh, you didn't screen, record this off of instagram and upload it. We can tell that you captured it in your phone, um and so when you think about the gamification of it, it's huge. It like that is Huge and the average person won't consider themselves a collector, but we collect things, not thinking about it, and experiences is definitely that thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely agree. I can't think of a single person who doesn't collect something, even if they say they don't right, right, um, so when? When does the light turn on with with blockchain? You kind of stumble upon it, you, you apply it to your company. When does the light turn on and you start seeing all of this. Like what's that experience? Like when did you, in a sense, fall in love with this idea of blockchain and all that it could?
Speaker 2:do. It was 2018, so q4 2017 the company was running out of money, um, so I sold my townhouse. I told my wife that I was going to move to awesome texas and do this accelerator, and if we ran out of money by may, then you know that was the end of the company. But in 2018, uh, I got connected with the accelerator. We got connected with mentors, like meli price, who had sold her company front gate tickets, um, and so she had an exit in the ticketing space, so now she's an advisor.
Speaker 2:We started working with orlando jones, um, actor, writer, having his insight. But the technology took off. We got invited to dubai, uh, for the blockchain summit to talk about what we were doing, which was wild because it made me realize that, while I may be banging my head up in greenville, south carolina, talking about blockchain, the world is ready. The world is looking for opportunities to use the technology in real ways. That wasn't scammy and wasn't, you know, running around trying to grab a bunch of money, like the ICO craze was, as we look back on it. And so for us, it was 2018 to see, oh, this is a real live application, people are seeing value in what we're doing. And then we sign one customer and move into the next one. So that's when the light bulb really went off and said like, oh, this is more than just solving the problem we had. This can create a platform to build everything on.
Speaker 1:So when did you come up with the idea to write the book? You wrote a children's book about blockchain. Yeah, clearly, that's that's an investment into the technology that goes well beyond any business. That's, that's the idea that our kids need to know this as soon as possible. Yeah, so when did that happen?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it was two things. Number one so I wrote the book in 2021, or the end of 2021 came out last year. But there's two things that happened. One was that I've got a now seven year old and I'm trying to make sure that he understands what dad does for work. But also I have an aging mom.
Speaker 2:I have people in my life who have no idea what I do, and I thought to myself like there's got to be a simpler way to explain this stuff, and so I wrote a kids book about blockchain Literally that's what it's called Because I wanted my son to be able to tell his friends like this is what my dad does for work, you know, and I wanted him to be able to explain it.
Speaker 2:But I also wanted my mom to know. So I was emphasized like we focus on six to 60 in that subject matter, where we want to make sure everyone's able to understand very at the basics of it. The last thing about it is is that growing up, we didn't necessarily have. I remember we got our first computer and then we got a well and the little disks online, and but we were a household that went to the library to use the computer, and so when I think about the opportunities that my peers had because they'd access the technology sooner, I didn't want my son to have that, have that disadvantage, and so I said not only are you going to be aware of what dad does, but we're going to play around, we're going to do some of the cool stuff with it, and so that stuff was really really cool for us to explore together and he, you know, I'm glad that he helped inspire me to write that book.
Speaker 1:Have you gotten a lot of attention because of that? Has there been this desire to see this moves earlier and earlier into a kids education. Because of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we're talking a different national organizations about how can be added to curriculums. I'm speaking a different like colleges and now high schools, and so we're trying to get even younger and younger. But overall it's just making sure that people understand the applications can be so, so low. You think about Roblox and some of these games that kids are playing. There's a lot of opportunity where the technology helps. There you think about oh, you created something and now you can be paid on it forever. That's really cool and so, yeah, it was definitely super inspiring to do that.
Speaker 1:It reminds me a lot of what we're seeing with like artificial intelligence and bringing kids up on the idea of like what it is and what it's not.
Speaker 1:So that we don't get 1020 years out and have a group of people who think it's something that it's not right, or have a group of people who are just unnecessarily like a verse to it or hyper, you know. Big on it I was. Yeah, I was really encouraged to see it. I thought it was a really cool book, thank you. When you think about your business and we think about the technology in general, you look back one year, five years and then you look forward one year, five years. That trajectory, it seems like we're picking up speed. Where do you see us being in like that one year, five years out with technologies? Well, I should say, with companies incorporating blockchain technologies into what they're doing and then, more specifically, with what you're doing, incorporating things like proof of experience into digital assets as a way of validation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think in the next year we'll see a lot of supply chain continue to go there, which is the not sexy part of it. So you know B2B trying to think through like, where did this product come from? I think that that's definitely going to be one of the things In corporate America. I spent about a decade there and I remember how everyone said Walmart is going to make RFID a thing and they put a lot of investment on. Walmart is going to impact the supply chain and so everyone's going to use RFID tags and it took a little while, but now RFID is everywhere and so I think that it's going to be a little bit slower, but we'll start seeing it in supply chain. But then the second piece is in entertainment. I don't think that that toothpaste is going back in the tube. I think we're going to continue to see digital experiences become prioritized. I think you're going to see this blend between virtual reality and augmented reality and thinking about how you can tokenize experiences. I think that that's going to be huge. But in the next five years I think that we end up in the same way that the cloud is like.
Speaker 2:People had all of these like feelings and adverse reactions to the cloud and now you realize like, oh, it's not stored here, it's stored somewhere else. That's really all blockchain was. It's like, oh, it's not stored here, it's stored somewhere else, and we're able to have some consensus mechanisms to help understand it. Like this makes sense. Like it makes sense. But I think that with the ICOs, with the NFTs ICO, initial coin offering, nft, non-vunjable token those things created this, yes, euphoria, but also put bad taste in people's mouths on like, oh, these are all just get rich quick schemes. When it's like, oh, no, this is actually a technology that can build infrastructure on top of things Like one of the examples I give in the book is about blockchain based voting in the future, and that's not too crazy, because countries like Estonia already use the infrastructure. They're using cryptography in their elections and instead of the United States, where we have one election day, estonia they do it for several days, and so you could change your mind, you could waffle when they have higher participation, participation rates because of some of those like choices.
Speaker 2:But being able to use the technology to advance those types of things that may not seem obvious is really important, and so that's one of the things I think about is that we talk about collaboration and we talk about diversity.
Speaker 2:You know, one of the examples I give is that if you take the top 12, your top 10 engineers in the world, and say here's a hammer, what can you do with it? They'll come up with a really solid list, like on a whiteboard right out, this really great list. You take them all out and you take, you know, bakers, and you take zoologists, and you take librarians and all these other people and say, hey, what could you do with this thing? You're going to get things added to that initial list, but right now we're still in that phase where the only people building blockchain technology applications are people who are in blockchain, and so we need to find a way to bring more people in. Tell everyone the water is a spine, it's not crazy. You can do this so that the technology can get to where it needs to faster and safer.
Speaker 1:It seems to me like the you thinking back over the ICO fad and the NFT, those, those bubbles that kind of happened, where you sit huge, run up crazy prices and then now there's really no value there at all. People were just so enamored with the technology and it was. That was the confusing part for a lot of people, as the technology really is incredible. I kind of feel like then what was happening was you weren't applying it to anything. There was no real pain that was being solved for, and so it turned into. This thing was like this is great, why do I need it?
Speaker 2:Well, I think, I think there was a pain. I think so here's. Here's my controversial take on NFTs. All of that timed up perfectly with the pandemic. You and I were sitting at home by ourselves, right? So you either were like some people said. They went days and weeks and months without seeing another human being in person.
Speaker 2:At the same time, you had an influx of cash, and what we were experiencing is a bull market, and so people had money, but they had no ways to show it off. So if I'm wearing a really nice Rolex or have a really nice car, you can't see my Rolex, you can't see my car. And so I think it was two things. One, people were lonely and desired community and felt a need to be connected, and so they found these little communities that are based on this animal or that animal or this art segment or this art style, and said, yeah, this is my identity and these other people share that identity, and now I just have to pay this amount of money to be in it and, oh, I have the money, and actually, as this goes up, I can show off my status. It becomes even more of a thing. I think those are. Those are the things that collided.
Speaker 2:So I do still think that there is a need to feel connected, there's a longingness of being close, but I think that what ended up happening is that we blurred the lines between what is art, what is community, what is needed to be in a community, and so now we're seeing a lot of that come back to earth. So you know as much as many of my friends and I have lost in that space. I think the opportunity is is that the, the core of it is still there. We still want to be part of a community, but how do we do that? And so that's what kind of how we're looking at with bandwagon is like oh, there's a community of you know bad bunny fans. Like this is how you do it. It's a little different, but this is how you use that same technology. So that's my thought on it, and I think there was a problem, but we just chose the most wild way to solve it initially.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what I was going to say is when, when you look at the very real problems that are getting brought more and more to the surface where blockchain can be applied and it provides that very real solution, I feel like the more felt pain you have that can be articulated, the more people are just naturally going to say, yeah, this is a good solution. So you know whether, yeah, so whether it's, you know, digital rights protections for video games and music. You know, a lot of the problem was people. People were like only the only the very small segment of, like, kids and college students were using Napster, right, and the only people who were talking about Napster were those kids and college students and the companies who were losing money because because of it. But they have a person like my parents didn't know what Napster was Right, and you know, I was on there download music, but they didn't know what it was, and so there wasn't this real felt problem.
Speaker 1:And it wasn't until much later where digital rights solutions actually became usable and they actually became, like you know, comfortable that we had success with them. Yeah, and it also took a little bit more of a felt need on everybody's part, I think, as, as you have this intensified felt need to verify what you're seeing online or what you're seeing with digital assets. I think it's going to be an easy sell over, sure to bring to bring blockchain, you know, validation, proof of experience into that and say you know, here's, here's the solution that works for that.
Speaker 2:It has to be. It has to be. I mean, we are one bad picture, we're one very good AI generated picture, away from this being oh, we need posts to be validated before they go online down to an anonymous user, like. It's going to have to happen, because if someone posts something that goes so viral that we can't stop it and I've been to the capital and been talking to different members of Congress and state legislation as well there's no way to slow this down from a legislation level. We're going to need to understand how the technology companies help here and do their part, and I think it's going to be really interesting and I hope that we're able to be part of that solution.
Speaker 1:Yeah, me too. I mean that sounds excellent. I'm curious for your take on this, though. Do you think that one picture, do you think that that happens and we lose all trust in digital assets before we find a viable solution for rebuilding that trust, or do you think that we can transition seamlessly? I kind of feel like we're going to have to go through that period of pain and broken trust before people wake up and realize what we need.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree. I think that there's going to be a I don't know what is real anymore, especially as you think about how global media is right now in the news and thinking about the fact that, like, I only know what's happening in this area because someone said that it happened in that area and the content that I'm seeing is from the I believe to be from that area, and so once we're able to start creating people, once we're able to start creating content video, pictures we are in for a problem, and so I do think that we're going to be dealing with something where it's like I don't know what's real anymore and conspiracy theories are going to sound a little bit more reasonable, realistic, like, I don't know, they could be on it, so I'm very concerned about it. I hope that the media platforms are willing to accept responsibility for this before it becomes the problem it can be Two things that I don't want to happen.
Speaker 1:The first is I don't want people to go so far overboard that they demand a bad solution now just because they can have it now, right, right. And then the other thing that I don't want to see happen is I don't want to see an overreaction from the powers that be in penalizing the ones who make it so free and easy for us to distribute content, to disseminate content. I don't want that burden placed on them to have to verify everything that goes up on their platform. I don't think that's good for the internet. I don't think that's good for the world. So we're right in this really sticky place where you know it could fall off on either side and create a lot of bad outcomes for a long time to come.
Speaker 2:It's interesting. I mean, so you know, so you remain in rain. I know like if you upload something to Instagram, instagram owns it. So if you upload something to Instagram, instagram now has a global perpetual license on that content and that content goes viral and then impacts a market or impact someone's livelihood or several person's livelihood, instagram should be responsible. And so at that point, you would want Instagram to say, ok, we don't outright own all the content that's on the platform, but then if they just say that their business model is impacted directly, so they're going to have to figure out which is it, do you own this content once I post it and then you have to deal with ramifications, giant mega company. Or do you want to allow individuals to own their content, which is what I think more of us want? To have more control for the creator and understanding that, yeah, you may lose money here, but you can create a way for this content to be verified and authentic, like it wouldn't stop Instagram at all, for example and I'm using them just because they're a popular one but it wouldn't stop anything for them to say like oh, this, we know that this was uploaded by this verified user. They have an account for this long.
Speaker 2:This picture was uploaded directly from their mobile device. It wasn't screenshot recorded and cropped like our devices know. That it wouldn't stop them from doing it. They could absolutely confirm this is an authentic picture taken with geotag location done. They just don't do it, and so it's the same thing that we deal with in the ticketing space with Ticketmaster. They just don't do some of these things that feel obvious. You know, I someone said man, I really hope that which all you are building, you know, can solve ticketing and bots. I was like they don't want to stop bots, like if they wanted to stop bots, bots would be done, and so it will be interesting. I do fear and dread that day where that thing goes viral, whatever it is.
Speaker 1:I feel like it would have already gone viral at this point, but we're still kind of waiting on it. At this point, I do feel like that trust is just kind of falling off a cliff. Right, we're so accustomed to just a clown show, right, everywhere we look, that, you know, nothing surprises us anymore, and whether you trust it or not, it's irrelevant because we don't take it seriously, even if it is real. So it's, yeah, it's going to be interesting to see what they do with it. There are I think there are voices out there who are like raising red flags, raising alarms. Whether or not they're going about it the right way is up for debate. But you got like, you know, elon Musk bought Twitter basically to change Twitter because he didn't, you know, he saw Twitter as being perpetuating, kind of what you're talking about, and it's the largest media company in the world, and so if you're a billionaire, like, why buy the Washington Post when you can buy Twitter?
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, I mean he has said a lot of things about what he wants to see and do differently and obviously he's made changes. It'll be interesting to see how we as users navigate it, and because I mean, how many Twitter clones have they tried to create? I mean, maybe a dozen different companies have said, oh, we're going to be the new Twitter and it's really hard to change user behavior, and so at that point that goes back to what I was saying earlier is that we need the platforms to make better choices to help us, because users aren't necessarily going to make the right choice immediately and we don't want them to clamor for a bad decision right now just because they can get it right now, as you said, I want to switch gears and talk about community, because it is such a big deal and it's such a huge part of your brand and your company's brand.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want to. I want to hear some of the motivation behind bandwagon and even other projects that you've done, like the book in, in bringing these technologies closer to home and building stronger communities, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, for me it's really thinking through foundational principles when I think about who is going to take the next you know idea and make it big. I want to make sure that they know that they have the space to fail, because that gives you a little bit more flexibility to go really, really hard. As a black founder, as a first time founder, as a founder building building in Greenville, south Carolina, instead of like Silicon Valley, new York. As a founder that went to Clemson University, a state school, instead of Stanford, or one of the IVs. As a founder that didn't work at Facebook or Apple or Google or Netflix. I worked at, you know, scansource, a Greenville, south Carolina company. Those five things made my perspective different from everyone's that I was going into the market against my competitors but as well as many of my peers, and so when I think about community, there has to be someone who's a manager at a you know, mid-level technology company in their local city that has an idea. There has to be a person that went to a state school and may have a bunch of student loan debt and has an idea. So when I thought about me, I thought about the things I needed. Like, really, I just looked and said, man, what would have saved me 10 grand or 50 grand or 50 hours? And so when I think about creating community, it really comes down to how do I find people who are looking for resources desperately in some cases and not be the person who provides them the resource but connects them with other people who may share that pain and they may find that problem, that solution, together. And so for me, it's always been that community is everything for me. Social capital is huge.
Speaker 2:I started in Accelerator with one of my friends, chandra Washington. She's the CEO of Blackat Labs, which is basically a program where we are delivering accelerator content for startups and so, early stage, we're working with Benedict College in South Carolina here and the idea is a 12 week virtual program and we're giving them information on fundraising and marketing, research and all that other stuff. But one of the core tenants of it is thinking about storytelling and making sure that people understand the importance of being able to clearly articulate your story and your business's story, and we wanna make sure we bring people together. And so the community that we're trying to solve for Black, they're women, they're people of color, they're veterans, they're disabled we wanna make sure that everyone has access to those tools, and so when I think about community and I think about we, and I think about the inclusive we, not the exclusive we, and so that's kind of to your point. That's my ethos. I just wanna make sure that people don't feel alone and don't feel like they don't have the resources to get to the next level.
Speaker 1:It seems to me that there's, like this huge pool of available resources as one way of looking at it, there are all of these people, groups of people, individuals, who come from different perspectives, like what you were talking about, coming from this really unique perspective as a founder, and a lot of times when we have these problems that we wanna solve for the hurdle is not necessarily that we don't have the means to solve for it. The hurdle is that we don't have the means to think about it being a problem that needs to be solved for and us being a solution provider. And so there's this mindset shift where you go from well, my job is to be a consumer or my job is to be a user, versus my job is to make this world a better place. My job is to interact with this world as somebody who has admin permissions, not just user permissions. I can go out there and I can change settings.
Speaker 1:And I think a lot of that starts with education. Kids are four, five, six years old, not necessarily throwing a computer into their hand and teaching them how to code, but giving them a mindset that says this world is yours to play with and change, and fostering in them as young people that freedom to fail, like what you were talking about. Something that we've brought into our company recently here is building a culture that says you are free to make mistakes. We just want you to continue pushing yourself. That's what we value most. Yeah, I love that. What are some of the ideas that you're bringing into your own communities? Trying to because I think this is something that you're trying to do trying to change that mindset.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, the first is definitely to not talk about disruption, and I say it a little bit differently. I say collaboration over competition. When you go into a market, it makes much more sense for you to say this massive yacht can't turn 90 degrees in the way that your three person company can, and your three person company can have like an $8 million a year revenue business and be great and compliment the billion dollar company. So how can you collaborate, create value in a market, create user value and make sure customers are getting satisfied and then compliment it? So collaboration over competition is definitely number one. Number two we're trying to think about when we talk about the social capital.
Speaker 2:This is something personal for me, but I care very much about who can say they were part of bandwagon story. Oftentimes people will say like oh yeah, I was an early customer, I was an early investor, I was this and that, and it's just like, yes, you were an early customer, but you gave us a really horrible review on Google and then we actually lost money on you because you had a review. Like, people want to idolize how they may be impacting of your story and I think it's important to make sure that folks understand that you can control who gets to participate in this journey with you, and so be intentional about who you surround yourself with. And then the third thing I would say is that when you are building whatever it is you're building, understand you do not have to be a startup founder, and I like to emphasize this. There are a lot of CEOs and founders and all the other stuff, but you don't have to be a founder. You could be employee number two, or you could be employee number 20, or you could work at corporate America and be the company that said, or be the person that says hey, I heard about this company on this podcast. Maybe we could try and be a pilot customer for them. Or you could be a person that makes $150,000 a year and say I'll take a flyer on this thing. It doesn't have to be perfect. I like the gist of it and, oh, I like it enough to where I can give them some advice and advise. Or I can be okay with the shipping coming seven days later instead of Amazon delivering it two days later or the next day. And so those are the types of things I wanna make sure that folks understand.
Speaker 2:Is that to be a champion in the entrepreneurship space. You do not have to be an entrepreneur, you do not have to be a founder. We all play a part in this ecosystem and so when I think about the ideas that we're trying to make sure, it's like you don't have to do this. If you want to and you have the means, to please by all means. But there are a lot of ways you can be supportive and contribute to a growing startup ecosystem and we hope that more and more people feel comfortable, as shows like Shark Tank and such have idolized what an entrepreneur is. There's a lot of really important people to that the equation that we wanna make sure know that they're valuable.
Speaker 1:Okay, you don't have to get it terribly specific, but can you give me some examples from your own experience of those champions that you really you look back on and you think they probably have no idea what they meant to me?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I had a early investor who basically said hey, what do you wanna do with this company? And I said, oh, I wanna build this big tech company and blah, blah, blah and they said, well, what does that have to do with StubHub? And I said, oh, nothing, really. I mean it's happened to be a big one. They said you shouldn't. What do you say? He said oh, he said beware the collateral damage of disruption. And I said what do you mean? And he's like you are thinking that you're going to impact the market in this way, but you have no idea the other things that will happen if you are successful doing it this way. So if you are more mindful about the rest of the market, you'll likely have more success.
Speaker 2:And from there we were able to create a partnership with a huge ticketing company. That actually helped our business grow versus going in saying we're going to put them out of business. And so that type of feedback from early investor, like I remember I was sitting at Smoke on the Water in Greenville having lunch at a booth right across from the bar and I got that advice and beware the collateral damage of disruption. And that changed how I looked at collaboration and changed how I looked at folks that could be in my community, because the little butterfly effect that you have can be negative or it can be really, really positive, and so we've been trying to figure out or I've been trying to figure out how to make it as positive as possible.
Speaker 1:There are a lot of voices in our communities who are quiet, and it doesn't mean that their ideas are bad. Their ideas are actually really good. What are the ways that we should be listening for those quiet voices? I'm thinking in communities, geographically, but I'm also thinking like larger companies. I'm thinking about spaces like tech or education. How can we be listening for the good voices that maybe are just a little quiet?
Speaker 2:Well, I think one of the biggest takeaways that I've found personally is that the solution to the problem may not come from within the industry, it may not come from within the organization, and so the way I look at that is if you've got a bunch of buddies who are all in the same industry and you talk to them constantly about the problem and they're like, yeah, I'm dealing with that same problem too, if you talk to someone who is outside the industry, you may find, let's say, it's a truck driver, it's talking to a baker, and the truck driver is like, oh, we solved this with this. Well, it's not that the problem you're dealing with hasn't been solved, it's that you don't know the answer. And if you keep this close knit hand, closed type of circle that doesn't allow for things to get in and it's really homogenous and you don't have diversity representing the experiences you're hearing from the perspectives that you're getting, it may take you longer, it may cost you more to get the problem solved. And so, for me, I like to be really intentional about saying, hey, I know you don't know anything about this, but here's something I'm dealing with. What's the first thing that comes to your mind on how you would approach this, and that, to me, is where you go beyond the quiet voices in your industry.
Speaker 2:You're going to voices that wouldn't think to speak up because you wouldn't have asked them.
Speaker 2:They didn't think you would ask them and they have no business to offer it without being asked, and so I think that that's probably one of the biggest opportunities we have is looking at who isn't raising their hand, creating a comfortable space. That's one of the things I talk about creating a comfortable space and then going to them. And I'll say this when I do my public speaking, I'm normally in a T-shirt or hoodie, and people are like, oh, you're not like to wear suits and I love to get dressed up, but at the same time, I understand how off putting a person in a three-piece suit could be if the person who wants to walk up is in a T-shirt and jeans, and so I tell people not only am I dressed comfortably, I want you to feel comfortable talking to me, so I'm going to remove some of those things that may subconsciously stop you from walking up. Here. I was like, hey, come on up, let's talk about it, and I think that that helps create a louder, a more opportunity for those quiet voices as well.
Speaker 1:There's this idea and I mentioned it in an email, I think that I sent to you. There's a guy, he's out of MIT, neil Gershinfeld. Have you ever heard of him?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:I've heard of him. Ok, are you familiar with what he's doing?
Speaker 2:No, but I've been keeping up more. I'm just trying to create more opportunities for my brain to casually know more things.
Speaker 1:OK, so his work at MIT, his Center for Bits and Addams. It comes out of this idea of a desire to see autonomous fabrication, autonomous robotics, things like that. But he's recognizing that we can't have that until we have that idea applied to people, and so he's personally founded thousands of these little maker labs around the world. We're talking everywhere around the world, in places where you wouldn't expect it but the idea is to equip these labs to build bigger tools, better tools, which can then be used to build bigger and better tools, which can then be used to build things, big things. And it's this incredible idea.
Speaker 1:But then you see it in practice and it blows your mind, because what you're seeing is you're seeing everyone all of a sudden, all of those hierarchies that we're so accustomed to thinking about. Now, all of a sudden, the potential from sectors where you just didn't even have eyes. The potential is just magnified 1,000 times because you've got people who have their own problems, who have their own solutions, who now, all of a sudden, have their own labs where they're building tools that we've never even thought of to solve problems that we've never had. And this is the foundation for something much more science fiction, much more out there in terms of self-replicating automata and all of that. But what he's done, I think, has done more for communities than most people give him credit for, simply because he is giving those quieter voices the megaphone, as it were, and the stuff that's coming out of that. It's absolutely incredible.
Speaker 2:Well, and he's given them picks and shovels, he's allowing them to create. And the thing I was just on a trip last week with some folks from a group chat that I met in Web3. And it was really interesting because everyone had unique perspectives and their different walks of life and experiences. And I was saying that I was at this conference years before I was at this conference and the guy was saying what's your moonshot idea? And he said it to a group of black entrepreneurs and it was interesting because we were working on good ideas and things that mattered to us, but they weren't moonshots to him. And I thought about it and I was just like, well, we don't have the latitude, we don't have the space, we don't have the time and we don't have the resources to come up with a moonshot that would be yours. Like, I'm trying to think about solving this. Someone's trying to think about solving a problem that's immediate to them, and so I think that that is where you get the opportunity is that as we create more of a level playing field on the baseline resources, as we create more of a level playing field on the access to information, we're going to see people move themselves up.
Speaker 2:The argument I got into at dinner last week was the guy saying there's no one on the planet like Elon Musk, and I said well, I mean, I don't think we know anyone who's like Elon Musk, but there has to be. Like there's eight, seven billion people on the planet Like surely there's other people who are smart and creative and have big dreams, but they aren't as well funded. They didn't start off in the same position. They may not be in a place that has access to technology and the internet like we do, so I'm not willing to go on a bet and say he's the only person on the world, on Earth, that would have done this. I just can't imagine that, and so I'm looking forward to seeing more people from different communities have access to resources and tools to build things, because I think that's what's going to change how the solutions are created and how they're adopted overall as well.
Speaker 1:I like that idea of making a more level playing field and broadening the access to technology. It's not giving more people an Ivy League education. It's giving the people who are on those bottom layers the picks and the shovels to raise that bottom layer up even higher. And the value that's going to come out of that is going to be this wildly new perspective that you're not going to get out of Harvard. The value that's going to come out of that is this new way of doing things, a new tool that's never going to come out of Silicon Valley. We don't need more people given access to Harvard or Silicon Valley. We need more people out there who are given the opportunities to create their own think tanks, their own schools, their own ways of doing things that can then, like you're saying, collaborate and we can work together with all of these different pieces to build things that we never thought were possible.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I mean, I think about that. One of the things we talk about is raising the floor right, like lifting up, as you just said, like raising that bottom layer, raising the floor. This is so wild and most people probably don't even think about it and entrepreneurs do, but most people don't know you get your health insurance through your job, through your company. So if you're an independent business owner, if you're a small business, if you're an entrepreneur, you likely don't have health insurance, and if you do have health insurance, it's really expensive, and so one of the things we were talking about at the Capitol I'm talking to some members of Congress about was having a health care plan for entrepreneurs, because right now, the people who are taking risks can either A afford them, so they've got a different lifestyle economically, socioeconomically, whatever or they are making a crazy choice.
Speaker 2:90% of startups fail, and when they fail or have a health issue, their lives and lives of the people involved are really, really decimated because the floor is so low, and so for us it's like well, you could, if you want to bolster entrepreneurship in the United States, you want to continue to be a world leader in innovation, these are some of the resources that you need to provide at a baseline level so that everyone can say, okay, well, I can, I can give this a shot, and I am very interested to see more of the resources that we can have at that level to to base. We don't everyone doesn't need to have Ivy League education, but everyone needs to have a certain base level of of security. To take risks Like that's calculated risk require a level of security and we need to get in a position to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and throwing it back to what you said earlier creating these, these opportunities, fostering this mindset where people are championing the others who are taking these risks, so that it's not it's not necessarily putting the entire burden on the entrepreneur who's taking the risk and and taking all of that upon themselves, but creating around that entrepreneur this, this zone of support, this, you know, the crowd that's around them, supporting them, is is championing them in their purchase decisions, in their comments, feedback, in their interactions with you, know the things around them and and you know if, if everyone takes on a little bit of risk, then those few entrepreneurs don't have to take on a lot of risk. Right, very quickly, I just wanted to ask you, harold, looking forward to the future, you're, you're excited about the prospects for your own company. I know what are you most excited to see coming down the pipeline in the next three, four years just for businesses in this space in general?
Speaker 2:I think the number one thing I'm excited about is creator tools. I think that one of the things we looked at when we started to to productize our business was the idea that everyone's a creator. You think about podcasts, you think about the content. You know, I made some sea bass last night and I was like, oh, I want to make sure it looks at a certain angle, and so I've been watching content creators who give tips on recording and pictures and stuff, and there's so much information out there.
Speaker 2:One of the things I often talk about is that we need to treat knowledge more like a library and less like a vault.
Speaker 2:Knowledge needs to be free and shareable very easily, not reserved and kept to myself so that I'm the only one that has it, and so I'm really interested in us taking the knowledge that we each have as individuals, that we have community knowledge and information, and allowing that to be shared into groups so that creators are able not only to put their ideas and thoughts into the world, but also to provide more supplemental income but create opportunities for themselves as well, because I think that in every industry, you find that the person creating is the one that's compensated the least.
Speaker 2:Like you saw the SAG strike. You see the folks that are creating. You know in every walk of our lives who are helping us day to day, but there's some executive that sits as far away from the problem as possible, makes a bunch of money, and so when I think about that creator, it's well, how do we keep the people who are closest to the problem informed and educated in a way that they can create more value for themselves? And I think that that's going to be super exciting as you think about content creator tools and then being able to manage the compensation they get from it.
Speaker 1:Excellent. If somebody wants to get plugged in with you, what's the best way to do it?
Speaker 2:It's definitely Twitter. It is definitely not LinkedIn. You can follow me on LinkedIn. You can, you know, friend me or whatever it is, but I just never really on there. I blame it on being sold a bunch of stuff in corporate America that my company didn't need, but I'm on Twitter. So if you like barbecue content and food, a little pop culture, tech startups and random sports, clemson is not doing great, so maybe I'll start talking about New York Knicks basketball. So I'm one band wagon fan, that's O N E bandwagon fan, because I'm bandwagon number one fan my company. One bandwagon fan on Twitter, and, yeah, that's that's where I am for most of my my hijinks and shenanigans, hot takes and information.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, harold, thank you for talking to me. It's been really good. I could. I could keep going for another hour, but I'm more inclined to say let's just do this again sometime and do a new set of questions. That'd be so much fun.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I'm going to come to Greenville. We'll sit down and have a coffee or beer and chat.
Speaker 1:I love it. Yeah, that'd be so cool. All right, I appreciate it and we'll talk to you again soon.
Speaker 2:Excellent, appreciate it. Thanks, sam.