Jason Eisen on UTU building trust infrastructure for the sharing economy

0:01i'm ashton addison from eventchain for investmentpitch media and fintech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have jason eisen the ceo and founder of utu jason welcome to the show and thanks for being here thanks for having me you're very welcome i'd love to kick off our time together by just having you briefly explain your background and digital assets and in

0:21tech and what has been your focus up to starting u2 sure yeah uh so i got into this world back in 2013 i guess i had been a consultant previously for like big donors like usaid and world bank and all those guys and had started spending a lot of time in east africa in 2010 and i fell in love with east africa i saw tremendous opportunity and this incredible energy and this

0:47early tech scene that was kind of just on the cusp of becoming something amazing and i was hooked i had this idea to start at the time the first taxi app anywhere in africa and i couldn't stop thinking about it and three months later i quit my job and moved to nairobi to do that and realized pretty quickly in the process of building that company that we

1:07were solving the wrong problem we were basically solving the same problem uber was solving which was how do i get a taxi and that wasn't the problem anyone there had everybody had the problem how do i get a taxi that i trust and we started getting obsessed with this question of trust and how do you divine trust in an environment like this where there's not really strong institutional

1:27trust but interpersonal and social trust is incredibly strong and so we ended up building this socially powered taxi app and building some pretty cool ai to optimize for trust in a very human way and we went deeper and deeper into this rabbit hole of trust and trying to build the kind of most perfect trust system that we could and that led us to obviously decentralizing

1:50it and we started down that path in 2018 uh taking this kind of feature that we had started in our taxi app to build trust in that case and in 2017 we started turning that into what we call trust infrastructure for the entire internet across all sectors and geographies and started decentralizing it coming up with the token concept and it's really been

2:14taken on a life of its own since then so yeah very cool jason and that's great that you are working on a project and then you find a specific problem or a little hole there and all of a sudden that turns into a gigantic business opportunity for you and your team and and a whole nother business in itself so that's really cool um and yeah and we found we could say we

2:34kind of found our calling in the process of building that mobility business and we still run that as a subsidiary uh but myself and my co-founder bastian uh he and i are really focused on building the decentralized trust future for the internet mm-hmm it's been a great journey of discovery for us great and can you just elaborate a little bit more on exactly

2:56what is youtube's value proposition how does it work and what makes the platform specifically unique sure so our concept is trying to bridge the gap between how people trust in real life and how they're asked to trust online so if i ask you like a really easy simple question who do you trust i can probably predict your answer you're gonna say something

3:20like i trust myself i trust my family i trust my friends okay well some of my friends sometimes for some things uh right and yet online you're asked to trust based on totally different things like um five random people that you've never met that you have nothing in common with that you probably don't share your biases your preferences and maybe they're not even real people maybe

3:46they're bots or paid reviews or the owner's brother but according to those five people this babysitter has five stars on the babysitter app and you should just go ahead and leave your five-year-old with him or her and we thought that was kind of crazy and we said well what if a different system imagine if you went to that same babysitter app and there were 55 star ratings for one

4:07sitter from 50 random people and one one star rating from your sister would you hire them and most people say no i said what if it's 500 good reviews and one bad one from your sister people still say no so the idea is that one piece of data one validation point is actually far more powerful than any number of aggregated anonymous data points to convey trust and so that's what u2

4:36focuses on is trying to understand for you as an individual uh what is that one or two data points that we can show you descriptively not us telling you like this is who you should trust but putting the right information from the people you already trust in front of you at the right moment at the right time at the right place in the right way for you to be able to

4:58make whatever decision you're faced with online to take a transaction or not to hire this service provider or the other one that you can make that as comfortable and safe as possible without fear that you're being scammed or ruined and they were really if i can just kind of tie it into three core problems of trust is really uh the model has broken has been broken

5:20for digital trust it's all been about uh this like universal score or one size fits all highest number of ratings best rating but that's just not how trust works it's highly subjective and so moving from that kind of universal to a dynamic approach based on the individual is a key bit uh the second key bit is that we move it from being a product like something consumer facing to being

5:44infrastructure that is built into the platforms that we're already using which not just makes it a better user experience but it also makes it immune to fraud and manipulation which all the other platforms struggle with and then the third problem is that the economics of trust are broken uh that right now there's all this economic incentive for buying fake reviews for manipulating

6:08trust and there's no economic incentive for building trust for helping someone get a good outcome from their transaction online and so we wanted to change that and basically eliminate the way for people to buy trust but allow people to be able to earn from building trust yeah that's super interesting jason and there's i agree there's definitely a difference between

6:30trusting somebody in in real life and trusting some amazon reviews or some any numbers that are just you see because it's all seems to be you know the potential to be manipulated and you know part of this solution is implementing blockchain and having that you know trustless factor where you can trust the chain but and and we can talk about that technology but i believe

6:52you're using you know a bunch of different technologies to make all of these uh decisions on how to determine how much trust there is you know artificial intelligence machine learning algorithms can you talk about the blockchain side but also all of the other technology that's needed to put together i can uh better you'd probably be more interested on another video maybe to hear our cto

7:14talk about it you can talk about it in great depth and detail and i can just say that we're building kind of cutting edge techniques in machine learning for trying to optimize for trust especially in low data scenarios and we're also building some pretty revolutionary stuff on the blockchain side in terms of uh oracle's the interchain operability and kind of we've had some staking model

7:40in our protocol even way before the defy hype and any of this uh so there's actually quite a lot to say on that but i'd actually uh i think it's more interesting and relevant just to keep the high level concept of like what we're trying to deliver for an end user about better trust and so honestly all that tech we try to make it as like invisible and transparent as possible

8:05and focus on like really magical user experiences uh breaking out of kind of what you had said earlier like a lot of that's the legacy of ebay and what they gave us in the 90s pseudonymous five star ratings and open text reviews uh where you're somewhat keying in something but we're we're not on our keeper's computer anymore you're on a phone so why don't we update

8:28even the format in which we share feedback like uh hold your phone in front of your face record a selfie uh how much more compelling is a video from a friend that's on the blockchain you know that this video is legitimate reported by this person about this service and there's no bullshitting around that so uh just trying to make the whole thing super transparent and accountable

8:52and get rid of all of the manipulators definitely and i think that's a great answer jason and keeping it high level is what brings adoption as well right because you don't need to be a mechanic to drive a car you just want to get in there and and go right and use the technology and you don't have to be a developer to you know you to understand how the trust

9:13factor works as long as you see it in action and and that makes total sense and i think part of that is is why you guys have grown so quickly and and you know it's the platform is is doing well so far and i i saw that you recently closed a fundraising round of 1.4 million so congratulations to that um could you talk about some of the you know investors and the partners that you

9:36have alongside your group that are helping you grow this quickly yeah we have amazing partners we've yeah we have just closed uh some different funding and different amounts but we've had amazing partners for this journey since the beginning uh you could say one of the first institutional investors that really believed in us was zeroth ai out of hong kong we were the

10:00first african company that they took into their program from there we got in with the softbank group with their deep core investments it's the early stage ai fund and they've been absolutely incredible and supportive over the years other incredible groups like animoka brands out of hong kong as well the blockchain gaming company and eternity ventures

10:23the blockchain out of europe and recently we've been very fortunate adding some really amazing strategic investors like genesis block hong kong duck dao one block moon rock capital kinetic capital and so really brilliant ventures a number of great kind of investor partners backwards and then we also recently announced some pretty cool technical things like

10:50uh partnership with elrond and actually just today we announced a partnership with travala.com congrats yeah and that sounds like some great partners and i think uh they probably share the same vision as you and your team and you know this is something that is going to be the next version of trust on the internet you know and the right done the right way you know um

11:13can you that's our goal nothing short of it trust is too important to leave it centralized and even even if we have the best intentions look what happens to the companies with the best intentions over time and market forces the best way to protect digital trust for and have a benevolent system for everybody for the long term is to decentralize it definitely

11:37now can you talk about where exactly you're at right now and what your goal is for you know the next year or so as you continue to grow sure so we have quite a number of different things going on we have this uh network of mobility businesses all over africa that's starting to scale quite nicely and we're also supporting a number of fintech platforms around east africa

12:00and also starting in southeast asia with shuttle one and we have this new partnership with travala and this is quite a lot of building and pushing product into the market that's going to happen you'll actually see our defy sector product our credit trust oracle coming out in a not too distant future tonight what in a couple hours we're listing on uniswap so

12:23it's an exciting day for me uh for the whole team in fact probably the whole hutu community uh but i think really what to look for is lots of partnership announcements of companies building on u2 integrating u2 into their products into their platforms and kind of this revolution of digital trust starting to take shape and people reclaiming all that data and

12:47putting it in their service instead of in some corporate overlord service yeah that's great and congratulations on the uniswap listing tonight that will be that will be out by the time this video is out so that's that's great to hear and i guess as you continue to grow um what do you see as some of the key factors to the success of you know the adoption of u2

13:11yeah i think uh the big success factors are focusing on our core value of trust and transparency fairness uh and living those values and that if we can be a really good example as a company of how to do how to be trustable uh it doesn't undermine our product we have to be so careful dealing with trust how do we behave we have to set this example and

13:36so it's living those values and building the right team uh we're very proud of the very diverse team that we have and we're okay we're about 45 people across the company and across the group mostly based in kenya our second largest group is based in nigeria but we have people kind of all over the world i think continuing to bring in all sorts of different perspectives from

13:59all over the world is probably the best thing that we can do uh after that it's focusing on product and focusing on delivering a really seamless simple kind of magical user experience around trust that people never really thought that they were missing until they have it and then they can't wait to use nothing but yeah wow that's super interesting and

14:22are is your team looking for more partners or or testers or community members right now and how can they reach out and find out more yeah for sure we're always looking for any platform any person honestly that's interested in digital trust that wants or recognizes trust online as a problem and wants to be a part of the solution we can find a way for you to

14:44contribute to the project if you're a platform for sure please approach us and come build on u2 we're expanding our ecosystem kind of constantly the best way to reach us is probably on telegram t dot me duh slash u2 trust uh so yeah great well thanks so much for your time jason it's been a pleasure speaking with you and all the best uh with u2 moving

15:07forward and i will leave those links to your community in the description box below for all the viewers and let's follow up in the near future thanks a lot ashton really great to chat with you