Lawrence Lerner on Pithia’s rchain-funded venture investments

0:00I'm Ashlyn Addison from event change audio for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network on this episode of blockchain interviews we have Lawrence Lerner the CEO of Pythia Inc welcome to the show Lawrence Ashton thank you so much thank you for your time I like I'd love to know a little bit more about Pythia I heard that it was a VC fund funded from

0:25the our chain cooperative can you explain a little bit about your company sure thing so Pythia as you said was funded as a loan from the our chain cooperative the cooperatives building a third generation blockchain platform based on mobile process calculus highly scalable to 40 thousand transactions a second and uses something called namespaces have both

0:49public and private namespaces for basically block chains that you can do transactions on concurrently very interesting so I know there are a lot of issues in the cryptocurrency world with scalability of block chains Bitcoin and aetherium there have been scalable discussions for four years now so is the are chain cooperative solving these solutions in an enterprise

1:18environment absolutely well the platform is being built very broadly to build and foster an ecosystem that will allow you to do highly scalable transactions secure and be able to provide concurrency by design in the rolling language and that's all being built from the ground up Pythia as the investment arm is looking for businesses and enterprises that are

1:48looking for highly scalable solutions we're providing funding you know we work pretty much as a traditional venture capital company but it's in the blockchain space so we're very flexible about how we do certain deals awesome so as a company that's looking to adopt blockchain technology why should I go to Pythia and use the our chain over some other block chains

2:14well that's a good set of question so our chant I think for the reasons that that I've mentioned we have a phenomenal ecosystem of developers and other partners Kathy is pretty forward-looking and I think one of the things that we've done you know my background has been in the enterprise software world and helped launch platforms on the internet I've

2:36been doing internet development since the 80s and then ran some large consulting companies of Motorola launched their smartphone strategy actually starting in crypto in the 90s and I think some lessons learned are there foundational things there are dependencies that you need to do so the first things that we're looking at our wallets exchanges identity solutions

2:58things that you're going to need to do millions of times an hour if you're going to be successful with any kind of scaleable solution around healthcare insurance airports supply chain so that's where our first set of investments are we're betting on and let me shoot some fish in a barrel as it were because if you don't have those things it's pretty hard to

3:23interoperate with any other systems I completely agree I myself have looked into the regulation of smart contracts and adopting this technology in business and have said to legislators if there's a broken foundation there's really no point in trying to extend that into business when you don't have a working scalable block chain that has wallets that are easy to use interoperable so I

3:49completely agree in that sense my opinion your first killer app is a great wallet one that does that full round-trip folks like you and I who are trading tokens even for ourselves doing a little bit it's there's a little bit of effort I think for people who are new to crypto space and doing that kind of online work it's it's a it's a big barrier to entry so building that is

4:15important and getting the standards around that is even more important that's why one of the first things that we did with our first container one fund was build a working group around Dimity and we've brought in the top companies the sovereign foundation life ID trusted key verify to build those and we're giving away all of the thought leadership protocols and standards that

4:42they're creating why because we want people to come to us and say hey we've read this now we're gonna build some great things on the blockchain on our chain and it's a lot like the early days of the Internet I completely agree in that sense and to touch on digital identification systems I believe that it's gonna be absolutely necessary for businesses and individuals

5:06to identify themselves if they're making any loans or any transactions on a blockchain network and currently in our most popular network aetherium there really is no identification system it's very hard to prove identity and receive a loan on that blockchain you're absolutely right and that's what the two first two investments that we've made second one is under embargo we'll

5:31announce that on the 26th but life ID is one of the first investments that we took and that is exactly the problem that they're solving with digital identifiers and they're already three companies life IDs not built it's being built on the are chain five form that's not built with the rate three companies that are signed up to build on their platform because they see how the

5:54technology works or more importantly they're solving a specific business problem not selling the technology problem so that was a great point you made that's great to hear so can we talk a little bit about the Pythia investment thesis and what does Pythia look for for high investment opportunities all the fundamentals and a little bit of blockchain tweak with it

6:19excellent management team well-defined plan you know look for 18 months of strategy of I'd used the funding that we would potentially give you what's it gonna be used for and how does it get there ideas are great planning is great that's about 10% everything else is around execution so we looked for management teams that have got great track records around

6:44delivering products platforms and then when you look at the blockchain side of it is there an earnable token how does the data get into the blockchain especially if you're taking and disrupting an existing business there are nuances to decentralization on the blockchain and distributing the information especially for large enterprises so the questions around that

7:06are the ones that we want to see them answer at least thinking about we can provide injection a thought leadership town on human capital as well so those are some of the things that that we'd look for in any investment I completely agree with you there and one thing that I like to say is that a project doesn't build itself a team builds a project so

7:31without a strong team you really don't have much well that's extremely well set and you also want to look for how long has the team been together what if they they've done and delivered and how are they building into the larger ecosystem especially at the enterprise level with some of the early stage or concept stage companies we work with it's fine for them to come in and

7:54say hey we're entering the market especially b2c but in the enterprise space you usually have a consortium and if you think about a lot of the conversations that I've had with large enterprises around food safety and supply chain how to go from the farm to the distributor the manufacturer and then back out to the retailer it requires a lot of collaboration and

8:17coordination among them and that takes time and that will it will take a few years to evolve but we do see some companies that are doing things very basic in health care like pulling datasets in taking insurance documents the claimed forms and pulling together all that information everybody can be all in on that pretty easily without having to change a bunch of regulations

8:45or adopt many new systems I completely agree completely so so if there's companies that are looking for investment are you guys limiting your investment to North America America I believe you guys are based out of America but is it a global effort or is it just inside of America so we're based in Seattle in Redmond Washington but we really look at investments all over the

9:13world and routinely speaking to investors with our investors and prospective companies all across Europe in Asia that that are looking to work with us because they believe in what they've seen in the archangel technology and the amount of things that we've delivered as well as the reputation of some of the team members that have attracted them and it's been really

9:40rewarding we've talked to a lot of super smart people who are solving business problems versus selling us technology that's great so can you speak a little bit about the development of the arcane platform in which people are going to be adopting I believe the zero point one first node came out at the beginning of this year what are we seeing in q3 q4

10:052018 for our chain great great questions so we're backwards a little q4 we will go live with our main net or for the are chain platform and you've got a team of more than 20 dedicated developers we're working full time building that out so June July will see the test net go live and the team is launched no rolling the language that's being built from the

10:33ground up based on mobile process calculate which is concurrent by design it is the communications layer the storage layer as we said the nodes are up nodes are up and find the Genesis block talk to each other so all of these packages are being built and rolled out and I think one of the huge credits to the development team is the fact that we've hit every release date not because

10:59they're pedantically marching towards numbers but it's because they're refining their approach and being very and releasing solid code that's great thank you for that so if there are Enterprise companies or any companies looking for investment and they're interested in questions from Pythia or an investment opportunity what is the best way for those people to find out

11:23more information so come to Pythia com write to us at pitches at Pythia comm we're looking for great ideas and if they want to learn more about our chain and the people who are developing it developer dot our chain co-op great Thank You Lawrence and thank you for your time this has been a wonderful applause ian interviews wonderful thank you so much Ashton have a great day