Matthew Hodgson: Good question. You’re right that it’s harder to do this in a conventional model, and ironically, we have a side-by-side comparison between the same team who were building these proprietary silos originally… And in some places they were more sophisticated than Matrix. We had things like streaming file transfer, so you could livestream video as a file upload and watch it in real-time as it downloaded. Really cute, really fun. Then we did Matrix, and I’m guessing it’s about 6-10 times more manpower required, and time and effort to build something we had already built, but this time do it as open source and do it in public, do it with open governance and open standards.

So in terms of the funding question, we were lucky in that the first couple of years we did it inside Amdocs. We took the unified communications team wholesale and suddenly pivoted overnight, with the blessing (of course) of the powers that be, to go and create Matrix, on the basis that if we were successful, Amdocs can one day go to AT&T and say “Hey guys, do you wanna buy a billion-dollar carrier-grade Matrix deployment from us?” And with any luck, there will be good reason for AT&T to stop messing around with this 150-year-old PSTN stuff, and actually come and jump onboard Matrix instead. They reasoned that if anybody would pull this off, it would be an existing, proven team, who were profitable and successfully delivering carrier-grade telco stuff.

[28:11] So that’s how we were funded for the first 2-3 years. Then it got to the point that we were successful enough that other folks were building on top of the protocol… Particularly, Ericsson spun up a business unit called the Contextual Communication Cloud Business Unit, who were providing enterprise communication tools based on top of Matrix.

Also, Thales, the French defense company, was spinning up a unit called Citadel, who provides military-grade communication on top of Matrix… And Amdocs were saying “Well, guys, congratulations. You’re slightly hamstrung, but not very hamstrung.” Moonshot is wildly successful, and why the hell are we the only people paying the bill for this? [laughter]

Also, more practically speaking, the thing would never ever work if it had a single corporate sponsor who was funding and driving the entire thing… Because it would be as if AT&T had invented the internet and never quite taken their talons out of it. So it was mutually beneficial to part ways, and set up the Matrix.org foundation as a non-profit legal entity which enshrines the governance model of the project and is the owner of all of the open source intellectual property inside an asset lock, and has a neural board of “guardians” (as we call ourselves), who are practically speaking the directors of the non-profit foundation, of which two are myself and my co-founder Amandine, who came up with the idea of Matrix back in about 2013 with me… And then three independents. We’ve got the Marconi professor of communication from Cambridge Univeristy over here, where a lot of the team started out, and also we’ve got Ross, who is a decentralization privacy expert lawyer in Washington, who works for New America as a policy expert in this space… And also Jutta Steiner, who is the CEO of Parity in Berlin, who are one of the major players in the Ethereum Blockchain space… And it turns out that Parity as a company runs entirely on Matrix, and has done so for about 3-4 years now… Which is petrifying, given how immature we were 3-4 years ago… [laughter]

But basically, we got independent people from the community to come onboard and look after – basically be custodians, to make sure that nobody screws it up, including myself, including Amandine, as founders and the creators of it… Because yeah, we need to keep the lights on, and the way we do that is to then set up a standalone startup called New Vector. It was originally called Vector… Vector, the Matrix - get it? Then we spun out of Amdocs - or parted ways, should we say, with Amdocs… So we were on a new vector, so we called it New Vector. It’s a terrible name.

Kevin Owocki: I think you can think of the Ethereum blockchain as a giant distributed database. What the blockchain does is it allows you to manage trust between parties across the internet. One of the reasons why that’s really powerful is we can store all the information about the bounty task on the blockchain, and that can be the source of truth for all parties about the state of the task.

So in contrast to a legacy financial system crowdsourcing platform like Upwork, for example, Gitcoin never actually is an intermediary that holds any of the funds between the bounty submitter and the bounty hunter. So when you post a bounty to Gitcoin, you’re actually submitting it to the Ethereum blockchain, and the funds that you’re associating with the issue live on the Ethereum blockchain, which is just a massive simplification over the credit card and legacy financial system where we would have to deal with translations between currencies, and having a legal structure associated with doing Escrow and stuff like that.

Basically, the task goes onto the Ethereum blockchain, and the way Metamask works is it’s just basically an Ethereum wallet that allows you to confirm that you meant to put that information on the blockchain, and the technology that powers Metamask is actually RSA public/private key encryption. So if you wanna do a transaction to the Ethereum blockchain, you’re signing it with your private key, and that’s how the rest of the computers on this giant distributed database know that the funds are authorized to come from you, and that the information actually came from you. So it all goes out there into the blockchain world, and then other people can pick up the funded work and turn it around by submitting their own transaction to the blockchain, which claims the funded work on the platform.

All this functionality lives on smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and that’s a pretty powerful way of removing the need to have an intermediary, the need to do international translation of currency…

The other powerful use case that this enables is the ability to pay your bounty hunters with tokens. If you think about all these ICO’s who have raised 10-20 million dollars to fund their projects, they probably have some Ether on hand that they can use to incentivize actions of their community, but they also probably have a native Ethereum token that they can use to incentivize work on their repo.

[59:13] That’s powerful, because it allows them to tie their incentives as repo maintainers with the incentives of the person who turned around the work, because they both hold the same token that rises and falls in value associated with the success or failure of their project. So I think that that’s an interesting use case that could never even exist in the legacy financial world.

Gavin Wood: Now, the other thing is to say the concepts that the blockchain can currently encode – the language that we have to play with in terms of what aspects of reality we want to place on the blockchain… For example, if we’re talking about a marriage contract, we may want to talk about things like there being a judge in the case of divorce to determine whose fault it was that they’re getting divorced, in order to make sure that there’s proper payment between the two – now, the notion of judge is not really… It’s pretty easy to write that into a legal contract, because we have centuries of case lore about what it is to be in such a role - that’s not the case with Ethereum; we’re still in the very early days, so we have relatively little concept. Our language is not very rich. But the richness is something that, in the same way that with programming you end up increasing the level at which you code over time, there’s more and more system libraries written and integrated into the system, and you end up being able to code in much richer concept. That’s gonna be the same with Ethereum.

[30:03] At the moment, the concepts we’re able to draw on are relatively poor, but over time we’re going to be building system libraries, you might say, or case precedent lore, in the case of legal parallel - this is going to build up the language into something much richer.

Derek Collison: Yeah, because remember, this had been gone to – it was named, and we kind of started to have logo for almost eight years before we officially joined the CNCF. So it had a probably longer lifespan than people realized prior to the CNCF. And so we fought it, on our own dime, as a small startup that was only a year old. We had just gotten seed funding… And we successfully defended it. And so upon completion of the successful defense, the trademark was awarded to Synadia, with the deal.

And so at the time, when I was talking to the CNCF, they were like “Well, we own the trademark.” I go, “Well, technically, you don’t.” Now, this will get listeners frustrated and upset, and I get that, and I’m totally empathetic to why you would get upset. And I’m not asking for empathy by any stretch, but I was very frustrated that something that they said they cared so deeply about, they threw away in one email and said “Oh no, you guys figure it out.” And then to say “Oh, but - congratulations, you won. Now give it to us.” That also rubbed me the wrong way. But technically, what the CNCF was saying is “No, the commitment was you were going to give it to us.” And so I definitely understand their position as well. And we are committed to that. And part of our agreement, we’re going to transfer everything over, the lawyers are working out the legal docs, and things like that. But that was kind of my frustration, to be transparent. And then they never asked for it after we successfully won that. And so again, the way things were conflated and released out was, I think, very targeted, in terms of trying this in the court and public opinion.

Mat Ryer: You get a legal flat white, and then you’ve got yourself armed to the teeth, really, to represent yourself in court.

Salvatore Sanfilippo: Exactly. I believe so as well. There was, I believe, some – I was not part of the company when this happened, but I believe that this was a consideration. But then, you know, sometimes also the legal advice that you get… I will say something a bit maybe unpopular, but I think that the legal offices in companies sometimes create the worst possible setups for companies. Because the legal offices don’t really try to usually balance the risk, the legal risk with the company potential, but they are mostly going always to err on the safe part, in order to be right later. If you are super-conservative, you never do anything wrong from your point of view. However, you are paralyzing the company.

Many times when I had to do contracts, I skipped the lawyers that were in between and we could not understand each other, and said “Okay, I will write the contract. This is the contract. If you want, you can fix the form”, and immediately, the thing started to immediately to work, the conversation. And I believe that sometimes it can happen that choices are – but if you read the AGPL license very, very well, you actually discover that also the form is not extremely clear. It’s not very well written. So I believe that it’s very hard that somebody will authorize to use it in a software as a service setup without any kind of a signed paper by the folks that have the copyright. And this could be a good – I think that they did a good thing switching back. Basically, in this kind of changing setup, you try, and you believe “This is very similar to AGPL. People will accept it.” Instead, you find the cultural resistance, and then you step back, “It makes sense. I can understand that.”

Break: [00:40:09.20]

Adam Stacoviak: Okay, I can tell you. I can tell you. Oh, my gosh… It’s been so long since I thought about this, but this is one of those stories. I won’t name names… Let’s just call him Dinesh. It’s Gilfoyle’s sidekick. Dinesh got a side gig, too. And I’ll say our main gig. Dinesh got this sketchy side gig where we were building out a system… And in our main thing, our consultancy, we were building out this template, let’s just say. And we wanted to keep improving that. And that template was open source. But then in this side gig we were doing some things that would make the template we did in the open source better. So we wrote the code for them, but decided to move that code over to here. When I say “we”, I mean Dinesh did this. I didn’t know that. And we had a company together. And it turned into a legal situation. It was bad… And it was the one time I was fired because of somebody else’s stupidity, basically. So Dinesh open-sourced somebody else’s code.

Arun Gupta: Yeah, one of the last chapters, that’s what I was looking at, in the book… It’s really about getting started on your culture change journey. A lot of the times if you continue to do things in a certain way that you’ve always done, and if you’re not challenging the status quo – because change is the only constant. If you’re not challenging the status quo, then – that’s the first thing you need to do. How does open source work for you? You need to overcome your legacy mindsets. That’s an important element, and there’s a chapter in the book that talks about that part of it. And then the book really gives you like a 10-step framework on how you can jump onto that cultural journey. I mean, the diverse audience is great. Having a top-level executive sponsor - because you need that somebody either at the executive level, top executive level, that says… And it doesn’t have to be at the ELT level, or the CEO must say that open source is our strategic direction. It could be like “Hey, this is a group where a lot of the open source technologies happen”, and that executive stands up, that “Yes, this is how I’m going to define the culture of my org, and I’m going to actively encourage, allow them to contribute to open source. This is what the incentive mechanism in the companies are.”

[01:16:22.00] Identify your stakeholders. Not just within your team, but outside your team. If there are other business units that are doing similar work, if there are folks in marketing that care about, if there are folks in recruitment that cares about. Because at the end of the day, they want to bring the top talent over there. So how you can start connecting with that.

You need to have – I remember when I joined Apple, I think second or third day, I was having a call with somebody… And my God, that person was screaming at me. “I submitted this pull request so many weeks ago! It has not been approved yet! It’s been stuck into legal!” “What can I do to help?”

Jeff Smith: No, I’d be glad to. As you mentioned those three things, it is the perfect storm, especially for topics today… And it was a journey to get here. And I can give you a little bit about my journey and how we ended up with AI and mental health.

I would say in my background - I’m a corporate guy gone good. A classically-trained entrepreneur. I built six companies, three nonprofits… It’s where I find the joy. Identify a problem in the world, create a unique solution, wrap a company around it and build it to scale.

And this one’s called Chrp, named from the story of the canary in the coal mine. When that bird stops chirping, you get the heck out. It can send signals that we cannot. Methane, carbon monoxide… And so it becomes an early indicator for health and wellness. And we’ve created a platform harnessing that, using music.

And so to go even further back on myself and how I even got in this business - for years, I was the go-to guy for most ad agencies in New York to do all their social impact branding, corporate social responsibility… I became an expert on weaving purpose into the brand narrative, and bringing people alive at work, and through the products, and the brands, and these global campaigns… And along the way found a significant disconnect, I would say, between the leadership – the leadership that cares. They care about purpose, they care about their employees, they’re throwing millions at perks, rewards, telehealth, but their employees aren’t feeling it. They’re not feeling seen, they’re not feeling heard. There’s work-life enmeshment. They’re depressed. They’re anxious. They’re looking for jobs. And so a few of us decided “Hey, let’s take that on.”

We created a small company to come up with solutions to address workplace flourishing, and thought “That’d be kind of cool. Let’s bring people alive in the workplace.” And we started there, and said “Hey, what’s this disconnect between leadership and employees? What’s the problem? If there’s intent and there’s resource, but not results, where’s the breakdown?” And we’ve found that it was an information problem. We’ve found it was the corporate survey, the quarterly polls. How are you feeling? Nobody answers it, they lie in their responses, fear of reprisal, and they’re just making blind bets.

The data they’re getting back is at fault, mainly because people hate surveys. They want to fill them out. And so we said, “Let’s start there. Let’s come up with a better diagnostic tool, so people can feel seen and heard and where they’re truly at. And how do we do that?” And we set out to improve the survey; the survey tool, different modalities, different lengths, maybe even the happy faces you see in the bathrooms at airports… You know, just make it super-simple. And none of those are really tracking after a few months, and I was training for a Spartan race. One of those crazy things that we do to keep ourselves alive… And I found my mood changing with my music. I switched to, I think it was Motley Crue, Kickstart Your Heart, and just found my energy level shifting, and started thinking, as I was running, “What’s happening here? Am I being affected by the music? Am I making certain choices in my music selection that’s a reflection of this?” And that was where I had the a-ha moment, to say “Hey, is music the signal that we’ve been looking for? Is that a reflection of how I feel?” And so we dug into that, looked at music science, listening behaviors, research AI, and found a direct link, as music is a mirror for your mood.

In the simplest form, Chris, if you’re driving in the car and you’re listening to the radio, and you change, change, change until you find a song you like, that’s just your mirror neurons lining up your emotion with that song. it’s how you’re feeling or how you want to feel. It’s very hard to listen to music you’re not feeling. It’s that grind… And so we thought, “Okay, if we can bottle this up, we’ve got a rocket ship. If not, we’ll sell the algorithm and move on to the next task.”

[08:07] And so fast-forward, raised a bunch of capital, surrounded myself with brilliant people, technologists, HR leaders, music… So a buddy of mine, Suman Debroy - we’ve built some amazing things together. As a doctor in machine learning, he jumped in to help figure out the models… HR leaders from enterprise companies, managing hundreds of thousands of employees, speaking into “What does that experience need to look like inside of the company?” The music industry, songwriters, musicians, former execs from the big music streaming companies saying “Hey, this is the data that’s available to you, or even the intent from the musicians.” And that was phenomenal, to understand what were they feeling when they wrote a song? What do they want to put out in the world?

And so that was fascinating. And then even the attorneys, legal counsel. We’ve got the former privacy chief of Homeland Security to really look at “What are the privacy blockers? How do we hold integrity in this conversation?” Because music is so personal. And so we brought them together and said “Hey, let’s solve this problem. Music is our answer.” And like any, I guess now a new tech company, you’re testing it across an alpha group, looking at everything: adoption, the science… You end up with a black box on the table, it works beautifully. And so that was like end of last year. Now you’re shifting to product-market fit. Who is this best built for, right? A healthcare company at 2,500, a sports team, automotive company? So that’s where I’d say the rubber hits the road, and where we’re at today.

And just incredible leaders - you mentioned Greg Enos and others - just looking at this, saying “Hey, here’s a direction. Let’s really look at that how we can apply it.”