Ep. 544 The Power of Solana On The Go with Solana Mobile

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00:08

Everybody, welcome back. I hope you guys are having a fantastic morning, noon or night wherever you guys are in the world. Whatever time it is, you’re certainly in the right place because we’re joined by Emmet, all your business and operations lead over at Solana mobile. This is big guys, this is this is one that I was particularly excited about to meet you. So Emmet, thanks for joining us today on the show. Absolutely. So let’s just let’s just start. Before we dive into Solana and saga, which is the new web three enabled mobile device, let’s get to know who you are. I joined the Solana mobile team about a year ago. So for those who caught the announcement last year,

00:45

about April, March of last year, we started to put together a very small team. So at that point, it was our head of engineering. And me. And that was the whole team. There you go. I made an announcement. And then we had 12 months to kind of put the whole thing together. So in the past year, I’ve been doing everything from partnerships to growth, to operations, getting actual phones delivered to actual customers. It has been a great year. Before that I was with Google for a few years doing consulting, specifically in conversational AI. So Oh, wow, maybe a few years ahead.

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There. So I did that for a few years, which gave me

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a real taste for kind of emerging tech that was struggling to find its way but it was like right on the precipice. And then before that I did mobile product consulting for a long time. So got that the mobile background got the emerging tech background. And when this opportunity came up, it was a no brainer. Nice. And how did it happen? Did you approach like, Anatolian Raj and you’re like, hey, like, I’m the guy for this, or did they reach out to you had this all the magic happen? Yeah. So I was fortunate enough to know a few people from Google who had gone to Solana labs in the past year or so. And so when this project started, sort of under wraps, it was a very small team, the Skunk Works, this skunk works, yeah, the codename days.

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It was a lot of engineering resources, and then just kind of pulling from elsewhere within labs, getting a little bit of expertise here. Little bit of expertise there. And so when it became real, when it was like, Okay, we’re gonna do this.

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One of the team members who had been picking up a lot of the business and operation responsibilities, was like, We need somebody who can come in and on this full time, he reached out, I had a couple of conversations with the team, and the rest is history. Wow. Yeah. I love it. I mean, that’s just a cool story, because you’ve got the perfect background mobile, emerging tech. crypto. Yeah. So saga. So this is a new a new phone. This is an iPhone competitor. This is an Android phone competitor. I think that’s fair to say. Yeah, yeah. Tell us a little bit about the phone. Yeah, sure. So at the end of the day, saga is a flagship Android device. So anybody who’s ever used any Android device, it’s going to look and feel very, very similar. So if you’ve ever used a pixel or a galaxy, yep, it still has that full Google Suite. But what makes saga revolutionary is what it enables on the crypto side. So specifically, there’s kind of two key components that’s just not available anywhere else. The first is seed vault. So Seed Vault seed vault. Yeah. So have you ever used a self custody wallet on mobile before? Absolutely. Have you ever been hacked by chance? I’m knocking on wood. I have no debt. Anybody who’s watching please don’t target. Yeah. All right. Well, so something that’s unfortunately common in the world of mobile software, is that user seeds, that cryptographic information that’s so critical to remain safe. If you’re self casting your funds.

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There’s that data is just not well protected. And yeah, and so we wanted to actually just found a vulnerability and trust wallet through like three weeks ago or something. It was disclosed in November. And then they just finally patched it up and publicly disclosed it and it was like, there’s a lot of people that were hacked. I know, I know. It’s unfortunate, there’s been a handful in the salon ecosystem. And so we knew that if we wanted to onboard a billion people into the world of self custody, we needed to give them something that was easy and secure. Totally. And, you know, for those that have used hardware wallets, certainly, you know, checks the box from a security perspective, usability, usability on mobile, nothing great. So the first is seed vault and really see vault is intended to give users that security that something like a hardware wallet will provide. But without the sort of

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awkward plugging it in or connecting with Bluetooth and pressing buttons constantly. We want those private keys to be right there in the phone protected, secure, but make interactions extremely easy. Yeah. So that’s one

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the second and let me stop you there. Just to ask is that like, markedly different than like, for instance, the iPhones te their Trusted Execution Environment? It’s exactly the exact tech Yeah, so the Trusted Execution Environment. Most modern processors have a secure element, a Secure Enclave, you’ll hear those words interchangeably. What we’ve done is we’ve coated dirt

05:00

rectally into that extremely safe environment, all of the seed creation, deletion signing activities, that wallets typically are doing within their app code itself, and are instead abstracting it away from the wallets. So if I’m a wallet, and a user has generated a seed through seed vault, I don’t know the private key, I don’t need to know anything about it just that it exists. And when a user wants to connect to it, when a user wants to sign a message, all I have to do is say, hey, seed vault, I have this request from the user. All of that gets abstracted away from Android from the wallet, it’s happening totally independently and securely. And then a user is brought back and the transaction is all done. Awesome. Yeah. So so that’s a big innovation, where, you know, we think it’s really critical as we bring more and more users into self custody, that they don’t have negative insecure experiences that scare them away, frankly, yeah. So that’s the first innovation. And then the second is the DAP store. I’m sure you’ve seen many stories of anybody building in the crypto space at large, having just a nightmarish time getting through the App Store, like uniswap just got approved for like a few weeks. I know. And it’s they’ve been in the queue for like a year. So I’ve never heard a good experience of any crypto company trying to get approved in the Apple App Store. You know, and it’s not I mean, while it is absolutely felt most by crypto companies right now, that process has been a challenge for many app builders years, in my years doing mobile product consulting, I would be working on an agricultural tech project. And we would get a denied submission, you’re like it can be hard to keep up the rules, or sometimes you could get kicked off and you have no rationale is no way that that’s your whole business. Yeah, exactly. And so given that the store policies themselves can be either a little bit vague or hard to cut through. And the fact that the fee structures exist in such a way that would make it extremely hard for web three business models to really succeed. We knew that we needed a new way to give users a home to the best mobile web three experiences in a way that was developer friendly. That was crypto friendly. And so that leads us to the Solana DAP store. So slotted App Store, comes on saga, it’s currently the only device that has it. But we intend it to be the home for all of the best mobile experiences in web three. It looks and it feels very much like the App Store experiences that users already know. But it’s got all of the web three apps with all of the web three features that just can’t can’t be gotten anywhere else. Yeah. And so you’re on the saga phone you’re flipping through, it feels like the normal experience you could go to and I’m asking the Android store and download your favorite Android apps as well as the salon debt. Absolutely. That’s so cool. So I’ve been using my saga for about six months. Well, I’ve adapted the beta version. Yes, the DAP store wasn’t ready until maybe two months ago. Can I see it? Absolutely. Yeah. And so. So what you just brought up is really critical. We’re not asking users to take a journey. That is totally foreign, right? There are a lot of competing, if at all. There are a lot of competing opportunities in terms of what mobile the future of mobile and web three looks like. We didn’t want to take users away from something that they were familiar with. We didn’t want them to have to make sacrifices. So on this phone, you can do all the web to stuff it feels just like an iPhone. Yeah, Twitter, Twitter, Instagram, all that stuff. Show the camera real quick here. Even the home screen, because I mean, this is I mean, how often do you guys get to see the launch of a brand new phone? It hasn’t even been released yet. So it’s super slick.

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And this isn’t like not a paid promotion or anything. This is actually just super cool. It’s got a nice camera. You know, clean buttons. It’s exactly you know, the weight of my iPhone. Yeah, slick. Yeah, it’s good. It’s good. So yeah, so it’s got all of the kind of core smartphone stuff you need. But it layers in the seed vault layers in the App Store and really gives users who care about web three, the best options, the best security without having to make other sacrifices. There will certainly be some people who buy this and think of it as their crypto burner. But we started to actually ship units to the community for those early pre orders. And they’re making the switch right, this is their right? This is like the only phone that they’ve got. Not just the secondary phone, just the thing I bring to buy NF T’s when I’m at dinner. Yeah, yeah. Well, hey, I love it. I’m going to ask a hard question. And I don’t know if I expect a full answer. But I gotta just throw this pitch down the middle for you. Yeah. You’re going up against Apple, right? Like you’re competing with Apple.

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And they’re really hard to compete with. I imagine. So how do you as the guy who’s leading business and operations think about attacking the smartphone market? Yeah. This, this is the first iteration, right? We can be totally honest, this success for us isn’t selling a billion phones. I mean, if we sell a billion, I’ll be happy.

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But the goal is to accelerate the whole of what web three looks like totally. So we do envision, you know, some people who were iPhone users who were frustrated because they couldn’t do all the web three stuff that they cared about making the switch. We also expect plenty of Android users who are familiar with the operating system to come over.

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But we also hope that this starts to kind of

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For the rest of the industry, we want to make the existing app store’s more clear. We want them to be more crypto friendly. So while yes, Apple sells phones, we have a phone, they are in a way directly competitive. Our goal is to just rise the tide and float all boats here. And so if people are happy to jump on this journey with us, we think this is the flagship web three experience on mobile. But that doesn’t mean we’re not trying to make everybody’s web three experience on mobile better. Totally. And actually, to that point, is the saga some for some device that I could actually use Aetherium or polygon, or maybe even have a Bitcoin wallet on that or is it simply Solana right now it’s Solana, okay. But everything that we’ve built from an SDK perspective, what we call this line of mobile stack, is fully open source. We want other communities to jump in, we want other communities to contribute. In an ideal world, you could have all of the wallets for all of the chains you want secured by seed vault, so that as a web three user, I don’t have to make hard decisions. I just know that my seeds are secure, regardless of what chain I’m transacting, right. So Trusted Execution, environment and cryptography are applicable to like all that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay, I love it. Now, when you think about your guys’s roadmap, walk us through, you know, where we’re at now, you know, spring, summer ish of 2023. And kind of what the next phase looks like for you. Yeah, so we just had our launch launch event two weeks ago, which was extremely exciting. So we’ve just now started to ship phones to the first preorder is nice. It has been wild, I’ve run into people here in Austin, who are part of the first batch of users, it’s getting very real, which is super exciting. So first and foremost, we want to make sure that for the first people who are receiving the phone for the first people who are buying, they’re getting the best possible experience. So we’re really focused on making sure that everything works as expected. We’re trying to pull as many partners as many builders into the App Store as we can. So part of the reason I’m here in Austin is to connect with teams who maybe have a great desktop app, but haven’t figured out the right way to get to mobile, where teams were building for mobile, but just can’t quite get across the finish line. We think that for that first cohort of users, we need to give them something that’s great, safe, secure, but also has access to the best possible apps. So that’s our short term focus. As we start to look out a little bit further, the phone itself is going to release more broadly on May 8. So awesome, pre orders are starting to receive their units. Now, for those that didn’t preorder for those that wanted to wait and see see some reviews, May 8 is when it becomes generally available. So as we start to ship to that cohort, we can start to look ahead, we can explore things like how we pull additional chains into the seed vault, we can explore building additional first party experiences. I think we’re in a bit of wait and see mode, because we really want to start capturing feedback from both users and developers. Yeah, well, that’s awesome. And I’m hoping that like, as you know, we’re in a bear market right now. And you’re launching this during a bear market, but I can’t even wait to see what a bull market does to this phone. Because, you know, everybody’s gonna start wanting crypto, everybody’s gonna want to have the phone that uses crypto. So I don’t know how sales have gone yet. But they’re probably at a low compared to what they can be once you know, the whole technology kind of gets sucked out in the market return. Sure. Yeah. From a from an initial sales perspective. Like I said, we’re still in pre orders only mode. But seeing the conversion rate seeing those people who, in June of last year put down their $100. And they were like I will be here whenever the phone comes the loyalists, the Loyalists are loyal. And so it’s been great to see we haven’t frankly, we haven’t been able to get phones in quickly enough to get to those users. That’s a good problem to have. Yeah. But then as we start to expand more broadly, I think, you know, market headwinds, certainly, you know, affect a product launch like this, but we’re feeling pretty confident that

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no matter how you’re using crypto, having something that’s safe and easy to access is going to be critical. So as more and more users come into the ecosystem, as we find ways to kind of support them in new ways that perhaps the product doesn’t right now, we’re feeling extremely confident in terms of growth for the next year. While I’m excited and Hollander thank you so much for having me Solana mobile, the new swagga. Check it out. Where can we drive some traffic? Where do you want people to go to learn more about it ensure protection by one? Yep. So head to Solana mobile.com. As I mentioned, sales open up probably on me. So you can sign up for emails, you’ll get the ping as soon as the store switches over. So put in your order on May 8. We’re going to start shipping those right away and we can’t wait to get soggy on your hands. All right, and we’ll see you around. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.