Ep. 541 The Future of The Gig Economy with Braintrust

Ep. 541 The Future of The Gig Economy with Braintrust
June 1, 2023 #CRYPTO101

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In this episode of Crypto 101 we talk to Adam Jackson the Co-Founder of Braintrust which is the first and largest decentralized talent network completely controlled by its users.  Bringing the top talent together via a decentralized way gives the power to the “Gig Worker ” and by empowering and bringing more value to them in return it lowers the fees for the business that is looking to hire , resulting in a better/cheaper transaction for a win win scenario.  This is a fascinating project that is operating at full speed today so make sure you catch up and check them out especially if you are someone that could benefit from this awesome project.

 

— TRANSCRIPT —

 

SPEAKERS

Aaron Malone, Adam Jackson

 

Aaron Malone  00:09

All right, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the crypto 101 Podcast. I am joined today by Adam Jackson, the CEO of brain trust. Adam has been on the podcast and digital currency summits many times, we can’t get enough of this guy because he’s so full of great information. We had to have him back yet again. Adam, thank you so much for joining us.

 

Adam Jackson  00:29

Well, thanks for having me back. I know I’m I’m usually full of something. Hopefully, it’ll be good information today.

 

Aaron Malone  00:35

Well, we’ll roll the dice and see what we get. Let’s start with your background first, for those of you out there who may be have been living under a rock, and I have not read about you just yet. Who you are, who are you? What do you do and what have you built?

 

Adam Jackson  00:51

Yeah, for sure. So Adam Jackson, co founder of brain trust. quick background, I’m a software engineer by training studied Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, moved out here to San Francisco, right out of school was 1617 years ago. It’s been a while seeing all the ups and downs here. But working on my fourth venture backed project, I’m sort of a engineer, turned entrepreneur, all marketplace businesses, but all in different categories. My first one was an E commerce marketplace acquired by Intuit, then an automotive marketplace acquired by advanced autoparts. Then in 2012, I started Dr. On Demand, which is a large video telemedicine service, not quite a marketplace, but it connects doctors and patients for live consultations, and then got into crypto full time in 2016 ish around there and built, co founded a crypto hedge fund called Cambria and asset management and then spun brain trust out of that fund. And brand trust. You know, we’re now in our fourth year is a decentralized talent marketplace that connects knowledge workers with clients that need their services. And we do so in a really fee disruptive way. Because brand trust is a crypto network. It’s not a for profit corporation, and it’s owned and controlled by the talent who make their living on the network. And because of that, it can charge very low fees disruptively, low, so 0% fee to talent 10% fee to clients. And what that does is it brings in the best talent from around the world because they got better economics. And then wherever the talent go, clients follow them. So the network’s growing really quickly, with that new kind of ownership model, powered by this new technology, Blockchain tokens.

 

Aaron Malone  02:32

When I first heard of brain trust, I thought it was going to be something like a new government entity, like the CIA, and I went to apply to like this, you know, new think tank or whatever it was going to be. And I found out it was a job hiring platform. And I was like, gosh, I’m on down. Yeah. But as I started looking more into it, I realized just how novel it is. And you know, learning about your background, you’re a guy that brings people together, and you know, how to really match supply and demand very well. So what was it about these other businesses that you did? I mean, honestly, you don’t have to work for a living anymore. If you don’t want to, you could just be off on an island somewhere sipping martinis. But what is it that keeps you inspired to keep building, especially here in crypto?

 

Adam Jackson  03:18

Well, yeah, it’s true, believe it or not, I do choose to do this with my time, which some days I wake up and wonder if if that was really the right choice. But I am very passionate about letting global talent like access opportunity everywhere, right? The old saying, talent is dispersed equally around the world opportunity is not and I come up in this world, I’m from Northern Ohio, where there was not a lot of opportunity, I moved to California where there was a lot. And because that when I came here, that was that was the only way you can kind of dip dip into the Silicon Valley ecosystem. And you’d have a network with the Sandhill crowd and the Soviet you know, blah, blah, blah, right? And it all seemed unfair to me, right? And restrictive on both sides, right? Not everybody wants to live in New York and California, especially these days. And companies would love to hire talent all over the world. They don’t want to be restricted to just one, one or two very expensive economic zones. And so in building two sided web enabled marketplaces, literally my whole career, I realized, like the dirty little secret with a corporate owned marketplace is that the marketplaces job is to extract more and more fees out of the network, right, raise the rake, raise the fees take more dollars out of every transaction. And while that might sound good to shareholders, that it’s it’s actually like the better you get at it. The more misaligned the incentives become between the folks who make their living on the network and the people who own and operate the network, right. And then the further misaligned those incentives become, the more of a incentive there is to disrupt right to get rid of the corporate middleman, so to speak. And so when I discovered blockchain tokens, I was like, wow, this is, you know, a totally new technology that allows 10s of millions more and more people around the world to organize essentially a global Co Op, right. And so to build a network that is essentially software driven, does not have to does not have the mandate of extracting more value from its users every year, and can keep incentives aligned and thus grow faster, right. So that the big idea here, this was an investment thesis at first, and now now, it’s just like, an operating principle is like, user owned networks will grow faster, and be more valuable than investor or corporate owned networks. And so that’s what we’ve been proven out here with branches. And that’s, that’s what I’m passionate about. That’s what gets me out of bed every day.

 

Aaron Malone  05:49

And it’s something that actually strikes a chord in my heart, because when I joked earlier that I was on hireable, there’s a lot of truth and pain behind that. Because before I got into crypto, it really was a struggle. I didn’t last the job longer than two years, other than reffering roller hockey in my entire life. And I’ve signed up on every job board you can imagine, indeed, monster cybercoders, whatever it was. And all they really would ask me when I would fill out these things is, where do you go to school? And who do you work for in the past? And maybe a couple of the random questions that, you know, no one really cared about. They don’t want me to upload my resume anyway. So like, why am I filling out a questionnaire and sending a resume that has all these answers in it. And the only responses I would ever get, were from a couple of recruiters that lived 9000 miles away and could barely speak English. And we’re just sending out mass emails to literally everyone didn’t even land one interview, and God knows how many decades I was on any of these platforms. Despite being very well versed. As a system administrator, I work for private security firms that destroyed you know, entire cities on the internet, at will. And I worked my way up there as a social engineers, there was a lot I could offer to any company, just from my experience that I couldn’t put on a resume. But had they taken the time to even talk to me, I could have shown them some things that were very impressive. But what is it a brain trust that makes things so different, that allows people’s you know, unique talents to really shine through and find a good match? What are the values the brain trust can highlight on that platform versus a lot of these legacy things?

 

Adam Jackson  07:31

I love that path. By the way, social engineer turned investor and podcaster. It makes it makes a lot of sense, actually.

 

Aaron Malone  07:39

Well, if I had planned it, it would have been this is literally like, the last page before suicide. And it just happened to be the right one for me. To be perfectly honest, it all worked out. I guess I had to reach rock bottom to find my real path. Cave.

 

Adam Jackson  07:56

So many of us do. I mean, I mean, look, I you touched on a couple of very salient points there. First of all, like legacy credentials are meaningless where you went to school, if you went to college at all completely meaningless. I have a computer science degree from Vanderbilt. Basically, all this is a receipt for a bunch of fucking student debt that I had to pay off. And fortunately, unfortunately, I paid mine off before the government relaxed all those loans, but weren’t weren’t, ya know, right. bad on me. But um, you know, the point is, like, we now live in this like, super competitive global environment where knowledge workers from around the world can become really good at something self taught, basically, for free, you can learn anything you want on YouTube, you can learn by doing all of this knowledge is free, right? You do not need to pay for some credential or whatever. And so that is the one of the core values behind brain trust is this, it’s an E egalitarian network, anyone can show up. You have to it’s a rigorous to, you have to prove you know what, you know, right? If you claim your level five Python developer, you’re gonna go through a screening process, both synchronous and asynchronous, you’re gonna go through KYC, to make sure you are who you say you are. But one of those questions is not where you went to school, or what kind of degree you got, or where you got it from, it just doesn’t matter. Right? And that those are anachronisms in this new world of, of knowledge workers. And so if you can, if you can do what you say you can do and get through the screening process, you can make a great living on brain trust. You know, we have a native token called the Beatrice token, which folks can earn by referring more of their friends and networks or clients. I mean, 80% of the network has been grown just by community referrals. We’re rolling out a professional network now where you can actually redeem those tokens you’ve earned for further upskilling networking, Career Mentorship, bespoke advice, like things from more senior people, not not something you could like type into Google or even chat UBT and get a real answer. This is like real mentorship. So that token economy at brain trust is what is making it grow so quickly, right? You go to the professional network, you upskill you refer people to earn more tokens. You can go buy them if you want to, but we’d rather you do things to earn them, right, it creates this virtuous cycle. It’s all merit based. One of the ways we’re using you will be utilizing the blockchain is, you know, if you do a great job for, say, Goldman Sachs or Bank of America to the bigger clients on brain trust, it’s provable verifiable work history, right? It’s like, Hey, I have proven on brain trust that I’ve earned, you know, X, you know, $200,000, you know, building software for Goldman Sachs, right? That that’s a real, that’s a credential, right like that. Goldman Sachs is a high standard shipping enterprise software for a bank is a real professional badge. This isn’t like lying about some club, you’re in on LinkedIn, or some bullshit like that, right. So the again, like the world’s talent has spread all over the world, like whether you live in India, or Oklahoma, or South Africa, or New York City, like it’s matters if you can do the job. And if you have done verifiably have done the work for these clients, this is the new economy.

 

Aaron Malone  11:07

Yeah. And the new economy really is user own networks. That’s what web three really is. It’s user owned networks. And brain trust is something that I often referenced as a case study for web 2.5. And the difference between that is you’ve got a centralized management team, and a centralized legal entity that is overseeing a user controlled network. So it’s kind of a bridge from the traditional corporation model, on the way towards being web three. And

 

Adam Jackson  11:40

that was sorry, I just want to clarify wrote it. Yes. close to that. So it’s not it’s not one centralized company overseeing, it’s actually like six or seven companies that all there, I only own one of them, right, one of the founding nodes, there are 656 other nodes, depending on how active they’re paying in a given month, that, you know, help bring on clients help process Fiat payments. I mean, it’s it’s important in a decentralized architecture that if any one of these nodes went away, like if my if I disappear tomorrow, if my node disappears, other other nodes around the network could pick up those client transfers, could pay the talent could do other things. I don’t own and control the other nodes. I only own and control mine. Now, when we started, I think that maybe the point you’re making when we started in 2018 2019, yes, it was just my one company. And then we, other community members came in and they brought their companies and their bank accounts and their relationships with clients. And we all come together to form a decentralized network. But we we started centralized, and we’re on this path of progressive decentralization with which frankly, that’s the point of blockchain. Right? That’s the point. Yes, I think web 2.5 is a more accurate, it’s a more apt term for this actually,

 

Aaron Malone  12:52

yes. As you started, it was web 2.5. And on the path to decentralization, which is web through where you’re at today. So and that’s tremendous. And I like any web two company or legacy brand out there that wants to get to web three, to study the brain trust model, and what you guys have done, because I think you’ve done a tremendous job at it, where there really was no blueprint before, but just through being very knowledgeable and ethical. You guys have made the journey and, you know, four or five years. So great, great on you guys. And you know, what do you think else is really ripe for disruption? In the User owned? network space? You know, is it going to be Amazon Web Services? Is it going to be Netflix, you know, what do you see really being disrupted next?

 

Adam Jackson  13:45

Yeah, I love I love this topic, because one of the things I’m most passionate about as an early stage backer of projects as an operator in the space contributor to other dials and networks, follow the money follow the margin, wherever there’s a lot of margin and a decentralized service. There’s probably a decentralized network that can do a better job at a better price. Right? So I look at the world of web web enabled marketplaces on a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum are marketplaces that, that that provide or give back just as much value or more value than they extract. On the other end of the spectrum, are marketplaces that extract more value than they provide their users. So everything on this the more extractive end of the spectrum, we’re ripe for disruption. I’ll just give you a quick examples on on the good end, right the not likely to be disrupted soon and because they provide so much value, I would I would say Airbnb, right. So Airbnb took this very disparate world of vacation rentals where there was no trust no safety, no price discovery, no liquidity. It was just a shot in the dark, right. It was just a very unpleasant experience compared to a hotel. Brian comes in and builds this new platform, easy to use, gets liquidity on both sides makes it easy price discovery provides insurance, background checks, protection, if something bad happened, all that kind of stuff. And you know, he’s made a platform now, when he’s taking about two, I think it’s 20% is the fee, and people are happy to pay it. Right? I mean, they may make a pitch about it, but like they do pay it, and it does grow. Because it’s a much better experience in calling some random guy in South Lake Tahoe and hoping the vacation rental doesn’t have a grizzly bear living in it or something. So, you know, you come out, he comes out of the other end of that 12 month, 12 years later, and he’s got more rooms than Marriott does. On the so I don’t see like a web three Airbnb anytime soon. On the other end of the spectrum, you have marketplaces that are extracting more value than they’re providing great examples, gig economy DoorDash, Uber, big, big consulting and staffing firms, you know that that take talent and mark them up three times and rent them out to big companies. Right. That’s what brain trust plays right? Brain Trust doesn’t compete with like Upwork and Fiverr. Those are very small jobs, $20 logos here and there. Brain Trust is mostly an enterprise grade network, providing, you know, really high skilled people or mid range people to clients that have insatiable demand for them, which are traditionally the you know, where staffing firms come in and say, Yeah, I’ll rent you 50 Java developers, and we’re gonna pay him 75 bucks an hour, we’re gonna charge you 250 bucks an hour, right? That’s a big spread. Great. That’s why braintrust grow so fast. That’s a great economic disruption opportunity. DoorDash another example. DoorDash is an amazing app. Right? It’s incredible value for the consumer. But they’re marking up the food they’re extracting a lot from the driver from the dasher and the restaurant. I mean, so much. There’s like restaurants will ask you not to use DoorDash sometimes, right? It’s a great indicator that we need to we need to use your own last mile network, right? For folks who deliver other people packages and food, right? What an amazing thing where you could have a tokenized network of those folks around the world. And then any, any client that needs those things delivered can just tap into that network directly. Right. And so that’d be to me, to me, that’s like the next iteration of, you know, where user networks should go.

 

Aaron Malone  17:12

Yeah, we’ve seen a decentralized, Airbnb come and go in 2019 2018, I saw the first attempt to be an Uber, without Uber, and that didn’t get off the ground. And I think a lot of it has to do with brand building. There’s some amazing tech builders in this space, some of the best in the world. But their strength is development, not marketing, not brand recognition. If you want to build a normal brand up and legacy markets, you raise a series B, and you throw that 100 million dollars into Google ads, and just let it run on autopilot. Or you hire someone like the illusion factory to build you a Superbowl commercial. But in web three, you have to build a community of people who are not just your customers, but your owners and your your participants. Everyone is kind of in this together. What are some ways that you’re building your community and web three, and brain trust, to continue growing that brand to become the next household name and, you know, 510 20 years? Yeah,

 

Adam Jackson  18:18

the those are great examples of where just good engineering or product is not enough, right? Because here’s the thing, Uber and DoorDash are amazing products. The economics are wrong. But the products are incredible. So having an incredible product is just your that’s table stakes. It’s not enough, right? I mean, like, yeah, take Twitter, blue sky, right. Like Dorsey is an amazing guy. He’s amazing product guy, but blue sky looks exactly like Twitter. That’s not going to disrupt Twitter. I don’t

 

Aaron Malone  18:48

remember when Uber came out, I got spammed and every email address I ever had for like two years with nothing but just become an Uber driver.

 

Adam Jackson  18:56

Exactly. So to answer your question, look, you need to build a new marketplace and gain market share quickly and be truly disruptive. You need an unfair advantage. My my prior company Doctor On Demand, my co founder was Dr. Phil from TV, the therapist, you know, in a TV show that reached 32 million people a week. He was our unfair advantage. We talked about the service on his television show. That’s how we broke orbit. And then we grew grew grew grew. The unfair advantage in token economies is the native token. So you reward you create a permissionless economy where anyone can come and participate without gaming this so I’ll just use braintrust token economy as an example, because it’s what I think about every day, but I think it could be a valuable blueprint for other verticals. So branch has created its own native token, which is used to govern it’s built on compound governance. It’s a governance it’s started as a governance token now it can be redeemed for Career Services and A career help mentorship etc has lots of uses now, but we, the protocol distributes the token to anyone who refers new clients and new talent. So we have now hundreds of folks, we call connectors, which these are like. They’re like very well connected people that, you know, they probably have day jobs or whatever, but their vast networks of either talent or clients or both. And in their, like, spare couple hours a month, they’ll send emails referring these parties into brain trusts using their unique code. And then when those parties get through and start transacting, like Nike or Nestle, or Bank of America, these are all referred companies, the connector then gets this constant stream of token bonuses sent to them by the protocol. And then they can, you know, they’re accruing this token kind of passively, just for, you know, inviting more talent or inviting more clients. That’s how we’ve grown to, you know, 1000s of clients and hundreds of 1000s of talent in such a short time. And that in its in and of itself, builds a community right now you have all these stakeholders in the network who, you know, want to see it grow or or, you know, referring business, you know, as a side gig,

 

Aaron Malone  21:13

we see these unemployment numbers now that our loving government puts out every month and says, Oh, you know, the economy is recovering so much. Yet, the Uber drivers that, you know, I’m involved in, whenever I’m going to the airports, they’re usually people that were retired and no longer can afford to be, or, you know, some cases, you know, very professional people that would be earning a six figure salary where that’s not enough, or now this is the only job that they can find. So it’s, it’s a slippery slope to say, are we really recovering? And still, you know, we see on the news all the time, this top companies laying off 10,000 employees, this companies laying off 8000 is, you know, we’re here in almost the middle of 2023, when we’re recording this, but what are your clients that are looking to hire, asking you for right now in terms of features or talent, or feet, or, you know, just on the network? How are, you know, big companies thinking about the markets right now.

 

Adam Jackson  22:17

So I’ll start by saying, probably half of the big companies on brain trust are under a hiring freeze. So you know, this slowdown is real, I don’t think it’s unthought thawing out, I think we’ve still got a lot more pain to go, I think we’ve got inflation that will keep rising. The unemployment figures are skewed, right, it’s just it’s just not I don’t think the numbers are accurate. But in the knowledge worker space in the IT space, we’re feeling the most pain here, right with this, there’s been hundreds of 1000s of folks laid off in the last two quarters. In the US, I think just in California. And every day, you hear about another round of layoffs, usually in the 10s of 1000s of folks from a big tech company or whatever. And then countless more startups or you know, Series B companies either slashing and half or going out of business completely because global liquidity has dried up this is you know, we’re in a high rate and higher rate environment. Now. global macro is risk off, liquidity has dried up venture has ground to a halt. That means for you know, folks get laid off and so on braintrust we we’ve been lucky enough to still remain growing through this not not nearly growing as quickly as we were a year ago, but still, you know, month over month, quarter over quarter adding more companies adding more jobs and what they’re looking for. I mean, it’s it’s nothing special. I mean, it’s you can go look at the brain trusts marketplace anytime and see, it’s you know, UX designers, software engineers, product managers, project managers back end, DevOps folks, systems engineers, AI ml people now, now prompt engineers, right folks that can help implement Bard or chat GPT to make a business more efficient, right, they couldn’t have had better timing with that technology coming out. I don’t think that stuff’s gonna replace any people, but it’s gonna make existing folks, you know, 50% or whatever, more efficient. And that’s a hot topic right now is how do we streamline and make our folks give them an Iron Man suit rather than lay them off?

 

Aaron Malone  24:29

Yeah. And I think that’s a great way to segue, let’s talk about AI. Because there is a lot of fear that it’s going to take people’s jobs or replace humanity. But the AI we see coming out of stealth right now. There’s literally 1000s that are just popping up everywhere. So that tells me a couple of things. One, this is just a bunch of things that already existed that are being rebranded AI that really aren’t. And in order to do that they’re calling it generative AI, meaning that this thing And you know, use some artificial intelligence to maybe manipulate a photo, or translate voice to text or something very, very simple. These are not fully autonomous, where if with all beings that are able to challenge God, nowhere even close, they wouldn’t even be able to, you know, recreate a Super Mario level and eight bit and follow all the game theory physics in from Super Nintendo at this point. So I don’t think there’s a lot to worry about. Do you see it the same way? Or how do you approach AI? I have,

 

Adam Jackson  25:34

look, I have the same view. And look, I study machine learning in college. I love the science behind this. I’m when I hack around at night, it’s it’s with things like this before open AI and all that stuff, right? I’ve been playing with TensorFlow for years and look a couple things. One, it’s the domain of large companies that have tons of data, right? So we use AI every single day zoom uses it to, you know, make your image look a little nicer in your meeting. And Google uses it to filter spam, and Facebook uses it to target ads on Instagram better, which they’re amazing at these natural language interfaces to the LLM. Yeah, it’s a parlor trick. I mean, it’s it. I think it’s a productivity hack for sure. If you’re a writer. If you especially if you’re a writer, you should really be paying attention to this. This is your like, this is your CRM. If you’re like for salespeople before there were CRMs. Right? I think that that’s the analogy there. It’s not the new iPhone. It’s not like broadband, right? It’s not a paradigm shift, I’m convinced it’s, it’s a productivity increase, which we need right now. If we need to grow GDP, you know, to pay for this constantly growing deficit that we’re going to monetize through through inflation. The only way to grow out of that is productivity increases, and these things can provide that right. But it i steadfastly believe AI, this whole technology will create more jobs and more productivity than it will replace. I mean, you use this stuff in it. Yeah, I mean, it create, it’s, it’s cool that a computer can do this, but you look at it, or like, I don’t know, like, it looks like if I had to guess a human middle schooler created this, right. And sorry, that’s just not valuable. And to your point, but like manipulating images or writing poems or whatever, great. There’s no commercial value in that there never has been right, like photo editors, not a big industry, right? Yeah,

 

Aaron Malone  27:37

I love that. That tape on there. As I’ve been trying to play around with a lot of the stuff that I found very few things, really production ready. One of the few things being fireflies AI, which is a note taking program that you can invite into your zoom calls, and it will write down and take notes of what people said and then email it to all the participants. That’s really useful. But I wasn’t hiring a person to do that before. Yeah, it was.

 

Adam Jackson  28:04

It’s been around for like six years, right? It’s like, right. But more importantly, we weren’t hiring people to do that. So who gives a shit one and two, like what’s not new? Right?

 

Aaron Malone  28:13

Right, exactly. So this is just kind of the latest craze that was really just a distraction. We won’t get into from what, but long story short, not a whole lot to worry about right now. That grid. So as we you know, try and get through the doldrums of this summer here. Do you think we’ve hit a bottom in terms of where the markets are at not just the crypto markets, but the job market layoffs? Or do you still think that we need some more pain to finally wrangling inflation and then bring prices of assets down to a level where people are comfortable buying again?

 

Adam Jackson  28:52

Yeah, so you know, this is certainly the question of the day and I have a couple of vectors I follow that helped me think about the potential outcomes because I don’t have no one can answer this like with with with super high conviction.

 

Aaron Malone  29:08

There’s no crystal ball yet.

 

Adam Jackson  29:10

Yeah, I mean, look, you have Dalio is convicted, you know has conviction one way and you know, there’s plenty of other smart global macro guys that are taking the opposite bet. It’s like how can this many smart people like be completely misaligned on a topic right it’s just makes it so fascinating global macro so fascinating. So it feels like we are at the bottom and dragging along the bottom and by the way, like interest rates drive risk on assets drives crypto, right it’s all the same thing essentially they correlate to one on the way down and typically on the way up ish and so the only thing I think, you know, we have to keep a close eye on is this commercial real estate debt issue you know, there’s all these so you know, COVID causes the shutdowns the shutdowns kill off Space remote work is born. Most people aren’t going back to the office. Commercial rents are just way down. The debt comes due. It’s not serviceable anymore. The buildings go into foreclosure you have in sample cities like San Francisco, I don’t know, 40% vacant vacancy rates potentially more in five years. So you have all this debt coming to maturity that’s been defaulted on, where’s it gonna go? Fed’s balance sheet, who pays for that? US inflation when the government monetizes debt? So are we. So I think that’s a foregone conclusion that that happens. Who pays for us slowly through inflation? And I don’t know if we’re gonna have a president that, you know, trims back and starts to close the deficit? I don’t think so. That’s, that’s politically unpopular. So we are going to deal with more inflation? And how do you grow out of that? I think, you know, productivity, that kind of stuff. So AI, and global innovation, you know, software tech are still like, I’m convinced part of the solution here. But what that could mean, I don’t see anything getting better in the next four quarters, maybe gets a little worse. And then then the cycle resets. Right, and then you get the balance sheet back under control. We’ve the system has digested all of the toxic things, you know, hopefully no more banks fail. But there’s commercial real estate things. Commercial Real Estate debt is an issue. I think in four or five quarters, we could be seeing quantitative easing again, right? Because that’s, that’s just the way these cycles go. So hopefully, always the bottom No,

 

Aaron Malone  31:41

I sure hope so too. And, you know, just about everyone I’m talking to is kind of looking towards a turnaround, hopefully by the end of this year. But I think the scare you out phase is just about finished. But from there comes to where you out phase, where there’s just months and months of nothing worse, but nothing getting better. So I hope that that’s where we’re at now. Because if you’re experienced in these markets, you know, that is a good sign of things to come. And that’s the time to start buying. As an investor, not just a business owner, what are some things that you’re looking at in terms of crypto sectors that you think might be able to outperform Bitcoin in this next run up ahead? Like what are you looking towards?

 

Adam Jackson  32:28

Yeah, I mean, I don’t look at crypto assets. I’m not a hedge fund manager. So I don’t like I don’t care about Bitcoin being a benchmark, I think owning all the important things, it’s what is what matters. So obviously, big on always owning Bitcoin makes a lot of sense. That theory, I’ve never been more bullish on Aetherium. And it’s such an important platform. I think it’s the it’s the layer one to kind of move society forward and in all Fiat and in banking, you know, eventually consolidates to Aetherium. And then I love things that create real world value, right? That, you know, that can disrupt Hi, Fi takers right now, obviously, brand trust aims to be in that category. I don’t like naming other names just for hygiene sake. But But anything that’s that’s playing on that right end of the spectrum that I mentioned before, where it is disrupting entities that take disproportionate value from the networks, they run. Right. And so there’s a handful of crypto networks that are aiming to do that, but I think I think we need to see more of that. The generic VC answer is like infrastructure pick and shovel. Right. And it? I don’t know. Yeah, I just think that’s simple phone

 

Aaron Malone  33:39

doesn’t even mean I don’t know,

 

Adam Jackson  33:41

it’s an intellectually bankrupt term that venture capitalists use because they don’t understand technology, but it’s like, okay, yeah, Alchemy, we get it, right. They’re like the AWS of have in there. Awesome. Amazing. Like, you can count on one hand or last, how many companies are like that in the space? But, you know, this isn’t like an open source world here. Right? I don’t actually don’t think there’s tons and tons of money in the picking picks and shovels. I think it is in the application layer that disrupts these high fee tickers.

 

Aaron Malone  34:11

That’s another great contrarian take. Love it. So Aetherium, as you mentioned, there gonna be the settlement layer for banking. At some point, I think when Aetherium 2.0 was first announced, I said, That’s it. Aetherium is gone corporate, it’s not going to be this place where there’s the next killer app, you know, you’re not gonna be having it be the settlement layer for gaming, or any of this stuff. It’s going to be used by large banks and world governments to settle really, really, really important things like peace treaties, or, you know, central bank digital currency exchanges between one another. Do you think that’s an accurate vision? Or how do you think Aetherium transactions are really going to look in the next three to five years like it can’t just be full of Pepe coins?

 

Adam Jackson  34:58

Oh my god, I can’t I wish the fucking meme coins would go away. It’s just so stupid. So, like, settlement layer for gaming? I don’t know I don’t really think about gaming I’m not sure gaming needs a settlement layer it seems like games games are bigger than movies and TV right? And they’ve done fine without a blockchain I don’t get I don’t get it, but settlement layer for how this all borrow lend, or borrow lend in the world should sell to Aetherium, right, like when three arrows and block phi and all these other, you know, kind of unregulated nonsense machines went under because they don’t know how to manage risk. Who’s still got paid back of a compound? Right The the the tote the smart contract lending systems, you can build your you know, dy dx, right and amazing infrastructure, you can build leverage on these things you can like figure, you know, originating and securitizing Home Loans using Blockchain tech to shave 150 pips off every transaction, wow, now you’re in a trillion dollar market. Right? That shit matters. And that, that that goes that settles to a theorem in my mind. And then and then application layers, right? Like, use your own talent networks use your own last mile networks settled to Aetherium because those networks need to be inherently trustless. So anyone can participate. And some, someone asleep at the wheel and risk management can screw the whole thing up.

 

Aaron Malone  36:28

Yeah, absolutely. Now, as we head into 2024, you know, somewhere down the line, I’m not convinced that gas fees are going to be affordable for the average person. And we’re looking at layer two solutions for our everyday defi trading, borrow and lend from an average user perspective, you know, what, we’re not taking out millions of dollars of loans. You know, if you’re paying a few $100, in gas fees for something like that, who cares? That’s still a tiny percentage. But if I want to borrow $250, and the gas fee is more than that, it doesn’t work. And the idea of defy is to create financial inclusion for people that don’t have any access to financial services, someone in India or the Philippines aren’t going to even be able to afford to pay a $10 gas fee transaction that’s completely insane from they might not even make that much money in a week. So what are some of the layer twos that might be of interest to you that you saw, you know, this still has the ethos of Aetherium and the structure of it, and it can settle on that layer? But I would you feel comfortable using any of these l tos? Yeah,

 

Adam Jackson  37:37

absolutely. So look, this is the brilliance of the market dynamics that Vitalik and CO have built into Aetherium. Right, you know, first it’s moved to proof of stake that you know, are 1559 You know, to make mining less extractive and essentially made Aetherium deflationary that doesn’t help fees, I get it, but it helps drive demand for the token second proof of steak makes everything cheaper. Third will be sharding, which they’re working on now. So that should reduce fees again, but it’ll never to your point. It’ll it’ll never become everyday affordable. And it was never designed to which, which is why Vitalik loves the L TOS right. He always talks about, you know, they’re very compatible. Polygon, obviously, the clear runaway winner here, we’re building on polygon with brain trust. Obvious clear winner there, right. There’s other network like there’s an LTE called scale, which is really popular for gaming. Totally EVM compatible, you move back and forth from eath or bitrum. Which I believe Coinbase is new thing. New L two is built on optimism. Sorry, optimism. Yeah, sorry. And so Coinbase embracing open source l TOS like, look, it’s clear that the EVM world is what we’re going to move forward with here, right? It’s, you know, Linux over over windows, essentially.

 

Aaron Malone  38:58

And when you consider the L TOS part of that application layer. Yeah, you were talking about?

 

Adam Jackson  39:04

Yeah, I mean, I don’t know it’s, it can it’s it’s like it’s hosting, right. So maybe not kind of in the middle of its hosting other file coins. Another one, right. It’s like, storage s3 amazon s3 storage is expensive for what it is. Right? And there’s in there’s not you can’t store on Aetherium. It’s way too expensive. And so filecoin actually, like, super compelling what they’ve built for a decentralized, Secure High, Low latency, high availability, storage system cost wise, compare it to s3, from what I’ve read, I’m not using it at scale, but from what I’ve been reading, and I’ve been involved in the project for a long time. It is very disruptive. So those look that to me is the future like these things. These things are here. They’re ready to go. They’re working.

 

Aaron Malone  39:50

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s been really interesting seeing internet computer being built by Definity starting to reach maturity and becoming More than just hype, like we’re seeing a lot of steak to match the earlier sizzle that was surrounding them in the half a decade that it’s taken them to build the stuff. But it includes compute file storage, hosting, just about like a kind of an all in one, quote unquote smart contract platform that does all these other things as well. Has that been on your radar whatsoever?

 

Adam Jackson  40:23

You know, I’m familiar with the project, I’m an LP in a couple of funds that that were directly involved in helping stand that up. I’m not I’m not I haven’t used it. So I’m not an expert on it.

 

Aaron Malone  40:34

Okay, I was just asking, I am not either. I don’t hold any ICP, but I haven’t used it yet. But I see more and more development on that platform every day. And it’s gotten me curious. There’s a Twitter account called Proof of GitHub, that will dump the top 10 platforms that had code commits that day. So you can kind of track and see where the development is really happening right there in your Twitter feed. And I kind of equate that to, you know, skate to where you know, the puck is going to be at Next. And I’m constantly seeing stuff. They’re seeing stuff on Cardano, Cosmos, polka dot, and even, you know, lesser known things like status network and Vega protocol, are just having hundreds and hundreds of commits every day. And I’m thinking, wow, you know, there’s really a lot of stuff going on over here. I want to pay attention to that. Awesome. Well, Adam, before we let you go, what are some of your final thoughts, you know, just from a brain trust, you know, operator perspective, like what’s next for you guys, in growing that business growing that community?

 

Adam Jackson  41:42

Well, I’ll tell you that the marketplace has really found Product Market Fit talent, love, it went from 75,000 talent last November to over 300,000. Today, largely driven, driven by tech layoffs and that kind of thing. So, you know, there’s enough supply on this network to drive billions of dollars of demand. This thing kind of grows itself with the token, it’s really capital efficient. So our next our big shot on goal here we’ve been working on for like a year is this professional network, which by the way, releases January, June 8, wide release, it’s been in private beta now with a bunch of people. So it’s really getting a lot of use, but it’s closed off still. That team will will generally release on on June 8. I think, you know, in a world where people need to reskill people need mentorship, that advice you used to get at the watercooler from your senior manager, that doesn’t happen anyway, there’s no water cooler anymore. So I think this this feature is building or filling a huge gap in the market and gives folks a good reason to come in and earn some brand trust tokens by referring their friends or their or their client or their boss, and then upskill their career, right, there’s no no good, no good place to do that right now in here, you can essentially do it for free. So that’s, that’s what we’re excited about. That’s what we think will keep this network you know, growing exponentially,

 

Aaron Malone  43:02

I’ve got an idea for you that just came to mind. And we’re going to codename at auto Tao where it’s going to take talent on your network that’s looking for work. And depending on what their experience is, it’s going to slot them into this simulated organization all the way from the top down. So they’re working for this mock company with other people that are looking for talent to get hired. And then they can just have like an open community where they can maybe come up with an idea of work on something together in the meantime. So they’re still being productive. They’re keeping their skills fresh. They’re showing employers that they’re still hungry and ready to go. And for all they know, they may get snatched up by an investor rather than an employer. And he just comes in and you know, you got an investor. Okay, I’ve got this, you know, funding, boom, here’s my entire company that already has synergy. And they got hired that way. What do you think about that? That’s cool. It’s like,

 

Adam Jackson  43:57

it’s like a cross between an open source project and an incubator. Yeah, right. Like, yeah, that’s kind of cool. Maybe we should put our heads together and start that.

 

Aaron Malone  44:08

That’d be amazing. Because what else is everyone else gonna do? Just watch Netflix? There’s not enough. No, not at all. Let’s build something cool together while we’re waiting for a paycheck. And maybe that paycheck will end up being founder shares instead. Who knows? I love it. Well, thanks for being receptive to my insanity. Again, a good one every now and then. Well, let’s, let’s see what happens. But Adam, can’t wait to have you back on the podcast next time, another six months or a year from now. Or if you have any big major updates, just send us an email, you know, we’ll book you again.

 

Adam Jackson  44:42

Hey, thanks for having me. It’s always good to see you man.

 

Aaron Malone  44:45

feeling’s mutual. Alright everyone. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll be back next week with another great podcast here at crypto one on one

 

 

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In this episode of Crypto 101 we talk to Adam Jackson the Co-Founder of Braintrust which is the first and largest decentralized talent network completely controlled by its users.  Bringing the top talent together via a decentralized way gives the power to the “Gig Worker ” and by empowering and bringing more value to them in return it lowers the fees for the business that is looking to hire , resulting in a better/cheaper transaction for a win win scenario.  This is a fascinating project that is operating at full speed today so make sure you catch up and check them out especially if you are someone that could benefit from this awesome project.

 

— TRANSCRIPT —

 

SPEAKERS

Aaron Malone, Adam Jackson

 

Aaron Malone  00:09

All right, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the crypto 101 Podcast. I am joined today by Adam Jackson, the CEO of brain trust. Adam has been on the podcast and digital currency summits many times, we can’t get enough of this guy because he’s so full of great information. We had to have him back yet again. Adam, thank you so much for joining us.

 

Adam Jackson  00:29

Well, thanks for having me back. I know I’m I’m usually full of something. Hopefully, it’ll be good information today.

 

Aaron Malone  00:35

Well, we’ll roll the dice and see what we get. Let’s start with your background first, for those of you out there who may be have been living under a rock, and I have not read about you just yet. Who you are, who are you? What do you do and what have you built?

 

Adam Jackson  00:51

Yeah, for sure. So Adam Jackson, co founder of brain trust. quick background, I’m a software engineer by training studied Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, moved out here to San Francisco, right out of school was 1617 years ago. It’s been a while seeing all the ups and downs here. But working on my fourth venture backed project, I’m sort of a engineer, turned entrepreneur, all marketplace businesses, but all in different categories. My first one was an E commerce marketplace acquired by Intuit, then an automotive marketplace acquired by advanced autoparts. Then in 2012, I started Dr. On Demand, which is a large video telemedicine service, not quite a marketplace, but it connects doctors and patients for live consultations, and then got into crypto full time in 2016 ish around there and built, co founded a crypto hedge fund called Cambria and asset management and then spun brain trust out of that fund. And brand trust. You know, we’re now in our fourth year is a decentralized talent marketplace that connects knowledge workers with clients that need their services. And we do so in a really fee disruptive way. Because brand trust is a crypto network. It’s not a for profit corporation, and it’s owned and controlled by the talent who make their living on the network. And because of that, it can charge very low fees disruptively, low, so 0% fee to talent 10% fee to clients. And what that does is it brings in the best talent from around the world because they got better economics. And then wherever the talent go, clients follow them. So the network’s growing really quickly, with that new kind of ownership model, powered by this new technology, Blockchain tokens.

 

Aaron Malone  02:32

When I first heard of brain trust, I thought it was going to be something like a new government entity, like the CIA, and I went to apply to like this, you know, new think tank or whatever it was going to be. And I found out it was a job hiring platform. And I was like, gosh, I’m on down. Yeah. But as I started looking more into it, I realized just how novel it is. And you know, learning about your background, you’re a guy that brings people together, and you know, how to really match supply and demand very well. So what was it about these other businesses that you did? I mean, honestly, you don’t have to work for a living anymore. If you don’t want to, you could just be off on an island somewhere sipping martinis. But what is it that keeps you inspired to keep building, especially here in crypto?

 

Adam Jackson  03:18

Well, yeah, it’s true, believe it or not, I do choose to do this with my time, which some days I wake up and wonder if if that was really the right choice. But I am very passionate about letting global talent like access opportunity everywhere, right? The old saying, talent is dispersed equally around the world opportunity is not and I come up in this world, I’m from Northern Ohio, where there was not a lot of opportunity, I moved to California where there was a lot. And because that when I came here, that was that was the only way you can kind of dip dip into the Silicon Valley ecosystem. And you’d have a network with the Sandhill crowd and the Soviet you know, blah, blah, blah, right? And it all seemed unfair to me, right? And restrictive on both sides, right? Not everybody wants to live in New York and California, especially these days. And companies would love to hire talent all over the world. They don’t want to be restricted to just one, one or two very expensive economic zones. And so in building two sided web enabled marketplaces, literally my whole career, I realized, like the dirty little secret with a corporate owned marketplace is that the marketplaces job is to extract more and more fees out of the network, right, raise the rake, raise the fees take more dollars out of every transaction. And while that might sound good to shareholders, that it’s it’s actually like the better you get at it. The more misaligned the incentives become between the folks who make their living on the network and the people who own and operate the network, right. And then the further misaligned those incentives become, the more of a incentive there is to disrupt right to get rid of the corporate middleman, so to speak. And so when I discovered blockchain tokens, I was like, wow, this is, you know, a totally new technology that allows 10s of millions more and more people around the world to organize essentially a global Co Op, right. And so to build a network that is essentially software driven, does not have to does not have the mandate of extracting more value from its users every year, and can keep incentives aligned and thus grow faster, right. So that the big idea here, this was an investment thesis at first, and now now, it’s just like, an operating principle is like, user owned networks will grow faster, and be more valuable than investor or corporate owned networks. And so that’s what we’ve been proven out here with branches. And that’s, that’s what I’m passionate about. That’s what gets me out of bed every day.

 

Aaron Malone  05:49

And it’s something that actually strikes a chord in my heart, because when I joked earlier that I was on hireable, there’s a lot of truth and pain behind that. Because before I got into crypto, it really was a struggle. I didn’t last the job longer than two years, other than reffering roller hockey in my entire life. And I’ve signed up on every job board you can imagine, indeed, monster cybercoders, whatever it was. And all they really would ask me when I would fill out these things is, where do you go to school? And who do you work for in the past? And maybe a couple of the random questions that, you know, no one really cared about. They don’t want me to upload my resume anyway. So like, why am I filling out a questionnaire and sending a resume that has all these answers in it. And the only responses I would ever get, were from a couple of recruiters that lived 9000 miles away and could barely speak English. And we’re just sending out mass emails to literally everyone didn’t even land one interview, and God knows how many decades I was on any of these platforms. Despite being very well versed. As a system administrator, I work for private security firms that destroyed you know, entire cities on the internet, at will. And I worked my way up there as a social engineers, there was a lot I could offer to any company, just from my experience that I couldn’t put on a resume. But had they taken the time to even talk to me, I could have shown them some things that were very impressive. But what is it a brain trust that makes things so different, that allows people’s you know, unique talents to really shine through and find a good match? What are the values the brain trust can highlight on that platform versus a lot of these legacy things?

 

Adam Jackson  07:31

I love that path. By the way, social engineer turned investor and podcaster. It makes it makes a lot of sense, actually.

 

Aaron Malone  07:39

Well, if I had planned it, it would have been this is literally like, the last page before suicide. And it just happened to be the right one for me. To be perfectly honest, it all worked out. I guess I had to reach rock bottom to find my real path. Cave.

 

Adam Jackson  07:56

So many of us do. I mean, I mean, look, I you touched on a couple of very salient points there. First of all, like legacy credentials are meaningless where you went to school, if you went to college at all completely meaningless. I have a computer science degree from Vanderbilt. Basically, all this is a receipt for a bunch of fucking student debt that I had to pay off. And fortunately, unfortunately, I paid mine off before the government relaxed all those loans, but weren’t weren’t, ya know, right. bad on me. But um, you know, the point is, like, we now live in this like, super competitive global environment where knowledge workers from around the world can become really good at something self taught, basically, for free, you can learn anything you want on YouTube, you can learn by doing all of this knowledge is free, right? You do not need to pay for some credential or whatever. And so that is the one of the core values behind brain trust is this, it’s an E egalitarian network, anyone can show up. You have to it’s a rigorous to, you have to prove you know what, you know, right? If you claim your level five Python developer, you’re gonna go through a screening process, both synchronous and asynchronous, you’re gonna go through KYC, to make sure you are who you say you are. But one of those questions is not where you went to school, or what kind of degree you got, or where you got it from, it just doesn’t matter. Right? And that those are anachronisms in this new world of, of knowledge workers. And so if you can, if you can do what you say you can do and get through the screening process, you can make a great living on brain trust. You know, we have a native token called the Beatrice token, which folks can earn by referring more of their friends and networks or clients. I mean, 80% of the network has been grown just by community referrals. We’re rolling out a professional network now where you can actually redeem those tokens you’ve earned for further upskilling networking, Career Mentorship, bespoke advice, like things from more senior people, not not something you could like type into Google or even chat UBT and get a real answer. This is like real mentorship. So that token economy at brain trust is what is making it grow so quickly, right? You go to the professional network, you upskill you refer people to earn more tokens. You can go buy them if you want to, but we’d rather you do things to earn them, right, it creates this virtuous cycle. It’s all merit based. One of the ways we’re using you will be utilizing the blockchain is, you know, if you do a great job for, say, Goldman Sachs or Bank of America to the bigger clients on brain trust, it’s provable verifiable work history, right? It’s like, Hey, I have proven on brain trust that I’ve earned, you know, X, you know, $200,000, you know, building software for Goldman Sachs, right? That that’s a real, that’s a credential, right like that. Goldman Sachs is a high standard shipping enterprise software for a bank is a real professional badge. This isn’t like lying about some club, you’re in on LinkedIn, or some bullshit like that, right. So the again, like the world’s talent has spread all over the world, like whether you live in India, or Oklahoma, or South Africa, or New York City, like it’s matters if you can do the job. And if you have done verifiably have done the work for these clients, this is the new economy.

 

Aaron Malone  11:07

Yeah. And the new economy really is user own networks. That’s what web three really is. It’s user owned networks. And brain trust is something that I often referenced as a case study for web 2.5. And the difference between that is you’ve got a centralized management team, and a centralized legal entity that is overseeing a user controlled network. So it’s kind of a bridge from the traditional corporation model, on the way towards being web three. And

 

Adam Jackson  11:40

that was sorry, I just want to clarify wrote it. Yes. close to that. So it’s not it’s not one centralized company overseeing, it’s actually like six or seven companies that all there, I only own one of them, right, one of the founding nodes, there are 656 other nodes, depending on how active they’re paying in a given month, that, you know, help bring on clients help process Fiat payments. I mean, it’s it’s important in a decentralized architecture that if any one of these nodes went away, like if my if I disappear tomorrow, if my node disappears, other other nodes around the network could pick up those client transfers, could pay the talent could do other things. I don’t own and control the other nodes. I only own and control mine. Now, when we started, I think that maybe the point you’re making when we started in 2018 2019, yes, it was just my one company. And then we, other community members came in and they brought their companies and their bank accounts and their relationships with clients. And we all come together to form a decentralized network. But we we started centralized, and we’re on this path of progressive decentralization with which frankly, that’s the point of blockchain. Right? That’s the point. Yes, I think web 2.5 is a more accurate, it’s a more apt term for this actually,

 

Aaron Malone  12:52

yes. As you started, it was web 2.5. And on the path to decentralization, which is web through where you’re at today. So and that’s tremendous. And I like any web two company or legacy brand out there that wants to get to web three, to study the brain trust model, and what you guys have done, because I think you’ve done a tremendous job at it, where there really was no blueprint before, but just through being very knowledgeable and ethical. You guys have made the journey and, you know, four or five years. So great, great on you guys. And you know, what do you think else is really ripe for disruption? In the User owned? network space? You know, is it going to be Amazon Web Services? Is it going to be Netflix, you know, what do you see really being disrupted next?

 

Adam Jackson  13:45

Yeah, I love I love this topic, because one of the things I’m most passionate about as an early stage backer of projects as an operator in the space contributor to other dials and networks, follow the money follow the margin, wherever there’s a lot of margin and a decentralized service. There’s probably a decentralized network that can do a better job at a better price. Right? So I look at the world of web web enabled marketplaces on a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum are marketplaces that, that that provide or give back just as much value or more value than they extract. On the other end of the spectrum, are marketplaces that extract more value than they provide their users. So everything on this the more extractive end of the spectrum, we’re ripe for disruption. I’ll just give you a quick examples on on the good end, right the not likely to be disrupted soon and because they provide so much value, I would I would say Airbnb, right. So Airbnb took this very disparate world of vacation rentals where there was no trust no safety, no price discovery, no liquidity. It was just a shot in the dark, right. It was just a very unpleasant experience compared to a hotel. Brian comes in and builds this new platform, easy to use, gets liquidity on both sides makes it easy price discovery provides insurance, background checks, protection, if something bad happened, all that kind of stuff. And you know, he’s made a platform now, when he’s taking about two, I think it’s 20% is the fee, and people are happy to pay it. Right? I mean, they may make a pitch about it, but like they do pay it, and it does grow. Because it’s a much better experience in calling some random guy in South Lake Tahoe and hoping the vacation rental doesn’t have a grizzly bear living in it or something. So, you know, you come out, he comes out of the other end of that 12 month, 12 years later, and he’s got more rooms than Marriott does. On the so I don’t see like a web three Airbnb anytime soon. On the other end of the spectrum, you have marketplaces that are extracting more value than they’re providing great examples, gig economy DoorDash, Uber, big, big consulting and staffing firms, you know that that take talent and mark them up three times and rent them out to big companies. Right. That’s what brain trust plays right? Brain Trust doesn’t compete with like Upwork and Fiverr. Those are very small jobs, $20 logos here and there. Brain Trust is mostly an enterprise grade network, providing, you know, really high skilled people or mid range people to clients that have insatiable demand for them, which are traditionally the you know, where staffing firms come in and say, Yeah, I’ll rent you 50 Java developers, and we’re gonna pay him 75 bucks an hour, we’re gonna charge you 250 bucks an hour, right? That’s a big spread. Great. That’s why braintrust grow so fast. That’s a great economic disruption opportunity. DoorDash another example. DoorDash is an amazing app. Right? It’s incredible value for the consumer. But they’re marking up the food they’re extracting a lot from the driver from the dasher and the restaurant. I mean, so much. There’s like restaurants will ask you not to use DoorDash sometimes, right? It’s a great indicator that we need to we need to use your own last mile network, right? For folks who deliver other people packages and food, right? What an amazing thing where you could have a tokenized network of those folks around the world. And then any, any client that needs those things delivered can just tap into that network directly. Right. And so that’d be to me, to me, that’s like the next iteration of, you know, where user networks should go.

 

Aaron Malone  17:12

Yeah, we’ve seen a decentralized, Airbnb come and go in 2019 2018, I saw the first attempt to be an Uber, without Uber, and that didn’t get off the ground. And I think a lot of it has to do with brand building. There’s some amazing tech builders in this space, some of the best in the world. But their strength is development, not marketing, not brand recognition. If you want to build a normal brand up and legacy markets, you raise a series B, and you throw that 100 million dollars into Google ads, and just let it run on autopilot. Or you hire someone like the illusion factory to build you a Superbowl commercial. But in web three, you have to build a community of people who are not just your customers, but your owners and your your participants. Everyone is kind of in this together. What are some ways that you’re building your community and web three, and brain trust, to continue growing that brand to become the next household name and, you know, 510 20 years? Yeah,

 

Adam Jackson  18:18

the those are great examples of where just good engineering or product is not enough, right? Because here’s the thing, Uber and DoorDash are amazing products. The economics are wrong. But the products are incredible. So having an incredible product is just your that’s table stakes. It’s not enough, right? I mean, like, yeah, take Twitter, blue sky, right. Like Dorsey is an amazing guy. He’s amazing product guy, but blue sky looks exactly like Twitter. That’s not going to disrupt Twitter. I don’t

 

Aaron Malone  18:48

remember when Uber came out, I got spammed and every email address I ever had for like two years with nothing but just become an Uber driver.

 

Adam Jackson  18:56

Exactly. So to answer your question, look, you need to build a new marketplace and gain market share quickly and be truly disruptive. You need an unfair advantage. My my prior company Doctor On Demand, my co founder was Dr. Phil from TV, the therapist, you know, in a TV show that reached 32 million people a week. He was our unfair advantage. We talked about the service on his television show. That’s how we broke orbit. And then we grew grew grew grew. The unfair advantage in token economies is the native token. So you reward you create a permissionless economy where anyone can come and participate without gaming this so I’ll just use braintrust token economy as an example, because it’s what I think about every day, but I think it could be a valuable blueprint for other verticals. So branch has created its own native token, which is used to govern it’s built on compound governance. It’s a governance it’s started as a governance token now it can be redeemed for Career Services and A career help mentorship etc has lots of uses now, but we, the protocol distributes the token to anyone who refers new clients and new talent. So we have now hundreds of folks, we call connectors, which these are like. They’re like very well connected people that, you know, they probably have day jobs or whatever, but their vast networks of either talent or clients or both. And in their, like, spare couple hours a month, they’ll send emails referring these parties into brain trusts using their unique code. And then when those parties get through and start transacting, like Nike or Nestle, or Bank of America, these are all referred companies, the connector then gets this constant stream of token bonuses sent to them by the protocol. And then they can, you know, they’re accruing this token kind of passively, just for, you know, inviting more talent or inviting more clients. That’s how we’ve grown to, you know, 1000s of clients and hundreds of 1000s of talent in such a short time. And that in its in and of itself, builds a community right now you have all these stakeholders in the network who, you know, want to see it grow or or, you know, referring business, you know, as a side gig,

 

Aaron Malone  21:13

we see these unemployment numbers now that our loving government puts out every month and says, Oh, you know, the economy is recovering so much. Yet, the Uber drivers that, you know, I’m involved in, whenever I’m going to the airports, they’re usually people that were retired and no longer can afford to be, or, you know, some cases, you know, very professional people that would be earning a six figure salary where that’s not enough, or now this is the only job that they can find. So it’s, it’s a slippery slope to say, are we really recovering? And still, you know, we see on the news all the time, this top companies laying off 10,000 employees, this companies laying off 8000 is, you know, we’re here in almost the middle of 2023, when we’re recording this, but what are your clients that are looking to hire, asking you for right now in terms of features or talent, or feet, or, you know, just on the network? How are, you know, big companies thinking about the markets right now.

 

Adam Jackson  22:17

So I’ll start by saying, probably half of the big companies on brain trust are under a hiring freeze. So you know, this slowdown is real, I don’t think it’s unthought thawing out, I think we’ve still got a lot more pain to go, I think we’ve got inflation that will keep rising. The unemployment figures are skewed, right, it’s just it’s just not I don’t think the numbers are accurate. But in the knowledge worker space in the IT space, we’re feeling the most pain here, right with this, there’s been hundreds of 1000s of folks laid off in the last two quarters. In the US, I think just in California. And every day, you hear about another round of layoffs, usually in the 10s of 1000s of folks from a big tech company or whatever. And then countless more startups or you know, Series B companies either slashing and half or going out of business completely because global liquidity has dried up this is you know, we’re in a high rate and higher rate environment. Now. global macro is risk off, liquidity has dried up venture has ground to a halt. That means for you know, folks get laid off and so on braintrust we we’ve been lucky enough to still remain growing through this not not nearly growing as quickly as we were a year ago, but still, you know, month over month, quarter over quarter adding more companies adding more jobs and what they’re looking for. I mean, it’s it’s nothing special. I mean, it’s you can go look at the brain trusts marketplace anytime and see, it’s you know, UX designers, software engineers, product managers, project managers back end, DevOps folks, systems engineers, AI ml people now, now prompt engineers, right folks that can help implement Bard or chat GPT to make a business more efficient, right, they couldn’t have had better timing with that technology coming out. I don’t think that stuff’s gonna replace any people, but it’s gonna make existing folks, you know, 50% or whatever, more efficient. And that’s a hot topic right now is how do we streamline and make our folks give them an Iron Man suit rather than lay them off?

 

Aaron Malone  24:29

Yeah. And I think that’s a great way to segue, let’s talk about AI. Because there is a lot of fear that it’s going to take people’s jobs or replace humanity. But the AI we see coming out of stealth right now. There’s literally 1000s that are just popping up everywhere. So that tells me a couple of things. One, this is just a bunch of things that already existed that are being rebranded AI that really aren’t. And in order to do that they’re calling it generative AI, meaning that this thing And you know, use some artificial intelligence to maybe manipulate a photo, or translate voice to text or something very, very simple. These are not fully autonomous, where if with all beings that are able to challenge God, nowhere even close, they wouldn’t even be able to, you know, recreate a Super Mario level and eight bit and follow all the game theory physics in from Super Nintendo at this point. So I don’t think there’s a lot to worry about. Do you see it the same way? Or how do you approach AI? I have,

 

Adam Jackson  25:34

look, I have the same view. And look, I study machine learning in college. I love the science behind this. I’m when I hack around at night, it’s it’s with things like this before open AI and all that stuff, right? I’ve been playing with TensorFlow for years and look a couple things. One, it’s the domain of large companies that have tons of data, right? So we use AI every single day zoom uses it to, you know, make your image look a little nicer in your meeting. And Google uses it to filter spam, and Facebook uses it to target ads on Instagram better, which they’re amazing at these natural language interfaces to the LLM. Yeah, it’s a parlor trick. I mean, it’s it. I think it’s a productivity hack for sure. If you’re a writer. If you especially if you’re a writer, you should really be paying attention to this. This is your like, this is your CRM. If you’re like for salespeople before there were CRMs. Right? I think that that’s the analogy there. It’s not the new iPhone. It’s not like broadband, right? It’s not a paradigm shift, I’m convinced it’s, it’s a productivity increase, which we need right now. If we need to grow GDP, you know, to pay for this constantly growing deficit that we’re going to monetize through through inflation. The only way to grow out of that is productivity increases, and these things can provide that right. But it i steadfastly believe AI, this whole technology will create more jobs and more productivity than it will replace. I mean, you use this stuff in it. Yeah, I mean, it create, it’s, it’s cool that a computer can do this, but you look at it, or like, I don’t know, like, it looks like if I had to guess a human middle schooler created this, right. And sorry, that’s just not valuable. And to your point, but like manipulating images or writing poems or whatever, great. There’s no commercial value in that there never has been right, like photo editors, not a big industry, right? Yeah,

 

Aaron Malone  27:37

I love that. That tape on there. As I’ve been trying to play around with a lot of the stuff that I found very few things, really production ready. One of the few things being fireflies AI, which is a note taking program that you can invite into your zoom calls, and it will write down and take notes of what people said and then email it to all the participants. That’s really useful. But I wasn’t hiring a person to do that before. Yeah, it was.

 

Adam Jackson  28:04

It’s been around for like six years, right? It’s like, right. But more importantly, we weren’t hiring people to do that. So who gives a shit one and two, like what’s not new? Right?

 

Aaron Malone  28:13

Right, exactly. So this is just kind of the latest craze that was really just a distraction. We won’t get into from what, but long story short, not a whole lot to worry about right now. That grid. So as we you know, try and get through the doldrums of this summer here. Do you think we’ve hit a bottom in terms of where the markets are at not just the crypto markets, but the job market layoffs? Or do you still think that we need some more pain to finally wrangling inflation and then bring prices of assets down to a level where people are comfortable buying again?

 

Adam Jackson  28:52

Yeah, so you know, this is certainly the question of the day and I have a couple of vectors I follow that helped me think about the potential outcomes because I don’t have no one can answer this like with with with super high conviction.

 

Aaron Malone  29:08

There’s no crystal ball yet.

 

Adam Jackson  29:10

Yeah, I mean, look, you have Dalio is convicted, you know has conviction one way and you know, there’s plenty of other smart global macro guys that are taking the opposite bet. It’s like how can this many smart people like be completely misaligned on a topic right it’s just makes it so fascinating global macro so fascinating. So it feels like we are at the bottom and dragging along the bottom and by the way, like interest rates drive risk on assets drives crypto, right it’s all the same thing essentially they correlate to one on the way down and typically on the way up ish and so the only thing I think, you know, we have to keep a close eye on is this commercial real estate debt issue you know, there’s all these so you know, COVID causes the shutdowns the shutdowns kill off Space remote work is born. Most people aren’t going back to the office. Commercial rents are just way down. The debt comes due. It’s not serviceable anymore. The buildings go into foreclosure you have in sample cities like San Francisco, I don’t know, 40% vacant vacancy rates potentially more in five years. So you have all this debt coming to maturity that’s been defaulted on, where’s it gonna go? Fed’s balance sheet, who pays for that? US inflation when the government monetizes debt? So are we. So I think that’s a foregone conclusion that that happens. Who pays for us slowly through inflation? And I don’t know if we’re gonna have a president that, you know, trims back and starts to close the deficit? I don’t think so. That’s, that’s politically unpopular. So we are going to deal with more inflation? And how do you grow out of that? I think, you know, productivity, that kind of stuff. So AI, and global innovation, you know, software tech are still like, I’m convinced part of the solution here. But what that could mean, I don’t see anything getting better in the next four quarters, maybe gets a little worse. And then then the cycle resets. Right, and then you get the balance sheet back under control. We’ve the system has digested all of the toxic things, you know, hopefully no more banks fail. But there’s commercial real estate things. Commercial Real Estate debt is an issue. I think in four or five quarters, we could be seeing quantitative easing again, right? Because that’s, that’s just the way these cycles go. So hopefully, always the bottom No,

 

Aaron Malone  31:41

I sure hope so too. And, you know, just about everyone I’m talking to is kind of looking towards a turnaround, hopefully by the end of this year. But I think the scare you out phase is just about finished. But from there comes to where you out phase, where there’s just months and months of nothing worse, but nothing getting better. So I hope that that’s where we’re at now. Because if you’re experienced in these markets, you know, that is a good sign of things to come. And that’s the time to start buying. As an investor, not just a business owner, what are some things that you’re looking at in terms of crypto sectors that you think might be able to outperform Bitcoin in this next run up ahead? Like what are you looking towards?

 

Adam Jackson  32:28

Yeah, I mean, I don’t look at crypto assets. I’m not a hedge fund manager. So I don’t like I don’t care about Bitcoin being a benchmark, I think owning all the important things, it’s what is what matters. So obviously, big on always owning Bitcoin makes a lot of sense. That theory, I’ve never been more bullish on Aetherium. And it’s such an important platform. I think it’s the it’s the layer one to kind of move society forward and in all Fiat and in banking, you know, eventually consolidates to Aetherium. And then I love things that create real world value, right? That, you know, that can disrupt Hi, Fi takers right now, obviously, brand trust aims to be in that category. I don’t like naming other names just for hygiene sake. But But anything that’s that’s playing on that right end of the spectrum that I mentioned before, where it is disrupting entities that take disproportionate value from the networks, they run. Right. And so there’s a handful of crypto networks that are aiming to do that, but I think I think we need to see more of that. The generic VC answer is like infrastructure pick and shovel. Right. And it? I don’t know. Yeah, I just think that’s simple phone

 

Aaron Malone  33:39

doesn’t even mean I don’t know,

 

Adam Jackson  33:41

it’s an intellectually bankrupt term that venture capitalists use because they don’t understand technology, but it’s like, okay, yeah, Alchemy, we get it, right. They’re like the AWS of have in there. Awesome. Amazing. Like, you can count on one hand or last, how many companies are like that in the space? But, you know, this isn’t like an open source world here. Right? I don’t actually don’t think there’s tons and tons of money in the picking picks and shovels. I think it is in the application layer that disrupts these high fee tickers.

 

Aaron Malone  34:11

That’s another great contrarian take. Love it. So Aetherium, as you mentioned, there gonna be the settlement layer for banking. At some point, I think when Aetherium 2.0 was first announced, I said, That’s it. Aetherium is gone corporate, it’s not going to be this place where there’s the next killer app, you know, you’re not gonna be having it be the settlement layer for gaming, or any of this stuff. It’s going to be used by large banks and world governments to settle really, really, really important things like peace treaties, or, you know, central bank digital currency exchanges between one another. Do you think that’s an accurate vision? Or how do you think Aetherium transactions are really going to look in the next three to five years like it can’t just be full of Pepe coins?

 

Adam Jackson  34:58

Oh my god, I can’t I wish the fucking meme coins would go away. It’s just so stupid. So, like, settlement layer for gaming? I don’t know I don’t really think about gaming I’m not sure gaming needs a settlement layer it seems like games games are bigger than movies and TV right? And they’ve done fine without a blockchain I don’t get I don’t get it, but settlement layer for how this all borrow lend, or borrow lend in the world should sell to Aetherium, right, like when three arrows and block phi and all these other, you know, kind of unregulated nonsense machines went under because they don’t know how to manage risk. Who’s still got paid back of a compound? Right The the the tote the smart contract lending systems, you can build your you know, dy dx, right and amazing infrastructure, you can build leverage on these things you can like figure, you know, originating and securitizing Home Loans using Blockchain tech to shave 150 pips off every transaction, wow, now you’re in a trillion dollar market. Right? That shit matters. And that, that that goes that settles to a theorem in my mind. And then and then application layers, right? Like, use your own talent networks use your own last mile networks settled to Aetherium because those networks need to be inherently trustless. So anyone can participate. And some, someone asleep at the wheel and risk management can screw the whole thing up.

 

Aaron Malone  36:28

Yeah, absolutely. Now, as we head into 2024, you know, somewhere down the line, I’m not convinced that gas fees are going to be affordable for the average person. And we’re looking at layer two solutions for our everyday defi trading, borrow and lend from an average user perspective, you know, what, we’re not taking out millions of dollars of loans. You know, if you’re paying a few $100, in gas fees for something like that, who cares? That’s still a tiny percentage. But if I want to borrow $250, and the gas fee is more than that, it doesn’t work. And the idea of defy is to create financial inclusion for people that don’t have any access to financial services, someone in India or the Philippines aren’t going to even be able to afford to pay a $10 gas fee transaction that’s completely insane from they might not even make that much money in a week. So what are some of the layer twos that might be of interest to you that you saw, you know, this still has the ethos of Aetherium and the structure of it, and it can settle on that layer? But I would you feel comfortable using any of these l tos? Yeah,

 

Adam Jackson  37:37

absolutely. So look, this is the brilliance of the market dynamics that Vitalik and CO have built into Aetherium. Right, you know, first it’s moved to proof of stake that you know, are 1559 You know, to make mining less extractive and essentially made Aetherium deflationary that doesn’t help fees, I get it, but it helps drive demand for the token second proof of steak makes everything cheaper. Third will be sharding, which they’re working on now. So that should reduce fees again, but it’ll never to your point. It’ll it’ll never become everyday affordable. And it was never designed to which, which is why Vitalik loves the L TOS right. He always talks about, you know, they’re very compatible. Polygon, obviously, the clear runaway winner here, we’re building on polygon with brain trust. Obvious clear winner there, right. There’s other network like there’s an LTE called scale, which is really popular for gaming. Totally EVM compatible, you move back and forth from eath or bitrum. Which I believe Coinbase is new thing. New L two is built on optimism. Sorry, optimism. Yeah, sorry. And so Coinbase embracing open source l TOS like, look, it’s clear that the EVM world is what we’re going to move forward with here, right? It’s, you know, Linux over over windows, essentially.

 

Aaron Malone  38:58

And when you consider the L TOS part of that application layer. Yeah, you were talking about?

 

Adam Jackson  39:04

Yeah, I mean, I don’t know it’s, it can it’s it’s like it’s hosting, right. So maybe not kind of in the middle of its hosting other file coins. Another one, right. It’s like, storage s3 amazon s3 storage is expensive for what it is. Right? And there’s in there’s not you can’t store on Aetherium. It’s way too expensive. And so filecoin actually, like, super compelling what they’ve built for a decentralized, Secure High, Low latency, high availability, storage system cost wise, compare it to s3, from what I’ve read, I’m not using it at scale, but from what I’ve been reading, and I’ve been involved in the project for a long time. It is very disruptive. So those look that to me is the future like these things. These things are here. They’re ready to go. They’re working.

 

Aaron Malone  39:50

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s been really interesting seeing internet computer being built by Definity starting to reach maturity and becoming More than just hype, like we’re seeing a lot of steak to match the earlier sizzle that was surrounding them in the half a decade that it’s taken them to build the stuff. But it includes compute file storage, hosting, just about like a kind of an all in one, quote unquote smart contract platform that does all these other things as well. Has that been on your radar whatsoever?

 

Adam Jackson  40:23

You know, I’m familiar with the project, I’m an LP in a couple of funds that that were directly involved in helping stand that up. I’m not I’m not I haven’t used it. So I’m not an expert on it.

 

Aaron Malone  40:34

Okay, I was just asking, I am not either. I don’t hold any ICP, but I haven’t used it yet. But I see more and more development on that platform every day. And it’s gotten me curious. There’s a Twitter account called Proof of GitHub, that will dump the top 10 platforms that had code commits that day. So you can kind of track and see where the development is really happening right there in your Twitter feed. And I kind of equate that to, you know, skate to where you know, the puck is going to be at Next. And I’m constantly seeing stuff. They’re seeing stuff on Cardano, Cosmos, polka dot, and even, you know, lesser known things like status network and Vega protocol, are just having hundreds and hundreds of commits every day. And I’m thinking, wow, you know, there’s really a lot of stuff going on over here. I want to pay attention to that. Awesome. Well, Adam, before we let you go, what are some of your final thoughts, you know, just from a brain trust, you know, operator perspective, like what’s next for you guys, in growing that business growing that community?

 

Adam Jackson  41:42

Well, I’ll tell you that the marketplace has really found Product Market Fit talent, love, it went from 75,000 talent last November to over 300,000. Today, largely driven, driven by tech layoffs and that kind of thing. So, you know, there’s enough supply on this network to drive billions of dollars of demand. This thing kind of grows itself with the token, it’s really capital efficient. So our next our big shot on goal here we’ve been working on for like a year is this professional network, which by the way, releases January, June 8, wide release, it’s been in private beta now with a bunch of people. So it’s really getting a lot of use, but it’s closed off still. That team will will generally release on on June 8. I think, you know, in a world where people need to reskill people need mentorship, that advice you used to get at the watercooler from your senior manager, that doesn’t happen anyway, there’s no water cooler anymore. So I think this this feature is building or filling a huge gap in the market and gives folks a good reason to come in and earn some brand trust tokens by referring their friends or their or their client or their boss, and then upskill their career, right, there’s no no good, no good place to do that right now in here, you can essentially do it for free. So that’s, that’s what we’re excited about. That’s what we think will keep this network you know, growing exponentially,

 

Aaron Malone  43:02

I’ve got an idea for you that just came to mind. And we’re going to codename at auto Tao where it’s going to take talent on your network that’s looking for work. And depending on what their experience is, it’s going to slot them into this simulated organization all the way from the top down. So they’re working for this mock company with other people that are looking for talent to get hired. And then they can just have like an open community where they can maybe come up with an idea of work on something together in the meantime. So they’re still being productive. They’re keeping their skills fresh. They’re showing employers that they’re still hungry and ready to go. And for all they know, they may get snatched up by an investor rather than an employer. And he just comes in and you know, you got an investor. Okay, I’ve got this, you know, funding, boom, here’s my entire company that already has synergy. And they got hired that way. What do you think about that? That’s cool. It’s like,

 

Adam Jackson  43:57

it’s like a cross between an open source project and an incubator. Yeah, right. Like, yeah, that’s kind of cool. Maybe we should put our heads together and start that.

 

Aaron Malone  44:08

That’d be amazing. Because what else is everyone else gonna do? Just watch Netflix? There’s not enough. No, not at all. Let’s build something cool together while we’re waiting for a paycheck. And maybe that paycheck will end up being founder shares instead. Who knows? I love it. Well, thanks for being receptive to my insanity. Again, a good one every now and then. Well, let’s, let’s see what happens. But Adam, can’t wait to have you back on the podcast next time, another six months or a year from now. Or if you have any big major updates, just send us an email, you know, we’ll book you again.

 

Adam Jackson  44:42

Hey, thanks for having me. It’s always good to see you man.

 

Aaron Malone  44:45

feeling’s mutual. Alright everyone. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll be back next week with another great podcast here at crypto one on one

 

 

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