Why I left my day job and took a corporate break to launch ColliderX

For those of you who have been following my work in the blockchain space, you can tell that I’ve definitely fallen down the rabbit hole and this is the industry that’s keeping me up at night.

Over the past couple of years I’ve had the pleasure of working with a great team at Deloitte, where I helped the organization advance from the general “what is a blockchain” stage all the way through to building a vibrant, growing blockchain practice. In the process, there were lots of lessons learnt, as we built a number of proof-of-concepts (PoCs) and pilots, and I continued to become more and more engaged with the open source community of developers, researchers, and general evangelists and enthusiasts.

One of the things though that became very clear over the past year or so is the realization that if blockchain technology is going to evolve, a number of factors need to come into play, jointly.

First, industries need to identify the opportunities to introduce new business processes that are more decentralized and require collaboration between a number of different stakeholders (this in and of itself can be quite the hurdle). After usecases are identified, the question becomes: “we have a usecase, but will building and implementing the tech solution have a genuine value proposition or business case?” If the answer is “there’s no value”, the process needs to go back to step one. The next step is figuring out how you go and build a small, bite-sized PoC before committing to an entire production value system redesign roadmap.

The cold, sober assessment of where we are as an industry is that we are in the land of “blockchain POC purgatory” — a term I’ve adapted from a good industry friend.

Yet, there’s a growing divide — the gap between this reality of being at the PoC and pilot stage VS. the hype currently surrounding the blockchain space with the promises of what this technology can accomplish.

One of the things that needs to happen to bridge this gap is to spend more time focused on core technical research. And I don’t mean the type of research that’s very applied, as in:

“well this is exactly what we want to research so that we can build this component, here are the specifications and now let’s go build it,”

but instead, more of the esoteric, theoretical questions that somebody, somewhere needs to answer.

What kind of research questions need addressing? Just ask anyone who has been involved with running or overseeing a blockchain tech PoC project: they will be all too familiar with the reality that for every 1 project completed comes a list of 10 new, related technical research topics that are outside the scope of any one consulting project, or one organization’s phased investment. So, who is going to do that core research?

This is the problem area where I wanted to focus more of my time — and so I left Deloitte (on friendly terms), and took a corporate break, to get the ball rolling on this front.

Over the course of the past few months, I’ve been working with a number of blockchain aficionados, designing a new model of funding and supporting core research and development in the blockchain space.

We’re building ColliderX: a R&D hub for [blockchain+] convergent technologies such as AI, IoT, and augmented reality, amongst others.

ColliderX in a nutshell: an open-source, crowdsourced and crowdfunded research hub to accelerate core R&D. This is a unique non-profit social enterprise. Take a look at our new Medium blog page for more details.

I get a lot of questions about Collider-X: Why was this created? Who are the participants? How does it operate? Who’s on your advisory board?

But the one question I get the most often is: why did you leave Deloitte to build this and couldn’t you build it internally?

The answer to that is a fairly short “no”.

I couldn’t have done this within the construct of my previous employer, or for that matter, any one other large corporation. Nothing to do with Deloitte specifically, but more so to do with the very unique requirements and things that needed to be true for ColliderX to be successful.

One of the core aims of ColliderX is to create enough “safe space” for researchers to do their work without the fear of any corporate bias, which is the reason that many researchers flock into the world of academia or remain independent and part of the open source community. What appeals to most researchers is the ability to explore an idea and its various permutations without the concern that when the research is complete, it may be swept under the rug because it’s not in line with corporate interests. The old analogy of “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” holds true.

That’s why we’re crowdsourcing the research topics, open sourcing the results, and crowdfunding our operations.

To maintain our independence, from the earliest stages of this idea, it became clear that ColliderX could not be too close with any one organization. It had to be an intentionally cross-entity backed initiative to achieve its mandate.

For that reason, I thought it was important for me to take a corporate break and provide enough space for ColliderX to start to take shape and form and to gather input from a number of participants to understand, from their perspective, what would need to be true for them to be comfortable and excited to participate in ColliderX.

That kind of separation would only be possible in the earliest stages of this organization if I did not have the requirements of a day job. And so that’s why I ended up taking a corporate break — to get the ball rolling on ColliderX.

To say that we’re on a roll is an understatement. It’s been a fast paced few weeks and we’ve been blown away by the positive response and feedback from the blockchain community supporting the ColliderX mission. The traction that we’re getting and the milestones that we’re already hitting were anticipated to take months!

Lots of startups want to contribute research topics and some of the well-funded startups want to contribute research funding as well as in-kind resources from their own technology teams to do research under the ColliderX umbrella.

We also have interest from a number of wealthy, private backers who are supporting ColliderX out of a philanthropic angle, because they recognize that what we’re trying to do is fundamentally a different model of funding research that is neither purely corporate nor purely academic.

And not surprisingly, we have interest from corporations that see ColliderX as an extended R&D team that they can tap into when they have non-proprietary research problems. There are many shared research questions out there where it doesn’t make sense for just one entity to bear the costs and the risk of doing it in-house.

But perhaps the most understated assets are the people behind the scenes who have been involved in shaping the ideas behind ColliderX.

Starting with my former colleague, Mo Kidwai, a computational and theoretical researcher, who lamented the seeming shortage of academic papers on the topic of blockchain and who would routinely come up with lists of open research areas in discrete and algorithmic math. Those observations started an avalanche of thoughts on this problem space.

All the way to the incredible group of dedicated people on the team now behind the ColliderX brand.

Everyone is a volunteer, most with day jobs, and it’s our passion that incentivizes us to spend long evenings, weekends, and holiday time bunkered down in meeting rooms trying to move this social enterprise initiative forward.

Stay tuned, as over the next few weeks we’ll be profiling the amazing team of volunteers behind the ColliderX brand and telling their stories!

Please do join us as we pursue this worthy mission.