IOST Cofounder Terry’s Interview on Binance — Block 101 | The blockchain Ideals of a Princeton Straight-A Student (Part II)
Welcome to the second part of the Block 101 interview with IOST cofounder Terry Wang!
If you haven’t read part I, you can find it here.
Why did you choose to join Uber after graduating?
I wanted to study for a Ph.D before graduating from university until the moment I found out the course content was very far away from the practical applications in the real industrial world.
At the time, I was researching things like Hadoop which was based on the MapReduce technology that Google researched in 2005. Basically, what I was studying in the laboratory in 2015 was Google’s leftover from 10 years ago. It’s frustrating for researchers to work on outdated things that weren’t in the market anymore. For all the leftovers that ended up at our school, we would then do optimization and improvement, prove its theory, and issue some papers. That’s all. If I wanted to work on the most advanced technology, I had to leave school and start working in the industry.
It was 2015, and two companies were particularly famous then, one was Uber and one was Airbnb. You can tell it was the hottest time for the sharing economy.
Uber started from a small company and to a billion-dollar business, and then a giant with tens of billions of dollars. I thought this company would be the next Facebook or Google, as Facebook had also followed such a path in the past and finally became a giant in a very short span of time. So I thought, all I have to do is to wait for the next giant to appear. In fact, it is just similar to when you buy a coin. I was also brainwashed by it very seriously. When I was recruited, I was told that the company’s valuation would likely to double five times next month, and maybe ten times the following.
I was very naive and didn’t know what bubbles were back then, this was in fact a big bubble, just like Bitcoin, and it was growing at the time. When I joined Uber, the valuation was soaring and I really felt that it could grow from a small company to a company with hundreds of billions of dollars like Facebook and Google. Although I applied for other companies at the time, such as Facebook and Google, and also got their call, I rejected everything because I was tempted by the shares, which may pump and multiply its value many times over. There were many people who thought the same as me, so I joined this company.
Uber is indeed doing well now, but not as good as we thought. We thought it would become a company with hundreds of billions of dollars, but now it is “just between 60–70 billion USD”. I still have some shares, but they are not so valuable, they definitely won’t make me rich haha. It is okay because they indeed cover demand. It is very inconvenient to use a taxi in the United States so Uber does solve the travel needs of the majority of people, the same as Didi in China.
How many people were working in Uber when you joined?
Not so many at that time, around 900 people.
Isn’t that a lot?
At its peak, there were more than 10,000 people. I joined it a little bit earlier.
Why did you leave Uber? Did you start IOST after leaving?
Yes, I spent two and a half years at Uber. From 2015 to 2017 and then came back to China in 2017.
Because Uber is based in Silicon Valley, life there is particularly boring to me. I didn’t work much time every day. In China, everyone was very hardworking, people would work 9 to 6, work overtime, and more for their goals, and that was different from Silicon Valley where the focus was on work-life balance. People focused on having their own life; work shouldn’t over-occupy your life, so everyone was not keen on working overtime.
In this atmosphere, my effective programming time was only 1–2 hours a day. Being a young college graduate, I aspire to challenge myself and prove my potentials. I worked in this company for an hour or two every day and got off work especially early. I spent a lot of time on meals every day, we could stay eating & chatting for a long time. There was nothing to do at home, neither on weekends.
There were 3 main/common activities in Silicon Valley:
- Playing board games such as werewolf, and I'm talking about playing for the whole night!
- Hiking, for example, for picking strawberries
- Going on a picnic
I thought: “I am so young! I need to step out of such a comfort zone! I must do something else, something challenging and significant!” People around often talked about retirement rather than starting a new business or something fresh. They wanted a stable life, work in a stable company, buy a house, get married, have children, and maybe get profits off the company stocks. This was not the lifestyle I wanted in my 20s. I was especially disappointed with this and then returned home.
Now I understand why you left Uber and returned to your country… So you have been in the US for a total of eight years, right?
Yes, slightly more than eight years. Four years as an undergraduate, two years in the Midwest, two years in postgraduate, and then work. I also stayed at Microsoft for some time, and later at Uber.
Are all Silicon Valley companies in a continuous state of retirement?
Uber was not listed yet back then, so it was a relatively new company, but if you check other larger or huge companies like Google they are particularly idle, and you feel like in retirement. I would definitely not go to such a company.
So, the bigger the company, the worse it is
If you are looking for competition instead of a comfortable lifestyle, looking for challenges instead of stability, looking for making an impact on the business instead of being a tiny insignificant part & climbing the career ladder of a huge organization, a young and smaller startup may be a better fit for you.
So generally it is not easy to enter, but as long as you get in, you can start to retire somehow?
The perks and benefits are attractive. Food, medical care, insurance, facilities, you name it, they have it. This comfort zone is just hard to get out even if you have a desire to do some other things. You need robust determination to step out of the comfort zone and do something bigger, or else, you would start to retire in this environment. I am not saying retirement a bad. It comes down to your personal lifestyle and career choices.
Then it is like our state-owned/ public organizations.
Many companies in Silicon Valley are like the American version of China state-owned organizations in which you barely need to work, and working for a few hours a week makes you an employee of the month.
For the uninitiated, many of China’s state-owned organizations are known for their unproductivity, comfortable working hours and life long contracts.
I’d love to go tho…
Newer companies have higher requirements of employees whereas the older and more stable companies are more comfortable. For example, in Oracle, there's no need to innovate to create a simple database. It is enough to make a very stable database. They are very stable and it’s suitable for the government and schools, so there is no need to innovate. Their employees have little incentive to do new things and writing 500 lines of code can take them a long time, while still earning continuous cash flow.
Was it because your salary was low that you didn’t enjoy the feeling of retirement?
Not at all, they have attractive high wages and benefits as mentioned above. In fact, you may like this kind of life when you are old, but when you are very young, such as when I had just graduated, I felt like my life should be a bit challenging, so I really thought I should leave. I feel that I have wasted more than two years. I went back to China because this is completely different from how life is here.
So you founded IOST after you returned to China in 2017. Do you think it was because of your experience in the United States what made you want to start your own business? I would love to hear the history of the development of IOST.
I always wanted to start a business. My experience with bitcoin and later Ethereum made me think that I could build my own chain, and could build it well. I chose to work in an area I’m good at. In addition, 2017 seemed to be a great year to start a blockchain project, at the time, bitcoin prices rose a lot in the first half of the year.
I was always drawn to this technology and the direction of blockchain and decentralization were the best among the potential businesses that I could start. At that time, the sharing economy was not doing well… Shared bicycles best days were already gone, along with shared shelves and shared umbrellas. It can be said that the bubble of the sharing economy was gradually being broken. After witnessing all this, I do feel that blockchain is better.
I gathered a few friends and started the IOST project. We shared many common values like the love for technology, blockchain-related experiences, and the idea of starting a business. Since they had also finished their studies in the United States and started their own businesses too, each of us felt that China was a better opportunity for us than the United States, we went back to China together to do this project.
I reviewed your previous interview recently, and there is something you said that caught my attention, “Not only POW and POS, but POB; not only ETH and EOS but also IOST”. Are your targets EOS and ETH? Do you want to do better than them?
Correct, I want to do better than them. Let me briefly explain myself, it is particularly simple. When I just entered this industry and found that the biggest problem in this industry was scalability, I wanted to solve it. Sharding was back then seen as the best solution for scalability, but it doesn’t seem to be a good solution, so we didn’t work on sharding in the end. You can more or less tell that when you see so many sharding projects have failed. We feel that if we want to expand the scalability to greater levels, we must optimize the consensus. We must start with the consensus algorithm and use the best consensus algorithm to ensure security.
That’s the reason why we have been working on POB all the time, we wanted to expand the scalability by optimizing the consensus algorithm to solve the biggest problem at that time. The difference between us, Ethereum and EOS can be summarized in one sentence: IOST is more scalable than Ethereum and more decentralized than EOS. Everyone knows that EOS is not so decentralized, and that actually relatively few supernodes do run the entire network.
I think you have also received a lot of investment from Sequoia Capital, as well as Zhenfund and other big names.
Yes, that’s correct.
I must admit you guys are pretty good.
You may remember that situation too. Mr. Xu Xiaoping’s speech in the dedicated blockchain group chats, claiming that he is about to enter the blockchain revolution, that everyone should embrace the blockchain, and more. Then he asked the people to not leak it, but it was well leaked lol. This actually happened after a conversation we had with Mr. Xu. After talking with us, he was very excited, and he said all I have mentioned. Mr. Xu really likes entrepreneurs who come back from the United States and our team members had all studied in the United States and then returned to China, so our background is of his favorite kind. Therefore, if you return to China from the United States to start a business, you can ask Mr. Xu for help, his knowledge and network are of great help. I think he helped us a lot.
Let’s talk about IOST’s future development. I guess everyone would like to hear if there are any new trends that everyone should know about, or if there is any new stuff about to explode.
Sure thing! Almost half of 2020 is gone by now, so fast.
At the beginning of the year, we actually released the IOST Aircraft Carrier Plan, which is very important for IOST. I think that the crypto space has changed a lot since its beginning. It’s a new era now and it’s not an era to burn money quickly and expand, but a stage where every penny is spent in the most effective place. At this stage, I would like to emphasize that the goal of our company is to first ensure that we survive in this space and to have a sustainable & positive cash flow. Our business model has changed from the previous main 2C focus, this means, to end-users, to the current consortium chain + public chain 2B + 2C joint development. So in addition to optimizing developer and user services, we have also optimized enterprise services. I think that this business model is more innovative and expansible.
Secondly, for the partner node plan, we have upgraded the IOST Staking mechanism to v3.0, shortening the voting freeze time from 7 days to 3 days, to make it more flexible. In addition, the IOST partner node contribution reward mechanism has also been upgraded to v2.0, we have improved the contribution rewards to the partner nodes who really do things and work to make the IOST ecosystem more prosperous every day.
For on-chain governance, we have analyzed many other public chains. The conclusion is that the governance mechanisms of most chains are not too good, mainly reflected in the low participation rate. Most of the governance mechanisms of other blockchains are related to technology, but our governance mechanism is not only limited to technology but also points related to the entire project. For example, you can propose your design, which can contain design proposals of the entire chain, including the node mechanism, operating mechanism, incentive plan, and all development plans. Everyone can participate in our governance mechanism, which is our main focus.
For technology, we are working on cross-chain solutions with our partner nodes, and we expect it to be completed for Q3. Through the IOST cross-chain transfer bridge, IOST blocks can be forwarded and mapped to different blockchains through the relay chain. For users, the implementation of IOST cross-chain transfer bridge can achieve cross-chain asset transfer, so as to use other applications in the relay chain, such as DeFi, DEX, Staking services, etc., while enjoying the security brought by the blockchain, improve the liquidity of assets. For developers, IOST cross-chain transfer bridge can realize inter-chain smart contracts interoperability, reduce multi-chain development costs, achieve multi-chain user sharing, and data interconnection.
And last, but not least, the NFTs. In April this year, we officially released the IOST NFT standard, launched a platform that supports NFT asset transactions, and docked different wallets to support IOST NFT assets, and began a comprehensive layout of the IOST NFT ecosystem. In addition, we also officially released a year-long NFT event. We will issue a limited number of IOST official NFT assets within a year. Users can collect these rare NFT assets through participating in activities. This is a long-term incentive plan that lets users understand NFT and have a sense of participation in the IOST ecosystem.
About Node Program
IOST Node Program v2.0
IOST New Staking Mechanism Now Unveiled!
About Cross-chain
IOST X Liebi | Interoperability Breakthrough With The Launch Of Cross-Chain Bridge
About NFT
IOST Unveils Official IRC-721 NFT Standard
In conclusion, in 2020 we are and will be working on the enterprise services and partner nodes, the upgrade our entire ecosystem and mainnet, the optimization of user services, and governance, including the addition of new technologies.
I would like to know your opinion of Chinese public chains that you think are interesting and talk about their advantages and disadvantages
There are quite a few Chinese public chains. Let me give you some examples. For example Bytom blockchain, their target is quite different from IOST’s as they target the financial market. We are more similar to Ethereum, which is multi-functional, rather than digging deep in a certain field. So, compared to Bytom, which only targets the financial market, we do games, tools for entrepreneurs and ordinary users, or involve many kinds of applications, so this is a big difference between IOST and Bytom.
For other public chains, such as NEO, Ontology, Vechain, etc.. Our basic model is just different, because they are dual-currency/token, while we are a single token public chain, we only have IOST and it fuels the entire ecosystem. It is the fuel that allows the entire ecosystem to operate instead of adding another kind of token as an incentive to run it, this is actually a big difference.
Are there any competitors of IOST out there?
Yes, of course. I’d say that all the projects I have mentioned are all somehow competitors of IOST and of course, there are other projects from out of China that should be considered too. For DApps for example, there are many projects that work on them too. If you check the rankings, we are probably #4 out there, #1 place belongs to Ethereum, then EOS and then TRON. DApp development is something that we value very much in IOST, and we have around 70 DApps now in our ecosystem
Someone is asking how is your portfolio? Is it convenient for you to share with us?
I believe in the concept of blockchain so I don’t have much money in my bank account. I keep a few thousand yuan a month for living and the rest of my money goes to my portfolio. I know this might sound crazy, but I am really optimistic, and I think this is something that will multiply its value many times in 3–5 years. I know that it’s hard to find the right one, but so it is in the traditional stocks or other!
Also, there are other reasons why I invest in blockchain. First, I have no idea about stocks, and second, I haven’t found any other particularly good thing to invest in. Even if you tell me about stocks such as Tencent’s stock, Amazon’s stock, I feel their valuations don’t represent their real value. On the other hand, I don’t think Bitcoin has reached its maximum levels, so I am quite convinced that a lot is about to come. I hold a lot of bitcoins, and Ethereums, and actually all kinds of leading coins and tokens from different generations in my portfolio. I really like decentralization, so I don’t hold only one type, I hold many kinds of tokens and coins.
I think that we have answered the main questions from the audience by now, thank you for answering so many questions and for sharing your experiences with us Terry.
Thank you Yingge, I’m especially excited about being here, and for finally seeing you “face to face”.
Would you like to share anything else with us?
If there is any chance, we might share more stories with the audience in another Block 101 interview. We can arrange another in the future, I love to work with Binance.
That sounds good, so we will leave it here today.
OK, thank you.
Today’s live broadcast is over, thank you all for your support of Binance Block 101, thank you all, bye.
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