Interview: Justin Ahn, Co-founder of Quid.li
Quidli is a protocol designed to enable equity transfers over a decentralized network; this s erves a gateway for companies and talent to connect through fast and flexible equity-as-compensation. With tokenization of ownership equity, companies can increase liquidity to distribute in exchange for labor at any level or duration in a click. With an array of applications built on top of Quidli to add more features and control distribution, stakeholders can simply focus on their jobs with potential future rewards securely in hand. Quidli creates incentives for people to take risks so they can contribute to the projects that truly inspire them.
OCC: Would you agree with e-Commerce Giant Alibaba’s Jack Ma that said “Blockchain Is Not a Bubble, Bitcoin Is”?
Justin Ahn: From my perspective, the stronger core technology is Blockchain. I think it’s reasonable for anyone to assume that it is the more long-lasting part of the boom that’s happening right now. The technology does have its use cases, and you’re seeing more and more people finding appropriate use cases and fits to use it. For sure, that’s an indicator that Blockchain is the thing that’s here to stay. Regarding Bitcoin, it’s more appropriate to ask about cryptocurrency.
Out of all cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is by far the market leader. Whether or not it will stay forever, we can’t possibly know. But if I were to choose between Blockchain and Bitcoin, I would say that Blockchain is the technology that’s here to stay. We see private Blockchains that are becoming more and more used by big corporations. IBM was first, and now we’re looking at Amazon and Salesforce trying to jump on the trend.
OCC: Why does the United States hate the crypto world so much?
Justin Ahn: I don’t think it’s fair to say that they hate cryptocurrency. In fact, I think that the US government is being quite open about their process. The unfortunate misstep here was that they were quite negative in the beginning of this open process. It’s creating this big controversy that the US — a general tech and innovation leader — is suddenly extremely negative about a potentially huge tech trend.
To be fair, I think the US is evolving. Today, there’s significantly less negativativity around cryptocurrencies than it was a couple of months ago. At the beginning of this year, everyone was like “Wow, we gotta get out of the US if we’re gonna do a cryptocurrency or Blockchain-based startup.” I think it’s impossible to completely divorce the two. If you look at the majority of major cryptocurrency-involved startups, they’re still led largely by American founders. But at the same time, in the interest of the long game everyone needs to find a regulatory solution at the state level.
If we’re looking at Europe, there’s a lot of positive talk happening right now. But the only countries that have taken action are Switzerland and Germany. Despite the overall positiveness towards crypto, no one else has set up frameworks. It is an opportunity for other countries to jump on this before the US. Once the US does make a decision, I think it’s gonna be hard to not be in line with everything that’s happening. Fortunately or unfortunately, the US will probably have to play a big part in what’s going to happen moving forward for cryptocurrency.
OCC: Do you think the US will finally adapt to the crypto scene and accept that Blockchain technology is here to stay? Companies like J.P Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley seem pretty interested in it.
Justin Ahn: From a bank’s perspective, I can understand why they take so long to adapt, given that cryptocurrency is slowly becoming an exchangeable trading product. Despite how negative the press has made the banking system look like, I understand why a major bank doesn’t want to adopt a very risky product immediately. Even today, if you go online, the real hardcore fans are kind of like conspiracy theorists. They think that the banks want to steal all the money of the average person and give it to the one 1% wealthy; and that they’re meant to generate profit for their high net worth individuals.
To be fair, if you come from a small, underdeveloped country, there’s even more distrust of the banking systems. Honestly, in countries like the US or in Western European countries, even though you hate the bank there’s still nobody else to trust. They’re not the best, but at the same time what are you going to do except put your money under a mattress somewhere?
For better or worse, we still need the banks and we still need fiat. For them to break through the crypto space, it would be a huge signal to the market that there is some legitimacy. It’s not just a bunch of conspiracy theorists speculating on global collapse. It will be a game changer now that these big players are coming in, both for Blockchain and for crypto.
OCC: Assuming that in the end, US accepts ICOs and cryptocurrencies, what do you think will happen on Wall Street? What about with all the startup founders on Silicon Valley?
Justin Ahn: To be honest, I come from a corporate background, so I might be a little biased here. Banking is a huge industry. It’s not just trading; there’s a lot of different moving parts to banking, even though the general public looks at the banking system mainly as an investment medium. There’s investment banking, retail, institutional banking — a lot of moving parts are involved. The people that we associate with the “Wolf of Wall Street” are mostly the traders. These are the guys with the dollar signs in their eyes.
It’s still far from mainstream. Now that these institutional players are coming in, it’s gonna become more mainstream. But in terms of what will happen with Wall Street and Silicon Valley, I think it’s a bit premature to say that this is the end of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. I think we’ll see a lot more smart people trying to find work in this space. Just like with Silicon Valley after the big dotcom boom in the 90s when the idea was to finish school and get a job at a bank or consulting firm, today we’re looking at a huge shift over to the tech industry. I’ve read about the way banks are losing great talent to companies like Google, Uber, Facebook; which I think is true.
When I finished college back in 2007, I was still trying to get a job at a consulting firm or investment bank. But then the tech trend happened. When I finished my MBA in 2014, more people were interested to work for Google and Facebook. Even for smart people, it’s kind of like following on the trend — what’s safe and what gives you a lot of money. There’s potential and once we’ll see a stabilisation in Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, there will be a talent shift. To be honest, I’m part of that first group chasing after that goal.
OCC: What do you think will happen in the digital marketing and advertising space, now that Facebook and Google have banned ads related to ICOs and Blockchain?
Justin Ahn: It’s kind of like a double-edged sword. One the one hand, it’s great that there’s more momentum and a lot of activity. But on the other hand, it has brought a lot of distrust, misinformation, and scams. It’s weird to take a position, although I do like the fact that there’s more legitimacy coming through regulation and better rules around the area. At the same time, it’s a little sad.
The best analogy I like to use is that of PayPal. Back then, there was no regulation for PayPal. The same thing is happening recently with guys like Revolut. There was no regulatory pressure, so they built the technology and it works. Now people want it, so now they’re reverse-engineering the regulation to make it legal. The same thing is happening with a lot of Blockchain-based applications. First, let’s make something that works first and that people want. In the case of banking, given the high fees by banks, exchanging and transferring huge amounts of money via crypto comes with significantly lower fees and in most cases it takes less than a few hours compared to days and weeks by traditional players.
Overall, in the digital space, people tend to go to the paid channels by default; which is good because there’s an initial growth that you can get through paid channels. But if you work in digital marketing and you have enough experience in the field, you become aware that sooner or later it’s gonna come to an end. We call it “the law of shitty click-throughs.”
There’s a rightful image of scammers, but at the same time it’s a lot of work. It’s truly impressive to see the amount of effort people put in to make money. Having said that, I’m a big believer in not just exploiting paid channels alone. It sucks that Facebook, Mailchimp, and Google Adwords don’t want to have anything to do with crypto. But at the same time — and I’m not just talking about crypto — it should teach any person working in the online digital marketing space that you shouldn’t just focus on the paid channels.
Drew Houston from Dropbox did a presentation back in 2010 that still stays with me. He emphasised that it’s really about the product at the end of the day and the virality of your product, not just about viral marketing but how viral your product can become. If you have a strong community of believers, that’s your best tool. Everything else is secondary. You can used paid channels to get that initial kick. But if your vision is not there and if you’re not engaging with your community, it’s not sustainable. It’s all about getting true believers on board. When these people start to use your product, and they really believe in it, that’s gonna help with word of mouth and virality.
OCC: What went well so far for you and your business? What advice would you give to people looking to break through the crypto space?
Justin Ahn: Sure. We’re still pretty early stage. We took some time to study and understand the key elements other ICOs have done. The crazy thing is, everything in this space is changing every day. A best practice one day can become totally irrelevant the next day. Having said that, we’re gonna go for an ICO. I am aware that we’re still in uncharted waters. Even though people keep saying that last year was the golden year for ICOs with a total valuation of $7 billion, we’re halfway through 2018 and we’ve already reached $9 billion.
And once you enter this space, everyone will try to sell you all kinds of services, from marketing to Blockchain development and everything in between. One thing we’ve done well with our product is — we’re kind of our first use case. We’re building a future work product. It’s about building companies by splitting equity. In our case, we’ve started using tokens instead of equity. Every day, we’re rewriting our ownership structure: who owns equity in the company based on the contributions they do, and will equal to tokens if we’re gonna achieve a successful ICO. That’s what we will reward all of our contributors. I think that the coolest thing is that we have now a team of 15 that are 100% working on a token basis. To me, that’s surreal. In 5 months, we’ve put a team of 15 people together and we have the burn rate of a startup with one person.
We’re only spending money on the things we need to spend money on. Everyone on board, whether they’re actually contributing or they’re part of our growth community, our goal is to hit them with that message first. I think that’s something we’ve done really well, building our community. And communicating this has helped us attract our first batch of future customers.
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