Exclusive Interview with Rong Kai Wong, CEO of PARSIQ

Learn the story about how a police commander went on to become the CEO of PARSIQ, a leading blockchain data company.

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PARSIQ

14 min readAug 30, 2023

Recently, Rong Kai Wong engaged in an exclusive interview with Academy Ventures — a student community that supports students in building their Web3 careers.

Beyond leading PARSIQ, Rong Kai Wong boasts 8 years with Singapore Police Force and managed Binance’s $100M BSE accelerator fund, backing 30+ projects, including PARSIQ. A seasoned leader, he shares valuable life and professional advice in the interview, offering timeless insights.

For a more in-depth understanding, you can refer to the complete interview transcript below.

Watch The Full Video Interview

Transcript

Tell us a little bit about your story and how you got into the Web3 space.

My story is probably quite hard to replicate in this space. I didn’t start in the Web3 space after graduation. I graduated from Imperial College London in 2012 with a Masters of Chemical Engineering.

I never did engineering after that because I went back to Singapore. I’m a Singaporean. I became a senior police officer with the Singapore police force. I had a scholarship from there and worked with them for 8 years. I enjoyed my time over there.

It gave me a lot of training in terms of critical thinking, stress handling, and man management. I was a superintendent of police, so I managed 1000 officers. And that was a really good experience that I had.

I left public service for various reasons. There’s a pool of factors, but at the end of the day, it boiled down to what I wanted for my life. That’s something that I hope the listeners — if you are young, fresh out of university, or still in university — start to think about.

You also need to know that your life priorities change over time. When you’re 23, you’re young, you have a lot of energy, you can go three days without sleeping, you can tackle anything in the world, and you want to go all out for a career — that’s great.

Go ahead and do it if that’s what you want. However, you also need to know that’s not going to last. You need to know that down the road, when you’re 30, when you’re 33, or maybe you’ve found someone, and you’ve settled down, and you have kids, then your priorities change with life, and you need to adapt.

So effectively, what I did was live a public service life for my family. I joined Binance after that. That’s how I got into the Web3 space in 2020. I did investments with them for more than a year, as well as ecosystem growth.

I was managing the 100 million BSE accelerator fund, of course, with my team. Out of the 500+ companies and projects we looked into, we only invested in 31 by the time I left. So that’s how strict we were. But of the 31 companies we invested in, PARSIQ was one of them.

I was very impressed with PARSIQ. I liked the team, I liked the technology, and I liked how well their growth was. When I left Binance, PARSIQ hired me, initially as COO and now as CEO.

My path is not traditional, and it’s not typical. PARSIQ hired me back then as COO because of my experience with the police force, which was very operational. I’ve experienced growing teams from less than 10 all the way to 1000. So, anything more than 1000 is new to me.

But in Web3, this is usually good enough. They hired me as a COO, and now they made me a CEO. So that’s my story.

What are the similarities and differences between leading a police force division and leading a Web3 company?

In public service, when I was in the Singapore police force, it was very structured in a big company. You tend to realize that whenever you grow a company to a certain size, once you go past 50, you’re approaching the upper limits of how well interpersonal connections can get between humans. There are studies into it.

They usually say the limit is probably about 200, but the 200 also includes your friends. So, if you filter it out to just your workspace, that’s probably about 50 or so. Beyond that, you do not have the same kind of interpersonal connections. The web of communication gets too complicated. You need to put in systems, and you need to put in communication protocols and hierarchies. It doesn’t have to be very high up.

It could be as flat as you want to make it to be, but there needs to be a system. Joining a big organization from the beginning of my career helped with that. So I think that for a lot of young students, one of the key challenges that you might be thinking of is this: “Should I join a big company and get the money? They will usually pay me higher right at the beginning. I will get a relatively straightforward career trajectory, and I will learn a lot from there”.

There are pros and cons to it. The pros I got from joining the police force were learning about very structured leadership training and management training. Those two things are different, by the way. You might meet very good managers, but they are poor leaders, or vice versa. They are different skill sets.

I think another very important thing that I brought from my previous experience is when you’re in the police force, you’re always managing crises and managing the worst things that ever happen to anyone. That gave me a very good and solid operational foundation. In the police force, you usually need to make snap decisions in seconds, and someone may die if you do the wrong thing.

Translating it into the private sector, it’s different. I would say that psychologically, it’s a bit easier. Mentally, there might be very difficult decisions, but psychologically, it’s easier because you do not need to make snap decisions in seconds. If you make the wrong decision, no one is going to die. So, to me, that’s already a win.

I had good, solid, and foundational training with the police force, and I’m eternally grateful to them for it. Bringing that into the private sector, into what I’m doing now, for example, as CEO, it’s a lot about identifying where the weaknesses in communications are and putting people together with different interests. Different teams have different interests. Even if you’re in a relatively smaller company, you have to recognize that.

I think one of the big problems with people, especially in Web3, is that leadership training is not solid. Many people think that if they are in a leadership position, they look at the skill sets needed as the managerial skill sets. These include how to grow the company, how to scale, how to organize the company accordingly, how to hit the KPIs, how to bring in the money, the commercial stuff, etc.

Those are great, they are managerial skills. But, leadership skills are different. They are from the heart. Leaders come earlier in human evolution. When we talk about leadership skills, it’s always about bringing people together, convincing them to go above and beyond what they’re supposed to do, aligning them with the company’s vision, and making it their own. And they say, “Yes, this is what I believe in. This is what I’m going to do”. So it’s different. Those skill sets are very hard to train, but they are trainable.

What have been the differences, in terms of your workflow, transitioning from COO to CEO?

Especially in Web3, COOs usually take on everything internal, and they take on everything that doesn’t fall under anyone else. So essentially, when I was COO, I would say 80% to 90% of my time was focused internally on operational aspects.

Things like how teams would work with each other. Things like operational campaigns, such as having a campaign going on and then the next and the next. How to push for commercialization of the product, etc. So those are operational issues, and my job is at a center node, bringing people together from marketing, community management, sales, business development, product, and even tech guys.

The tech guys are usually a little bit untouched compared to everyone else because, by right, they shouldn’t be disturbed, they should focus solely on the code and building it. The product guys talk to them and get all the requirements, so the product guys are usually the in-between. They understand the business needs of everyone else, such as marketing, and then they talk back to the tech guys.

As COO, I want to make sure that the whole machine is well-run. As a CEO, it’s a lot more external, especially in a Web3 sense. It’s a lot about talking to investors, building the brand name, and building the recognizable aspects of the company in this industry. It’s a lot about finding out what’s going on out there.

Knowing whether we are in the right market space or not and maneuvering it along the way. Since its infancy until now, Web3 has probably been around for more than 14 years (when Bitcoin was first published and the whole Bitcoin ecosystem was set up). But it is still in its infancy. Everyone is just trying something.

One of the major criticisms of Web3 is that it is a solution trying to find a problem. I would argue against that, but I could see why people say it. A lot of it is pushing the boundaries. In the first place, why blockchain and the related technologies around it were invented, was because of a problem (the 2008 financial crisis).

There was a lack of trust regarding all the centralized entities the banks, and everything started from there. There was a problem, and blockchain was and still is a potential solution. But we’ve gone way beyond that now. We have tried to apply that principle and those technologies to all sorts of different use cases: DeFi, NFTs, insurance, supply chains, etc.

Once you do that, a lot of the use cases are very exploratory. And being in the space that I am in right now, which is blockchain data, there are a lot of potential use cases among our clients as well. They’re exploratory, which means that not all of them stick. Sometimes, things fail, and we have to navigate it, both from a technological standpoint, the product, and the sales standpoint.

We have to say that, okay, we have to adapt to market changes. That’s one. But as much as possible, we should try to stay ahead of the market as well. Set the new trends, and be ready for when new waves come in so we can ride them. That’s basically what a lot of my job as a CEO entails.

Some of the product offerings at PARSIQ include Tsunami API and Data Lakes. From the perspective of clients, what would you say are the benefits of using one?

Tsunami API — Tsunami is basically the brand name. If you say a blockchain API solution, that’s probably it. You can find many types out in the Web3 space right now. But essentially, what an API solution does, including Tsunami API, is that there is a problem with blockchain data access where if you attach to a node and you want to pull raw data from a node, it is raw. So, it is a series of zeros and ones. That’s it. And you have to translate it into something you can understand and read as a human.

So there are different processes that you need to do. Even after you do them, you need to look at the blockchain data from block one to block, maybe 20 billion right now. Across the 20 billion chains are blocks of data. If you have a search query, it will search block 1 to try and find what you want. Then, it will go to the second block, the third block, all the way to block 20 billion. So, that is essentially what you get from the raw data.

If you run your node or gain access to a node service, an API service usually indexes it, making it easier for you to do all this processing. Indexing means bookmarking it. That’s essentially what the Tsunami API does. So, it takes the entire blockchain and bookmarks the whole thing. So when you want to search for certain fields, the search engine thinks about it this way: it does not have to search through all 20 billion chains anymore just to flag up all relevant ones. Maybe it’s just 1,000 blocks, and that’s it. It makes it way faster, it makes it way neater.

The power of our technology is that it indexes the latest block in milliseconds. Once it comes in on the blockchain, the latest block with all the data inside our system already indexed the bookmarks in milliseconds, and our users can get it in milliseconds as well.

There are a lot of providers out there, but usually, they are probably a couple of blocks behind. There are historical reasons for this. I think part of the reason is that they come in and build this whole suite solution. So, most of the time is spent to ensure the historical data is queried properly. As the latest block comes in, the newer the block, the harder it is to do it because you need to act very quickly, you need the developmental resources to do it, etc.

For PARSIQ, we were purely a real-time data service for 4 years, from 2018 to 2022. This means that we solved the hardest part, and then we decided to build backward to cover historical data, making us really fast. That is probably purely on the generic Tsunami API. That is our strength. If you want to query data, but you want the freedom to query whatever you want, and you want the full data, then Tsunami API is probably for you.

Data lakes are probably where it gets really fun because I think we are the only ones who actually do fully customized data in this space. So why would people use the customized data rather than the generic API? For the generic API, you’ll probably be thinking, “Oh, I don’t know whether my requirements may change, so I’d rather get the generic API.” Fair enough. But most of the time, actually companies find that they get a generic API, they still need to process it further because they need the search queries, they may need to change the search queries, and after that, they need to change it to the output that they need based on their specific use case.

That’s what Data Lakes is for. We fully customize the output, and we fully customize the inputs. There are very complex projects, especially now compared to 2021. Things have gotten a lot more complex. Especially when you are a project or a business building on blockchain, you might be looking at your project and already have 100 different smart contracts purely on your platform. But very often, you are not only monitoring your platform, you’re monitoring someone else’s platform, especially your competitors. You may need to look into, as a hypothetical example, 5000 smart contracts. Each smart contract may have 50 different conditions that you are looking into. We’re going to hundreds of thousands of different filters.

If you ask any API solutions, they’re going to tell you no, you can’t do hundreds of thousands of filters. That doesn’t make sense, and that is too complicated. Then, what happens traditionally is that most people do it themselves. This takes a lot of development time, and it takes a lot of adjustments. If you need to change certain parameters, you need to redo the whole thing again. So it’s extremely time and money-consuming.

Our Data Lake takes the whole thing and says that for your inputs, even if it’s hundreds of thousands of different filters or fields, we change the inputs according to exactly what you need. And then we also change the outputs at the bottom that says that if your output is in this format, we will give it to you in the same format. So, as an end user, project, or company, you do not need to do anything else. You get what you are trying to find and can do whatever you want with that data.

What advice would you give Web3 students? What learning resources would you suggest for them to learn more about how to work with data on the blockchain?

There are quite a number of good educational platforms available. If you’re already studying data and know how to code, you should go straight to the SDKs (software development kits) of various platforms. Very often, especially if you’re new to Web3 but know all the fundamentals, check out those blockchain educational pages, such as the Ethereum Foundation. They will tell you if you are building a project, these are the things you need to look out for. Building a smart contract is one. Data is another layer that is a complete monster you need to look into.

I think that data is something that most projects neglect. They look at the data layer and say, “It’s all on the blockchain. What’s so hard?”. Then, after their computers start running and the data volume starts coming in, they ask, “How do I connect to it?”. The first instinct is to go to a block explorer, attach the API, and then draw it. But then people realize that they need to process it further. That is where things escalate. You realize that you need to put in a lot more resources than you initially allocated, especially on the data layer.

Do your research as much as possible. Find out exactly what you need. Talk to projects like us, PARSIQ, and find out our strengths. Other people in this space are also trying to create a solution for data. And I think that’s great. Everyone has different strengths. For PARSIQ, our strength is that we have extremely fast, extremely customized data. That’s what we dedicate to our clients, and this is what we want to give to them.

So we have AI projects coming to us, and they use us because we are the only company that can give them what they want. They crash our servers. That’s how much they’re using us. We fix it within half an hour, for example. They crash our service perhaps twice, and then it never happens again because we grow with them as well.

Once you build further and have more experience, joining hackathons becomes a good way to learn the basics. But at the end of the day, you need to ask yourself how serious you are in terms of the idea that you want to bring to fruition. Talk to people and join incubators if you are interested in it because there’s going to be a lot more help from those platforms. It’s not just about building. You need to learn about the business side of things. You will learn about bringing together the team.

One last advice is when you’re forming a team, form it with the least number of people with the most number of skill sets. So make sure there are no two people with duplicative skill sets. If both have the same skill sets they’re bringing to the table, then one is redundant. Form the team with the smallest number of people. Make sure everyone is in it together. They have skin in the game and are willing to go all out for this and start building from there. Bring in different skill sets. That’s very important.

The tech guys, maybe you just need one person or two. It depends on what kind of skill sets they bring. But you always need the financial commercial guys. At the end of the day, someone must sell this product. Operational guys, as well, don’t neglect that. Bring in someone with the organizational skill sets, but it’s fine if everyone comes from university and you don’t have the work experience. Find someone from the club or the usual work assignments you already know. Someone who is pretty good with organizing and structuring things and thinks like an engineer. I think that skill set is often neglected as well.

About Academy Ventures

Academy Ventures makes finding careers in Web3 simple and personal for students. We are solving the difficulty of landing jobs in the blockchain industry by connecting job-seeking students directly to company founders. Our goal is not merely to be a job board; we go beyond that and assist students throughout the entire hiring process, from resume building to founder introductions to interview preparation. By matching talented students to powerful blockchain startups, we serve as Web3 career mentors that many students lack in traditional university institutions.

About PARSIQ

PARSIQ is a full-suite data network for building the backend of all Web3 dApps & protocols. The Tsunami API provides blockchain protocols and their clients (e.g., protocol-oriented dApps) with real-time and historical data querying abilities. Data Lake APIs allow complex data querying & filtering for any project, specifically designed and tailored for our customers’ blockchain data needs.

Supported blockchain platforms: Ethereum, Polygon, Polygon zkEVM, BNB Chain, Avalanche, Arbitrum, and Metis.