Q&A with Jan Semotam, General Manager of Primalbase
Our new General Manager, Jan Semotam took open questions from the Primalbase Community in a Q&A session on our Slack channel. Jan talks about the MSP, the different locations of the offices and where he sees the company direction going in the next few years.
Jan Semotam
Hey folks, that’s me in our London location with the amazing views behind me and ready for your questions. Fire at will!I’ll try my best to answer all your questions today and we will also publish them in a Medium article at some point this month.
MSM:
Hey Jan, welcome, can you introduce yourself and tell us what experience you bring to us as the new GM? Do you come from a coworking or blockchain background?
Jan Semotam: Hi MSM, thanks for the question! I come from a sales and management background. For the last 7 years, I ran a sales office of a company designing bespoke art pieces from glass and crystal. So a little different from blockchain and coworking. But what I do hope to bring to Primalbase is my ability to run a healthy and sustainable business. I’m from the Czech Republic originally, spent 8 years in Scotland and then 8 years in Russia so maybe now 8 years in Amsterdam with Primalbase?
longestline:
Hi Jan, all the best for 8 years in Amsterdam. Picking up on your response here — what do you see as the next steps to turn (or keep) Primalbase into a healthy and sustainable business?
JS: Hi longestline, that’s a good one! My focus right now is two-fold: sales and PR. As simple as that may sound, we have been lacking on the sales part and I am trying to build a dedicated sales team for each location that will work both within the blockchain/tech community and also with real-estate professionals to attract the best companies to reside at Primalbase. Secondly, we have expanded the number of events in each location, from smaller workshops to full-day conferences to get as many people in as possible and raise our brand awareness.
longestline:
Excellent — just because it sounds simple doesn’t mean it’s easy work. It sounds like a sensible approach — good luck with it all!
Jack Tanner:
What kind of culture does Primalbase want for its clients and coworking members?
JS: We’d like a culture that acts as a connectivity and innovation incubator for the tech community. Although the “tech community” is quite broad, there is a lot of crossover, connection and collaboration potential for people in different fields to come together. We want to help out as a catalyst for this, allowing our spaces to become a place to meet your next business partner. The triage of events, hot deskers and company tenants all come together to make this culture.
MSM:
That’s a great definition of the culture. There are a lot of external events organized, but as a token holder and co-worker, I would love to get more events organized between people attending PB, like lunches etc… Do you plan to organize that? There has been some stuff on Friday evenings but that’s usually a time when most people want to disconnect a bit from work…
JS: I love the idea and incidentally I had a great meeting today in London with a coach/yoga instructor and we’re planning to do a number of classes and exercises for our community within the PB space. I think that could be really great and want to look at stuff like that in all locations. Plus obviously food and drinks-related gatherings.
Charlie:
hi jan — have you visited all of the primalbase locations? what do you think of them and how do they vary?
JS: Hi Charlie, I have visited them all. Last one on the list was Berlin and I managed that on Monday this week. I like all of our locations (obviously) and each of them has something cool about it. Obviously the views in London are hard to beat, the harbour location in Amsterdam I find quite relaxing and pleasant whereas the Lower Manhattan buzz in NY is just amazing. Berlin is just a really cool building by Renzo Piano but I also love the whole history part of it with Checkpoint Charlie not far from the office. I studied history of Eastern Europe so this brings out my inner history nerd.
Sem:
Hi Jan! As PB Singapore is expected to open in 2020, Primalbase will have 5 offices running. Where do you see Primalbase in about 5 years from now? Will the strategy be to expand as fast as possible and grow exponentially like WeWork’s approach (where we can expect like 100+ offices) or will Primalbases approach be a more slow and steady one (where we might see about 10 offices by then)?
JS: Hi Sem, I want to be ambitious but steady. We absolutely want to grow, we want to grow fast and we want to be in all the relevant places around the world. But I want to make sure we have a solid base first. For now we have made a decision to delay the opening of the Singapore office for a little while until we have our other four locations running at a fuller and more fulfilling capacity for the community and for us! We have some great new companies licensing offices already and this should continue and speed up in the coming weeks and months.
RB:
Do you think the offices are currently in the right locations in each city?
JS: Yeah, I think we’re in the right spots. Of course in megacities like NY or London, you’ll always have more options but I do believe we picked the right ones.
Paula:
Hi Jan, does Primalbase have any plans to change or introduce anything new with PBT or the MSP?
JS: Hi Paula, the MSP has been quite the hot topic over the past few weeks. To maximise the holders’ benefit from this, I have decided to eliminate the commission that Primalbase takes so now 100% of the revenue from the MSP will go directly to the PBT holders. This will be implemented in the next couple of weeks.
That’s great, but why do I have to change my price every Monday?
JS: Primalbase cannot change the price for tokens as they belong to the individual user, not us. We also want to grant a degree of autonomy for users to choose their own pricing past the minimum amount and cultivate a more open market for the tokens as a result.
You also only need to change if the price has dipped below the €8 minimum by Monday, with the price of ETH lagging as of recent, the €8 is a minimum price, not a recommended price, you can pitch your PBT above it and then not be as likely to fall beneath this threshold.
We don’t control the price of ETH. When launching the platform we looked at a number of different cryptocurrencies and ETH was the most stable one to use, along with being the most accessible and notable. We made a decision to pin the price to ETH rather than fiat because it would garner better results for our users should the price rise. If we pinned the price to euro you would not profit if the price of ETH shot up overnight. Cryptocurrency is a volatile asset and we felt the community would appreciate this and benefit more.
Jack Tanner:
Are there any technical plans to alter the PBT token, such as upgrading the logic, or moving it to a different blockchain?
JS: We are looking at developing the product and actually have been talking to several relevant partners about this. When we have a concrete plan, I’ll keep you all posted.
Sem:
Can you provide any numbers about the occupation rate in the different offices?
JS: It varies a lot but in the third quarter of this year we did actually have more desk users than in the first 2 quarters combined! That shows the utility value of PBT has been increasing and people are using it more and more. I do believe that this will be followed by an increase in the nominal value of PBT as well. The occupancy of the offices is also increasing — our 4PBT offices are pretty much full all the time and we are making individual arrangements with 4PBT users to allow them to work in other offices. And long-term lease clients are coming in too. If you’ve been to either London or Amsterdam in the past couple weeks, you’d see them buzzing!
Alexis:
Hi Jan, how many Bitcoins are remaining from the original 3000+ BTC of the ICO?
JS: Hi Alexis, we have used a big chunk of the initial funding to set up the current 4 locations and cover the day-to-day operations.
Sem:
Any plans to offer 24/7 opening hours, I mean 09:00–18:00 or 09:00–20:00 is pretty conservative these days right? If not what’s the main reason for these limited opening hours?
JS: Long-term office users already have 24/7 access in all our locations. All other users can work at PB within the service hours. But I do plan to have 24/7 operations in the future. But as I mentioned, we need to have a solid base first as such operations are quite demanding on staff, costs, security etc.
MSM:
What do you mean by long term office users? People who are renting a private office? Why do token holders have less rights and cannot use the office 24/7 when we showed lots of belief in the company by investing in it?
JS: Long-term office users have legal contracts with us which means we can grant them access to the buildings 24/7. As we are renting our locations ourselves, we must follow security rules of our landlords. So we actually cannot give 24/7 access to “temporary visitors” and have to stick to the opening hours. It’s not an ideal situation and we will change it so that everyone has the same access to PB locations.
Anonymous:
Do you only focus on attracting people or companies in the crypto space or can anybody use it?
JS: We obviously focus mainly on blockchain-related companies and individuals. It’s who we are ourselves and the basic idea behind Primalbase was to create a valid and legitimate blockchain product. But we also see a lot of exciting tech out there and want it to be part of the PB community, whether it’s AI or the space industry. But we will always want to keep the community relevant and beneficial to each other.
Thomas:
I’d love to see a weekend hackathon to work on projects and to connect with other developers.
JS: Thomas, I think that’s an awesome idea! We have, in fact, hosted a few of these before. The Master Workshop: Layer I solutions was in AMS earlier. Check out the highlights here. We’ll definitely do another one soon enough. Saying that, if anyone has an idea for a cool event that they’d like to organise at Primalbase, get in touch with us, we’d be delighted to help you make it happen!
RB:
What are the ideal types of company that you want to take up private offices?
JS: We want to see creative, innovative and passionate companies, whether they’re startups or already established, in blockchain or other tech or tech-related fields. And also they should be able to hold their own in a game of pool.
Pierre:
Hey Jan! Could you please describe briefly what are the benefits of using the blockchain compared to Primalbase competitors (who do not)? Cheers!
JS: Hi Pierre, the benefits are to do with issues such as privacy and decentralisation from the fiat currencies. As blockchain is still at quite entry level of development, it attracts a lot of talented and creative people looking for something new. Using blockchain as part of PB lets us all watch this industry develop from the inside out.
The above questions and answers were edited for length and clarity in this article.
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