Startup Spotlight: Bitcannery and Jobberwocky

Here at Primalbase, our shared workspaces are designed to encourage collaboration between different tech companies with convergent interests. They are nothing without the people who use them, and our members are working on a wide range of fascinating tech projects — some on blockchain, but also in various other areas of emerging technologies.

Pavel Filippov is a regular in our Berlin office. He has over 15 years of experience in development, co-founding the anonymous online job matching platform Jobberwocky and being a part of blockchain-based encryption system Bitcannery. We sat down with Pavel to talk about both projects, the technology job market at large and Primalbase.

Hi Pavel. Tell us about your work with Bitcannery to get us started.

Bitcannery started out as a hobby project but it’s become bigger than that.

Bitcannery is basically a system that helps you keep a secret on the blockchain. The secret can be a text message, a binary file, anything. The message is encrypted on the blockchain, and it stays encrypted for a set period of time. If the sender doesn’t extend the time before it is up, the message gets decrypted.

So in the simplest scenario, this works as a dead man’s switch — you keep checking in periodically, and as long as you do that, the secret stays safe. But if you stop checking in, then the message is decrypted and sent to your heir or whoever you chose as your trusted person. Quite like a notary, really, except it’s better because it’s decentralised and it’s trustless.

You no longer need to hand over your secret to a data centre or a human agent, because Bitcannery keeps your secret on the blockchain, and does so in a very intelligent manner. What happens technically is Bitcannery generates a key, encodes the secret with it, then splits the key into chunks and uses Shamir’s Secret Sharing algorithm to distribute them between the machines of our agents. We call them The Keepers.

Where did the idea for that come from?

In 2017, at the peak of the crypto hype, some people around me got rich in crypto. Immediately they got nervous: “How do I not lose it?”, “How do I pass it on if need be?” Owning crypto boils down to a password, a key — and what if you lose it? What if someone unfriendly gets it?

That’s the big question, the big challenge we’re up against. People are frail. Things happen to them. One minute you’re OK and then — well, anything really. A fortune can be lost on a whim of, uh, fortune. That’s the weak spot of owning crypto, and that’s what we’re trying to attend to.

That’s how Bitcannery started, but it’s so much more than that. Take Julian Assange, the Wikileaks guy. Ok, great, you have a lot of secret files, and you try to use it to some end, but you’re limited in your moves — with Bitcannery you’ll have more. You are also a physical person, and things can happen to you. Someone gets their hands on you, and you’re cornered, and it’s not even the worst scenario. You have the secrets; they have you.

So, what are your options presently? It’s either something centralised, and thus vulnerable, or traditional agents — lawyers, notaries, escrows — which is even worse.

And it’s not to say people are not trying. We saw some good ideas out there — mostly in whitepapers, though. Keep.network is one example. They get close — kind of, but not quite. There’s nothing out there that you can put your finger on and say “hey, here’s the thing that keeps my secrets in a distributed fashion!”

Except there is now, because we built it. It’s called Bitcannery, and it’s in alpha stage, so come and play around with it at bitcannery.net.

How are the key keepers incentivised?

Keepers get tokens. For now, it’s Ethereum. If you are a keeper, you get some Ethereum. The fee is set by the customer. If you want to keep a secret, you offer a reward to those that help you, and if they agree to it, the reward is distributed between the keepers.

Is the system currently limited to Ethereum?

It is for now. We were also looking at Rootstock/RSK, but there seemed to be issues, and now we’re thinking of building our own blockchain, tailored to our specific needs.

Ethereum is great, but it’s very meta, a catch-all, a big great Leviathan. A bit scary. Right now we stick to it, but what we really need is a very simple system cut to our measure, and that’s what we plan on building.

How do you see the solution fitting into the wider development of blockchain technology? It’s quite a specific use-case, but do you expect it to remain a specific use-case?

Ideally, we want to polish the specific use-case to perfection, see it used a lot and with a great deal of success — and then build on that. If Bitcannery does take off as well as we hope, there’s bound to be a lot of feedback, a lot of feature requests, all these signals that keep us alive and push us forward.

Then maybe partners would pop up, wanting this or that, suggesting things — more specific, less specific, anything. If the core functionality is reliable and if the general idea is a good one — then we’ll be able to answer all of that, develop in any direction there’s demand for.

We’ll just do our thing as well as we can, then see where the market takes us.

Let’s talk about Jobberwocky as well — do you want to tell us a bit about that too?

Ok, Jobberwocky is a sweet little monster. It’s like OkCupid and LinkedIn married.

Functionally, it’s a platform for job finding slash recruitment. With Jobberwocky you are anonymous to your potential counterparts — up to a point when you allow disclosure. You are represented only by your personality traits, and to a limited extent, by your skills. Jobberwocky finds out about all of that by asking you a few questions, then a few more questions… Whether you’re looking to hire or to be hired, you’re still getting through this quiz, or a poll, or whatever.

Based on your answers, Jobberwocky suggests you people you might click with, have good chemistry and work happily ever after. It’s only then that the contact details are shared, if you choose to. We are now launching a limited preview and finalising the platform itself. We’re thinking August or September is when the big Jobberwocky launch will happen.

Where did the idea for Jobberwocky come from? What was the inspiration behind it?

The idea for Jobberwocky comes from a world of pain. I came up with the idea while working in IT engineering management. The thing is, people are key to everything. If you have the right people, everything else is trivial. And it’s not the people who are right in absolute terms, it’s the people who are right for you.

People come first, technology comes second. Communication, worldview, core values, who loves being yelled at, who needs to be scratched behind the ears on a daily basis — yeah, that’s what matters. Not the stuff they write in CVs — half lies, half irrelevant.

So, I was thinking that maybe I could try and apply some of my previous experiences and this is how the idea was born.

Why do you think anonymity is so important in job matching?

Most people you want to hire already have jobs. Some of them don’t mind moving on, but you will never know it. They just sit there quietly wanting a change in their life. And if they openly reach out, they expose themselves to a lot of unpleasantness.

First, there are invasive recruiters. They insist on pestering you with bad offers and non-offers — very often they ping you pretending to have an offer, then just shove you in their database. The other thing is more subtle. I, for one, think it’s normal to put out feelers for something better. But there is the concept of somewhat feudal loyalty. You’re not supposed to do it in the open, or everyone around you gets fussy — your boss, your co-workers, your competition. Usually, you don’t want that.

Even someone who is out of a job wouldn’t always want to advertise it. To some, it’s like signalling a loss of social status. “Ooh, I’m too cool to be available”. Anonymity would address these issues.

Another thing about anonymity is it would reduce bias. People don’t like making decisions. They save themselves the effort. They use crippled heuristics, an arbitrary set of formal criteria. And it’s doing them a disservice. It makes them discard what they should have picked and vice versa.

A name, an address, a school — all these bits of trivia add up to infer a background, mostly wrong, always immaterial. They look at a resume, and they immediately ‘know’ — but they really don’t. With Jobberwocky-style anonymity, you can at least save all your bias for the interview. Personal communication defeats prejudice easier then a piece of paper does.

And it pays. Diversity in a team of people who like one another works better than when you have a bunch of clones. Plus, it’s less boring and more fun. You know, cultural exchange, communication challenges, different viewpoints and all that.

Does the system take any programming inspiration from matchmaking sites or is it just the inspiration for the product itself?

I really love OkCupid but we’re not using their code.

We are inspired by their general approach, though. All the endless surveys, endless questions, open-ended questions, then more surveys… extracting one by one the little things that make you you, then reconstructing you in its innards to find you the perfect match.

What’s next for the program?

We’re quietly launching the landing page now, at jobberwocky.io. After we have some feedback from our innermost circle, we plan a small promo campaign in a slightly wider circle, then maybe an even bigger one — all to get feedback. I mean, are people even getting it?

Based on that we make changes — unless the thing is a complete flop — then launch a real-size marketing campaign and release to the general public. And that’s the way it goes.

How is Primalbase helping you achieve these goals?

Oh, I don’t know. It only gives me a place to be when I need one; that little thing.

I’m a bit of a nomad. I don’t need a permanent office, it’s too much hassle. But then, I do need a place where I can do things. I looked at different places, and they were not good enough — and threatening to consume the time and the energy I needed for my projects, for the things I love.

Then Primalbase came along with this weird impossible thing. It was borderline insanity, especially the token price, so I immediately bought some. Because I love that sort of thing, and so should everybody.

And I was right. I came for the tour, and everyone was really sweet, and the office was very cool, and the location was lovely — that great big skyscraper in Potsdamer Platz. The view is amazing; bird’s eye view of Berlin right there in your window.

So for all your readers out there, if you don’t know yet, you should totally visit! Primalbase Berlin is where we had our most productive days for both Bitcannery and Jobberwocky. Madness pays.