Interview with Rafael Sanchez Garcia, Blockchain Entrepreneur
Rafael, please tell our readers a little bit about yourself and your professional background.
I have a strategic and entrepreneurial profile, with a focus on continuous improvement either operatively or disruptively. I like to say that I connect different worlds, first the world of science with a focus on health, then I continue with the world of business with a strategic focus, ending in the world of blockchain-DLT-focused technology. I have followed this path naturally since the generation of value begins and ends with people, and starting from a healthy approach landing in a distributed P2P world of collaboration where each agent is relevant. This motivates me to continue.
Could you please tell us more about what kind of projects you are currently working on?
I am currently developing a startup with my team, it is a FinTech business model focused on developing health innovations. We use blockchain technology in operations at various levels and hope to generate an impact on the life of each person. It is a social entrepreneurship project, but we don’t forget that we are also a company. We are developing the model to generate large-scale value and capture it through our know-how.
How do you choose the projects to collaborate with? How do you assess their potential?
Sometimes I don’t know if I choose the projects or the projects choose me. I usually think about it in two ways, one is the next step and in this case, I collaborate with external projects to obtain short-term resources or positioning. But my focus now is to generate my own projects. So I try to develop ecosystems so that others would want to collaborate with me. In my own projects, I think long-term with the goal on the horizon. In both cases, it is a priority for me to meet people to see if the collaboration or what I have in mind fits both me and others.
When it comes to assessing the project’s potential, it is always “people first”. Direct contact gives much more information than a professional background since I consider the team’s alignment to be essential in developing a good personal treatment that can give rise to the full potential of each of its members. With technology and operational efficiency they buy you — but with people and empathy it sells. Assessing whether a project is going to be successful or not is complex, and depends more on previous expectations than on the project or business itself. So, if I collaborate with other projects I study how useful it can be for me in terms of revenue, positioning and compatibility with my way of thinking, collaborations that I am already doing and my position at that time. The rest is secondary to me, almost nothing is certain.
Which current trends in the blockchain industry do you think are the most important? Which blockchain use cases are going to have the biggest impact going forward?
The important thing about technology is that it is useful for companies, organizations and for each individual. The collaborative environment that distributed architectures can generate at different levels, where each agent that interacts is relevant and the ecosystem is important, is the truly disruptive element of this technology. Focusing on its P2P potential and the immutable traceability of transactions can generate more value, associated with business models and interaction with other technologies. Collaboration is necessary so that the resources and capabilities that develop the innovative blockchain-DLT potential are established.
Blockchain has innovative disruptive potential and is also capable of continuous operational improvements. I believe that the greatest potential will be in those use cases that give more value to each person and then or in the meantime, each person will have greater potential to generate more value individually through their own collaboration within ecosystem environments. I believe that this technology has exponential growth potential, but it has not yet been generated. Although I believe that cryptocurrencies as its first use case have already validated it, but they still remain in the laboratory phase.
In your opinion, what are the most common mistakes that blockchain startups make?
The most common mistake from the point of view of potential application, utility and business is that they focus too much on talking about the technology itself but do not usually focus on the real use cases or business models that can generate true value that improves things that already exist, whether through innovation and disruption or by scalable operational improvements. I know it is to get on the wave and generate financial resources for the projects, so I understand it although the use case should have more weight than the technology itself. But this technology will have succeeded when you stop talking about it. It is just a tool with a lot of potential to build important uses through it.
What is your general market outlook? Where do you expect to see Bitcoin price by the end of the year?
If we talk about the market today, we can only talk about cryptocurrencies, the other use cases do not generate resources directly or value, they are in the conceptual phase and do not constitute a market yet. Although I hope that the entry of projects like Libra can accelerate the development of use cases beyond cryptocurrencies. Today, cryptocurrencies are the engine, and yet I consider them still in the laboratory phase for the potential they may have in the future. Even so, the cryptocurrencies will be the ones that will pull forward and promote other use cases with blockchain-DLT architectures.
The price trend should be rising, some peak may occur, but I hope it will be more moderate and continuous growth over time, that would be good news because the crypto world is settling and generating value for more stable and accepted in more traditional markets at various levels.
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