Investing in Innovations - Jing Sun | Ep. 5

Julian: What about that conversation, made you take it seriously?

Jing: Yeah, so that'sactually a fun story. I started my career as a venture capitalist back in 2013and, investing in all those kinds of frontier tech. By that time, there's nokind of technology called blockchain or Web3 right now.

One of the founders his name is Tom and, he come to me. I metwith him, for a long time, he's a definitely awesome entrepreneur type andalways look for the new ideas. And then just one day, early in 2015, he come tome and say, Hey, this is my new idea. I say what it is?

Say I'm doing a crowdfunding platform for cryptocurrency. Andthere was two projects launching on my platform, one is Gemcoin or something.And to me, it's what the hell was that? I have never, I only heard about theBitcoin, but I don't really understand why, there are some other kind of,MimiCoin and, there's not even necessary to have a crowdfunding platform.

I Almost miss this opportunity. I don't really understand whathe's building, I like this founder. I think that, Tom is one of the smartestguy I have ever met. I just don't really understand the idea. And two, like oneof my partners who is actually a fintech guy.

And he keep just like convincing us, say, hey, Bitcoin is thefuture. And I believe, cryptocurrency has a future. And I don't understand whatmy partner is saying as well, and end up our fund didn't really directly investin them, but my partner puts a personal check into their company.

And then later his company become a kind of string lab, whichis blockchain incubator, and then just like DFINITY, the first project theyincubated. That's the story. Yeah. And then you asked me the question how itchanged my mind. I think, it really inspired me and, triggered me to start lookdeep into the technology.

I want to figure out, why it matters. And since then, back in2015, I started looking into deeply into the thesis and the foundation of thetechnology. And at that time we see Ethereum come up with a whitepaper with asmart contract platform, which is the first one.

And this make me feel much more understandable because of asmart contract and make it programmable, which means it opened up anotherplatform. And the possibilities for other developers, they can build things ontop of that. So that's really the starting point, of my personal experience tostart looking into the blockchain.

Julian: Yeah.

You mentioned something, when you said The technology has tomatter. And what about, Web3 or blockchain when you were going through thisdiscovery process, why did it matter to other people to crowdfund or crowdyeah, crowdfund and actually build on top of these?

Other platforms and companies. Why did, in your opinion, whydid it matter to the global community to actually care and invest time?

Jing: Actually, it'snot really about, the crowdfunding part. This is the application or the need,but it's really about why Why it matters, for us to have a permissionless moneyfor the first place, which this is value proposition for Bitcoin.

And then just my mindset. At that time, only about, okay, soprobably it can create money, but what else? It's just like money, right? IWill say all the value is about the decentralization, the transparencypermissionless part. Basically when I invest in other front end tech, forexample, AI, IoT, VR, the technology itself is really innovative, but theplatform itself is always centralized and controlled by the big, giantinstitutions and the companies.

And which means there is no kind of ownership from the userside, there is no ownership from the developer side. And even just put thedifficulty for, The developer, if they want to build something, they don'treally have the open access to data. They don't really have the open access tothe developer tools and the developer tech stack, right?

And then just like when we see there was a kind ofpermissionless platform, which means it's open for all the participants tolike, create the network, own the network, and also open the access to, otherpeople who can easily build and use. So that part really is intrinsic value tome, at least at the beginning when I take a look at Ethereum to come up with asmart contract platform building on top of the blockchain.

Julian: Did you havean experience with this kind of open source, open development style of buildingbefore? Never.

Jing: Yeah,definitely. We see there is the internet to start with open source, everythingopen source, everything decentralized. And then, it start to have the bigcompanies, they build the applications and the application itself become closedsource.

yEah, because of kind of the profitability, nature, right? Andthen just so it's more and more difficult to further innovation on top of theinternet. And that kind of make it a need, say, in open source is always verypowerful tools to foster, the innovation for the newcomers, for the newdevelopers, right?

Yeah, I think that's something, why, I think, at this pointback in 2015, when we see the centralized company, they become bigger andbigger. And then there's a need, really, for the new developers to have theopen access to the resources and data.

Julian: Yeah, I waslooking at one of your products the Deepin scan, and seeing the distributionjust across the world was pretty fascinating on, where you see a lot ofactivity.

And one thing that was particularly interesting was there'sheavy activity in Europe, between countries like, France and Ukraine, a lot ofGreece in there. What about, this technology, do you feel in your opinion,creates, was this intentional to have such high activity in these areas?

Why do we see, this technology being adopted locally in thoseareas in particular?

Jing: That's aninteresting finding. I didn't really see, particularly like in France andUkraine but we see when you look at, all the project our Deepin project, on topof platform and you will see you never see there's a one kind of startup as itcan create such a scale, global scale in such a kind of fast pace, right?

So that's the beauty of how you can leverage on the communityand community turn to be your kind of infrastructure builders. And then when welook at, which regions and, countries are really be active, very active inadopting decentralized Technology.

I would say it really depends on the network itself. Reallydepends on the project itself, right? And also for high, from high level, wesee interestingly develop developing country. They actually are more activelyadopting Web3, saying develop countries. But of course it really use case byuse case.

But that's the slicer, the high level.

Julian: I wasthinking in regards to IOT and just the whole ecosystem of IOT is fascinatingbecause of the possibilities, how it can be implemented and, I was talking tosomeone who was building a IOT company focused on the, it was more like oil andit was more about pipelines and actually identifying when they burst.

Yeah. Things like that. So I'm curious.

How does blockchain improve IoT?

Jing: Yeah. I wouldsay blockchain normally, it's not like an improvement. It's totally differentway to organize resources and network. When you look at the IoT device itself,it's always decentralized, right? So it's always you can purchase your devicesand devices can be in any country.

But actually the problem is how to organize those devicestogether as a network. And, we always see most of the device network, or youmentioned IoT network, will be centralized. It will be controlled by big, IoTcompanies or big kind of, tech companies, right? But what WebStreet contributeshere, As we will be able to create a decentralized version of device networkand, leverage on the resources and data which is generated by the devices,right?

But when you look at, one single devices, they only cancontribute a very limited resources. If you put them together at a globalscale, and that's huge, that's a potential, never happened, before, how you cancreate a network and scale it at a global scale in different countries,hundreds of countries, and put those resources together, either it could bearound the world.

A computing network, could be an AI, network, could be 5G,wireless network, could be energy network, just like you mentioned, right? Sothat's just like the huge potential, how Web3 can facilitate. They canfacilitate a community built, large scale. Device network at a very fast pace.

Julian: Yeah. It'sincredible to think about the applications of it. But also one thing that wasfascinating was as a company.

It's one, it's hard to build software or build a community or,build in the way you're doing, but also then to go into hardware and add thiswhole other layer of complexity, what was the decision behind, whether it'sinvesting money, resources, partnership, to actually, building devices, why didyou do that?

Jing: That's a goodquestion. First of all, we are not a hardware company. We are not amanufacturer company. We are infrastructure. We are a modular web freeinfrastructure company for deepening decentralized, physical infrastructurenetworks, right? But, at the very beginning, back in 2020 we do have someexperiment.

We launched to hardware with our manufacturing partners. One iscalled YouCan. This is the first experiment for us to test, the veryproposition of, devices, which is privacy. So you leverage on the web, theprivacy and security element of the blockchain. It's successful.

And, we just really Go through the entire process of how to doa hardware, a blockchain based hardware. It's really hard. And the secondexperiment is about we using the concept of dipping to create a hardware whichwe call Pebble Tracker and which has become a data saucer, right?

So real time, data saucer for, from the community directly.And, crowdsource all the data, real time data, including any location data or,temperature data, all the things, right? And then put them together and make itavailable and usable for the developer, right?

So that's another kind of experiment. And then just we realizedthere are so much kind of existing resources. wHich already in the world, allthe users, they have over 10 of the devices and all those devices, they havecomputing powers, they have storage powers, they have various of the kind ofresources and they can be a kind of data gateway.

So that's the beauty of the Deepin how we can crowdsource, allthe, just like doing the Airbnb, like Airbnb or the Uber, but we here, we arethe Airbnb for for the device resources or for the real time real world data,right? Leverage on the existing devices. Or if needed, they create the newdevices.

And for us, as infrastructure players, our job is how we canhelp them to accelerate the process for them to building a network or buildinga blockchain, a project. And hardware is part of the resources we can provideto them because of our experience.

Julian: Yeah.

And if I'm someone who's looking for different infrastructures,pardon me, if I'm someone who's You know, looking to build on top of differentinfrastructures, what makes IoTeX infrastructure worth building on?

What is the reason I would choose IoTeX?

Jing: Yeah, I thinkthe modularity, right? So we believe each single kind of innovators. They havetheir creative ideas, they have their big vision, like what type of networkthey want to build, right? But they don't really have, the all the tools rightnow, right?

So they have to build the tools from scratch, but we feel thisis a waste of resources. They don't really need it to build all the wells. Theyneed, their focus will be how, what's the business look like? What's exactlythe use case they want to build? It could be for a vehicle network, forexample, right?

For maybe an energy network or AI computing network, right?They need to focus on that part and they need to focus on how to on boardsthere the users or community to contribute resources or how to onboard theservice provider, who will, be using the outcome network.

But, they need to have a kind of robust tech stack that theycan. They can basically plug and play or they can pick up whatever model theywant and then put them together and create their own platform. So we are justlike, see a modular kind of, infrastructure provider.

We provide different modules and these chain agnostic, they canstill choose, whatever chain they want to build or issue their token on. But wemostly focus on the middleware, right? So from off chain compute to data proof.And provide us the best kind of platform for them to showcase their projects,their data, device data, and so that the investor can discover various dippingprojects And decided to participate into their network in the early stage,right?

So we provide all those resources and the developer tools,right? So they can pick up whatever they want and then dramatically acceleratetheir go to market timeline. Yeah. So that's our kind of our preparation here.

Julian: And describeWebStream, where does that come into play, because I didn't completelyunderstand where it comes to play, and if there is, say, a comparable productthat you still work with, maybe that's, similar but if this was like necessaryor better, describe WebStream.

Jing: When we firstlook at this space, we feel there are multiple kind of choices for the dippingproject to find, a layer one blockchain. So basically the blockchain itself isdoing the settlement. It's to issue the tokens and do the transaction and dothe proof and smart contract, right?

So that's the kind of settlement layer. But specifically for adipping network, blockchain itself is not enough. Because of, the nature all,most of the DP network is, they have, they need to handle a lot of the deviceand device data, and then they need to just connect the device data and theproof of the data from the real world to the web story.

So that part is not really completely on chain. So there's akind of a process how to bring the off-chain data and bring the proof of thedata on chain. And it's unnecessary. All the data processing has to be onchain. It's a waste of the resources on chain resources, right? So that's why,original position of webstream is a middle layer.

It's a middle layer infrastructure and mainly doing off chaindevice data computing, and now just like we have ZK capability as well, andthen put those ZK proof on chain to trigger the smart contract for whateverkind of single business logic, the builder they want to do.

So you can see WebStream itself is computing, off chaincomputing network.

Julian: Amazing.

When you think about, when I was looking into your background,one thing that was particularly interesting is the fact that you went thereverse route. You went venture capital and then you started, and you went intobecoming a founder and then you went into becoming a crypto founder, which iseven more crazy because it's not necessarily, it's such, it's the wild west.

There's so many different ways this technology can beImplemented in the real world, so many other variables we don't know in termsof, it being actually scalable and handle the amount of volume that, Web 2companies are managing in terms of consumers and users and things like that.

What made you go from investing in companies to getting yourhands dirty and starting to really build something that is completely new? It'swithin its own frontier.

Jing: Very goodquestion. I sometimes I also ask myself, if this is the right route. I think,when I was, when I'm in kind of start to do project by myself as operator andas an entrepreneur I never want to go back.

That's a, that's the kind of effect. But just like when Ireview my career, I'm lucky enough, after graduation in Singapore and I got achance to get into the investor investment kind of area. And first I was a PEreally focus on the growth stage, late stage, for Southeast Asia market.

And then I got a chance to come to Silicon Valley, which is 10years back. And I'm so fascinated. I was so fascinated about all theinnovation, for the early stage, projects. So I, I got a chance to really jointhe VC firm and as an early investor. And then just start to cause opportunityto start to look at all the frontier tech, just like I mentioned before.

And then just I realized as an investor. You have theopportunity to have a broad view, like you will be the earliest one to reallysee the trend, right? For the big trend, for the biggest kind of innovation,which will shape the world. But as a kind of young investor you don't reallyhave the experience, right?

You don't really just Really get in the shoes of the foundersto understand the single details, how, what really make a founders to create agreat company from scratch. I think that is a kind of always is a secret for meand, I'm so like into it and really want to be like the one to understand, howwe can create and grow a great company from the first day.

Yeah. ANd also just like in inter in in another way if you, ifI don't really understand the process, I cannot really be a greatest kindainvestor, especially kind of industry because I don't have really have the bigpicture and have the detail to, from the strategy to the execution.

Yeah. Still, because as an investor you look at, futureopportunity and, you just spread your bets into different sectors, right? Soit's a very different mentality, but as an entrepreneur, you are laser focused,you laser focus on On kind of one single sector and one niche market and fromscratch and grow, scale and operate, right?

So that's a very different mindset, right? So I have to havegenuine passion for a particular kind of sector, and I can relate myexperience, my vision into this particular sector. So that's why I think Ispent over five, six years, looking for the right kind of sector I can tap intountil I find, crypto and web3 which is back in 2017.

Julian: Yeah. So muchto that. First of all, I totally respect having to almost like what they say,eat your own dog food, right? You have to be able to understand the experienceto even become that much better of an investor. I totally hear what you'resaying.

Has it changed your investment strategy?

Jing: The experience?

Definitely. I would say it's really hard. Of course, it's afund, right? So when you get into a stage. Then you will be able to manage avery kind of a big amount of money. And so that you can have a different set,different sectors in a very different sectors. As a if you really want to be agreat investors, you have to focus, you really can need it to invest in thingsyou, you understand.

And you need to focus on one sector and this sector has, youneed to have intensive. Domain knowledge, and you need to have the deepunderstanding about the vision and where this technology will be driving thesociety into which direction. So I would say just eventually I become aninvestor again I will be more, I will be more comfortable in leading a fund,which will be focused on one sector.

And this center, I have the best kind of knowledge andexpertise. Yeah. So that right now, just like even in IoTeX so I'm alsohandling our ecosystem fund, right? Yeah. And now I'm much more enjoying my,my, my job and I have much more confidence because of, my understanding of theindustry much deeper than an outsider and also because of the network, right?

So you are in this industry and you have the most relevanttalent network, founder network. You know who is best for what, and then justyou can always have the brainstorm session. And this starts in, I'm reallyenjoy those kinds of brainstorm session and, to to talk about, what's a greatidea.

What's You know, really what ideas really make sense and what'sthe biggest need and demand for.

Julian: When you saywhen you say ecosystems, I had a call with another founder and they weredescribing ecosystems cause they were different products, but similar structurecompany.

What, how do you deploy capital to these ecosystems and arethese ecosystems individuals, companies small groups of people? Describe to usthe ecosystems and how do you actually deploy capital? Is it coins? Injectionof funds?

Jing: Yeah, I thinkthis is almost A term for crypto and Web3, right?

For each kind of network, they see themselves as an ecosystem.First of all, when we talk about ecosystem, mostly it's about, the fundingsource. Most of the ecosystem funds, the funding source mainly from thefoundation, right? So for each foundation, they will have a treasury and thistreasury have certain allocation will be assigned for the ecosystem fund.

The reason is, they want to like, support and in invest in someof the early stage, project which are building on top of their platform, right?Of course, they, each of them, they have their own vision, their own project,but this, they are some sort like, have a synergy with infrastructure of thatecosystem or building with and contributes.

Or add value to the ecosystem. So normally that's the scope.And in our ecosystem fund, since we are the largest modular infrastructureplatform for Deepin, right? Our main focus will be investing in the Deepinearly stage of the Deepin project founders, right? And also including Deepin,of course.

And AI, some of the AI, some of the infrastructure, and alsosome of the device based, RWA projects. Those are our what type of the projectwe are looking for. So they are we are more later focused and we understandwhat they are building. And, of course, when we select who we support.

It's just like a, it's just like a VC play, right? So you areselecting the best, founder team, founding team, who with a long term visionhave the best skills.

Julian: What else dothey have? You just, do they have a strong business model already?

Do they already have an MVP that they're testing?

Do they already have users? Are they pre users? When you saythe best, what are the almost checklist items? They may not need to be, revenueor profitable, excuse me. But they have to have these items. What are thoseitems for you?

Jing: For us, themost important thing is about the people. Yeah we're not really looking forthose are later stage. We will, if they get there, we will help them to haveaccess to our kind of investment network, for the growth funding or furtherinvesting in them, right? For us, we are most focused on the very early stage.We want to be the first check to support them, right?

But the most important thing is about the funding team, right?If they have the big vision and what's their kind of experience with theirpassion, with their motivation, right? If they have any kind of track record, Ithink that's the only thing that matters because, all the direction, if thisis, this team is smart enough, they can pivot to the right direction, right?

And or we can help them to lead to eventually, through roundsof the iteration, they will get there, right? But the team, we cannot reallyput our shoes into them. They will be on the driving seat. Yeah. And we aremore like the support, supporting role to provide all the resources providingall kinds of go to market kind of network, to help them accelerate theirprocess.

Julian: And what'sthe go to market strategy for these ecosystems being that, it's not say, B2Cproduct or something B2B, it's not necessarily they have these social platformsthat genuinely attract or what are those platforms for these projects? How doyou go to market?

Jing: You mean youmean for Altex or for those Deepin projects? The Deepin projects. The dippingproject. Yeah. For most of the dipping project, I think, what blockchain reallyhelps them to scale at the early stage is about incentive model. So it's aboutthis idea to have a kind of right incentive model.

So incentive, the most important like participants, they wantto drive to the network as a first. And so that they will have kind of theflywheel really can kick off. So I would say this is a harder part because, ata very early stage, for it, for any of those DP network they are not reallysure which part of the network is the most important thing and, once they canget, those resources at a certain scale, and then it will help them to drivethe entire network grow. Yeah.

And that part is also, what we as a kind of investor andsupporters, we can we can add a value, right? So it's about like how we createkind of the token model, for example, right?

So how we create the whole model and make it important to drivethe resources, like the demand the supply side, right? The supply side, to growthe network in certain in certain stage. And another thing is about how theycan, where they can find the initial users.

Like the community, right? The foundation for many of thosekind of deep network, just like a crypto network. So we are, they find the, thebest, the value add network builder and it's different, from deep network isdifferent from as a kind of crypto project. They have a very importantparticipant we call miner.

So those are the device deployer, right? So where they can findthose, community members, they are passionate about your vision and then theywant to take the high risk and they join your network, even purchase yourdevices and deploy by themselves and contribute those resources to a network atthe early stage.

So that's a hard part. Yeah.

Julian: Wow.

Taking a step back here, what initially made you decide to gointo technology? There's so many industries in the world. There's so manydifferent career paths, life can take anyone any direction. Why technology?

Jing: I would saytechnology, is the only tool I think normal people can leverage to change theworld. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think technology is is the most kind of fairtools if for the ambitious kind of individuals, if they say, Hey, no, we reallywant to move the human society in a good way or bad way. That's really dependson you. But, for many of the entrepreneurs, they want to be like, useful,really move the world, towards that kind of direction if you want, right?That's the best way, for you to involve into technology, be part, even verysmall part. Not everyone can be Elon Musk, right? Yeah. But, at least if you'reinvolved in technology, it can be a small part to contribute your ownexpertise, no matter if this is development or even just as an evangelist andadvocate.

That's a big part, right? And, contribute and devote ourselvesinto this. inTo this career and, to build it by yourself, or be part of thebuilding process and, make your technology useful or eventually beneficial tothe everyday people. I think that's a kind of the biggest motivation, at leastfor me.

But I, I think also for many of the technologists or innovatorsin Silicon

Julian: Valley. Yeah.Yeah.

Thinking about your career, seeing that you've touched so manyamazing companies, you're building IoTeX and really pushing things forward inthe decentralized infrastructure or Internet of Things space. Who along the wayhelped you get to this point?

Jing: Good question.I would say there's no kind of single person really, but every day I feel I'minspired by. Other people, I'm inspired by the other founders, investors, andsome of the biggest role models in the value of course, like those kind ofbiggest technical icons. They inspire, everyone here but just for me, themostly, some of the biggest inspirations sometimes just like for the normalpeople I met here, met with a lot of hundreds, even thousands of passionatefounders. I'm always like, got inspired by some, young people, talented, verytalented, with big idea, bold idea. And, put their ideas into the work. Andthis kind of just in reverse kind of, inspired me. I want to be reallycontinuously building step by step, and to put my vision into the reality.

I think that's a continuous process. There's not one day we, incrypto world, sometimes people say, hey, they come here for the money part, butI see there are a lot of people that come here for really changing the world.They want to build the technology from scratch, step by step, right?

So that's a kind of a long term journey. I would say themotivation has to root it into a long term vision.

Julian: Yeah.

And, and I guess, and if you weren't working on, IoTeX andinvesting in these ecosystems that you're, working with, what would you bedoing?

Jing: That's aninteresting question. I haven't been thinking about that, for a long time. Iwould say, I would say just I will think about some other ways, for myself, Iwill say, I want to do sports, right?

So I'm always like, enjoy sports, ski, track and field, I woulddo more sports and, in the nature. I want to create the connection with thenature and, to focus on my own kind of, mental and the body and all the things.

And, eventually I will say if I'm not doing like blockchain,crypto, I'm really interested in the healthcare and medical stuff. I reallyhave the interest in like the gene, the beauty of the gene. And try to justspend my time to look at that part.

And then say, see if there's any innovations or, like anythingI can do for that, of course, I'm not really like from that background. But ifI have time, I want to spend time kind of research on that.

Julian: What makesyou it sounds like a common theme is you're attracted to emerging companies,innovating companies, early stage things that may not have any practical senseyet in terms of its adoptability.

In terms of the average person. What makes you so attracted tothese types of companies or technologies where it's, the average person may notsee it day to day, but it has such a long term benefit?

Jing: Yeah, you,because I will say, when you look at the humanity, right?

So when you look at the kinds of human society, how they evolvestep by step, it's not really from just the existing system. It has to becomefrom out of the box. Never. Be like, you're doing the similar things andcompete with a big player and then you create something dramatic or just movesthe society forward.

It's always you need to think about things from the firstthing, principle. And sometimes some ideas I met with, talk to those kind offounders like quite crazy why it matters. But why it matters, it looks likefrom now, maybe you don't really understand that.

But in 10 years, it's different, like a lot of the technologyright now, you feel, wow, we are getting there. For example, the autonomouscars, right? For example, the, the artificial intelligence 10 years ago, a lotof things, it's like, it's impossible, but now they become part of your life.

whEre are they from? It's not they come, they just appeared. Sothere is a kind of decades of research and decades of hard working, innovativework. It just like maybe come from kind of some researchers like ideas, crazyideas, even like imagined ideas, or it's just like from sometime from theirdream, right?

Or it's just from the first principle point of view,theoretically, there's a possibility, but there's no practical way to getthere. But normally, sometimes those bold ideas turn to be the biggest,innovation force, which can eventually change the world. So I think. I'm reallyjust fascinated by that part of the world.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Ilove it. I think those bold predictions, like you said, things that weren'tavailable technology wise are becoming actual, even ChatGPT, the average personcan start using AI intelligence to even start implementing that into theirnormal lives. Autonomous cars, they're already testing them.

Jing: One part isvery important, it's about we need to have the tolerance for the failure,especially for the early stage kind of investor sometimes they say you don't,when you invest, it you forget about it, it's not about the return game it'sabout, you buying the vision and the people and you have to like, plant seedand you put the funding into so many kind of talented people and let them try.

So maybe 90, 99 percent of the experiments will fail, buteventually there is this, there was a kind of some cool idea, can work. So it'salready already worth it. It's very worth it, just like only for kind of oneidea, eventually it breaks through.

Julian: Yeah.

If if I was a, a fan of yours and I was curious in how toactually get to where you are today, what steps along the process would yourecommend someone who wants to, work with companies like you or invest andreally get into your the day to day mechanics that you're so excited about, howdo you do that?

Jing: Yeah, I wouldsay, for all the kind of the, young talents just be open minded, don't likeasking other people to identify the success, right? So you are your ownidentifier and, have a strong kind of belief in yourself, in your world. Likeown perception, of the world and how it should go with, right?

And also really get yourself involved into the right network,right? So it's a network, with kind of a lot of the bright minds, unless therehas to be like successful people, right? Of course, you need to have thementors, role models who you know, Eventually make things work, right?

Those are you can learn from them. But also you need to makeyourself into the environment. And this environment have a lot ofopportunities, for the changes and for the innovations and not a staticinnovation, static kind of, environment, which, just ask you to follow therules.

And just do what, they ask you to do, right? So I think theenvironment itself it's very important. It provides different opportunities.But for the young people specifically, I would say, I'm not, you don't reallyhave to quit your college and start your kind of, projects straight away.

I think that life is a marathon, right? So it's a long termgame and then you need to just keep learning and keep the curiosity. And. Getall the resources you, you can to learn and get your hand dirty. Even just likea kind of small project. For example some of them, they come to me and say,Hey, how I should start a blockchain project, right?

So I say, Hey, become a user first, right? So you just have youever used all the tools by yourself, all the Deepin protocols, all the DeFiprotocols, all the blockchain, layer one, layer two, yeah. Do you understandall that? Before you really be a kind of active users and really understandwhat the user needs. And then it's very hard for you to be a founder becauseyou don't really understand, what's your audience need, so get your hands dirtyis very important.

Julian: If I'msomeone with a project, or, want to get into blockchain, where do I startlearning the information I need to get my hands dirty, get involved maybe Ihave a wallet, I've used it, but I really want to start, say, building anelixir or an Solana or are these other technologies?

Jing: Where do I goto the docs, yeah. Look at the docs, from for all, any kind of ecosystem.Solana, Ethereum, right? Bitcoin. They all have very good resources of the thedocs, to try to read and understand if you are a developer, right?

And, try try to build something, leverage on the tools and docsthey provide. And also if you really want to have normal like basic knowledge,there are so many resources, go to some of the podcasting, very easy for you tounderstand the basic ideas, the concept of what they are talking about, try tounderstand what they are talking about, right?

But it's not enough. You need to try by yourself. So that, forexample, there are a lot of narratives that, hey, how about, so the ownership,authority, a lot of the terms which are only existing in crypto, but it justnot only follows the terms. You need to just use the product so that you canreally understand what this term means, right?

To have your own way to understand, what's the value, why itexists, why, decentralized money matters, why decentralized network matters.Those type of things.

Julian: Yeah, soundssurround yourself with the yeah. Surround yourself with information and Yeah,exactly.

Yeah.

Jing: Yeah. Emergeyourself into the, the entire network and talk to people. And engaging, engagewith, the community. Engage with, different community. And each community, it'sinteresting, they have different culture. You have different, philosophy and ifyou get into kind of AAP, NFT club will be so different from, if you getinvolved into kind of the developer, the Ethereum, developer community.

Yeah. Yeah. And find your position. Eventually you will knowwhich community you really belong to. So you're so aligned with that vision.You want to be part of it and then, be active, right? Be a try to find your wayto contribute.

Julian: Yeah.

Thinking about anything new and exciting nowadaysprofessionally, personally, what's exciting for you and, what you have goingon?

Jing: I would say2024 will be a very exciting year for the entire web street and so many newthings will happen, right? So Bitcoin, of course, everyone, the mind is in inBitcoin, but I think much more than that. Deepin is definitely one of thebiggest exciting sector we should look for. It's 2. 2 trillion dollar market,right now.

And including like the AI and WA, it will be 10 trillion. It'smuch bigger than DeFi and, other kinds of crypto combined. The potential isthere, right? And also the technology is ready. I think, that's a big sectoryou cannot miss. And in other like areas, we see a lot of the other kind ofinnovations, almost in every kind of single sectors like DeFi and, Web3 game.

And we see 2 scaling solutions. So those are all haveinteresting development, right? So I would say definitely. Next year will be avery exciting year, for the entire society.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah.Anything you're reading or listening to right now that has given you littlebits of inspiration?

Jing: Yeah. So a lotof a lot of reading a lot podcast. Everyday podcasts, I'm a, a listener toUnchained of course A16Z, crypto. And I feel like, but sometimes I will listento the non crypto podcasts, I just, mentioned, it's about biology, it's about,like the AI.

I would listen to the different, irrelevant to our kind ofindustry. Sometimes, you can get more out of out of those kinds of sectors. Somake yourself open minded and, those cross border information really can helpyou to understand, why we are here now and what, where, will bring us up to.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah.Coming up to the end of the show here one of the questions I'd love to ask isthere any question that I didn't ask you that I should have?

Jing: nO, I think youasked everything. Yeah, I'm really enjoying. Yeah. I saw one question, myquestion is, Julian so what's your what's your vision and what's your missionhere?

What's your mission, this year or just what's really make youexcited?

Julian: Yeah, a lotof things. When you see the overall landscape of technology, there's so manydifferent ways that news can surprise you any day. So that just always keepsyou on my toes. On a personal level, we're building out an amazing communitycalled Grupo, where we're connecting remote engineers.

People in tech designers, people who have really great skillsjust want to find community. And I'm really just bullish on everythingcommunity based. Everything is community based nowadays. Products are becomingcommunity based. Networks are becoming community based, professional orotherwise. And there's just, there's not a one size fits all anymore, which Ilike, and I think Crypto and Web3 is really pushing that community forward, orthat that that reality forward, where it's companies and ecosystems will haveto share, and we'll breed some amazing collaborations but there'll be a lot of,dynamic changes that we'll see, and I think, personally, I'm excited becauseit's been so stale for, the last few years The podcast, we ran a successfulpodcast for startup founders, Behind Company Lines which was immenselysuccessful and really, the group of podcast is to continue that success butalso to amplify what's going out there in the world.

What are people building how can I start building, gettinginvolved what are the smart people doing today, how can I catch them, how can Icatch Jing in, in her office and really, Get to the grasp of what are amazingcompanies doing? What are the decisions they're making?

Why are they making those decisions? Because I think the moreinformation that's out there the more you can give that to a community ofpeople the more exciting, fun positive benefits. Everything just moves forward.So My vision is just to be the inspiration and just continue pushing thatforward however I can, talking to founders, giving thoughts, opinions, supportyeah, at this point in my career, building day to day is fun, but, the otherstuff, it's okay, how can I just get involved more, play around with, differentpeople's ideas, brainstorm, things like that.

I think from what I hear from the 300 founders I'veinterviewed, Finding That's what you got to do to be successful, you got towork really hard on what you're doing and then talk to a bunch of people aboutit and talk to them about what they're doing and just be a friend.

Jing: That's afantastic, mission.

That's exactly just like what I say, what you are doing isreally contribute hugely, to to building kind of the community and to educatethe people, right? All the interviews, you Bring up the stories of, thebackground stories and, you try to educate your audience about something, newto, something new to the technology and also just like you mentioned I think,the remote work really can change everything change the entire kind ofstructure of the, I think the corporate, globally, a hundred percent. Take usas a kind of example, like before COVID, like most of our core team based inSilicon Valley. And then now, like we are our team member across, five, fivekind of continents and across over 10 countries. So yeah, so everyone like,work remotely.

But still we have such a kind of strong tie and work togethereven more efficient than we work together. And we have been able to work withso much so talented people and actually, a region previously, we will not beable to have access to those talents, right?

They are going to live remotely. They are in different in thecountry, in Europe, in Southeast Asia, in different countries.

Julian: Yeah, forcompanies to be successful, they have to have the right people with the rightskills. And now it's even that much more easy to, and accessible to find thosepeople because they're everywhere in the world.

And It doesn't matter where they're currently living but youcan find them, and we've been we have a team internally where they just havesuch an amazing, unique skill set, and, they're in parts of Brazil, thePhilippines we're in the U. S., and it doesn't matter because it's soefficient, it's we're the right people, the right team And then, as having thatcore together, I was going to ask you, actually, how do you build in such avolatile ecosystem, as from a company structure standpoint, like you can't hireand fire everyone like a SaaS company but you got to keep, really strong coreteam as the market is unpredictable at times or based on, some kind of trend orwave, how do you do that?

What structure do you have and how do you keep that core teamtogether? Throughout and built continuously.

Jing: Long termvision. I would say just It's very important, for the corporate level, you havea kind of long term vision. And this vision is bigger than, founders.

It's bigger than the ambition of any kind of singleindividuals, right? So this vision makes everyone aligned. And this will alsojust help us determine who is the right person, who is the right kind of,person to join our team as a talent for the first place, right? And everyoneknows they are here.

They come in here because they are excited and passionateabout. Making this big vision into reality. And so that, the market itself willnot really affect, what you do on everyday level. And we also believe in it'snot about the price, it's about the value, right? When the value is there, whenwe really building the value, the network building the value, and value can bereflected in the market eventually.

Of course, it will not really in the same pace, right? So wecannot predict markets and we cannot really directly affect the price. But,what we can do is like building the value, we make sure we can grow the value.And those type of things actually can accumulate it. And also it's much morekind of predictable.

And it's also much more in your own hands, right? And I think,we have a very strong team and each of them, when you talk to them,individually, you will say each of them, they are very talented in their way.And, each of them, they are very aligned with, the long term value, which IoTeXwant to achieve.

So I think that's the best kind of asset we have. And we canmove so long, starting from 2017, it's a long, a lot of kind of just like theysee us as a kind of OG project, but we are becoming stronger, the team wisestronger, and we have better team members. Some of them they have been with usfrom day one.

And they never changed, and our co founder never changed. Theyare still so much, so committed to the vision. I think that's the importantthing. But of course, because of the remote work, this kind of, gave us abetter, much better, wider access to the talents globally. So that's reallyImportant.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah.Yeah.

Jing, that's a great question to end on. Last thing is, wherecan we find you? Where can we be a fan of what you're doing, what the companyis doing? Give us your social plugs , where can we be a fan of what you havegoing on?

Jing: Yeah. Followour, follow our kind of Twitter.

Follow our X dot. So iotex.io and it is our website. And joinour community, our tg on Telegram and discord. And subscribe our newsletter,right? So we have a weekly newsletter to update you about everything about theDPA and everything about IoTeX, right? And we have a lot of events. We, thisyear we initiated an event brand called Real World.

Our next big event will be in East Denver February 2024. And wewill have kind of a lot more events and even just like for the community, likeyourself, right? We're happy to support you if you are. Passionate about, thedipping sectors and we can work together to host like, some of the virtualevent.

Maybe we have a lot of Twitter space. Yeah. To focus on one,one topic and, invite our, the dipping founders, investor QL, and we worktogether, right? We talk about all the topic and then try to just make theaudience understand more and how they can evolve. So there are multiple ways toget involved, they are here.

Julian: Amazing.Yeah. Amazing, Qing. Yeah. Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to gothrough your experience, your background, what you're working on now. I'm surewe could have had probably an episode that lasts 10 times as long, but we'llkeep it, we'll keep it here for now, but thank you again for joining the show.

Jing: Thank you somuch for having me. Of course. Take care. Have a good one.

Julian: Thank you forwatching the episode. The Grupo podcast is about technology and working in aremote world. If you like what we're doing, please like, comment, subscribe,and support us interviewing the leaders of today.