S9E5: Powering the Future of Blockchain with Kathleen Breitman of Tezos

Tezos was built by a very small team initially. A good way to keep yourself honest is to actually put some skin in the game. I meet a lot of founders who think of how much they can raise as like a vanity metric and very little about what they need in order to make an effective product. So I think it encourages a sort of thinking that I think is unhealthy overall.

Welcome back to Season 9 of The Room Podcast.

Claudia, happy Tuesday.

Happy Tuesday, Madison.

Thrilled to be back behind the mic with you. Since last season, you've had a few updates on your end. You're now at Harvard Business School. Congratulations.

Thank you so much, Claudia.

It's been a dream of mine for some time to attend, and I'm thrilled to be back on the East Coast this fall. You'll have to keep me updated on what's going on in the Bay Area news and all things Priv, where you're still co-CEO and co-founder.

I absolutely will.

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Welcome back to another episode of The Room Podcast. Today, we are excited to share our conversation as we sit down with crypto innovator Kathleen Brightman, co-founder of Tezos. Tezos is an open-source blockchain that can execute peer-to-peer transactions and serves as a platform for deploying smart contracts. The Tezos network achieves consensus using proof-of-stake mechanisms. Tezos uses an on-chain governance model that enables the protocol to be amended when upgrade proposals receive a favorable vote from the community. In today's episode, we discuss key themes such as security in the early blockchain landscape, approaches to funding startups in the crypto space, and self-governance in Web3 and the current regulatory environment. We hope you learn a lot in today's episode. Enjoy it. Let's open the door.

Kathleen, thank you so much for joining us today here in The Room.

Thank you for having me.

We're really excited to dive into your story of Tezos. And before we get to that, we'd love to start at the beginning. With all of our guests and understand a bit more about where you grew up and how that shaped your view of the world.

I was born in New York, March 16th, 1990. Pretty well documented. My parents are college sweethearts. My dad was a contractor. My mom taught public school and lived a very conventional sort of tri-state, eventually suburban, very nice New Jersey lifestyle for a bit. And then I went to college. I studied philosophy. I started off at NYU, I transferred to Cornell. I met my husband the second to last week that I was in New York, so we did long distance for a few years and then we got engaged after I graduated.

Oh my gosh.

Okay. So growing up in the center of what many people would say everything, I know Claudia might say that also having grown up in New York, but in that vein of early identity, did you always think you were gonna become a founder?

No. In fact, my father is a small businessman and I grew up with a very nice lifestyle, but certainly seeing a lot of the stress associated with being a founder or having to make your lot. And so it's not glamorous. My, um, maternal grandfather was also in the restaurant industry and mostly as a consequence of being an Irish immigrant, he was, I don't wanna say an entrepreneur by force, but certainly he had very limited opportunities when he came to the US as an adult. And he became a restaurateur and there was no glamor about any of these things early on. Not to say that I thought it was bad. Certainly there's a lot of independence associated with running your own business, but just seeing the sheer volume of BS that my dad had to deal with, my grandfather had to deal with, it wasn't the most attractive advertisement. But those are very different, obviously, than software-based challenges. I got like a very different flavor of, I don't wanna say conflict, but stress growing up. But there was still ways to reason about it that I think are a little bit nicer than doing a software startup. The restaurant sells food or it doesn't. The alcohol has great margins. These are tried and true things. My father, he was a contractor. He would get that contract or he wouldn't. So in some ways it was like unenviable, but in other ways it was gloriously simplistic. I'm surprised that I do what I do, but I think mostly it's because I married who I did.

It's so interesting to hear just how having exposure to enterprising individuals, whether it be your parents or your relatives or who you decide to marry does chip away at what you decide to do and influence you in those ways. And, um, something that's interesting for both Claudia and myself, we actually both attended all-girls experiences through our K through 12 education. Me for high school, her for elementary school. And I've personally noticed a pattern of meeting all-girls graduates in any capacity and just being maybe like disproportionately impressed by them and I'm really curious, I noticed on your resume that you also attended an all-girls school for some period of time. Would you say that's impacted your kind of, you know, perspective and how you view the world?

Yeah, it's funny. I went to high school at a place called Immaculate Heart Academy. It was a sports powerhouse of Northern New Jersey at the time. I was a jock, or at least I thought I was, but the silver lining of it was that, yeah, I think if I'm comparing my more traditional public school experiences that were co-ed, What was interesting about IHA and what I continue to find fascinating is the high status thing was to be a nerd. So like if you were in all the AP classes and you were also on a sports team, you were walking on water. It was like this blissful little oasis where like, I have a friend who sent me a song about like self-esteem and things like this and the internal monologue of, of a teenage girl. And I'm like, yeah, that wasn't at all what being around other women all the time inculcated. So I was in retrospect very happy. I think at the time I was definitely like, oh, where are the dudes? But I think just the tenor of the school I went to was extremely nice. And I still have some friends from high school and they're all really quite wonderful women.

I'm laughing just because the where are the dudes question was such a question I felt in high school too. But then you get to the real world and you're like, oh my gosh, they're literally everywhere.

I'm good actually. Let's go back. For me, the transition to having to care about my appearance all day, every day was quite jarring when I went to college. I'm like, oh no, I can't get dates like that. I think grooming was probably the thing that I had to readjust to more when I went to college. I was like, oh crap.

Speaking of college, let's fast forward just a few years. So you graduated from Cornell, and after a stint at Bridgewater and Accenture, you found yourself on the journey to start Tezos in 2016. However, you released a white paper on what came to be Tezos just a couple of years earlier in 2014. Can you ground our listeners in what the blockchain landscape looked like in that era and how you even came to land yourself in that space?

That's a great question. It's also one of my favorite questions to answer. I found out about Bitcoin, I started dating my husband in April 2010, and I want to say he was on the, um, cryptography mailing list where Bitcoin was announced since the mid-aughts, right? Like, and so he has a fateful draft in his email, like, this Bitcoin thing looks cool, should check it out when it launches. That was like 2008. And so like by 2010, he's like, oh, I missed the boat. Crypto's already taken off. But basically Bitcoin was this hobbyist project that it was announced on a hobbyist mailing forum and, and it was very little more than that. Basically the software was released in January 2009 and it was basically used for buying and selling drugs on the internet. And also this phenomenon called local bitcoins where you would buy and sell crypto by meeting up with someone in a bar, like, and waiting for the transaction to post 'cause it takes 60 minutes. And all that's to say, like, these were very primitive days. When I first learned about it, I thought it was cool. The idea of having stateless money is really provocative and a ways. It tests the boundaries of what we think of money is, and I think it challenges some assumptions in a really clever way. However, I, it looked and smelt like a pipe dream, right? And especially in 2010. And so my husband was always like very curious about it and frankly, he would just not shut up about it. So I, so I gradually had to learn about it the same way that had he rooted for a sports team, I assume I would've known about the sports team. But this is Arthur's version of manly hobbies. And so I got to know more about crypto. Writ large and like the kind of assumptions and opportunities around it. Meanwhile, the cryptocurrency space professionalized quite a bit around 2012, 2013. That's when like Coinbase was founded and a few other like OG companies. More importantly to the Tezo story, there were also new technologies being developed because Bitcoin is a, a wonderful piece of software and frankly it's got a lot of staying power, which is quite incredible, but it also lacks certain features that you would ideally want in digital money, in stateless money, namely anonymous transactions. So the idea is to basically have upgrades to the protocol. Like, how do you actually instantiate that? We happen to have known the original team that worked on what later became Zcash, and we know offhand that they had proposed to the Bitcoin Core team, the maintainers of the software, this perceived upgrade to the protocol, and they're like, nah, we're good. And I think that really rocked my husband's world because it just didn't make sense. Why wouldn't you do that? And it prompted a question. More to the, to the point of like, hey, if you do want to actually upgrade this software, how do you fashion it? So Bitcoin is open source the way that most cryptocurrencies are, and really who maintains that code base ultimately directs the evolution of the protocol or devolution or stasis, whatever direction it's going to go in. I'm just thinking towards the more principled account of this. If you do have stateless money, how would you go about adjudicating what should be an upgrade or what isn't, and that's where the idea of Tezos comes. It, it's born of the observation that Bitcoin lacks mechanism to upgrade itself, and more importantly, it's not good if every time a new feature is introduced into the space, it comes through the process of having to bootstrap an entirely new protocol or token in order to make it a reality. So what Tezos does, Tezos is a cryptocurrency. It has a native forum for upgrading, proposing and upgrading itself. It's done so 14 times, most recently last Friday. And with that, it adds a lot of new technical features mostly, but obviously it can also change the rules of the protocol's upgrade process. So it gets pretty meta pretty quickly.

Since 2008, really, you and your now husband were very deep in the crypto ecosystem and you had this aha moment really that there was this opportunity to really build a new cryptocurrency that was able to upgrade itself. Tell us a little bit more about that actual moment in time where you looked at each other and said, hey, there's something here, let's go start this.

We're not as crypto enthusiastic as many other people are. We treat it like what it is, which is by and large like a cool experiment. And so we just were content. We found a really great group of engineers that were reasonably priced. Instead of a golf course membership, we just were paying, um, for development of this. And it was truly, no one likes a hedger, so I try not to look like a hedger, but we were hedging, right? Like, it was like, oh, you know, this is kind of on simmer. Meanwhile, I had started my career. I was overall pretty happy with my first jobs, but I didn't really find my forever home or a place that I really wanted to work at long-term. Whereas my husband kept getting jobs that he really loved over and over again. It was more of like a gradual descent until people Fat became more interested in Tezos when the DAO hack happened on Ethereum, which was basically like a emergency bug was found in this software that was managing hundreds of millions of dollars and, uh, a hacker exploited a pretty substantial amount of the reserves. And this prompted a governance crisis in the Ethereum ecosystem. And there was a whole big like, hey, what happened to those Tezos guys? Once that part of our prophecy was fulfilled. And at the time I was working as basically a product manager at a startup. I didn't think it was anything to write home about. And my husband was at Waymo, which is a self-driving car company of Google. Way cooler job. So I just decided it would be better if I managed the project from there on out and we launched it. But it was a combination of like, it was on simmer for a bit. We were working on it gradually, but not with both feet in. And then it seemed like the market timing was really perfect and I just thought I was the better person to steward that, both given opportunity cost and also just generally feel the vibe of a place or not.

It's amazing how many of our guests have a very similar narrative of like they were working on something for a while, maybe it was on the back burner, and then timing aligned and went all in. Certainly not a hedger situation at all, um, but really a truthful part of what it looks like in those very early days with starting a company. You mentioned the DAO hack. Tezos was one of the first blockchains to leverage a proof-of-stake mechanism to provide high security and low energy usage compared to the popular proof-of-work chains. What was the aha moment that unlocked this strategy?

Oh geez. Austin has a pretty unromantic answer, but basically the whole Tezos ethos is about getting the best technology right away. And by 2013, proof-of-work had become dated, had become stale. Proof of stake is very difficult for a variety of reasons. Basically, you need to have this event where everyone coordinates and runs the software, and they need to have some way of posting a stake in order to do that. So it's a coordination issue really more than anything else, more than a technology issue. By come 2014, so it's really just in the spirit of like best in class. I did pitch one or two people on like, isn't it better that it's more environmentally friendly? But the, the crypto folks, they're not sold by this. So I, I quickly got rid of that part of my bit, but now it has since been revived since obviously a lot more people are interested in cryptocurrencies, but had hangups about Bitcoin's energy consumption and Ethereum's energy consumption before it transitioned. But really it's just that it was the best software, it was the best tool for the job. And, and that only really happened because proof of work, which dates back to as a proposal from 1994, is a really elegant mechanism for launching a cryptocurrency because you don't need this coordination point. You basically just release tokens as part of the, the mining process. There's no such elegance in proof of stake, unfortunately.

Totally. That makes a lot of sense. Switching gears a little bit, as Tezos grew, let's talk a little bit about funding and how you were able to capitalize Tezos. In the landscape of crypto startups, people over the past 5 years have taken many different approaches to capital raising, from working with crypto-native funds to working with established venture capitalists, crypto arms. To funding through ICOs. Walk us through your approach to funding Tezos and what that journey was like for you.

Yeah, the Tezos Foundation was established in Switzerland in early 2017, very similar to the Ethereum Foundation. In fact, use the same attorney, same everything. And so the idea for having a sort of nonprofit for an open source piece of software is extremely commonplace, and that's unsurprising. Basically, it's convenient to have places to house trademarks, things like this. So that was the principal idea behind having this sort of entity. It's funny, so the project was in effect feature complete by around mid-2017, but we still had that variable, that like coordination point for launching a proof-of-stake network that needed to be established. And so the cleanest way to do that and the most elegant way to do that was to have the Tezos Foundation conduct a fundraiser, what's commonly called an ICO. The Ethereum Foundation did this, and again, I don't think they needed to because they wound up being proof-of-work anyway. Um, so arguably they didn't really need this coordination point, but Tezos being proof of stake certainly did. So over the course of 2 weeks or like 2,000 Bitcoin blocks, the Tezos Foundation raised $232 million from 30,000 people, I think in over 60 different countries across the world. So pretty crazy coordination point. Obviously a really nice, uh, gesture. And then about a year later, the network was launched and everyone claimed tokens based on, uh, pro rata shares of what they had contributed to the Tezos Foundation. In my mind, this was just a coordination issue that needed to be solved for the proof of stake launch. Because frankly, the hard parts had been self-funded by me and Arthur, and then we sold some shares of our company to a venture capitalist named Tim Draper. But that was like May 2017, so it was quite late in the game. But I like to argue that it's mostly self-funded. Obviously the Tezos Foundation now has quite a bit of money as a result of this coordination, uh, exercise.

Fascinating how there's just so many different ways to cut and dice getting a company off the ground. And I think a lot of early stage founders, and this is maybe less relevant in crypto, but they assume that VC money is the only way to go. And so it's always great to hear a lot of founders on the podcast where they actually bootstrapped or used their own money to get the initial product off the ground and then scaled it later. So incredibly cool anecdote.

I mean, obviously VCs have a, a, a place in any ecosystem, especially with like more ambitious projects and very technically dense projects. But honestly, Tezos was built by a very small team initially. And a good way to keep yourself honest is to actually put some skin in the game. I meet a lot of founders who think of how much they can raise as like a vanity metric and very little about what they need in order to make an effective product. So I think it encourages a sort of thinking that I think is unhealthy overall.

Also, just one fun full circle thing.

You mentioned Tim Draper. We've had Jesse, his daughter, on the podcast, and she's actually an investor in Claudia's company.

She really walks the walk with helping female founders. She's like the one Draper child I haven't met yet.

We'll need to host like a podcast guest reunion party or something like that. You mentioned skin in the game. As a founder myself, I very much feel that on a daily basis. We know the founder's journey is full of high highs and low lows. Could you share a little bit more about a moment in Tezos's lifecycle where things just didn't go as planned?

Most of Tezos's lifecycles, things aren't going well as planned. Anyone who tells you that like most of it's really green with any project is probably not being entirely honest with themselves. But what has compounded, I think, the stress of this is that my husband and I work together and we have a very direct and clear communication style. And unfortunately that means we don't bullshit each other or we can't, I don't know. I, when I try to bullshit him, he calls me out on it. But all that's to say the highs are very high. The lows are very low because basically there's this constant reminder of what you're going through together. But I would have to say probably the most stressful thing was basically the money was raised into this entity called the Tezos Foundation, which I've never been employed by, associated with, so on and so forth. I interact with them on occasion, but it's sparingly. And basically the person who was running the foundation at the time was this fellow Johann Gevers, who decided that he didn't want to actually disburse any of the funds or refund anyone or pay anyone. Basically from the month of August to February of 2017 into 2018, as a consequence of a story he told the press, which was entirely fabricated, it prompted 6 class action lawsuits to be blamed against me and my husband personally, alleging that we had access to the money and were secretly controlling the foundation, which is a funny story when you're getting allegations of how the project isn't going to launch, so on and so forth, because we don't have access to the money. So I don't know, like it, there is a contradiction in the sort of written statement. So that was super stressful. A few things you don't know about lawsuits until you get into them. One, it's the most legal way to torture someone. Two, it's really expensive. And 3, basically the truth will not set you free. The legal process in the US is meant to say like, oh, well, if you didn't do anything wrong, it's no problem. No, because in the meantime you could be bankrupted, you could lose your shirt just basically trying to mount a defense. And so that's almost what happened to us. Thankfully we had quite a bit of money in savings based on previous investments. And so we were able to basically mount a defense on behalf of the Tezos Foundation, which was not doing anything. but also keeping the engineering team going and, and figuring out, how to get this guy, Johann, ousted, all at the same time. So it was a very fun, 6 months in the sense that I know I'll never be that stressed out ever again. But I think a lot of people are litigious without thinking about the way that litigation affects you. And it, it really does cripple most people unless you're ferocious and nerdy like me and Arthur, in which case it's just another challenge to go through.

I can only imagine that you lost sleep and maybe years off your life dealing with that type of high-stress lawsuit situation and the survival of your company.

There are parts of it that were really funny though. The first person suing me was this guy Arman Anvari, and I look at his resume, he's a white shoe attorney who's worked in like Perkins Coie. This guy's suing me. Wow. And my husband just put in his Ethereum address and we find him on AutoAdmit, which is like a racist 4chan. And Tucker Carlson's maid writer was also found to be on it. So what's interesting about AutoAdmit is no one wants to be obviously associated with their query there. So my husband built a Google for AutoAdmit, an indexer, and he found this guy's post every day. And he has like direct contradictions of his written testimony. This is an attorney who is active in the bar, right? And he coins the phrase "break kike." He's racist, homophobic. He like. Does all these things, but more importantly, he directly contradicts his written testimony. So we got him out. And then the next people who came in somehow were worse. They ran an OTC trading desk in Australia and they had on their click-through, again, a thing that directly contradicted their written testimony. At the same time, their patriarch of this company was thrown in prison for raping a 12-year-old girl. These were terrible people. Like, I felt really self-conscious at first. I was like, oh my God, like I'm being sued. Maybe I did something wrong, rethinking everything. And I was like, I'm getting sued by actually the worst people in the world. So I was like, let's get this. So I think it was like looking at my adversaries. We often like dox our trolls, not in public, but just for personal pleasure. And it's really sad folks. So at first I felt very apprehensive, really like afraid. And then I was like, oh, come on, this is awesome. I have nothing to worry about.

I think when we talk about stressful moments in starting a company or having to have perseverance, We sometimes don't think about it in this context where you have people outside of the company itself attacking you or challenging you in this way. Or at least that's not the first thing that comes to mind. I think of like, oh, push through that deployment timeline or, or push the fundraise. But this is like real attack-forward experiences that is expensive, as you pointed out. And so it's really helpful to hear some of the different definitions of perseverance and how that can be applied through building a business.

I gotta tell you the best thing that ever happened to me in the course of this is I found out I was being sued, but I was at this conference called Founders Forum, which is like group therapy for entrepreneurs. It's based out of Europe, but they have some outposts in the US on occasion. So if you ever get invited, please say yes. It's by far the best ROI on, on any time I spent. And I must have looked like someone had just killed my dog or something when I was reading the email, cuz my friend takes me over to the side. He's like, is everything okay? I'm like, oh, I found out I'm being sued. He's like, oh, is it your first time? And I was like, yeah. He's like, let me know when it's a country trying to sue you and I'll give you my lawyer's attorney. This is small potatoes. So it's like, what's the worst that could happen to you? Like you go bankrupt. Okay. Start over again. I was young at the time. Now I'm like, oh crap, that wouldn't be good for me now. But, but all that's to say, like, it's good to remember what your worst case scenario is and pretty much always being around people who've done successful things. Someone's tried to come after them or someone's tried to screw them over or whatever. And it's worth putting in perspective that it's a badge of honor, which is, uh, source of ulcers.

And this is why we partner with Cooley Law Firm with the podcast, to create increased access to great lawyers for situations like these. Little soft table read there. The beginning of 2023, you shared an incredible goal around continuing to use Enchanted Optimistic rollups and then through that, hitting 1 million transactions per second in data availability sampling, which has been a part of the platform that you've been building for the last 6 years, really in the public eye through the ups and downs. So first of all, congratulations on building the company from the vision you had through those moments and milestones to being here today and getting to share what you've built. We're curious though, it's halfway through the year. How are these milestones going? Get us up to speed on what you're looking for second half of this year.

Basically the challenge with blockchains right now, like, I don't know if anyone thought that they would be used for as many things as they have been. Some of the obviously use cases are poured in, slap a token on something and try to basically extract rent from what would otherwise be free software has been like a very popular business model that I don't think holds that much water. But basically NFTs, non-fungible tokens, exposed the limitations of a lot of cryptocurrencies. So Ethereum has super egregious gas fees. The network will get clogged, but that's great in comparison to other networks, which just straight up go down, right? Very centralized systems that still don't even hold water. And so the real question now for blockchains is like, how will they scale? Meaning how will they take the throughput that apparently the general public wants to give them? And basically the answer is, I think, in the Tezos roadmap. And Ethereum has challenges. One of them is that they don't upgrade as efficiently or as quickly as Tezos. And what the teams working in the Tezos ecosystem have been able to do is facilitate a pretty clear roadmap using data availability sharing and, and trying optimistic rollups in order to process a million transactions per second, which is more than Visa and MasterCard, which is pretty cool. Basically the argument or the criticism that's always levied towards blockchains is that they're clunkier databases. Why don't you just use Oracle? Right? And for 99% of what IBM proposes in their copy, that is entirely true. But there's cool stuff, and you can imagine a, you know, entire economy underpinned by Visa, MasterCard. Jeez, if you have the same throughput in a blockchain like Tezos, it's not a far cry to see a way to have basically private stateless money that's an alternative on the internet for folks who want to use it. Yeah, we think really scaling and all that good stuff are the big challenge that needs to be met for this stuff to hit primetime. It also comes from had a fair number of conversations with places like Ubisoft, which uses Tezos, and like, what would it take to get you to use this as a more active part of your servers? And usually the limitation is in scaling. But there's this other aspect to it where like these technologies are not really used for the sort of exotic purposes that they were originally intended for. Maybe it is just about trading cat JPEGs or whatever.

We'll see how that gets written in the history books. And I think It's really helpful to have that context around how fast a million transactions is per second. These days, I have a hard time keeping up on what the definition of fast is. And so benchmarking that against payment processing providers that we all know and love against this is really helpful, especially for someone who is less in the weeds. And to see that evolution, to your point, around where there are really legitimate, better use cases for applying this technology has always been core to the ideology. The ecosystem has had an interesting 2 years from high highs and low lows. You know, taking a step back from really the Tezos company itself, how have you guys been impacted and how are you thinking about the ecosystem as a whole and your thoughts around some of the reputational damage that has been done by others and their bad actor behaviors in the ecosystem?

For context, the cryptocurrency space hit its all-time high in terms of market capitalization in like 2021. And it's crazy cuz you'd think like in the middle of a pandemic, what, what was the thing that was going on? And it was a lot of speculation, obviously, like NFT craze, this sort of thing. There are notable projects that kind of became magnets for this and stewarded that social factor. And then there was the economic factor. So FTX, which was an ex— is an exchange technically, cause it's just John Ray is now the CEO, but FTX sort of came into prominence around this time. And what they were doing was basically, in addition to committing fraud, allegedly, was they were basically pumping money into all these random companies in the ecosystem and really trying to buoy that. So it made this like extremely distortive ecosystem, I would argue, because valuations got pumped up to the nines and all of a sudden, like things that otherwise wouldn't have made any sense had this distortive valuation tag to them, which lifted all boats. And got really crazy really quickly. In particular, the Solana ecosystem was the main beneficiary of that. The Tezos project is largely very boring compared, uh, to a lot of this, and there wasn't as much love heading in the direction of something that had debuted in 2018, not as shiny. While everyone was doing all these sexy things entangled in the FTX crosshairs, we were just putting our heads down and doing what we do. But bizarrely, this managed to attract a ton of generative artists who have made the blockchain super cool, at least in some corners of the internet. So I joke that it's like Greenwich Village in the 1960s. My husband's French, so he says like Paris in the 1910s. So we have our own version of what cool is, but we know that we're both not cool. So all I'd say, weirdly, Tezos has kind of persevered and had this like really organic community come to it that wasn't heavily subsidized by venture capitalists and outsized valuations for things that never made any sense in the first place. So you're seeing a lot of the fallout from that based on both FTX imploding, and a lot of VCs do invest on a track, on a longer timescale than your average person perhaps. But certainly they do wanna see some return on this. And so you saw some, like, some really funky business models fall out of grace over the last few years. So uniformly, I think this industry by and large has the reputation it deserves. I think that it's been a lot of fast and loose and not playing a long game from other entrepreneurs in the space. But my hope is that this is purely cyclical. And that, at least at some point, being a boring married couple and, and having like really solid technology, will one day come into vogue.

I think that day's around the corner, so I'm excited for you and I'm grateful as a participant in the broader ecosystem that there is your product, your experience, and your community building into this vision. Taking more of an optimistic turn, what are some projects today that you are particularly excited about?

Oh boy. I'll give you some themes. So I do think like, it's funny, DeFi, which is a common portmanteau of decentralized finance, has largely been, I call it Ouroboros finance, cuz it's a lot of tokens that exist to be traded for tokens that exist to be traded. And it's all like turtles all the way down. It's bizarrely recursive and, and doesn't actually offer any value. However, if you can imagine finance is an activity and it's a great activity, it's what helps build civilizations. It's a wonderful tool for human betterment. And so I think the more that we see things tokenized, there's a few different projects that are tokenized on Tezos. One of them is like a real estate project in Thailand, for example. It helps with capital formation that these things are on the blockchain in some form because it helps attract outside investment, right? Obviously you have to be compliant with local securities laws and things like this, but the idea of having like something that you could finance using a decentralized fashion that is really difficult to tamper with. Could be revolutionary. And so I'm more about financing activities that actually look like financing activities going into DeFi. It hasn't happened yet, but I think that's really the space where it can be transformative. And I suppose I really like the art angle. I don't think it's like the most revolutionary use case for a blockchain, but there are a lot of people, especially in the emerging markets and things like this, whose lives have been substantially better by being able to sell their creative outlet on a Tezos blockchain because it's far fewer fees than Ethereum. And I like that. It really moves the needle for a lot of people in, in pretty desolate areas to be able to do something that they love. So more of that, even obviously you can imagine some sort of souped up Mechanical Turk, or I had also written a piece in Fortune about AI plus music plus blockchain. I've heard crazier things. People actually like musicians and I'm sure they'd be willing to pay them if it was like a de minimis amount of money and, and it wasn't a difficult transaction. But what's been observed to me by many people who've interviewed me is that basically a lot of the crypto stuff, it's like 5 different loops to get through what would be just a swipe with your credit card. So that's obviously an entirely separate issue that the space has to solve for itself.

There definitely is exciting times around the corner in what else this technology can do and do at scale. And we're grateful that Tesla is doing that. One kind of macro question, again, slightly taking it outside of particularly Tezos and in your experience, or just what you're thinking about as an expert in the space. Taking a step back, the Tezos platform is built with mechanisms that help to ensure this safe, active community governance with participation and key components for Web3, but then users are able to be involved through evaluating, proposing, and approving those mechanisms. Which is standard or can be standard. How are you thinking about the relationship between self-governance and the current regulatory environment that is really across the headlines today with things like Coinbase and of course the fallout of FTX?

Interesting question. It's worth separating. Obviously Coinbase is a company that exists in many markets. FTX was an offshore exchange that was based in the Bahamas and the point's been made periodically that Coinbase tried to operate in the US and like very consciously. A lot of the reasons Sam Bankman-Fried allegedly has gotten away with the things that he did was because he really didn't give a shit in the way that poor Brian Armstrong seems to really be a bit of a Boy Scout. So it's two very dramatic stories. One is one of alleged fraud and the other is basically a company wrong place, wrong time type of thing. So it's hard, but I think cryptocurrencies are, are meant to be censorship resistant. It's a test to see some of these places that have been really difficult to operate in, like China, for example. Bans Bitcoin every few years, but Bitcoin's still there. You do find these authoritarian regimes and whatnot periodically try to get rid of cryptocurrencies, but they're not able to. I think a lot about decentralization in the context of Tezos. Me and Arthur own tokens in the Tezos ecosystem, but rarely are our opinions solicited for upgrades to the protocol. Apparently we speak authoritatively about what we think they could do, but no one solicits my opinion for whether or not they should vote on a proposal or not. So I like to think it's an actually decentralized network. There's Tezos nodes operating in, I think, 6 out of 7 continents. We'll get to Antarctica one day, but it's like a, a truly global exercise. And I think its origins, though somewhat messy as I've described before, we really did try to like put our hands behind our backs and not be petty chieftains or anything like that the way with some of these projects.

You mentioned New York in the '60s, Paris in the '10s. Both Madison and I are big art fans, and so I'd love to ask how your work in the blockchain ecosystem has interacted with the art world and how you see that aspect of crypto really evolving.

Oh yeah. The most beautiful part is people who otherwise wouldn't be able to get exposure or make a living can now make a living because they post their work to a blockchain, right? It doesn't have to be Tezos. And a guy who's become a really good friend of mine, Misson Harriman, It's funny, I met him through another one of my friends in London, and it's a cute story. She just, I suppose, had met him the week before and was like, you have to meet each other. Like, this is ridiculous. And so she set up, we had dinner at an Indian restaurant and I meet him and I, I'm like, oh yeah, I work with crypto things. And he is like, I know who you are. I'm like, oh, okay. And then he pokes out his phone and he's got 80 pages of like NFT art that he had collected on Tezos. And I was like, oh, like my first question was, how have you secured this? The second question was, the hell are you collecting all this? But it was really cool and it was like across many different genres. We got along famously and he's a very famous portrait photographer, but also just a great human being. And he called me a few weeks later and he's like, I'm being solicited by a few different places to be like a curator for different art collections because he does collect so, so much. I just really like the ethos that you've cultivated with Tezos. Like, is there a way for me to do something with you instead of these other places that are hitting me up. And I was like, yeah, sure. So I introduced him to the Tezos Foundation and now he's the curator for their first permanent collection, which has been a really nice way to showcase some better known artists. And also more importantly, perhaps a lot of people from emerging markets. So Mason has his feet planted pretty firmly between Nigeria and London, and he finds a really good way to incorporate some of the best up-and-comers. And also he seems to know everyone. He's done a good job of collecting his Rafiki Adedolans and all those guys for the foundation.

That's incredible. We're excited to, to continue to see how that collection evolves and grows over time. Kathleen, we are at time, but we have to ask our hero question of the podcast, and it's something that we ask all of our guests. That question is, who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career?

Yeah, that's a great question. I've had so many really lovely people, honestly hard to name one. I think right now, probably my husband's executive coach is this woman, Anne Hyatt, who's become a really good friend of mine over the last few years. Not just because she's the only person I think I would trust to coach, but also just because she's like extraordinarily gracious and tried to make a good career out of her own. So I would say probably Anne is the most direct impact on me, but honestly, every now and again I'll just meet someone and I'm just like, man, the crap you went through so I could basically have the career I do is incredible. Incredible. I think very highly of Cathie Wood. I think she's got a lot of gumption, also like a tremendous amount of integrity. Yeah, there's just so many examples, but I, I think Anne is probably the closest to me right now. And I'm just a fan of anyone who has had the chutzpah to really make it in the tech world, like mid-'90s through 2010, cuz that was not easy. And the stories you hear, so on and so forth, are pretty appalling. I think the MeToo movement seems to have cleaned up a lot of people's acts. But a lot of women really kicked ass and took names in spite of a lot of really ridiculous antics of other people.

Totally. Thank you for sharing that, Kathleen, and thank you so much for being on the podcast today. We've loved having you and learning more about Tezos. So thank you so much.

Yeah, congratulations to you. It's a wonderful format and extraordinarily clever of you. So well done.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast. If you want more from The Room every week, subscribe to our newsletter. At theroompodcast.com/newsletter.

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