Alan Vey is Founder & CEO at Aventus. Following receiving his Master’s in Artificial Intelligence at Imperial College London, he completed a stint as a quantitative developer at macro hedge fund Brevan Howard, giving him exposure to the world of traditional finance.
Marrying these skillsets and his hunger to innovate, Alan founded Aventus in 2016 – an enterprise-grade blockchain with the aim of making the benefits of blockchain available to businesses. After raising over $20m in an ICO in 2017 and surviving the pandemic, we have since continued to grow and expand into new sectors (including NFTs, loyalty, ticketing, gaming and supply chain to name a few).
Alan was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 winner in 2021 for his work at Aventus, and he continues to look for ways to remain at the bleeding edge of the space.
In addition to his work at Aventus, building further blockchain businesses and supporting others with their tokenomics models, Alan focuses on extending discipline to all areas of his personal life.
Connect with Alan on LinkedIn.
This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix
TRANSCRIPT
Intro: [00:00:02] Welcome to Daring to a podcast that finds out how CEOs and entrepreneurs navigate today’s business world. The conventions they’re breaking. The challenges they faced and the decisions that they’ve made.And lastly, just what makes them different.
Rita Trehan: [00:00:19] Well, what a way for us to kick off 2023. Joining me today is Alan Vey, a serial entrepreneur, Forbes 30 under 30. He’s just traveled from the UK back to Dubai. He’s only just landed, but he’s looks as fresh as a daisy and he’s raring to go to share his knowledge, his expertise about a subject that I think is like on everybody’s radar right now. There’s like a ton of news about technology. Yeah, we know technology’s been around a long time, but you’re kind of like a really interesting character. So I’ve got some what I call wicked questions for you today that we’re going to cover. We’re going to cover. Does it make a difference? Is an entrepreneur successful because of the diverse experiences that they bring to the table? Why do I ask that question? Well, Alan was born in South Africa, but apparently he’s lived around many countries. Let’s explore. Does that make a difference to being a really successful entrepreneur? I wonder? We’ll get his thoughts on that. If you’ve heard of blockchain, I will share with you my own experience of blockchain. Very briefly, back in about 2016, 2018, I was on the board of a publicly listed company in Australia.
Rita Trehan: [00:01:31] Sitting on the board. The board were talking about black blockchain. I came out of the meeting and said, Is anybody got blockchain for dummies? Because I like, I really need to understand this and my mind is blown. But Alan is going to help us understand that in a way that’s really important. One Web two, Web three. I know. Do you know what they are? If you don’t know what Web three is, you better listen in because it’s something that we may all really want to benefit from. So, you know, I’m honored to have you on the show, Alan. I mean, you know, you are you’ve created not only successful businesses, raised $300 Million and more, but you’re continuing to be an advocate for a tech industry but making tech accessible. So let’s start. Tell me, what does gold and blockchain have in common? I ask that question because it seems like golf is quite important in your early days. And I play golf, but I can’t say I’ve connected. It’s blockchain. So tell us a little bit about yourself, please.
Alan Vey: [00:02:29] I read that. Thanks for having me up for a chat today. So maybe just starting off on that first point, right? I think I played a lot of being South African Culturally, it’s quite typical to play a lot of sports is very sort of outdoorsy lifestyle, right? Everything from water sports to different team sports. Golf and rowing were the ones that kind of resonated best with me. And I continued on playing the most, I think in any team sport, especially as you’re growing up as a kid, it’s just great and learning the discipline of training, right? A competitive nature and figuring out how to at times do it with, well, what you’re going to golf the world of etiquette or just in a competitive but not too far in the realm of that being a little bit unpleasant to others. I think a lot of those sort of good fundamental building blocks and how to deal with people in a competitive environment and work together come from the world of sports.
Rita Trehan: [00:03:24] And so what was it? I mean, like you trained like I mean, you played at a national level, but then you decided to pursue computer science. What was it about computer science that interested you? I mean, that’s not necessarily outdoors, is it? But but clearly, there was a passion, a hidden passion that you’ve had, which you’ve actually brought to, in all seriousness, to to play in a very important space right now. So tell us a little bit about that. What was the intrigue around I computer science and your time at Imperial College? Because that’s kind of where you got your like you really kind of made it come alive. Tell us a little bit about that.
Alan Vey: [00:04:05] Exactly. So I started I moved to the UK. I was living in Germany and when I was 16 my parents moved us to the UK and that’s really when I’ve been playing kind of at a national level in Germany and then the moving country that age at 16 as well, and was starting to become an adult, or at least the early phases of that. I went through, shall we say, a less motivated phase with respect to my goal of right after the move. So I was a little bit lost all over the place looking for kind of a direction like what’s next, right? And I started to become better and better at maths in school. It just seemed to be something that came to me naturally, but I like to apply it to the real world. So the applications are kind of physics or more recently computer science. And that’s where in my last year I took a gap year after I did A-levels in the UK to really figure out what I was doing. I worked. Deloitte, an entrepreneurial business, which was my first kind of commercial world experience in that seeing sort of small and medium sized enterprises and what that meant from the sort of financial professional services and consulting side. Being at Deloitte and during that year then applied to do computer science because I just thought it was a nice application of maths. Imperial was a great school. I was really, really happy when I got accepted there and I thought spending some time in London, you’ll meet amazing people there and kind of see where that takes you, right? So my undergrad was done in computer science and as I learned more and more about the space and artificial intelligence really resonated with me.
Alan Vey: [00:05:40] We did various different assignments. I remember one of them was predicting people’s emotions, so you would get sort of readings of whatever facial expressions and the like 45 action units or something on the face, an eyebrow up or down or something like that. And we’d predict to 93% accuracy what the emotion was. The person’s face was kind of showing, which is as accurate as humans can predicted. And these kind of little tests I just thought were so powerful when you extrapolate where this technology might go one day and then we had to do a sort of industrial placement. So I spent six or nine months working at macro hedge fund Brennan Howard, looking at machine learning strategies with them. So I went to my professor, also South African guy William Newton, both he had just launched the cryptocurrency Center at Imperial in 2015. This is also the Ethereum blockchain. That sort of second biggest blockchain today was launched and I went to Will and said, I’m going to predict the price of Bitcoin based on sentiment laws, machine learning, sort of techniques I learned better than anybody has so far. And he was very unenthused, as I gathered. That’s that’s, that’s old news. And why don’t you do something really interesting and look at what Ethereum has done to Bitcoin. And Ethereum obviously introduced the notion of smart contracts programable money, if you like, and that innovation really learning about that is what kind of set me off on this path.
Rita Trehan: [00:07:07] So I talk about the companies that you have, like you are a serial entrepreneur, your companies have as you progressed, they’ve actually really sort of open the field of transparency around contracts and changes and actually addressed a really critical problem, something that I’m very passionate about and which is inclusion. So in the sense of inclusion being that everybody gets the opportunity to be able to access, have ownership and get to decide where and what they do and how they how they play in a marketplace. But you just use the word I’m not sure even I’m going to say it right. Etherium Right. Which is like people like, quick, let me Google that. What does it mean? But actually it’s a really important concept. So can you talk about some of the the businesses that you’ve actually created and and how actually it’s making technology not only available, but but actually really transparent and actually inclusive, INC making it inclusive versus these big technology companies, which we loved. So let’s not get us right. We love them. We love them for what they are. But also, you know, they’ve had their share of the game, haven’t they? And it’s time now to maybe open it up a little bit. So talk a bit about that. You are a massive advocate for that, the businesses that you’ve created. I’ll let you talk about them and have done that both from a ticketing perspective, just opening up this concept of tokens and exchange. I mean, it’s a whole new world, but it’s so fascinating. So they share some of that.
Alan Vey: [00:08:45] Yeah, for sure. Let’s start with. A sort of high level overview of what was innovative about this technology, right? Because then we can understand the problems that we tried to apply it to to solve them. So there’s a lot of complicated terminology around blockchain, and it’s the nature of the technical industry. People like to be very precise, but at the end of the day, the thing we couldn’t previously do, which blockchain enables is create scarcity without a trusted intermediary. It’s pretty much that simple, right? With scarcity, you can’t actually have any genuine representation of value without scarcity. If something isn’t scarce, it has no value, right? It’s infinitely available. So that ability to represent value and to move that around is what Bitcoin really enables. No intermediaries, like you say, transparent and immutable so that nobody could tamper with it kind of creates that beautiful audit trail. And then the second generation of blockchain is what Ethereum kind of created, which is coin smart contracts. And what you layer on top of that is the ability to create rules around this value. How is this value created? What conditions have to hold for this value to be transferred? You can think of these. The reason they call it smart contracts is almost like contractual clauses. Right at the end of the month you will pay me X if you did your job properly or whatever it is. So that’s what Ethereum brought to the space in the kind of second generation of smart contracts. And when you look at the industries we got involved in, so I had done my master’s thesis with Will at Imperial at on film rights distribution and in exploring the film industry, it became clear quite quickly that music typically adopts new technology first and then formed us.
Alan Vey: [00:10:45] So we thought, okay, let’s start with the music industry and then music. There’s two major subcategories, right? There’s recorded, which is your Spotify, and you’re kind of playing it on your phone and there’s live where people attend events and whatnot and revenues and growth in recorded is decreasing because of their business models there, but in life is massively increasing. So we thought, okay, growth market in a sector where this is very applicable, we think there might be some problems there and in doing our analysis, really noticed in the ticketing market how there were certain inefficiencies in the secondary market. Now it was a bit naive at first. Our approach being very technical and background and coming into this industry and thinking, Oh, it’s just a tech problem. There are various political reasons and and sort of monopolistic behavior in the market, which is why it is the way it is. But the tech can help support that. And specifically the point you’re mentioning around transparency, right? This technology that now does not require intermediaries means essentially from an economic perspective, you can move away from this notion of economies of scale, Right. Where something needs to scale to be really big for it to be efficient With blockchain, the technology so efficient that the base layer, we can do much more sort of decentralized and put the power back in the sort of masses and individuals and just as efficiently come together as in that sort of economies of scale.
Alan Vey: [00:12:15] So when you apply that problem to you apply that those properties to these kind of problem areas and ticketing, for example, what we found is you don’t want to touch the transaction, you don’t want to be dealing with the money of the sale of the ticket because of how the industry is structured. That’s a very hard way to break in. But if you restructure what you think has as the access, right, it was originally a piece of paper moved to barcodes, Now it’s moving to these what you call NFT tickets or should we say blockchain based tickets where you can essentially lock the tickets to an identity and you can very transparently track how that ticket moves between various different identities. So maybe the identity is the identity of a phone. So you buy a phone, maybe it’s an actual individual’s identity. There’s various ways of thinking about identity and how you validate that when somebody shows up at the venue. But this infrastructure gives you the ability to much more efficiently manage this shed light on some of what’s happening in the secondary market, which ultimately allows the artist to deliver the experience to the fan as they intended, with maximum effect alongside the promoters and managers and whatnot who are involved in that value chain. So yeah.
Rita Trehan: [00:13:33] That was available when George Michael was having those debates around like who owns the music rights for his music Boy, would it maybe have created a very different place for his passion for music. And who should who should benefit from that, right? I mean, you can kind of play that back. And say actually, that you’re solving a problem that many musicians and and artists, whether it’s in the film or music industry, were saying, like, actually let the people have access to the music and exchange that in a fair, fair way. Right. So it’s kind of really addressing a very real problem that existed. I’m sure if he’s listening above is going carry on, Alan, because that’s the way forward. If you’re a George Michael fan. I am. So we’ll leave it at that. But it’s a really interesting concept. So, you know, you’ve created several businesses from this. And one thing that I because I like to kind of find that interesting facts is you say experience is not everything. I find that a really interesting and insightful comment from an entrepreneur because a lot of people that listen to this show particularly are wannabe entrepreneurs. They want to hear inspirational stories. Now, you may have this brilliant idea. They may be right now thinking, I’ve got this idea around how Web3 might play out for me or some of the technology and some of the space that you’re playing in could be a real collaboration, but I don’t know that I’ve got the experience to do it. You said earlier we came at it from a tech perspective, but actually there’s a whole lot more. Tell me why that comment experience is not everything and was so important to you? Our couple that with one with other things which is influence comes from the people that you know you talked about your professor and how you learn. I kind of put those two together and go like experience is not everything. Influence is about people like who you know and who you work with and who you trust kind of thing. Tell us a little bit about that journey for you.
Alan Vey: [00:15:34] Yeah. So. On the experience front, right? There’s there’s various different ways of looking at it. Base kind of as an individual for trying to achieve something. You kind of look at your base talent or shall we say the things you were born with. You then have your skills, the things you really worked hard on creating for yourself, and you spend the time and then experience as you kind of use your talent and skills over the years, which helps sort of further refine that. That’s the way I kind of look at the sort of base skillsets of an entrepreneur, right experience. It’s difficult sometimes when you look back on your life and you’ve done different things to say, Oh, the reason I had this success was because of this property, that property, that property. Because if you changed any one of them, you don’t know which one actually created that sort of causal link to the result that you were trying to achieve. So sometimes people who are amazing people in business have worked in business for 40 years, had great successes. They don’t necessarily know which of their characteristics are the ones that led to those successes. They know all of them together potentially lead to that result. But to say just this one thing or that one thing from my experience is so important, it’s difficult to dissect them objectively, sort of quantify. So that’s one thing. But that’s not to say experience doesn’t matter, right? Like, it’s very important to surround yourself with people who know what they’re doing.
Alan Vey: [00:16:59] And better yet, the more independent sources you can draw on. Mentors is a very important part of being an entrepreneur. Finding people that you respect who see something in you, maybe something of themselves, and they want to help sort of foster that learning from their experience and listening to everybody, always having an open mind. I think it was Continental. Somebody said strong opinions loosely held. You have your strong opinions form your point of view. Of course, be willing and ready to change that as and when you are given evidence of concrete. Right. So if you have four or five mentors or completely independent, diverse backgrounds all telling you the same thing, there’s probably something to it. They all have a different opinion on it, then maybe the experience is not so relevant to that particular element. So all of this kind of plays a role in trying to build and then ultimately everything comes down to relationships, right? The fundraising, which enabled building the products, hiring the team that was able to take these ideas to the next level and further develop the ideas come with their own ideas and ultimately sign with the clients. Every one of those aspects is about relationships with people, and if you don’t work on that and actively see that as one of the most important elements of your job as an entrepreneur, I truly think you’ll struggle to get to get anywhere.
Rita Trehan: [00:18:20] You have been very active in sort of being a voice for technology, in technology. And let’s talk about Web3 because it’s technology Web3 the new wave of of the Internet. Internet for good, as some people refer to it. And you know, you’re an advocate for that. But mentorship around that as well. So why is for all those budding entrepreneurs and actually all of those corporations that are listening to because we do get some high level CEOs, they say they don’t listen, but we know they do. We know who you are. And they are interested, too, in budding entrepreneurs. Why is Web3 so important and how can you explain it to the average person like me? Okay, but I liken it to Brexit. It’s a complex subject, but you can make it simplistic in a way that can help people. It is really important, right? It’s the internet for good. Can the internet be good? Is it a liberator or is it really an enslaver? Tell us your views on Web3.
Alan Vey: [00:19:25] Yeah. So. Let’s start with some definitions and then we’ll get to the conclusion of how people choose to use it. So. Web3. Let’s do Web one. Web two. Right. The Internet itself, obviously is just a bunch of computers that are connected and talk to each other. Web one was all about reading content. You had these big service companies that would create informational websites or whatever, and you would sit at home and you would pull this information and you would kind of read it to consume it. What went to then did this is really where social media started to explode, is read and write. So rather than pulling information from these websites like Facebook, you would start with user generated content posting YouTube videos, Facebook pictures, all of this kind of stuff, creating more of a dynamic Internet environment of reading and writing. What Web three adds to this equation is owning as well. You can actually have digital ownership and everything that comes along with that the scarcity notion that I mentioned before. So Web3 is really all about the ability. The Internet itself was not set up very well for payments for sort of value exchange. Any of that stuff is still a lot of manual processes, right Today, if you transfer banks for money between international banks, you’re waiting days in a world where we can lend each other a text in just than a second.
Rita Trehan: [00:20:52] Seconds.
Alan Vey: [00:20:52] Right there. So it’s a basic building block that’s going to help a lot of that. And the reason it’s so in the forefront of people’s minds is because of crypto, Right? It was an interesting market, like the stock market, like what Robinhood did with sort of shares and that kind of way of making investing easy for people in the stock market. Crypto is very easy and unregulated and that’s why that’s one application of blockchain that web3 technology itself will fade more and more into the background of. I think people will start using it without even knowing that they’re using it because they’re getting value from these properties. That’s more and more where they’ll go. And of course crypto and trading in the markets and financial side will stay interesting for those that are interesting and playing in that domain. But the core technology now is really starting to get used underneath things and like any technology. It’s not inherently good or evil. It’s how many? I mean, even the defense industry, you could argue some people use it for defending rather than attacking, and that’s questionable. But most technology is how people end up applying it.
Rita Trehan: [00:22:00] Right.
Alan Vey: [00:22:00] So let’s have an example in the ticketing world from when I spoke before, you could use this technology to ensure that what’s promised with the artist, let’s say Ed Sheeran, he’s big on sort of making sure he does right by his fans. Right. He could make sure that none of his tickets ever sell for above whatever price and everything is enforced properly all the way through. It’s called the supply chain of a ticket from sale to redemption when you enter the venue. Or his manager could use it to ensure that they still market works exactly the same as it currently does, but they get their fair share of all of the revenue within that market. Or somebody downstream can use it to ensure that they control that downstream. Right. So there’s various ways more right or wrong, depending on where you kind of draw the line with respect to what you’re trying to optimize towards where it could be good or bad. But ultimately, it does give us the ability to empower individual communities and move away from these models, like the tech companies storing all data and benefiting from it. Right? You can now build systems where you are paid for your data if it’s used in advertising. So I think more and more use cases is going to act like a nuclear deterrent. Big businesses in the financial world and big tech across many industries are going to be forced to innovate their business models in a more fair direction because of the pressure of competitors using this technology for good. So ultimately it is going to improve the scenario for the kind of individual every man from this technology.
Rita Trehan: [00:23:43] To what is your vision taking you? You know, you’ve raised all this money, you’ve created these platforms where whether it’s ticketing, whether it’s payment opportunities, whether it’s about opening up sources for token exchange on different aspects around payments, an opportunity for people to kind of like collectively create their own, if you like, exchange platforms. Where’s your big vision going? Where do you see not only have you done that, I should also say like you’ve done it in an ecologically sound way, right? We’re we’re in this week is Davos. There’s a lot of there’s a lot of talk is going out there at the moment but maybe they need to hear from practitioners, the people that are really making it happen about where the vision is. So where’s your vision, Alan?
Alan Vey: [00:24:34] So. I just want to for our companies, what we are trying to achieve is being a part of on building on building the world to Web3 right. The real definition, the goal is to continue to improve The infrastructure will be a part of improving the infrastructure that we have to kind of drive advancement across society. So we’re a minor part of that today. But more and more, this technology really has the ability to drastically transform ecosystems. And we’ve seen a lot of interesting stuff already happening. People are moving towards more sustainable infrastructures with the impact this has had in developing nations. Their example of of crypto games that were basically exclusively axie infinity, as an example that blew up and this is a game on Ethereum and blew up in the Philippines and such a large amount of people started playing the game because they were able to earn triple what the sort of average salary earning was that they otherwise had access to. So the ability to create fairer economic systems, people send money back to developing economies now without 20, 30, 40% fees, you can do it for a few cents. There’s so many ways that this can help better connect the world and improve our infrastructure as a whole. So might not be the sexiest kind of vision, but being a.
Rita Trehan: [00:25:57] Part, I think it’s a pretty sexy vision, right? I mean, just thinking about the UN have 21 sustainable goals that they’re trying to achieve, you know, that are empowering and saying to companies, governments, institutions, hey, we can’t do this alone with three potentially offers, opens up that platform to make some of these massive challenges and they are global challenges. We can’t move away from them anymore and say it’s a government challenge or a corporation challenge or an institution challenge. It is a collaboration and it’s making technology like at the core of how it can be a good thing. Like technology is not bad. It’s not. I’m a big believer technology is not destroying jobs, it’s creating jobs. Technology is creating interesting work. It’s actually solving societal problems, as you say, it depends on how it gets used. Right. And ultimately, that that’s the that’s the foundation that you’re proving with the companies that you have invested in and or have serially created to prove out that point. You’ve said that actually you’ve been quoted, and I wholeheartedly agree with you, that the downturn in the Bitcoin and crypto currency was probably a good thing, right? It kind of sifted out those bad players in the market or people that were perhaps more focused on like, let’s go with the hype rather than actually doing what you’re talking about, which is like, let’s invest in a sustainable infrastructure that actually works and capture on those ideas wherever they may come.
Rita Trehan: [00:27:32] So I have to come into a little bit about knowing a bit more, digging deeper. You know, I don’t have the facial tech AI that tells me like what you’re thinking right now, but I am intrigued by that. We may talk about that later on another on another webcast. But let’s let’s delve a little bit more into Alan. Right. You know, here you are, 30 under 30. Having created this, you talk about the need to be tough and ruthless, right? Like hard work, determination, but this kind of ruthless quality I like ruthless like you look like a ruthless kind of guy, But I don’t think you mean ruthless in the sense of like just in it. For me. I think you are ruthless. Is a different kind of take on that word. Tell me if I’m right or wrong and what you mean by that.
Alan Vey: [00:28:20] Yeah, I think the most important thing is to try and be objective, right? As much as possible, keeping an even temperament, not being too happy with any of the apps. So people agreeing with you, not being too depressed with any of the downs or people disagreeing with you as much as possible. Trying to be objective, trying to be rational. And people at times can say that comes across a bit cold. And those things that I’ve had to work on over the years is especially with staff internally and telling people, Yeah, great job, but they’ve done a great job or now we need to improve this or that. Because most of the time we all work really hard. We get it done and then we move on to the next thing. So I think, yeah, ruthless is not intended to mean. China doesn’t matter. The other people don’t matter. Let’s just optimize towards ourselves. I think ruthless in pursuit of the objective without distractions. Right. That’s that’s the really important part. Objective focused and not getting taken off path by things that don’t really matter to the core objective of what we are all waking up for.
Rita Trehan: [00:29:33] So I think that’s a great payback moment. I always have like there’s always an aha moment happens on my podcast, me personally, and that was my aha moment. And this is the one where I say, go back and relisten, rewind listeners and just listen to that sentence again because it was all about have the focus, don’t get distracted, stay true to what you’re trying to to achieve and be really disciplined about it. I guess that’s where maybe some of that goal came in to it, but I really like that. Ruthless In your pursuit of what your goal is, I think is a very powerful message for businesses in general to stay the course and not get sidetracked and be true to following that that path. I go back and listen to that. There’s plenty of nuggets all around. But but that one, I think, just kind of hits. So I’ve got to ask as well. Right. We’ve got to like it’s really current. It’s been in the news this week. I’ve been on I’ve tried to chat TB to right. People may not know what it is, but I’ve been quite intrigued with it and it’s I it’s in the space where you have, you know, you are an expert in there’s lots in the media about Microsoft’s $10 Billion potential investment in this in this new thing where you kind of go in, you ask it a question. It’s the kind of the taking the web to to potentially a web3. It’s kind of letting you ask questions and get information back. Is A.I. designing A.I., As some people have said, this could be What’s Google doing about this? Because suddenly they’re in the space of like, hang on a minute, isn’t that what, like, I’m just going to Google this dead? And is this now playing in this space? Our favorite saying, What’s your take? What do you say to the people that are debating this right now? Because it’s a big thing into Web3, I think, is it not, or am I wrong?
Alan Vey: [00:31:27] I think it’s really exciting to see how far I has come. We had Siri and Alexa and all of these tools for a while, but that’s its really fancy way of selecting from a menu with GPP when you kind of interact with this bot. It feels very different than the kind of intelligence it shows. I mean, I don’t know to what degree you’ve played with it, but one thing I like to do is I would do these kind of meetings. Right. And I have a tool that transcribes the conversation, and then I’ll put that into chat and say, please give me the action points and the kind of summary and everything. And it’s amazing how accurately it even does that. So processing new data, drawing on other data. Once this thing gets properly let go, right now I think we have beta version three, version fours coming, which is sort of a whole nother level. So I think it’s very exciting what the best technology can do. I’ve heard I think I saw Google’s got kind of red alerts around.
Rita Trehan: [00:32:26] They say they’re now fast tracking their version of it. So.
Alan Vey: [00:32:31] Exactly. And then Microsoft, one interesting thing that I saw from the deal structure with Microsoft and Chat Group, I believe in the early years, they from any profits, they recoup their investment. But over time, it shifts to a 5050 split. And in the long term, the profits stay with church. And so despite this investment, it’s really them looking at it as whatever the timeline is, 5 to 10 years of first to market and being able to use this and ultimately giving up the revenues in the future for that advantage. So it’s not even your traditional kind of investment, which is very interesting to see sort of strategic thinking that might be happening at Microsoft that that suggests.
Rita Trehan: [00:33:14] That’s nice thing. Yeah. They all said some interesting things in the space without a doubt. Yeah. And you obviously see it as a play for all of the things and where you’ve invested and kind of what you are trying to to bring forward. I mean this is this is continuing to open up the avenues, is it not? Is it not heightening the the sort of the awareness of just the capability of what technology can do and how blockchain can play a part in this?
Alan Vey: [00:33:44] Yeah. So between sort of blockchain and especially the payments infrastructure that we’re seeing really starting to change on the financial markets, these sort of intelligent AI tools that will ultimately be able to join anything that is digital and concepts around sort of metaverse, where obviously Facebook announced this a couple of years ago now and people are more and more kind of building out those elements, but you’re starting to see a world come together of I don’t know if you’re familiar with Steven Spielberg’s ready. Player one but.
Rita Trehan: [00:34:15] Now, yeah.
Alan Vey: [00:34:16] It’s kind of live in this virtual world. You transact there and every now and then the real world is kind of not so interesting and you just get a sense of your core substance that you’ve won by playing this game in in this kind of fake world and you’re playing against real people and computer intelligence. So it’s very advanced. It’s pushing forward things significantly. And I’m really excited to see what happens with GPT. I mean, it’s really good times for the AI industry and something. I finished my master’s in AI in 2016 and couldn’t even dream of something like this when you know, you kind of reach the edge of where certain elements of research are in the world and to see what’s happened in what, five, six years. Yeah, it’s very exciting to see what might happen in the next ten. We’ve just got to be careful with how it plays out from us.
Rita Trehan: [00:35:03] Yeah, well, I hate to see you writing about it and talking about it, because I do think it does need visionaries like yourself to actually be contributing to the chat on these new technologies as they come out. So I hope to hope to be reading back your opinions on this in the future. I’m going to come back with one question that is particularly, I guess, important in my kind of my heart, I guess, which is do you think that your diverse experience, having lived and worked in different cultures and and what you’re trying to what you have shown with what you’ve done with blockchain, is it truly opening up the opportunities for inclusion? There are many people, as you’ve said, like whether it’s payments that people, you know, trying to send payments to across countries in underserved populations and underrepresented founders and massively continues to be an issue, does blockchain and web3, does it open up that And do you think your own personal experience of having that diversity is actually core to the potential success of entrepreneurs? I’m curious.
Alan Vey: [00:36:16] So to the first half of that question, is blockchain opening things up more? Yes, to a degree, especially because of the lack of regulation. Right? There was the ability for everyone and anybody to kind of get involved in this market early on. And that led to a lot of problems because, of course, the easiest way of making money is to kind of cheat. And if you have a scenario where that’s possible and not enforced, that’s why we have some of the negative sentiment from the 2017 ICO bubble and various other crypto winters we’ve had since then. But the flip side of that coin is that everybody has access, including. Various underrepresented people. People who don’t quite have the advantages, or shall we say, the access to capital, the democratization of capital is a very important one in solving this problem. Right? If you look at the sort of founders, there’s a demographic profile that emerges as a significant majority, despite merit wise, you wouldn’t necessarily expect it to be the case. So that democratization of access to capital, to debt, to financial markets that operate more efficiently, less relationship based, more merit based, because you just have the transparency of the KPIs that you can enforce on the blockchain, right? It shows transparency. So you can see how many transactions are occurring, how many users there are these kinds of things. I believe that there is the ability, if people so choose and the regulators leave room for it, for this technology to to create a big difference in sort of inclusion when it comes to experience the second half of what you’re asking there.
Alan Vey: [00:37:59] I’ve noticed it in our businesses that the best teams are those with diversity of thought. So often having different backgrounds leads to diversity of thought. If you’ve lived in various different countries, I remember when I moved to Germany, I didn’t speak German and I went into a German school, not an international school. And certain things that you just think are like universal truths in the world. As a kid, I’m just not because people laugh at you for it, or it’s just completely different cultures. And those kind of learnings. But the moving around is not the only way of getting those right, going through difficulties and overcoming difficulties, really taking challenges head on. That’s what ultimately builds sort of diversity of thought, diversity of experience and from what I’ve seen, so the better. And does that impact performance? What I’ve seen with teams is the more diversity of thought that exists people from different backgrounds, ethnicities, genders. Sexual preferences, whatever all the arbitrary classifications that we create around people, the more diverse peoples are, often the more, shall we say, friction there is between the team, the good friction, because people have different viewpoints, they don’t just agree. And that ultimately if you have the right management structure and a very emotionally intelligent manager to make sure that you keep this productive, that’s where you get the best ideas from them. So, yes, I think it I think it’s important to evaluate myself is difficult. I believe it’s helped me, but who knows?
Rita Trehan: [00:39:43] Yeah, well, you sound to me like you have a mindset that says I don’t need to be the smartest person in the room. I need to, like, have that diversity of thought around me to help me ask the questions. Why? Why not? What if? What could be? So that’s the sense I get from who you are. And certainly you’ve been an inspiration to many, many people. If anybody looks you up, they can just see how much of a thought leader you have been for the tech industry and to individuals, which is the kind of leader I call them, leaders of difference. You are the leader of difference that hopefully is going to continue to make that make that traction going forward. We need more of them. We need we need the advocates and you certainly in the businesses that you’ve done are taking them there. So I think well, I’m certainly much more educated on on web3 and blockchain, so I no longer feel like I need to refer to Blockchain for dummies, which I felt I did need back in probably 2017. I think it was when my head was hurting and I thought like, I’m never going to get this. And I would encourage people to kind of like really read about it. It is important and certainly we’re going to get on to how they can find out a bit more from you. But as much as I’d like to to chat more, I’m conscious that we are running out of time. So I do have one last question which I ask everybody, which is they’re daring to moment. So it could be something that you’re daring to do. It’s you’re daring to moment, it’s what you did or it’s a daring to just believe what you’re daring to moment that you want to share with the listeners.
Alan Vey: [00:41:23] The biggest one that sticks out to me is a personal risk I took when when starting all of this, I had just finished uni and you don’t have much money as a as a recent graduate got your uni debts to kind of deal with and I just raised my first angel round for a business. So this was late 2016. I raised £80,000 and now I wanted to spend every dollar as little as I could to get as much as I could out of it. And from a personal perspective, that meant cutting at many costs in my personal life as possible, right? Dedicating ridiculous amount of time to work. So I had maybe £1,000 in savings or something like that, and I decided to invest all of it into cryptocurrency ether. Etherium So I think it was about $10 at the time when I made the purchase and. Then when it got to about $50, my investors told me an amazing return five times in, whatever, six months or something. You should cash that out and sit on that. And I was like, No, guys, I believe in this. And anyway, I needed to go out and I’m going to be able to pay for my my noodles and whatever. And so I just left it in and it ended up going to so I ended up at 5000 at one point as it went through those phases, I was selling it off and actually paying for just my food and my eating and my whatever in London was just trying to build this business and draw any money on the company, spend that purely on marketing or third parties and whatnot to scale as much as possible. So there were a few times where I sat thinking. Am I really stupid for doing this and kind of doubting it? But looking back on it, it was for me, a big risk putting all of my money into something that was unproven. And everyone told me, What do you know about financial markets in the world? But it paid off, fortunately, and it helped me build the companies and and get to that next level.
Rita Trehan: [00:43:23] So I come back to your core experience is not everything. Believe a vision and real hard work and being ruthless in the pursuit of an idea and a passion. What counts? It sounds like that was your daring too. And boy, I mean, it’s showing its its fruit, if you like, in just how it’s helping in many, many sectors. So, Alan, it’s been a privilege to talk to you. If people do want to know more about you, about your company, about how they might even work with you and or your mentorship as well, and what’s the best way to get hold of you? What’s your website? Do you have LinkedIn, Twitter? What would they be?
Alan Vey: [00:44:07] So the best the one that I’m personally the most active on is LinkedIn. That’s just my name, Alan. But otherwise you have the companies Aventis, Aventis, today, AT&T, US Dollar, and then all of the socials are sort of at Aventis Network as well. I’m on Twitter as well at own pace. Yeah.
Rita Trehan: [00:44:26] Okay, That’s great. Okay. Well, thank you so much for being on kicking off 2023 with such a brilliant podcast on a topic that is really, really hot at the moment. So this podcast is going out ASAP because there’s lots of people that need to learn about this as fast as they can. And if anybody wants to hear and learn a bit more about and worldwide and what we’re doing, you can get us on our website. Ww Wine.com If you like this podcast, please like it, please share it. And please recognize the importance of technology in 2023. It is really important and it is a way to change the world. We’re big believers. Don’t wait for the world to change. Change the world you’re in. So do that. You can get me. And you’re here where you can get in contact with us. If you’re interested in learning more about what we do as well. So thank you very much. Alan. It’s been great having you.
Alan Vey: [00:45:18] Thanks for having me. Retranslated chatting to you.
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