The full transcript

Oleg

Hi, everybody! Welcome to Devico Breakfast Bar! Here we speak with different people involved in the business landscape, share their expertise, delve into the latest tech trends, and explore the ins and outs of IT outsourcing. I'm Oleg Sadikov, and today I'm excited to have Temoc Weber, a seasoned and visionary leader in the crypto Web3 and blockchain space with over 20 years of experience in the industry. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell, so you don't miss new episodes. Hi Temoc! Could you please start by telling us your journey and how you became a prominent figure in the crypto Web3 and blockchain space?

Cuautemoc

Yeah, first and foremost, thanks, Oleg, for having me on board. Very excited about this podcast. Always exciting to give a little bit of the background story on how you go from different technologies and then end up in this kind of crazy crypto Web3 world. But, yeah, my career started many moons back, early 2000, so actually even before 2000, in the late nineties. Well, yeah, I joined a telco company called MCI Worldcom, which eventually became Verizon. But it was right during the end part of the dot-com bubble that a lot of people don't kind of remember. They forgot about it, but that's really how I got incepted into technology. I was able to get kind of an internship program at this company for about a year, learned all about the core now you can say protocols and infrastructure used in those days. This was a little bit earlier than IP. It was technologies like Frame Relay, ATM that people don't remember. You had SDH. And then, through the career, like at the end of the nineties, I moved back from the US to Sweden, right during the dot-com bubble explosion. So, I was part of that explosion where I had a job. I came back to Sweden. Everything dissipated. A lot of really cool projects just shut down. But eventually we ignited together with another company called Alcatel, French-based telco operator, pretty well respected back in the days. And yeah, I had a career there for the better part of 15 years.

I worked very, very close on the core layer infrastructure. In terms of research, I was running quite some interesting research programs inside of Alcatel, both in 3G technology, but also DWM systems. 3G in the early 2000s – very exciting. I found that technology being like magic. You know, a lot of people didn't understand the true power of 3G until a decade later, but I was already working early on in the 2000s with the protocols, the infrastructure, making sure that at least the only line infrastructure technology would be ready. Through the career of 15 years at Alcatel, we had a merger with Lucent. It was pretty interesting to see how two big conglomerates would kind of collaborate together. Eventually moved to different positions within the structure, ended up running some very large accounts, mainly around mobile. So, I was in charge of Telenor Group with more than 15 different operating entities across the world. I was very involved with TeliaSonera Group, eventually ran into Vodafone as well. And through that career, around 2013, again, I got a little bit unexcited about the infrastructure layer. The better part of 15 years, I saw pretty much the internet stack being built from the core infrastructure all the way to, yeah, you could say, the application level. And I started to realize that this application level was opening up. There was a lot of very interesting new products coming up, things like streaming, social media, social networks.

Then I decided to take a leap of faith, left Alcatel after a long career to join another company called Opera – Opera Browser – based out of Norway, pretty innovative company, which was a spinoff of Telenor Group, really brought mobile internet to a lot of emerging markets, many in Southeast Asia and Africa. Very exciting career there. I spent the better part of 10 years, doing a lot of very exciting things to really bring in mobile internet to emerging markets from 2013 to 2017. I spent the better part of those years traveling countries like Myanmar, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, again, trying to bring this kind of use case of mobile internet to the masses. And then, we ended up going to Africa afterwards, where it was kind of the same story, but a little bit later within the stage, I would say 2016, 2018. And then, through that progress, I was working a little bit in fintech. Through that, I also got involved into blockchain. So, we started looking early on into blockchain around 2017. Eventually, I led that within Opera. Very, very excited about the technology. I felt that it was a new layer on top of the stack that already existed. Got to work with some pretty amazing early projects like IPFS, CNS, again, these are very kind of crypto-native. After five years, I decided, ‘Hey, I've given the better part of my career to a lot of corporates. It's my time to do something.’ And I saw a very big gap in the space where we talk about decentralization. It was not being really tackled in the proper way. So, I decided to go fund Gateway.fm together with a very good colleague that I knew for many years at Opera. He was also in crypto. Yeah, the journey started in 2021, and here we are today. Maybe we could go a little bit more in detail of what I do in crypto. Yeah, that was kind of the journey.

Oleg

Amazing! Amazing, long journey. What unique solutions does Gateway.fm provide to make blockchain more service-friendly, inclusive, and fun to work with?

Cuautemoc

Yeah, to be honest, blockchain is not very fun to work with. Technically wise, it's a very…

Oleg

Yet.

Cuautemoc

Yeah, yet. Exactly. It's very complicating in terms of the technology. It's a very steep learning curve. These are very heavy databases. It's pretty unique in terms of a new technology. So, there was two main visions that I wanted to do within Gateway. One was really bring this promise of decentralization to kind of make it more like the internet, right? You bring in a layer on top of the internet, but there's still a lot of centralization because a lot of the infrastructure is provided through public cloud, which again is a good thing, but not just one provider. So, we built our own software stack to actually federate the infrastructure to work with other providers. That was one of the promises. And then, the second promise was to make it a bit easier to work with, right? So, either bringing an API, so bringing an abstraction layer to the complexity of blockchain to just make it a bit more fun to experiment with. And if you look at what we offer today, we have a platform called Presto, which just completely abstracts the blockchain side. And within four clicks and five minutes, you're able to build your own blockchain, which is pretty amazing. So, the technologies come quite advanced. We were using very specific components, in this case called zero knowledge, EVM, which is called Ethereum virtual machine. And it really allows you to take security of Ethereum itself – one of the largest networks in blockchain – and really use public blockchain to build your own kind of semi-private or fully private blockchain in a very efficient way.

Oleg

What do you think about the problem of when prices of Bitcoin go up, everyone passionate about blockchain, in general — new startups – but when it goes down, people start forgetting about it? The lack of investment, et cetera, all these problems. I think it's a kind of problematic trend for technology because since the prices – it's basically market prices - go up, down, and the future of technology depends on this volatility market, for me, it sounds strange. What's your opinion on that?

Cuautemoc

Yeah, as I said, it's very valid point. And I'll go a little bit into why crypto, blockchain, or Web3 is a little bit different. Because you have this native token, and there's kind of a monetary alignment on a token that kind of rules the entire market. But again, if you go back to the dot-com, people forget about it. I mean, a lot of these companies were worth billions of dollars, right? People forget there was a company called Nortel, by far, one of the most innovative telco companies in the world, Canadian based. I think in 2000 it was worth 180 billion and by 2001 disappeared. So, people forget about technology waves have this kind of super cycle, super bubbles, right? And with crypto, it’s kind of the same, but it's faster. If you look a little bit at around AI right now, it's kind of the same, right? I was working in AI, I think 2015 through, you know, doing neural networks for content. For example, I was in charge of the content, and we were training the content. The investment was very small. There was just a couple of companies. If you look at NVIDIA, for example, they were just doing accelerator video cards, right? There was nothing to do with AI, right? You look at it today – it's worth a monstrous amount of money just because the technology has become very bossy. And yeah, we see the unlock of AI, right?

So, I think there's this native dreaming of the technology with an allocation of capital behind. The same thing as Tesla, right? Very innovative company, but is Tesla really worth more than all the combined car industry? So, you could say the same thing. But just to come back to crypto, it is a very valid question. And I think it just the way that you could say crypto Web3 got started was through Bitcoin. Bitcoin, through the white paper, was the first opening or unlocking of this new technology without token. It took a while to kind of get footing. And you could say that one token controls all the other tokens, more or less, right? If Bitcoin goes up, then the entire industry goes up. You could think of it the same as the top five technology companies. If they go up, the entire industry goes up, if they go down, the entire industry, for the better part, goes down as well. So, there's no difference. It's just the cycles are different, and the volatility is different, but there's a lot of correlation. But I do agree with you that you have this new dynamic and an intrinsic token value with the technology. That's something that is a little bit different in crypto. So, I do agree.

Oleg

You know, for me, AI is different than blockchain because as you correctly mentioned, one token controls the industry. And this token is basically nothing else that just, let's say, paper equity, whatever entity on the market. People try to pull technology analysis, I mean, trading tech analysis, someone tries to understand investment factors, long-term investment factors. But if to compare with AI, AI doesn't have such trigger. AI is technology, right? Some broader, something very wide I would say. But for me, it's really different. Blockchain is very dependent on Bitcoin. AI doesn't have this dependency and neither other type industries that will be in the future, probably quantum computing, whatever, they don't have this you know, basis, core, fundamental stuff that influence the entire industry.

Cuautemoc

I super agree with you, but also tend to disagree because if you look in AI, again, if you look in just five, six years ago, I mean, the investment, I think, it was in the range of really small. I mean, it was like 10 to 15 million, roughly, in terms of how much money was being invested. If you compare that to today, it's almost a hundred billion, and that's just growing right there. They're talking about almost a half a trillion dollars to be invested by the end of this decade, right? Which again, it just multiplies, and nobody really knows the true unlock of AI just yet. There's a lot of speculation. I use AI quite often within our own company, both in terms of some of the development that we do, but also for content, and, you know, it looks interesting. But to be honest, it is pretty speculative if I look at it from that point of view. But I do agree that crypto is different, and it was actually built this way on purpose, right? I mean, if you think about why Bitcoin came out, it was an antithesis to the financial market system. You know, that was the main reason behind. Hey, you know what? The system that has been existing since seven, eight, nine hundred years, or even longer, maybe it's not working. We need to change it. And we're becoming more digitally nomad, right? As society converts more from analog to digital, there's a change, right? And I think that it's a little bit of a cultural thing together with a technology thing, right? So, you merging these two things together.

And that's why I do agree with you that giving value to Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency, it's no different than giving value to the dollar or the yuan. Like, they are controlled by central entities that, you know, make all these decisions on behalf of people, right? Here, in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, it's kind of the same, but it's, I would say, more tribal, right? So, you have the markets, and then you have the people that support it. And I think that that's been always kind of a little bit of a missing link on the current financial markets that there's a lot of people that don't have access to that, right? Even recently, if you think about Robinhood and these apps that started doing fragmentational stock option buying to these big companies, – you know, because maybe people cannot afford it – but they want to become part of that wave or technology. So, I think from a technology point of view and an incentive point of view, Web3 and crypto is very different. And it's more egalitarian from that point of view. It's permissionless. Anybody, for the most part, can buy any kind of cryptocurrency to a certain level, right? You could do things with it. You know, you don't have to go and do all this KYC and things like that. I understand that the market has a bad angle to say, 'Oh, it's being used for really bad things.' But if you compare it to flat, I mean, a lot of very bad things are happening with flat, and people don't talk about it, right?

If you compare it to, of course, the amount of bad things that are being used with Bitcoin or Ethereum in terms of terrorist, sex, or something like that, it's very small in comparison. But I do agree. I think just in currency, there's this kind of correlation of, well, it seems to be a bit of a scam versus where's the technology. And that's the part, to be honest, one of the reasons why I came to this space, because if you're able to understand the technology, which is complex, it really has an immense promise, right? If you combine, for example, blockchain with AI, that's a very interesting intersection, and that you already start to see now. I'm pretty sure you watch the news. And I mean, like, there's all these deep fakes happening right now in real, right? And then, how do you counterbalance that? Like, do you have a system that is able to keep AI in check? I think blockchain is that technology, right? Because you have this immutability, so you could really track things with the origin to the end and really know the source. So, for example, content, let's say that there's a video that comes up, but there's this little tracker that knows that content came from this source, and now it's here, and you're able to track it.

That's going to be a very powerful thing to moving forward. So, I know I'm deviating a little bit, but I just see the same tendencies over the last two decades or three decades that have been in technology that there's a lot of hype at the beginning, then there's kind of stability, and then eventually there's adoption, right? And I've seen it probably three times already. And yeah, with crypto, it's just a lot more powerful. You have these megacycles. They're very, very high. They come down very, very hard. And then there's a quiet period of time, and then they come up again, but the speed. So, two things that I'll tell you that I feel very passionate about the space. One is the innovation area. It's very wide. You have a very large surface area to innovate. And then the people that I've come across—I'll be honest, there's a lot of scammers out there – but the people that work deep in the deep core of the technology are tremendously smart people. Like, I was in telco at the beginning, I get that kind of feeling of the hardcore technology people that came into the space because they were passionate about telecommunications back in the early days and computer science. Now they're going into crypto and blockchain.

Oleg

That's very interesting. Let's see. Let's see. Are there any professionals or leaders in your network who inspired you in your professional journey?

Cuautemoc

Too many to count. From the old technology days, for sure. I mean, I think during the dot-com era there was these unsung heroes, that people kind of forget about because, of course, if you look at the applications that have been developed over the years, you know, like, of course, you have the browser, like Google, Apple, Netflix. These are kind of top applications that had really visionary leaders, but people kind of forgot about the old early days of who did this foundational technology. I got the opportunity to work very close to Bell Labs research. And, you know, there was incredible people that really invented really amazing things that we forget about, that we use every day, you know, like basic transmission, the transistor, telephony. Of course, as time goes by, things change, and now we have more the iteration of, you know, the likes of Elon Musk, for example. I know he has a lot of hate, but I think what he's trying to do – he's trying to crack very large challenges that we have in humanity. And I give him credit for that. You know, if you're successful, you are hated in a way, but I admire his persistence, to be honest. And I think that's something that I've seen other leaders not do. When it comes in crypto, of course, I also have a number of people that I really respect. It's more people that are looking long-term change in technology—maybe not so flashy—but that they have this kind of longer term wanting to change. So, I have too many to name, to be honest, but depends on the circumstance, I think about different people as leaders. I do listen to a lot of audiobooks, both in the old days and new methodologies, and I'm always looking for new nuggets of information.

Oleg

Innovation often involves taking risks. Can you share a notable challenge or risk you faced in your career, and how you navigated it and the lessons you gained from that, particularly that experience?

Cuautemoc

Yeah, very good question. So, I was saying I worked in telco at the beginning, and, you know, funny enough, I worked at Alcatel, which was an okay company. It was always seen as the underdog kind of vendor if you compare with Ericsson or Nokia, you know, very, very, very big brands globally. So, it felt good in a way to be the underdog because you always have to work harder, and you always felt that you were at risk. And that was like trial by fire. You know, I was there for 15 years when I joined Opera, as well very innovative company. But, you know, globally, we were a large company, but we were working with very large competing partners like Twitter, like Facebook, like Google. It's a little bit intimidating. So, you always have to get out there and just show a little bit bigger, eager than what you had just to get a little bit more of respect. When it comes to blockchain and crypto, that's what I would say is a whole different level in terms of the risks. I mean, the risks are pretty astronomical if you compare tech to crypto, because, again, as I indicated before, you have these cycles. The cycles of innovation are so much faster than anything you see in traditional tech, mainly because of the open source, and the markets move very, very fast. And again, there's also a lot of appetite from investors in terms of returns, right? So, I think it was Elon Musk that talked about this, but by the way, he was talking, 'Hey, you know, this thing about having your own startup is like chewing glass.' I do concur with him. But if you do it in crypto, it's like chewing glass and drinking sand. That's how rough it could get at the time. So yeah, it's very risky. You have to have a pretty strong stomach. And you just have to be persistent and take one step at a time, or one day at a time. That's the way I kind of survive.

Oleg

How have you seen the landscape of blockchain and Web3 evolve? And what excites you the most about its future?

Cuautemoc

No, absolutely. I'm very, very excited to be on. I've been very excited for many years. I've been now almost seven years in blockchain. So, I'm a strong believer of the technology. But you know, I think we have a very unique opportunity on this cycle. You know, the blockchain bubble is still very small. If you compare it to the technology. My ultimate goal has been, okay, how can we open a door to this small Web3 or crypto bubble into more traditional markets, like either Web2 and Web2.5, majority enterprises. And I think it feels that this cycle we could actually do that. Of course, at Gateway, some of the things that we do is removing, because the technology is so complex, and it just takes a long time to kind of get into it. What we want to do is just to remove that complexity and create this kind of layer of experimentation. The good thing is that the time to market and the costing to do that has gone down dramatically, right? If you think back, in 2017-18 if you wanted to do something in blockchain – maybe you need to build your own blockchain itself – there was companies like Hyperledger Besu, there was Quorum. But as an enterprise, if you wanted to do anything, it would take you the better part of one year and probably millions of dollars to bring maybe a use case into on-chain. And what I'm saying that technology is moving so fast, being revolutionized. You can think of it a little bit as the AWS moment where you have, 'Oh, okay, now we could actually draw in a lot of resources with a couple of clicks and actually build my online e-commerce site.' You didn't have that potential back in the early 2000s. You need to find a developer, you need to find a data center.

So, we see this in blockchain right now—this abstraction layer happening through your platform, right? So, you come into the platform, you're able to experiment at a very reduced cost and time to market. And I think for the first time, I would say that the last few cycles, we start to see real use cases, like real, real use cases having appetite to say, 'Okay, I think the blockchain can really serve a purpose for this particular headache that I have.' You know, it could be things like verifiability. For example, if you have traceability of goods, how can I trace those goods from source A all the way to source B? And that's maybe because retail is asking for those things, right? This label of saying, you know, 'done' in a green way is not good enough. They actually want to see, they want proof from the actual manufacturers to say, 'I want to see. Not, don't tell me. I just want to verify that you're doing the right things.' And I think that I'm very, very interested about this, a little bit around, you know, what is happening in the market around carbon credits, for example. Still very new, but you know, there's regulation coming very, very strong over the next two years where all companies, and in particular technology companies, will have to demonstrate their carbon footprint. And there's no real good solutions in the market out there. And I think blockchain is going to play a very pivotal role within that. And the 3rd party is definitely AI, because, I mean, we already see that we're working already with a number of projects on AI in particular for two reasons. One is you could say the large language models, verifiability of the large language model databases, that they don't get contaminated. So you're able to verify within blockchain.

And then, the second part, it's actually transitability to do microcomputations of this kind of verifiable data sets. How do you incentivize people to allow for smaller computation adjustments to the database? So, it is happening already. Really exciting to see. And as I said, I mean, you have more and more traditional investment companies coming into space, or what you call institutions. You probably heard about the Bitcoin ETF coming out. It's the largest ETF in the market. It surpassed gold. Oh, no, gold. Sorry, silver. Pretty amazing to see. It's like 13, 14 billion dollars. So, just think of that one second. So, you were talking about this speculative nature of Bitcoin. Now think about that speculative nature – it has now more value than silver, that has been around for millennia. And this is what I was talking about before – there's this digitalization happening also on the asset class of the world, right? And I think we're not realizing it's happening slowly, but I think eventually things will become fully digital – metaverse. Maybe in the next decade, there will be a proper metaverse. It didn't work on the first iteration. I mean, let's look at Facebook. They tried, they fail. I think it was very clear. But it doesn't mean that it will not happen. It's just that technology was not ready. And I get the same feeling, as I said, on technology that we saw in 3G. The technology was ready in 2000, 2001, but the real use case, the killer app, was the iPhone. It took a decade for the iPhone to come out. Actually 2008, the first devices came out, but they were too expensive. By 2010, mobile technology was really starting to pick up this momentum. But it took the better part of 12 years when the technology was ready to actually find the adoption curve to really start. So, sorry for the long answer, but yeah, I feel sorry for some of the exciting things.

Oleg

That's very interesting. Thanks for sharing it. How do you view the current regulatory landscape? And what changes or developments do you anticipate in the near future that might impact the industry?

Cuautemoc

Yeah, very, very tough question, to be honest, because it depends on the , I would say, the jurisdiction that you're looking at. So, if you block it into three big chunks, you have Asia, you have Europe and Middle East, and then you have US – four chunks, I would say. Asia has been a big max in particular for crypto, where you have some countries being very open to it. So, you have countries like Korea, Japan, Singapore, super adapted to blockchain. They've been putting regulation in place. Very innovative, very welcoming to crypto, with a good regulation, which is not strong holding, but, you know, it provides at least some guidance for companies working. Then you have countries like China. Again, that's no, no. Australia also has been so, so about it. Now they're making some more regulation. India, for example, again, no, no. So, it really depends on the country. When you look in Europe, I think that it's been semi-decent with MiCA. MiCA has taken into account a lot of the kind of traditional financial markets, tried to look at crypto as a new asset class, and then saying, 'Okay, if we are uncertain, we will regulate it. And if we think that if it's well with existing kind of regulatory vehicles, then we will put it there.' So, I think it's been pretty welcoming. Let's see how the implementation will be because it's coming by the end of this year. It's now passed through the parliament of the European Union, but now it'll be rectified by each country.

And what happens – each country will probably put their own little flavor, and we'll see what happens. So it's still to be seen. US, it's been very aggressive. So, the current political landscape, the SEC chair, Gary Gensler, has been very against crypto, which is insanely funny as he was teaching this technology at Stanford. Anyway, I'm not going to go into details. But I think it's just very political game right now happening between all institutions with new technology. There's always resistance. Again, people forget about electricity back in the early 1900s. It was very dangerous. There was a lot of media saying that it will kill everybody. Today, we cannot live without electricity, right? So I see similarities. And then you have Middle East. So, I get to go to Dubai quite often. It's a very crypto-friendly region. And I see the government really doubling down in a good way right now, not just to attract anybody but to create kind of good framing for innovation around crypto. And funny enough, because they did the same thing within fintech, and they were quite successful. Not a lot of people maybe know that, but Dubai was not known for any technology innovation, and today, I think that they're kind of leading in medical healthcare, fintech, and I think that they want to take the position to be one of the leading markets for crypto and blockchain.

Oleg

Yeah, I agree. What role do you see DeFi playing in the future of the financial industry? And how can traditional finance institutions adapt or collaborate with innovation happening in the DeFi space?

Cuautemoc

Yeah, again, the same thing. So, there's been a lot of experimentation in DeFi, particularly in blockchain native through decentralized protocols like Aave, you have Uniswap. These are very well-respected brands already. You have Compound. So again, a lot of experimentation has taken place. What you have is more traditional finance now coming in and utilizing some of the tools for DeFi. So, I see more of emerging happening already. And you see that already indirectly with the EFTs in Bitcoin, right? So, you have traditional institutional giants coming into the space, saying, 'Hey, we are going to start tapping into this kind of derivative called an EFT Bitcoin.' It is like one step closer to true DeFi, right? Because again, it's a new asset class. The biggest problem that you have with DeFi is the regulatory landscape. Like, where do you regulate this thing? It's already regulated on the outsets. You know, if you want to come into DeFi and you need to buy a token, that's already pretty regulated on the on-ramping. If you want to exit, whatever you do in DeFi, it's also pretty regulated because it's the off-ramp.

So, in between, it's difficult to regulate at this stage, but maybe I could see kind of a unification happening over the next one or two cycles where traditional finance comes and takes some of the goodies of DeFi. Because what it does, if you compare the technologies itself from traditional finance to DeFi, there's changes in terms of the regulatory part that brings inefficiencies. DeFi, it's efficient because there are algorithms working with each other. So, once you agree on the algorithm, you launch it, you let it go. It's like automatic market making, happening by itself. So, you don't have any kind of midgates or intervention. And I think it just will bring a lot of efficiency to the market, to the traditional financial markets. And I think that's been by the resistance in terms of the regulatory place. Yeah, it's already happening. Not a lot of people hear about it, but there was a recent project called Libra. Actually, it was announced yesterday through one of the largest institutions with like, I don't know, 30 trillion dollars of assets creating their own digital platform for digital asset DeFi in a regulatory environment. So, it is already happening. But I do expect that different jurisdictions will probably work differently on how that merger is going to happen.

Oleg

What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs and professionals looking to make their mark in the crypto Web3 and blockchain space based on your extensive experience and leadership in this field?

Cuautemoc

Yeah, two things. One is perseverance. It's a very important one. It's a very rough market. Crypto is not for the easy at heart. It's really extremely competitive, very fast-paced, very technology-intensive. And I would say those are kind of the negative things about it. The positive things is very welcoming to people from the outer world. That's really, they're very embracing. Like, if you come from – they call them newbies – ‘Hey, we have a newbie. Come on board. We'll help you.’ You know, very, very open, welcoming, very tribal in a way, because you have different ecosystems. So, you have Bitcoin, you have Ethereum, you have Solana, you have many others. And then you almost have to choose your tribe where you want to work. But it's a very exciting place to be. Reminds me, I get the same early feelings of the early days of the internet, the early days of mobile technology. So, kind of the same feeling. The only thing that I would say is it's difficult to come in this space because there's not doors to say, 'Hey, come to crypto.' There's just a lot of marketing. One of the recommendations would be, you know, just go to some of the larger crypto events. Normally, there's a lot of them. One of them is happening in Dubai, I think, in a couple of weeks. It's called 'TOKEN2049'. Very well respected. They talk about everything going in crypto.

But if you're an entrepreneur, again, I would think twice before you jump in and have this ultimate vision. I know, I think you're also an entrepreneur. It's a long battle. I know that with social media today – I have kids – you know, everything looks so easy. It's like, well, everybody's flashy. They make money instantly. It's not the case, to be honest. You have to work very hard. You have to be diligent. Find role models. I'm a strong believer that I don't have all the answers, so I surround myself with people that are smarter than me. And maybe I have some superpowers, I know that. Other people have superpowers. If you get enough of that superpower team, then you become almost invincible. And that's very important. So, I would recommend don't try to do everything yourself. Find good superpower teammates to battle. It is a battle. It's a long-term battle, for sure. And if you come into blockchain and crypto, I would call it the battle royale of all times. As I said, it's like eating glass and drinking sand at the same time. It's pretty intensive, but very exciting. I mean, there's good chances that you're going to get thrown down on the ground, and you'll have to get up again, dust yourself, and keep going for an extra day. So, but exciting. Yeah. But it's not for the light of heart. I'll put it that way.

Oleg

During the global shift towards remote work, what insights or facts have you focused more effectively maintain connected and productive team in a virtual setting?

Cuautemoc

Yeah, it's a very good question. So, we, again, native to the blockchain space. We're decentralized. We kind of don't have a headquarters office. We try to meet in different locations. I think a lot of it has to do with, again, finding people that are passionate about the space, that they want a very good challenge in terms of the technology. We're trying to bring people that are good developers from traditional markets, you know, either good DevOps, good Web2 front-end developers, and then induce them into how blockchain and crypto works. It's difficult. It's a new kind of technology. There's no proper education. It's just kind of jumping into the space and learning as you go. So, we spend considerable amount of time on educating the teams as they come. Knock on wood, you know, we have very loyal teams. We've been very good to them. We operate kind of independently. But we give people accountability. I think that's important in this space, like, give people accountability to learn and to make their mark in the space. So, that's worked out for us. It's been a very interesting journey so far. Technically very difficult. The market was very difficult. But, we've grown stronger by these challenges. I like, in a way, a little bit of challenge. If you have good times all the time, it's difficult to build a very strong bond. Sometimes, as they say, you have to be in the trenches to build that very strong bond. And if you do that at the beginning of the company, it just kind of cements that DNA very strongly.

Oleg

Could you share how your development team is structured? And have you ever outsourced your techniques to an external vendor?

Cuautemoc

Yeah, very good question. So, we try to structure it in terms of the components. As I said, you have the basic infrastructure. We run a lot of infrastructure. We kind of an infrastructure-native company. So, we keep that kind of a DevOps layer where you have all the different clouds that we deploy, you have the clustering, you have the security. So, there's like that one layer. Then, on top of it, you have the different services that we provide. So, we do like RPC, we have Presto, we have staking, we have other services. And these are kind of dedicated teams with either product lead, including, you know, it could be front-end, back-end developers for that specific product. And then, they work with the different teams, for example, in deployment on the DevOps side, or if we need to correlate that with business development. So, we try to create this kind of segments. We have people in a proxy, we have people on the back end, we have people on the front end. Some of them collaborate. So, we try to create a kind of a product block where that team is responsible for that product. And then they’re outsourced internally within

Gateway itself to other teams that are more specialized within other segments. And that seemed to work pretty well because then you're able to scale without having to scale the entire company. So, if you have a product that is more successful, then you could scale the team within that product itself. And then, the infrastructure doesn't get impacted as much. We're strong believer of automation. So, we've done a lot of our automation internally, mainly around the operation of infrastructure. That's something that instead of outsourcing to say, 'Hey, we outsource to third party DevOps team,' we just built the automation internally through our own systems that allows us to be more efficient and effective. We have outsourced definitely some services, mainly around auditing. So, we do outsource that to do audits within both the infrastructure but sometimes around smart contracts as well. And we do work with a couple of companies in the space to outsource very unique development of specific services that maybe we don't have in-house. But for the most part, we develop most of the things in-house. So, yeah, that's a little bit how we've been operating.

Oleg

What were the precise factors that you prompted to consider IT outsourcing? I guess this is niche specialty that you lack experience.

Cuautemoc

Yeah, exactly. So, more like if we got a project that required very unique specialty that we didn't see that it could be either repurposed or resold, then it made more sense for us to either outsource it or just find teams that would either more specialized on it. But we're pretty pragmatic. We see that either part of the development that we'll do it's something that we could repurpose and either resell, then we'll try to keep it in-house. We're strong believer of building the IP and the service itself. Again, we do outsource some of the components, but for the majority, 90% of the things that we built, we built in-house. And we kind of invest on the teams to make sure that we develop the technology. But yeah, I would say some of the specific third parties, maybe that we don't see the value to keep it in-house, we will outsource.

Oleg

How do you measure the success of your collaboration with your partner, IT outsourcing partner?

Cuautemoc

So, it's a very good question. We have a lot of different partnerships. I think there's two parts of it. One is are they aligned with the kind of visions that you have in terms of when you partner to do something? It could be either marketing or it could be developing something together, go to market. It's around, are you very well aligned in terms of the go to market that you have for the vision in terms of implement. And then, you know, what is the end result? I'm a very result-driven person. So, it's all good until they say the road hits the rubber, and then you see the collaboration and the output, right? So, that's normally how I look at things. You don't know until you actually start working on projects together, and then you realize this. You could always tune it, of course. Every partnership is very different in nature. So, I think those two things. So, you align on the initial direction, and then, as you start collaborating, you see the results pretty easily, as an output.

Oleg

As we wrap up our conversation, what advice would you give to other companies considering IT outsourcing?

Cuautemoc

Yeah, definitely. I think it's rated a lot of the years. I worked in Alcatel. As well, we had insourcing, outsourcing, nearshore, offshore. So, there's been all kinds of different models. I think just look at the needs that you have. I think it's an important factor of any company to again, stay core within the core of what you do. And everything that is not really core, you definitely outsource it, or if you have, for example, in terms of either scaling or maybe you're trying to tackle a new service or a new product, that kind of makes sense to outsource that until you feel maybe you need to insource it. But I would say it's a little bit tricky. It sounds very good, but really, as I said, these two things: are the missions aligned, and really, when you start working together, do you see that there is this kind of very strong correlation on the output? Because if not, it just creates more headaches than support. Yeah, I'm a strong believer of partnerships and outsourcing the things that don't make sense to own internally. And we’re definitely always looking into that, and we do outsource some of the things within Gateway as well.

Oleg

Temoc, thanks for your time. Thanks for joining me. Blockchain industry has been growing for a while after Bitcoin price has significantly increased. Now there is some correction. I hope it's temporary. But I do see, not only me, everyone sees the increasing interest to this crypto, to blockchain, to Bitcoin. So, definitely we're on time having our video podcast, and I'm sure it will be valuable for tech people from blockchain. Thanks for your time. Thanks for joining me.

Cuautemoc

Thank you very much, Oleg, for the opportunity and exceptional interview. So, very good questions. Thanks again for the opportunity.

Oleg

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