Yeah in 2015, when we really started getting behind watching,
we were able to do that because at that point suddenly,
and it happened over a course of a couple of months,
people, executives, big companies,
CEOs, governments started to realize that there was this difference
between blockchain and cryptocurrency or bitcoin specifically.
Once that occurred, it became safe for companies,
like IBM and Microsoft and Intel and others,
to get behind the technology as the next evolution of the Internet,
as opposed to taking a stand on something like cryptocurrency
which a lot of companies in 2015 were not ready to embrace.
So, suddenly we were able to go out and say,
"We're working on a blockchain,
just not on cryptocurrency",
and that made sense to people.
Three months before I started working on that,
you couldn't say blockchain.
You couldn't because it would
cause mayhem among clients who would say, "No, what are you doing?
You're going to ruin our business".
Suddenly, a couple of months later after we started,
CEOs were saying, "Oh,
blockchain is wonderful. We want blockchain.
We're not sure about this other stuff,
the cryptocurrency but we love blockchain.
That's when we started working in earnest in 2015,
in the summer, on blockchain technology.
Then, we had a decision to make,
would we get involved the way we did around Java in the 90s?
Say well, we didn't invent Java,
but we want to get behind it.
It's open source. We're going to get behind that technology.
We worked for several months to do that on Ethereum.
We said we're going to work on Ethereum and we're going to make it the next Java.
Then we ran a ground on that strategy because in 2015, Ethereum's leadership,
the community we're really working on some hard problems around the notion of
cryptocurrency and public networks that weren't the same problems as we,
in industry, were looking to solve.
Specifically, the public network side of this schism, this divide.
We needed to focus on scaling,
and privacy which now we see in the forms of Sharding,
and ZK-Snarks and other kinds of protocols that are coming out.
So, for the last two or three years,
the public side of this conversation has been working on
these really deep hard problems around those issues.
So, the best resource,
other than this course,
is more stuff like this and it's all over the Internet.
So, it's not hard to find the information.
The most important thing when getting into this blockchain technology is again,
focus on a problem to solve and then use blockchain out of the corner of your eye,
peripherally to say, "Is that going to give me
any insights into that problem that I wouldn't have had if I hadn't had this lens?
I am going to dial up that lens".
If you look straight at it,
you're going to go full blockchain.
Going full blockchain means that you're going to start
imagining things that don't even need to be solved.
You need to focus on the problem.
I had an investor in a company I ran years ago that was really smart.
I wish they had told me this 20 years before they did.
They said, "We don't fund people who are in love with their solution to a problem,
we fund people who have an authentic story about
a problem because they're the ones that are going to
keep on figuring that problem out even if their first idea didn't work."
That saying, "Hey, I've got a authentic story about curing
cancer or drug use or opioids or anything like that".
If you have an authentic story about a problem,
then focus on that or at least pay attention to what you pay attention to.
Bina RamamurthyTeaching Professor
