 Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's theCUBE covering Polygon 18, brought to you by PolyMash. Welcome back, everyone. We're here live with theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Polygon 18. We're in the Bahamas. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, co-founder and co-host of theCUBE. We're here with special guest, Halsey Miner, entrepreneur. Serious serial entrepreneur here on theCUBE. Halsey, great to have you. You're the founder and CEO of Video Coin. Successful ICO. You had an event last night, kind of an investor thank you event out in the Bahamas Country Club there. You're here. Man, you're pro. You're back in the game with this crypto. This is a wave. I mean, I want to get your perspective because you see waves. You've seen CNET. You started that from scratch before online news was anything. You were the pioneer in that. First investor, first operator. And at salesforce.com, a variety of other successful entrepreneurial ventures. You got a nose for the waves. So just put in perspective. What is this wave? Yeah, so I actually have an interesting story because I've actually started around 2012 and I launched my first business in 2013. So the first problem that I saw was how do you get your money from your bank account and by Bitcoin? Still a problem. It hasn't been fixed, right? So I tried to fix that. I did. Too certain to fix the problem. So what I did was created effectively a Coinbase connector and I started out and was going to make it very easy to take your bank account, connect it up. It seemed logical and then buy the currency. The company was called Bit Reserve at the time. So no bank would touch anybody meaning fit in their name. And it was even worse than that. All of us who put our company name into our bank account, we had our bank accounts based on stuff there, right? So I started getting an idea how difficult this was going to be. Coinbase getting Silicon Valley bank account early on to become the conduit was very fortuitous. It ultimately took two and a half years and buying a big giant New Jersey bank before we were able to allow you to connect your US bank or European bank into a poll to buy a currency. So it's really a poll, Coinbase, maybe like a very, very few who have been able to crack that problem. We literally had to buy part of the bank too. So that's where I started. So I really looked at it very much as money as a new monetary system. And I still see unlimited opportunities there. It wasn't until really a couple years later that I saw the blockchain as a new architecture for computer. And what I mean by that is what Bitcoin proved was that if you gave people software and they ran it on their computer and they got paid and some funny kind of digital money, they would convert that money back into P.O. or you know, dollars and they'd go buy more computers. And nobody asks anybody to be a Bitcoin miner. They just kind of showed up the more of the bigger it got, the bigger opportunity. And what's most interesting is whether you make money or lose money depends on your cost of power. So for most of these Bitcoin miners that you're hydroelectric, bam. So what I realized when video coins in the area of video, it's a direct competitor with Amazon web services for everything you do in video. So there's, it's called a coding which is compress it, there's storage and there's streaming, three basic pieces. And what I realized was we can, two things, first of all, 20% of servers in data centers are not used at all called zones, right? So all of these people can have an Air, B&B, Uber model. They can all of a sudden start earning on assets that are doing nothing, right? But even if you look at it in the future, if video mining, which is what we call it, ends up being like Bitcoin mining, then what happens is that, is that the whole thing works on the cost of power. It's not good for Amazon if they have to be competitive solely based on cost of power. Dave, so he's got an ICO going on. We looked at Filecoin, right? So Filecoin with storage and that's infrastructure. You get a video coin, we're streaming right now, we got video. This is kind of like an interesting digital media infrastructure. Well, what you're taking, compare it to the Filecoin. The thing that's interesting to me that I'd love to get all these input out is you've, you've got the full spectrum here. You started in publishing. Yeah. And now you- With five TV shows. Okay. Yeah, I've seen it at five TV shows. Right. And so very digital from the beginning and relatively ripe for disruption and now into banking, which really hasn't been disrupted, but we all think it's coming. That's right. So that's an interesting spectrum. It's not Negra Ponte, I don't think, bits versus atoms because you've seen, taxis get disrupted. Yep. That's atoms. That's right. What are the factors that make an industry ripe for disruption? Well, I mean, the obvious thing is really disruptive technologies, right? And so for the internet, for me it was, I started the company in 93 to be on commercial online service like AOL. And I saw, I guess, the first browser in 93. And that's actually its son. And it made me believe that this internet would be this incredible thing. And it was really seeing information coming in, and the internet wasn't that big back then, but I watched like a GIF of a storm and from one of the weather centers. And so I realized that this information thing was incredibly interesting. And so what all of us did, the way I thought about it, seeing that is we're cracking open databases and we're just letting people have the information. And it was silly things like the ability for me to live in San Francisco but know what the weather was in New York and pack appropriately. This was called the magic. I mean, we take all of this for granted. This is magic right at the time. Oh my God. You had to go out and buy it. Check the stock price. Oh my God. Yeah, exactly. Call your friends in New York. Yeah, so that was magic. So at a very high level, it was just in access to information. At a very high level, what this is is combining information and money into a packet, right? So now what we can do is I can gather information from servers about what they're really doing and I can also be paying them at the same time. So it would have actually solved a lot of problems around the internet because the internet, getting paid was hard. And there were so many times we'd go into a meeting and we'd agree on the partnership but we didn't know who's paying who. You know, my paying you for traffic or you paying me for content or you know how I was like. So this kind of comes with a built-in payment system which is I think what makes it so incredible as a system. So we're more stable I would inferring long-term anyway because that whole system you just described in the internet kind of all blew up when the funding dried up. It blew up. And I think there are certainly a lot of risks. I mean the number one thing I would tell everybody in this area is be very cautious about what you invest in. There were a lot of companies that, so my whole description was sort of of the internet bubble was that, you know, people say, well, you know, $9 trillion was lost in investing. But I think it happened though. And what I said to the people is it would be great if people had just invested in the survivors but who knew what they were. The only reason the United States emerged with, you know, with Salesforce and eBay and, you know, Amazon and et cetera. The only reason that we emerged dominating the world was because we invested in them all. Right? And so even all those things that were called silly ideas actually happened. And at the end of that happening, it was all a matter of timing. Yeah, all of it. So, you know, what's happening now is very much the same thing. You know, there's a lot of people who are going to invest in a lot of bad ideas, right? And, but this is all necessary for the good ideas to get funding and for something big to come out of this. So I'll take on with the video coin and compare it. You mentioned Amazon, right? So our observation, obviously we're reporting all these shows, Amazon websites and among others. The big guys are sucking all the oxygen out of the room. Look at that. Absolutely. The big whales, right? Google, Facebook, Amazon. I mean, we can't even run any ads on our site. We actually prefer to just push the content all over the world because it's hard to build a destination site. I mean, people going out of business in the media business, video your choices are, Ustream now owned by IBM. Twitch TV became Amazon, which was Ustream before that. Build your own custom player, set up a CDN, which is actually hard and expensive. Yeah. Okay, so do I use Facebook live? Again, controlled by Facebook? That's right. So there is an opportunity that you're pursuing. Did you have that in mind? I mean, we see it every day and we know this and luckily we have a good deal of Ustream. But the point is that going to be up too. Yeah. What's the alternative producers? Content producers who are streaming, whether it's a pro set like this or someone who's going to have unlimited access to video streaming. So the real issue, the two are cost and innovation, okay? And so, so Hano Bause, who's the CTO of 20th Century Fox and one of our advisors, right? So all these media companies, they have same problem. Nobody is watching broadcast anymore. The cost of nothing. And everybody's now streaming it, which is one-to-one and has a cost associated with it. So that's why, and even worse, video is going to 4K, 8K, VR, the data that's going up like this. So all these companies are confronted with all these costs and they can't monetize it. Google can monetize it. Amazon can monetize it. Telcos. Netflix can monetize it. But they can't monetize it. So it's all cost, effectively, and revenue. So the one thing that we offer from video platform by using all this research, so we cut the cost 60 to 80%, so that's huge. The other thing is, in the early days, everybody bought Salesforce because it was cheaper. One tenth of cost. And I used to say to people, from the long run, it's going to be way more innovation because they're constantly, every quarter, rolling out a new version, right? And they're going to have this, the ability to connect in API, effectively, the ability to connect. An old ecosystem can arise around that and that's why their conference has 140,000 people during Dreamforce because there's a whole ecosystem. It's sticky as hell, too. Hard to get out. That's right. So while we are 60 to 80% lower cost, we're also effectively open sourced at the same time. So the ability to have a community arise and develop software. And so right now, you've seen this huge consolidation because it's actually kind of hard to build new kinds of apps on top of Amazon Web Services, right? But if you have this open system and you have all these people who are contributing code to it, all of a sudden there are apps, video apps that they'll be literally a whole new- So are you going to have an open source contribution piece to your? Yeah, I mean basically everything we build is open source, right? So all the way through the network. So it creates a palette for people to start innovating in video because really what's happening is a lot of the innovation is getting hurt by the fact that these big guys totally dominate it, right? And they don't want to see any innovation outside of the ones that they bring to you, right? So you've heard my rap on this. I'd love to get a hold of these thoughts. So the big guys say, you're right, I've won. It's like centralization, victory. And then people here say, no, we want to take it back. The premise that I hear a lot is there's been no innovation in protocols. And Google built Gmail on SMTP, HTTP, DNS, and it's all government funded or academia. And there's just been a lack of innovation. That's right. And now, this is why I counter Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger is, oh, we're building out a new set of infrastructure. That's right. Okay, so where do you guys fit into that? What are your thoughts, first of all, on that premise? And where do you guys fit? Yeah, I mean, look, you've got these huge companies that are totally dominant. And even though they are in fact, you know, innovative Silicon Valley companies by label, okay, they have all of the same issues. Like I say to people, nobody today believes that anybody can put Amazon Web Services at risk. If I went to somebody and said, you know Amazon Web Services, which are worth three quarters of the value of the company or five, six, depending on who you talk to, there's going to be something after that. It would literally be a new concept because everybody's convinced, and this is, this is Amazon's, yeah, this is their big, this is the way they make all their money. Right, and if you said to somebody, there is going to be a next thing, they would look at you like you're foolish. But the reality is, when you start changing some basic underlying infrastructure in the internet, and you start doing things and decentralization, this is the word we're going to be using, you know, we're going to see it in solar power. And in solar power is on a cost to benefit like this. So, you know, it isn't going to be long for we're going to have our, you know, powering our house legitimately, not like, you know, some science fiction thing. We'll be legitimately powering most of our needs with solar that we connect because the cost is coming down so much. So we're going to see all of this decentralization happening. And in the world of computing, decentralization means that this is going to be the most efficient that computing can ever be. Because it's just compared using the Uber and Airbnb model of saying anything that's excess, let's turn in to, you know, let's turn into value. And I've heard that for every Uber driver, 15 cars go away, right? So this decentralization is going to have a profound effect on the economy. And it's going to have a profound effect on these big guys. Oh, and even those guys are going to get disrupted. They're going to get disrupted. But they're 20 years old. It's time for them to get disrupted. I mean, you know, e-commerce is a 30-year-old stack, some say 20-year-old stack on e-commerce. All these things are ready. Even what we would consider modern, the miracle of saying, oh, weather in New York. I mean, that magic is here now in a new way. So I got to ask you the question. I got to ask you a question because you brought up that point. In your history of your career as an entrepreneur, because you are doing stuff that's always new and cool, and probably before anyone else sees it, can you talk about some of the ideas that you've seen, not to say your ideas as well, others, where the investors said, that's the dumbest idea I ever heard. So what billion-dollar opportunities have you seen emerge that investors have said, that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard? Well, actually the one that is Salesforce, no VC would put money in. It was really kind of backed by Larry Ellison and me early on. And what, so- Google was a dumb idea. We even went portals, not search. So the bet that nobody would take in 2000 was that companies would take their sales information and they would put it in the cloud. Nobody would believe that. Not anyone in, and so, and I used to joke, and I used to say the only way it's going to happen is if the sales guy's been waiting two years to get his sales management system in place actually runs over the head of security in the parking lot. That's what it's going to say, because it's outsourcing. And the security guys would say, oh no, no, no, no, we're going to lose all of our data, right? It didn't matter that Salesforce had way more security guys than these guys had and better working internally. Nobody believed in it, literally nobody believed in it. It was 1999. This is your point about the decentralization. No one's going to believe, wait a minute, that could never happen. So in a way, the investor thesis should be, I want to invest in the dumbest ideas, because that might be the best idea. It is, I mean the big obvious ones that attract billions and billions of dollars, I mean how many of those end up actually not turning into anything, right? A lot of them, right? I mean so CNET was profitable $9 million. I believe that Yahoo is profitable on $3 million. I think Google was somewhere around 12 to $15 million. So there are a lot of these businesses, and Amazon's kind of obviously the outlier. You still have a problem. Yeah, this is the outlier. But a lot of these businesses are started by people who use a relatively small amount of money and are very creative. You kind of get this over and over again, Microsoft never needed any money, they accepted $5 million from, yeah. So this happens a lot and in fact, I think it's very dangerous when in year five you're losing $300 million, right? I mean you bought 500, whatever it is, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. What's the role of community? Because we heard the guy from Block Tower Capital say something I thought was really profound. I don't need VC because if you're a startup you can actually don't have to waste your energy on board meetings and other things. You can build your business and use the community as your benchmark. So this plays to your whole picking up the slack kind of thing in efficiency. So entrepreneurs can be more efficient in these communities. This is where the crypto currency blockchain is thriving. What's your thoughts to that? And how do you see that community interaction progressing? I mean I've been, you know, in my career there's been a sea change in sort of the culture of technology and really everything, right? Which is, you know, when I started out everything was very hierarchical, you know? It's like how far up the chain you got that measured how successful you are. Now it's how big is your network, right? And you know, I was talking to somebody the other day who said, you know, these VCs are going in and they're measuring these companies' success by how many Instagram and Twitter accounts and there's massive fraud going on because people are buying these accounts to pump up their numbers, right? So people are starting to value by the breadth of your network. Reputable network. Reputable, yeah. Not fake network. But what I heard is there's actually a Twitter application type of scene that'll go in and tell how many of them are real and how many of them are not now. So really the community comes, you know, almost the measuring stick for your value. And so it hasn't, you know, before I had users, you know, today everybody has community members. And so it becomes sort of kind of like everything, I guess. And as our meeting model is all community-based, which is we just naturally go there because that's where the data is. That's where the feedback is. I mean, I can't get feedback from Facebook and Google. They don't have any, they own the data, right? They own the data. There's no letters to the editor on Facebook. There's only hate, but you know, a comment. But you know, before Microsoft and all these other came, you know, IBM dominated the world and nobody ever thought they would go away. You know, AT&T dominated the world and nobody ever thought they would go away, you know? All right, personal question for you. I've got to wrap, because I know you've got to go. Appreciate your time, by the way. Great, great story. You can go off for another hour. Personal note, what is the most compelling thing that's moved you as an entrepreneur in the crypto market? Like something that it could be an anecdote, it could be a situation. When you look at this opportunity, as the world's going to eventually be re-instrumented with data, with new open source and community, what's something that surprised you or moves you as an entrepreneur saying, this is freaking awesome? So this hasn't been done yet, but it will be done. And so this is what actually motivated me to start Uphold, was the ability to turn your phone into your bank and to be able to exchange money and primarily really solving the ability for the poor to be able to move money around without having 10 to 20 to 30% of it taken away. Everybody's talked about this, remittance. And so far, nobody has actually solved that problem. That problem is going to get solved. I mean, it's inevitable that the phone becomes the bank. There are so many regulations that are designed to stop that. And it's extraordinary. Once you get in, you see all the ways that have been set up. This is a team system. This system, this problem should have been solved long ago, right? And every phone should be a bank. I mean, it'd be connected to a bank, but every phone should have my money in and I should be able to send it to you instantaneously. And it should be like getting into Fort Knox. I mean, banks have computers. They could make this happen today. They just don't want to do this. So I think the most profound thing for me is the problem that's still not solved, the problem that I set out to solve, which is really creating a more equitable financial system. And we live in a country where the banks make about $37 billion a year in bounce check fees. Think about that. $37 billion in bounce check fees. So if you just take that out, you just take out, because it all affects, it all affects people on the lower socioeconomic scale. You create a revolution. Just getting rid of the bank fees that people pay for bouncing checks. Well, I mean, the narratives, like the narrative of taking down gatekeepers or central authorities is the premise of this ecosystem. And you could take that example and apply it to thousands of use cases. And banks are repatriates. Flat out. American banks are the most repatriates because no other country would allow $37 billion to be taken away in bounce check fees. So Halsey, congratulations on your success again and great to see you on theCUBE. And you're now a CUBE alumni. So you'll get your congratulations on that too. We're going to get you in our telegram groups. Now you'll be 42 members. We just turned on last night. Appreciate your time. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Thanks for your insight and experience and commentary. Halsey, my own experience, entrepreneur pro here in the trenches, establishing a great new venture. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break.