 I am very excited about our next guest. She is the CEO and founder of True Story. Please welcome to the stage, Prithi Khasaredi for coming. Go ahead and have a seat. So you have an impressive background. Many of you may not have already heard of Prithi, but some of you certainly have. You are the founder and CEO of True Story, which is doing incredible work in rebuilding not only trust on the internet, but truth on the internet, which is an admirable effort. You were a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. You worked at Goldman Sachs. You were an engineer at Coinbase. You talk about blockchain and educate folks. It's an amazing background that you have. And I have like a million questions for you. And I want to talk about True Story, because I think it's just such a timing of this company is so perfect. But before that, I want to talk about something I think is really amazing. You have an engineering degree, and you went to a hack reactor and took some courses for 12 weeks or so. But you essentially taught yourself how to code, is the story I have heard. Tell us about, in open source, we've got all these engineers who work in all these projects, and some are mentors to other folks in projects. And then there's a lot of folks who want to understand how I can do something like you did. Tell us a little bit about how you taught yourself to code. Sure. So I have an engineering degree, but it wasn't software engineering. And when I was working at Andreessen Harvitz, my job was to meet with entrepreneurs and builders and understand what they're building and decide whether it's a good investment or not. And to be honest, sitting on that side of the table, I started to get envious of the fact that they can have this idea and just bring it into the world. I wanted that skill set. I wanted that tool set to be able to have an idea and just code it up and bring it to the world. And I felt like if I fundamentally had that skill set, I can do anything in the world. It's like this freedom that I didn't have that I wanted. And so I started to look into how to learn how to code, typical Google search. To be honest, I probably spent about a year struggling to get started. I started with different platforms, whether it was video courses or books or online courses. And it was that kind of beginner struggle where you get started, it's easy at first, and then you get to a little bit higher up and you fall down this, you spin your wheels on something and you just get frustrated and you give up. And then I started to, then something hit me and I remember my ex-boyfriend was like, why are you learning Python? Go learn JavaScript. It runs anywhere. So something about JavaScript, one day I just sat at home. I was like, I'm gonna try JavaScript. I sat for 10 hours that day, just glued to the computer, teaching myself JavaScript following, like I think a code school course or something, and I just got hooked. Something about JavaScript really, really hooked me because the immediate feedback look that you get when you code, you don't need all these tooling. You can just use any editor. It was super easy to set up. And that was just the start of it. I just had fun just playing around with CSS, HTML, JavaScript and seeing how that works. And over time, over the next month, just became obsessed with teaching myself how to code. And then I was doing, I was spending more time coding than I was on my real job. And that's when I realized actually, I think I want to, I just want to focus on coding. And that's when I decided to leave Andrews and Harvest and just focus full time on teaching myself how to code. I did do a boot camp. And the reason I did a boot camp is because I feel that the value of a boot camp is they kind of curate the knowledge and the information that you need to learn. If you're just beginning, it can be overwhelming to go on Google and try to figure out what you need to learn. And they really curate the projects, the curate the steps for how to just start creating and start coding. And also you have an entire peer group of people who are struggling with you too. And the support system helps a lot because you're all going through the same thing rather than you sitting alone in the basement trying to spin your wheels on something. So it was definitely helpful, but it was definitely not the end all be all. That was just the beginning. And then you build on from there to continue to code. So we have, you know, no JS folks in the crowd here, Kubernetes, different projects, you know. And they're always struggling to get more developers to the party. Like what advice would you give on that side of the equation for are there programs, are there boot camps? Like what could they do to, you know, appeal to someone who's just bent on teaching themselves how to code? Like what would you suggest? Like you're saying, what would, sorry. What kind of like, is it a boot camp that these projects could build? Is it a online courses? Like what can they do to bring more people in? There's no one size fits all answer to this. I think everyone learns differently. For example, some people learn really well just reading a book and hacking. And some people are very much like the hacker mindset. Some people prefer a much more structured format. For beginners, I would say something more structured. Like free code camp is a good example of a platform that has done a phenomenal job of creating all this content for free for any developer in the world to come in and just start coding. And they create like bite-sized projects and you can complete them and reach different levels. And then you start to build projects on your own. So there's a lot you can do, but I don't know if there's a one size fits all. I think like the reality is to become a programmer, you just have to code and code and code and try a bunch of stuff until something sticks. And if you don't have that mindset, if you don't have that hacker mentality, maybe you are not a programmer at heart, right? Grit, combined with some structure would be the summary. Well, so that is cool. Like it takes a lot of termination, I think to do something like teaching yourself to code. But I'd really love to hear about true story. So this is an organization, you started. I shudder to use the word fake news, but I mean, there's certainly, if you look around the internet, it's just filled chalk block with either anonymous trolling or falsehoods and from all corners. Tell us how you came up with this idea and what inspired you to start true story. Sure. So in a nutshell, what true story is, it's a decentralized application where we're validating claims that people make online. And if you think about it, what the internet did was it connected four billion people and allowed them to communicate ideas, knowledge and share everything online. And it is undoubtedly one of the best innovations in the world, but at the same time, that openness and that permissionlessness also meant that people can go online and say whatever they want. There was never a trust layer built into the internet. And so that's what led us to the situation we are today, which is fake news. And companies like Facebook and platforms like that are trying to control the fake news problem in a very centralized way. And there, for example, Facebook is employing offshore parties to validate fake news, but then why do they get to decide what's fake and what's real? How do we know their incentives are aligned for the, like maybe they'll be more favoring to an advertiser on Facebook versus not about what's fake news and what's not. So instead, what we're doing is we're using the community as a whole with the right token incentives to validate the claims that people make. And basically it's a game theoretic network and when a claim is made, someone can submit it to True Story and then people in the network are incentivized to determine whether it's a valid claim or not. So you can think of it as a truth layer on the web. Right, right. And the reason, I mean, one of the reasons it started was actually because of, I'm not sure if people have been following the blockchain space at all, but last year, in 2017 was this like crazy ICO phenomena where between the months of let's say March and December there were thousands of ICOs that started to come up and people were able to raise millions and millions and millions of dollars off of like white papers and websites, like fancy websites. And I was like, holy crap. Like there's a few legitimate projects and then a vast majority of them were just making up stuff and making false claims and just raising millions of dollars off of it and sometimes running away with it. It was building investors basically. Yeah, milking investors. And I was honestly just like in shock seeing all that and it really bothered me at a deep level that that could happen. And it was interesting because I was starting to notice that there were a lot of people in the know who knew what was actually an authentic project and what was not. We were talking about it in Slack. We were talking about it privately in DMs or in Telegram. But there was no platform to come out and say this in an organized way. All these conversations were happening in a disorganized way. So I was like, what if I can build a community around just truth seeking? We're just talking about whether that's a valid claim or not. And it actually started there and I started to figure out whether there's a token incentive system that I can design. It's kind of like think of it like what true story is basically Wikipedia or Reddit. But instead of Wikipedia where you're curating just information on true story, you're curating the truth. Right. Yeah. And so tell us a little bit about how the incentive works in terms of how you curate and get these people to get to the truth. So it's a stake based voting game and we'll release the details of it in the near future. But the idea is everything is staked. Everything has skin in the game. So to create a claim, you have to stake some amount of tokens and then people who want to participate in validating that claim also have to stake some amount of tokens. The votes are rated by a reputation score that's the reputation score is not a centralized score that we're deeming. The reputation score is basically the token balance of that user. And the only way the user has a token balance is because they've been a part of the network and accumulated that token balance by being a good validator. Interesting. So your stake is your, your token balance is your reputation. Right, right. And you don't, you can't buy your reputation. Right. You earn your reputation on the platform by being active and validating stories. And then there's also various processes to challenge things that have been, let's say some stories deemed as true, you can also later challenge it if you think that's actually a false story and now the game would start again and people would try to figure out why that's a false story or not. Yeah. I mean, it's a fascinating system where you're trying to align these incentives to get to what truth is, you know, in many ways like how blockchain sort of is trying to create this distributed trust model. I gotta say that distributed truth, that is ambitious. It is, it is an amazing journey. It's ambitious, but we need it. Yeah. And what do you think are some of the biggest challenges ahead of you or that you're even currently facing? The biggest challenge is, I would say, obviously there's technical challenges because there's a lot of technical challenges in the blockchain space with just building something that's scalable. And that's why you're seeing no meaningful applications out there today and everything either is either dog slow, the UX socks or those are the main two challenges. Like because blockchain, so technical challenges is one. And then the other challenge is we're trying to figure out which communities to start with first. Like we're not gonna solve the web's problem as a whole, the trust problem on the web as a whole at once. We're starting with specific categories where we think we can build meaningful communities of people who understand that category well. So we're starting with categories specifically in crypto as well. So categories like cryptography or Bitcoin or Ethereum or consensus protocols and people that are making claims within those categories and then building communities in those categories so that people in those categories can validate the claims that are being made in those categories. So for us, the biggest efforts right now is how do we build those early communities and how do we make sure that we're picking the right people to validate the content in these early communities? Interesting, interesting. Well, you mentioned the technical challenges around blockchain and how part of the reason because of those challenges, you're not seeing a lot of interesting blockchain applications. I do wanna put you on the spot though. What, you go around and educate people about blockchain technology, distributed letter technology all the time. And certainly at entries in Horowitz, you would have seen a broad view of different efforts and businesses and stuff. So what, aside from true story, what are some of the really cool blockchain efforts that you are seeing out there now? I think there's hundreds of things. People are trying a lot of different things. I would, my focus has mostly been around projects that are based around token incentives. I think I'm obsessed with, I'm obsessed with the idea of using tokens to realign incentives in social systems. And that's examples of projects that are doing that besides true story or auger. And there's another phenomenon called TCR, token curated registries, where they're using token incentives to basically curate lists. So like top 10 movies or top 10, I don't know, developers or whatever it is, like they're using tokens to curate certain kind of content or lists. And so that's an interesting area in applications that I'm obsessed with personally. But besides that, there's a lot of people that are trying to do, obviously payments is huge. Micro payments, micro finance, there's a lot of people who are trying to do that, but it's challenging today because the, first of all, the scalability problem. Right. Like Bitcoin doesn't scale, Ethereum doesn't scale, none of these platforms scale. To really do payments at a global scale, we need to solve that problem first. So I think even though there's all these ideas that people have for different applications that the blockchain can be used for, a lot of the focus recently has shifted to more of the infrastructure layer. And so a lot of people are trying to build scalability solutions, privacy solutions, more cryptographic primitives so that we can build the infrastructure first before we think about what are the applications that can exist on top. We're home to the Hyperleisure Project and I know Brian Bellendorf. We're seeing governments now looking at using blockchain technology for national ID, land registration, which are important systems that every citizen needs to interact with. Are you seeing any, what are you seeing out there that's interesting? Are there particular regions, countries that you think are kind of on the leading edge in terms of leveraging this to create government transparency, to make their society better? To be honest, my focus has been mostly on, I would divide the blockchain world into public and private blockchains. And they're very different. Of course. And I would bucket government or that kind of blockchain, any kind of banking blockchain type stuff in private blockchain world and then public blockchain world. And the private blockchain world to me is, it's definitely big, but it's less interesting. It's like, I don't know if it changes the world in a big way. Whereas the public blockchain world, I think it has the potential to, I think it's much more meaningful. And the reason is because, it has the, like with private blockchains, basically they're taking a database and trying to open it up amongst like close consortium group of people and see how that consortium can maybe operate in a more transparent, more effective way. With public blockchains, you're talking about how the world at large can basically have this shared transaction log and communicate and transact with each other across the world. Like just basically people talking to people without middlemen. Right, right, right. And do you, so do you think that, well, and I wanna ask a question, I think a lot of people to mine here is, so in terms of that public ledger as a currency, are you a long Bitcoin Ethereum? Like, what are you seeing in terms of these cryptocurrencies out there right now? I'm definitely a long Bitcoin, I'm definitely a long Ethereum. But to be honest, it's like, I definitely believe in a multi-blockchain world. Meaning I don't think it's, oh, Bitcoin wins or Ethereum wins or Cardano wins or whatever it is. I don't think it's that. I think there will be many, many, many blockchains. And that's because every blockchain kind of has, okay, it's a distributed system in the end and every blockchain is trying to optimize some part of it. Some blockchains care about privacy. Some blockchains care about scalability. Other blockchains care about other characteristics. And so you'll have different blockchains that serve different needs. And the currency, assuming that blockchain gives adoption, the currency will be valuable. That's how I think about it, yeah. I mean, that makes complete sense. I wanna come back to something you mentioned about true story, how it's sort of like Wikipedia, right? I mean, this may be sort of a bold thing to ask, but could it actually be Wikipedia? I mean, do you think this, I mean, it sounds a lot like what Wikipedia is to some degree. You know, what are your thoughts on that? Could this be a different way to go and curate something like Wikipedia? Yeah, absolutely. Ambitious. More to share? Thank you. I think, I guess I view true story less as a database of information, or, you know, Wikipedia is just a database of information. Right. And that's certainly valuable, but I view true story as a social network, where people can communicate and discuss why something is true, why something is false. There's a communication aspect to it that Wikipedia doesn't have today. Wikipedia is very flat, in my opinion. And I want information on true story to be alive. Interesting, interesting. And in terms of, yeah, I mean, I don't know if you are willing to name some of the sectors you're focusing on, you talked about securities and financial services and so forth, but how do you get people into that world? Is there some gate that they initially come into or anybody open to it? Like, just describe how it actually works. For true story. Like if you wanted to be participating in the economy. Oh, and? In the social network. So, yeah, we will be generating the community members and we'll be curating the community members and over time, it'll be more decentralized in the sense of the community members will figure out who they want to invite onto the platform and whether they believe they're good validators as well. But in the early days, the community members that we select will be somewhat centralized based on who we think would make good community members. Right, right. It's not, we're not doing like, for example, we're not doing an ICO. We're not doing any kind of token sale. And the reason is because we think that if we give the token to anyone in the world, we don't know what their incentives are. We can't control whether they understand the purpose of true story and whether they'd be good validators on the platform. But if we can curate the community ourselves in the early days and really lock in the early community ethos using those early community members and then let that community grow by itself, I think that's a better approach. Interesting. Well, it is, I wish we, I have like a hundred more questions but I'm starting to run out of time here. And it is, I mean, just the technical challenges, the social challenges, but when you look at sort of at a high level when you ask the question, is the truth, truth? I mean, what an important and compelling mission. Is there anything you'd like to say to get folks interested in true story or have them go and check out what you're doing? Sure, we're hiring. So we're looking for really, really smart developers to join our team and help us build this vision. And I'd love to chat with you if you're interested. There are a lot of smart folks running around this conference. And you don't need to know blockchain to join us. But you have to have some grit and be willing to be dedicated and learn. Well, thank you so much for coming. It is just amazing what you're doing. Thank you.