 Everyone's different here at the Canopy Workspace, different organisations, projects and specialisms. But here inside the Entopia building, there's also a common goal that brings us together. There's a collective desire to accelerate change, and sustainability is at the heart of it. The Canopy is all about collaboration, a community, sharing and learning from each other's experiences. And this is Canopy Connect, a podcast where you can get to know your fellow members at the Canopy. This time on the podcast. Hi, my name's David Coleman. I'm the Chief Product Officer at a company called IV42. So, let's connect. IV42 is a technology company, and more specifically we're a technology company that deals in trust, in helping people build trust. So, what typical technologies do people think of when you talk about trust technologies? We have things related to security, like cryptography and what have you, but we also have some more recent technologies like blockchain and distributed ledger technology. So, we're a technology company that is leveraging and building our own technologies to try and help people in business contexts, build trust in whatever their business processes. It's been an interesting journey for IV42. The company itself has been around for over six years now. It was originally founded on the basis of building a distributed ledger technology. So, that's where we started our journey, and that's how we really got into this area of trust technologies. But more recently, our journey, you know, often people talk about a technology, a good technology that's looking for a problem isn't really a useful technology at all. And so, we focus much more on what are some of the real problems that can be solved with such a technology. And we, you know, we looked at all different kinds of things. We ended up really looking at sustainability and more specifically in traceability. We realized that traceability in relation to sustainability in particular was an area of fraud with all kinds of issues, things like fraud, just the mechanisms of how information is shared, increasing regulation, putting huge burden on organizations, particularly the organizations trying to do the right thing. And so, we started to apply that technology into that space. And we're focused, at least for now, very much on commodities that have contributed in the past to deforestation. So, there's regulation coming out, that has come out rather, but will be enforced in particular in Europe next year. It's called the EU deforestation regulation. And a big part of trying to meet the requirements of that regulation is traceability, knowing where your imported goods have come from right back to the point of origin, but also being able to trust that, being able to trust the data that is being shared. If you're being held to account for that data, how do you know you can trust that data? So, we've built and we're building a platform which helps with the whole collection of that data, sharing and distribution of that data, and really, importantly, the trust in that data. So, typically, if we are working with the organization, there are two challenges that we need to help them overcome in regards to what it is we do. So, firstly, it's understanding and framing the challenges in their business and particularly around trust. So, it's funny that our system really models what we do for trust anyway. It just builds on that and builds, you know, technology to help with that. So, there's a real key part which is helping them understand how do you bring trust into their system? How do we fix the problems of trust around their business? So, we will actually sit down with them, preferably with a whiteboard, and we will get them to talk through their processes, their business, how it works, and where they see the issues are, and then we would point out and take them on that journey to understand how can you fix the problems that they've expressed using our technology. So, it's generally a very interactive thing. My background is a technologist. I've been a software engineer and an architect, and I've worked from anything from start-ups to big enterprises, and I've been primarily in the financial industry. And to be honest, I ended up in this area kind of by accident. I've always been very, very passionate about problem-solving. It's just what drives me. And the software process is very creative, so I just enjoy problem-solving and being creative in that regard. But I was very happily working at a bank. I was running a big program there, which I'd got off the ground and I got funding for. And then a friend of mine said, why don't you come along to this blockchain hackathon that Reuters were running? And I was like, I'm not that interested. I knew a little bit about blockchain, but I was like, you know, I've got my thing. I'm quite happy where I am. But he was quite persuasive in the end. I went along and we spent the weekend at this Reuters hackathon, put together a fun little project, and we had to pitch it and we had to pitch it everywhere from the, you know, as if it was a business pitch, not just the technology, but everything, the market and everything. Really enjoyed it and we ended up winning. And it really sort of gave me more of an appreciation of how blockchain and DOT could be used. I know a lot of people's experiences around Bitcoin and what have you and there's quite a lot of negative connotations in blockchain. But really, as a technology, you know, Bitcoin is an application of the technology. It's not the technology. And so what you can do, it started to kind of excite me. And then Reuters said, right, you guys need to come back to our next one to defend your title. This time I held it in Zug in Switzerland. The bank I was working at got wind of it and they were like, well, we can get some PR from this. So they actually sponsored us to go and we went and ended up winning again. And I'm kind of, and it got me a little bit more immersed into this sort of trust technology and some of the ideas of where it could be applied. If I was going to reflect on where the company's been and our ambitions for the future, I think you'd probably say from a, from a, from a startup perspective, we've done everything the wrong way around. We very much built a technology and then went and tried to find the problem it could solve, which is like classic textbook. You read it everywhere, like, don't do that. And in a way, I think you kind of like, yeah, of course I wouldn't do that. Even when you're in it, you kind of don't necessarily realize you're doing it. So it's been a real journey of sort of discovery, certainly for myself in terms of what it means to be a startup, what it means to try and find product market fit. And also sometimes as well, particularly as technologists, technologists I think can get very, well, I think anyone can, but as a technologist, you can get very attached to the technology. And so for me, it's been a real learning and for the organization, a real learning about the technology is key, absolutely. But without the problem, the technology is worthless. And so there's an element of we've had to discover, what is our short-term goals? What is our long-term ambitions? But you kind of got to hold those long-term ambitions to a certain extent with an open hand because they may change. You've got to be willing to pivot. You've got to be willing to say, right, if I don't solve the short-term challenges, then I'll never have the opportunity to achieve the long-term ambitions. So the easiest way for an organization to get in touch with us, if they want to, you know, maybe they think our technology is useful, but we're also happy to, we love to just to collaborate anyway. So we'd love to talk to people about their challenges, about what our lessons learn. You know, we really, there's so much we can learn from each other. But the easiest way to find us is through our website, which is iov42.com, so relatively short. But that's where you can find out more information about us and how to get in contact. One of the things about the technology that we work in, and I think it's actually one of the bigger impacts of blockchain and DLT than the technology itself. And that is a technology that requires collaboration. And I think maybe partly shaped by this fact of the technology, I think a lot shaped by the team that we built, but we're an organization that really thrives on collaboration. In fact, the whole point of our solutions is actually bringing people together and collaborating. And I think some of the challenges that we're, you know, organizations like ourselves and many of the other organizations in Canopy who are working in sustainability, these are problems that are entirely going to rely on businesses and organizations coming together and collaborate. So we're very, very open to collaboration. We already have a good number of partners and people we work with. We're very open to anyone. And then maybe, you know, people coming thinking, actually, we have a traceability problem or we're looking for a technology that can help bring trust to things. We can collaborate at that level. We're also willing just to collaborate at a different level where we're talking about sharing ideas about how we can solve problems, how we can go about building successful businesses. Our technology is about collaboration and us as an organization is about collaboration. So we're very, very open to anyone who wants to sort of just have a chat or someone who may want to explore our technology and how it could help them with their offering. Thanks for checking out this episode of Canopy Connect. Log in to your Office R&D profile to connect with your Canopy neighbors. Just head to the members page and find them. This is a Canopy podcast made by Newell Lottman. The Canopy is part of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Thank you for listening.