I was recently asked on a podcast how I went from clerking on the Supreme Court to being a VP of Strategy for Aleo (a blockchain company). I gave a quick-ish answer about how technology can help us protect people’s rights, but I thought I’d take a little time put that answer in a fuller context:
(1) I think it’s important to figure out what motivates you, and for me, I’m very motivated by curiosity. I view my career as a way to experience different parts of the world. You can use a job to move to a different city or country, or to a totally different industry.
(2) Curiosity among other things took me from law to finance. In the finance world, I learned things I would’ve probably never learned as a lawyer — the nuts and bolts of corporate finance, how capital markets work, etc.
(3) I also learned how to think (more) like an investor. And one of the things I came to appreciate is focusing on spaces where the pie is growing, and growing fast. Those tend to be industries where there is room to innovate and where demand far outstrips supply, as opposed to a zero-sum game.
(4) One way to think about these industries is that they come in waves. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, the concept of asset managers (companies that manage money for other entities, e.g., Vanguard, Blackrock, Blackstone, etc) saw incredible growth. There was far greater demand for these asset managers than there were asset managers. And there was a lot of room for innovation — from index funds and ETFs to all other sorts of financial products (good and bad), and so on. In the 1990s and 2000s, internet tech companies were the next wave — and with them a different kind of asset manager, the venture capitalists.
(5) So one question now, for any investor, is what is the next wave? What is the next space where the end market is growing fast, and there is a lot of room for innovation that addresses problems or makes life easier or better?
(6) After going down the rabbit hole to understand how it works, I think blockchain technology is the next wave. There’s two reasons why: (a) before blockchains, it was hard to create reliable and portable digital assets — we didn’t, for example, rely on a digital real estate title because it could be faked, and the idea of a new digital money would’ve been a joke because owners of the money could just copy paste it and there would always be an inflation problem; bitcoin, by solving that problem with the blockchain, opened the door to a world of innovation (even beyond money) that few had previously considered possible; and (b) much like cloud technology gives companies the ability to outsource data storage, blockchain will give people and companies the ability to outsource computing power, and that computing power can be configured to do things we are just beginning to dream up.
(7) OK, so, blockchain is maybe interesting from an investing perspective. Why go there as a career?
(8) I love the law — thinking about it, reading about it, debating it. Why is that relevant to the blockchain? Because, as my mentor Lawrence Lessig so persuasively argued, code is law: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html — and I’ve come to see that understanding this is crucial to actually protecting people’s rights.
(9) Case in point: Over the last thirty years, Web 2.0 — as many have called it — was built on an information asymmetry. Companies that understood “code is law” wrote the code to back into business models that worked for them; in the process they took our data and created a world of clickbait & echo chambers & algorithms that divide us. Much of this w/o us even realizing it.
(10) Worse yet, many of these companies have been untrustworthy stewards of our data, sometimes failing to implement even the most basic security safeguards. HHS reports that over 250 million healthcare records have been compromised over the last 11 years (https://www.hipaajournal.com/healthcare-data-breach.../). Equifax alone allowed over 147 million records to be compromised.
(11) Web 3.0 will be the convergence of three things: (a) faster speed/capacity; (b) better AI; and (c) blockchain technology. None of these things by itself will necessarily be good or bad — like any tool, it’s what we do with them. What we know for sure is that the convergence of these technologies will create applications and functionality as unforeseeable as Uber and Instagram and TikTok were just twenty years ago.
(12) Enter Aleo. This is a company building out “zero knowledge proofs” — a mind blowing technology that computer scientists and cryptographers have been working on for decades. The basic idea is that it allows you to prove something without sharing the data that proves it — e.g., that you are 21 without sharing your DOB, or that you have your password or social security number without actually sharing it. This has the potential to reduce data leakage and increase data security by orders of magnitude. It will also be crucial to creating a blockchain that can comply with regulations around sensitive data like people’s financial and healthcare records. Long story short, it is a very powerful technology that will give us tools to build a stronger and more secure web.
(13) Finally, to me, it is crucial that the U.S. and other democracies be at the forefront of this technology. This is an “infrastructure of the internet” race and we have every reason to be the ones building it and the ones who understand it the best. Like 5G or quantum computing, it would be a huge mistake to fall behind on understanding this.
(14) Put all of this together, and…you can also see why it’s impossible to give a full answer on a podcast :) but I wanted to lay out all the things that converged to make Aleo and blockchain the subject of my curiosity, and the next chapter of my career. Let’s build!
