Building Web3 Infrastructure with James Bayly

James Bayly From dreaming of becoming a pilot to working in one of the fastest-growing technology sectors, James Bayly, Head of Business Development at SubQuery, has found a space that is both high pace and dynamic.

He creates, scale, sell, and continuously iterate product portfolios in growing startups. To do this he relentlessly focuses on the customer, on their experience, and on key insights that we need to adapt to quickly.

He has been involved in the Auckland startup scene for a few years now, building his own companies as well as helping grow existing ones. He has been in product ownership, engineering, testing, and even marketing roles in his short time. The breadth of these experiences has taught him the following James Bayly

– The customer needs to be at the front of everything that you do

– Rapid software prototyping is one of the best ways to validate a solution in the market

– I excel at reducing complex problems down to manageable ones

– Intuition is valuable, but nothing beats having quantitative data

– One of the hardest things to do is to walk away when it’s not working, take the invaluable lesson and move on

– A indispensable skill is the ability to talk tech, talk sales, and talk exec

Episode Highlights Here:

James:

Just like in a book, I would have to go through every single page looking for the last ten transactions that have been made. It’s the most inefficient way to store data if you want to correct it.

Brett:

What is the number one secret to subquery? By the way, if you want to learn more about James Bailey and everything he’s doing, go to the subquery. the network says subquery. network So what’s the number one secret to building web three infrastructure, James.

James:

So maybe I’ll take a step back and look at the environment with three at the moment. So look with three right now as the.com. industry or the industry in 1997. Also, right? There’s a lot of bullshit out there. There’s a lot of hype. There’s a lot of snake oil. And that’s one of the biggest downsides of industry, but behind the scenes, beneath that layer of noise. And, and Canada’s, there’s a lot of really smart people building and building infrastructure tools, building tools, bring new applications, and d phi, NF T’s and all these different spaces. We do a lot of work in a subgroup with Berkeley University. And their top master of financial engineering course masters of financial engineering was a historic course basically everyone from the top of the top would go to hedge funds. We’re seeing a lot of those students. And I’ve told them about the lecture on this course. And she’s saying that most of the students now go into blockchain blockchains, attracting the smartest and the brightest, because it provides an alternative to the way that we do things online now, what alternative what our financial industry is like an alternative to how we sell art and sell value around the art. Now tune in to a lot of different things. One of the things in blockchain it’s quite fundamental, a different approach to how things work. And so we’re so trying to figure out where it might work, what applications of the technology work, and just like back nice 97, where pets.com was the biggest new thing, some of those applications are a bit misleading. But you know, looking 2022 years later, you know, Brett, you and I are talking from across the world, on the internet, and without the Internet. You know, life as we know it wouldn’t exist. So regardless of all the hype, there are a lot of people building these infrastructure pieces that are going to be there hopefully and 2050. To subscribe, what we do is focus on an infrastructure challenge. Now, Blockchain is quite different from the internet. The Internet runs on this concept of databases, right? If you store data somewhere, it’s in a database and a database. For those that aren’t technical, it’s like a big spreadsheet. Okay, so you had these rows and columns of different data. And you can sort and search and filter those rows and columns just like you can in a spreadsheet. Blockchain is different. Blockchain is like a book. And every 10 seconds, a new page is written with that book. And that book has from that page, and we just have the last 10 seconds’ worth of transactions. So if we’re doing a Bitcoin, for example, that page includes the last 10 seconds worth of transactions that have been in 30 minutes, so I sent you 10, Bitcoin, that record we’ve written in that book, and all those pages will make up the entire history of Bitcoin, and all the transactions have ever happened. Now, if I want to find out how the last 10 transactions that I have made if I want to look at a wallet to see that, just like in a book, I would have to go through every single page looking for the last ten transactions that have been made. It’s the most inefficient way to store data if you want to query it. And as we all know, data is the secret to many of the companies out there, right Facebook and Google, and these companies would not be where they are without their ability to interrogate, manage, and extract value from the huge data sets they have. And it will be the same in the blockchain. So what subquery does is take data from this book, this chain of blocks this page of this book of pages, same kind of concept of a blockchain and the name. And constantly every time blocks are added, or take their data out and put it into something more akin to a spreadsheet to which you can use in these applications and these wallets, and there are NFT marketplaces and these defi platforms, and then everything else that we’ll be building in the future is a core piece of infrastructure. And it’s one of those things that we’re in a space right now in blockchain we’re building all these pieces of infrastructure so that we can build those next generations of websites or applications or mobile apps or platforms that the next generation Internet can be built upon.

Brett:

Okay, so we see like a capture that so we have, first of all, the analogy I think of as like TV that used to be no color, right? And then there’s a TV in color. And then I even think about the original like dial-up internet where it’s literally like you know, the phone number and it’s you know, making all the noises. The AOL was the classic one, right with all the little chirps and chimes, and it’s taking forever. And then eventually, data was able to be even quicker, right. And then there’s, there’s fiber optics, and there’s, and then, of course, Wi-Fi came along, and then there’s 2g, 3g, 4g 5g. And then blockchain is almost like it’s maybe seen in 2d like 3d but doing it so quickly and consistently updating and then be able to extract that data. It’s taking it to a whole. It’s almost like it’s taking it to like the nuclear level. Is that a fair summary of what I’m saying here, James are warm.

James:

So there’s like, we call with three because there’s like three generations of the whip, and blockchain is a third. So with one is as the age of like early dial-up Yahoo, where you’re going to the website, and you’d read something that they have created for you, okay, as you go to a newspaper article, that’s an example, we have one where you go there, and you read content that the owner of that website has created for you. Okay, web twos different web two is the age of social media as the age of user-generated content. So a lot of people these days, they just get what they there’s read content and consume content on websites where I can generate anyone can generate it, and you know, whatever is popular will be shown to me, okay, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, all these platforms, that’s web two, with three looks at web two and says, like I used to generate content, it’s that content is really powerful. But the problem is, we will be lost control of that content. Even though we create the content, we do the hard work, we build these up, and we are the product of these great big search giants that then use the data from that content, the insights from who likes it, and they use it against us, they serve us content that compounds our beliefs, or creates bubbles. We can’t take that content and take it somewhere else. We kind of we can’t do that. So we’re threes around this mindset of ownership of that content. And hoping that with three enables, which are having a decentralized database, having a decentralized protocol, where we own it, and we control it, that it’s very transparent, who owns that content, and the rules of which you can use that.

Brett:

I think it’s it’s clicking even more here. Right. And it’s part of how this is connected with cryptocurrency and investing in the future of all places visit.

James:

great minds to that political mindset of you know, we should control what we create, and what we do. We shouldn’t like, again, you send money like and using it, we have a lot of migrant population from islands in the Pacific, Fiji in a new way. And the Solomon Islands. And for example, if they want to send money home, they’ve got to go to Western Union. They got to spend 100 bucks back to their family, and Western Union takes 10% off that. And that may take two weeks to get there. It’s a terrible user experience. Right? And that’s not right. It seems strange. Why does this financial institution clip the ticker on everything? So that’s the idea of defy, building that protocol to automate that and do that more efficiently. And that’s a whole thing with wave three how do we automate and make more efficient all the processes we do in real life?

Brett:

Love it.