Founder Interviews

In our earlier years, we interviewed many passionate people who started decentralisation projects. What motivates them? What’s special about their technologies? What business/funding model do they use?

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#23: Pablo Ojanguren - SwellRT

Pablo Ojanguren talks about SwellRT, a real-time framework for making decentralized apps. It is based on the Apache Wave protocol.

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#22: Juan Benet - IPFS

Juan Benet, founder of Protocol Labs, describes the InterPlanetary File System, a decentralized content distribution protocol. What ways are there to fund protocol development?

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#21: Sam Patterson - OpenBazaar

Sam Patterson describes decentralized marketplace OpenBazaar. He's cofounder of OB1, a company made on top of OpenBazaar. How to have competitive middlemen, peer-to-peer dispute resolution and build using IPFS.

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#20: Luis Molina - Fermat

Luis Molina, founder of Fermat, a platform for making 'Internet of People' apps. When should we have geographically localised networks? How do we share reputation between applications?

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#19: Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn - Tahoe-LAFS

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, co-founder of Tahoe-LAFS, a distributed cloud storage system. Zooko discusses the long view of a 7 year old project, including changing business models.

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#18: Gavin Wood - Ethereum

Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, a distributed social contract platform. What kind of apps can be built on a block chain? How can this enable financial scrutiny?

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#17: Kenton Varda - Sandstorm

Kenton Varda, creator of Protocol Buffers, on his new personal cloud platform Sandstorm. How can we get more open source web apps?

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#16: Sally Carson - Pinoccio

Sally Carson talks about Pinoccio, an Internet of Things platform which uses mesh networking. How can it be made easy to use? Can we build a decentralized global sensor network?

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#15: David Irvine - MaidSafe

David Irvine, founder of MaidSafe, which lets you pay for decentralizing storage, computation and bandwidth using a cryptocurrency. Why do this, and how will the economics work?

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#14: Aral Balkan - Indie Phone

Aral Balkan, founder of Indie Phone, talks both about what motivates him to build a decentralized smartphone, and how starting with a great user experience is key to mass adoption.

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#13: Richard Bartlett - Loomio

Richard Bartlett on decentralizing decision making with Loomio. How can user experience help us govern ourselves? Plus crowdfunding.

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#12: Michiel de Jong - Unhosted

Michiel de Jong talks about Unhosted, a protocol to separate web applications from where their data is stored. Plus a call for more developers to work on decentralized technologies, and how to get paid.

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#11: Benjamin André - Cozy Cloud

After the Personal Computer, is the Personal Cloud next? Benjamin André talks about Cozy Cloud, including thoughts on business models for decentralized services.

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#10: Daniel Silverstone - gfshare

Daniel Silverstone, creator of gfshare, on how we can safely keep our (decentralized!) digital keys and coins. Split them up into pieces, such that, say, any 2 of the 3 pieces can reconstruct the original.

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#9: Daniel Siders - Tent

Daniel Siders on Tent, a protocol for personal data and communications. How can decentralized standards replace centralized ones like HTTP?

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#8: Bjarni Einarsson - Mailpile

Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson talks about Mailpile, a mail client aiming to decentralize email again. Will people ever encrypt email? Can we make it cool to code on email again, and beat the central services?

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#7: Jeremie Miller - TeleHash

Jeremie Miller, creator of Jabber, talks about his new distributed wire protocol, TeleHash. What lessons has he learnt about how to make a protocol popular? How does Kademlia work?

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#6: Christopher Webber - Media Goblin

Christopher Webber talks about Media Goblin, a decentralized media publishing platform. How can we have a federated alternative to services like Flickr, YouTube and SoundCloud?

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#5: Jacob Cook - arkOS

Jacob Cook talks about arkOS, which makes it easy to securely self-host your websites, email and files. What would the world be like if we all hosted our own services?

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#4: Paul Gardner-Stephen - Serval Project

Paul Gardner-Stephen talks about the Serval Project, which lets mobile phones make calls without a cell tower. He gives real examples of it being used in disasters today.

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#3: Tony Arcieri - Cryptosphere

Tony Arcieri talks about Cryptosphere, an open source P2P web application platform. In the process he describes how this can give more privacy and governance control to users of all kinds of network applications.

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#2: Adam Ierymenko - ZeroTier One

Adam Ierymenko talks about ZeroTier One, which creates flat virtual Ethernet networks of almost unlimited size. He describes how this lets people experiment with new ways of using networking.

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#1: Nicholas Tollervey - Drogulus

Nicholas Tollervey talks about the drogulus, his programmable peer-to-peer data store. In the process he describes how a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) works and what motivated him to start the project.

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