GRTiQ Podcast: 188 Riad Wahby

The following podcast is for informational purposes only. The contents of this podcast do not constitute tax, legal, or investment advice. Take responsibility for your own decisions, consult with the proper professionals, and do your own research.

Riad Wahby (00:00:18):

At the time, people were like, “Well, yeah, but what is this thing good for?” We would write papers and we would get responses from these academic reviewers. And academics don’t usually demand something has an immediate impact, but they were like, “Well, this seems like a hammer in search of a nail. Who’s going to ever use this stuff?” And then suddenly somebody had this idea that, wait a second, no, this is the thing that we can use it for. We can use it in the context of Web3.

Nick (00:01:11):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today, I’m speaking with Riad Wahby co-founder and CEO at Cubist, a company dedicated to enhancing security and simplifying key management for Web3 developers and businesses. With a background that combines pioneering academic work in proof systems and cryptography, Riad brings a wealth of experience to his role at Cubist where he and the team aim to bridge the gap between cutting edge technology and user applications. During our interview, Riad shares his interesting journey from growing up in Iowa to pursuing advanced studies both at MIT and Stanford, where he made some notable contributions to the field of cryptography. We also discussed his early interest in technology, his perspectives on how the industry has evolved ever since he first got interested as a young person, and then his professional journey that culminated in the co-founding of Cubist. Along the way, Riad shares some great insights on the evolution of AI, the importance of decentralization, the early days of Web3, and his vision for the future of the industry. I started the discussion with Riad by asking about where he is from.

Riad Wahby (00:02:19):

Well, first of all, thanks for having me. Yeah, exciting to be here. Where am I from? So I grew up in a small town in Iowa. I was actually born in New York, but my dad’s a physician and doctors are needed everywhere, so we ended up in a small town in Iowa called Fort Dodge, which was kind of a super interesting place, a town of about 20,000. So yeah, I grew up in this little town. There was a cornfield right behind my house. I spent a lot of time in the woods. I played a lot of paintball. I’m used to open space now, I guess. And I don’t know, what was I like as a kid? One thing I spent a lot of time doing as a kid was playing music. So I was a violinist. I started really young. I was super serious, and you spent a lot of time traveling and performing and all of this. In a sense, it’s like a team sport, right? You’re playing in an orchestra, you’re cooperating with other people. Yeah, I thought that was super cool. It was a really fun experience.

(00:03:03):

It’s always nice to connect with people about having a musical background. So that’s something.

Nick (00:03:08):

Riad, I’ve had a lot of founders and Web3 builders on the podcast, and this theme of being interested in music in their early age has come up quite a bit. And I’m just curious, have you ever made the connection between your interest in tech and that foundation of music and how that ties together or benefits one another?

Riad Wahby (00:03:27):

I read this study or maybe a couple studies about how, well, learning something about music early on somehow makes you maybe more apt to learn math or more interested in math or something like this. So maybe there’s some kind of connection there. Maybe it’s one of these things where it’s just like, well, people who sort of started early with some kind of thing that they were really, really focused on just kind of got into the habit of really focusing on things. And whether it was super high level sports or whether it was music or whatever, maybe there’s something there about just getting used to focusing on one thing, kind of that crazy hyper focus that you need to run a company.

Nick (00:04:04):

It’s an amazing take. And so as a young person then, do you remember when you sort of became interested then in technology and when that became a point of interest for you?

Riad Wahby (00:04:13):

Yeah. Well, I think it’s one of these classic stories. My dad, in his office, they had this computer system and they were getting rid of the old one, which I’m old, so this was an old machine. This was really, really… This was like an IBM PS/2, a classic, the full height five and a quarter inch floppy drives. And so he brought this thing home. And now we look at that and it’s like, oh my gosh, my watch is much more powerful than that. So I just got super interested in learning about what was going on, and I read some books and I got kind of into computer programming, and this was around the time that the internet was really starting to take off as something that you would actually have in your house. That was important, right? Because then I could go and find information. I didn’t have anyone locally that I knew that was writing code, but I could find people on the internet, or I could read the Linux source code or something, and that was kind of super magical.

(00:05:06):

So I think it was just a combination of, okay… By the way, I’ve completed two things now. There’s a 10 year compression there because it’s not like IBM PS/2 connecting to the internet. That would be a nightmare. But over that 10 year period, it was like got really interested in it, and then, oh my gosh, there’s the internet, there’s all this information out there. That was super important. Being from a town of 20,000 people, you got to be able to reach beyond the people immediately around you, I guess.

Nick (00:05:29):

I appreciate you sharing so much of your background there. And again, so many of these themes keep reappearing on the podcast with interview people like you, and so I really appreciate the background there. So eventually you end up at university, you go to MIT, and then later pursue a Ph.D at Stanford. Let’s jump forward in time on your personal story here. Talk to us about that university experience, why you chose those degrees and what that experience was like for you.

Riad Wahby (00:05:53):

Yeah, so I remember going and visiting colleges, and I still have these memories of going and visiting and being like, “Wow, I want to be here. How can I be here?” And I was lucky enough that I was admitted, and I was like, okay, yes, immediately, that’s where I’m going to go. It was really a matter of going, visiting, seeing, feeling like, oh, this is a place where people do cool stuff. And I don’t know, when I look back, I think about, sure, I took a lot of classes and it was interesting and there was a lot of hard work, but then there was also this real interesting spirit of just building stuff and doing cool things. I had a bunch of friends, we all lived in the dorm that was a bunch of nerds, and we just built all kinds of interesting stuff.

(00:06:34):

So we had some laundry machines that some students previously had hooked up to the internet so that we could check when our laundry was done. And then we decided, well, it was kind of a weird dorm and there weren’t very many bathrooms in it, strangely. And so especially during finals week, it was just impossible to find a bathroom. You’re going to shower and go to… So we hooked up little door sensors to all the bathrooms so you could tell, oh, there’s a free bathroom on that floor. And put that on the internet. And it wasn’t as weird as it sounds. Really, it was just the door sensor. So that kind of stuff, that was just the stuff that we did. So it was really just a bunch of people who lived together and loved to hack on stuff. And oh, by the way, we also took classes together and sometimes that got in the way.

(00:07:14):

I went in thinking like, oh, I’m definitely going to do computer science. And then I took a class on circuit design and I kind of switched tracks. I was like, okay, well, fine, I guess I’ll do circuits instead. And so I ended up studying electrical engineering. I really focused on integrated circuit design. And then when I finished, I actually went and got a job in the integrated circuits industry.

Nick (00:07:36):

And what’s your vision for your career when you’re at university? Are you kind of envisioning an entrepreneur lifestyle? Are you imagining joining a large company and just sort of folding in? What are you thinking at the time?

Riad Wahby (00:07:46):

Well, okay, so this was around… Again, old. This was around the time of the first internet boom. It was sort of in the air. Yeah, you got to go and start a company, but of course, the bust also happened before I got out of school. And so then it was like, okay, not going to start a company after all. And especially because I think everyone kind of has this feeling and it’s really true, it’s super hard to start a hardware company. That’s like start company on hard mode kind of thing, right? Because it takes much more money to do stuff and things move more slowly. And both of those… Those two things compound, right? So it’s like not only am I spending more money, but everything is going more slowly, so I need more time. Well, I don’t know, it kind of felt like, oh, it would be really awesome to be an entrepreneur, but probably got a start out on the bottom rung and go to a big company.

(00:08:32):

I didn’t end up at a very big company. I ended up at a company called Silicon Labs in Austin that was not so big at the time, a few hundred people, which big for a startup. Sorry, it wasn’t really a startup at that point. I think it had gone public very, very recently before I joined. But still, it was like this small company. Everyone knew everyone. It was kind of a tight knit family, and it was not being sort of an anonymous cog in the machine at all. So it a cool thing, and in some sense, way better than what one a person could reasonably hope for if you’re just kind of going through the grind of, okay, I want to crank out circuits. It’s like normally, the expected result is, yeah, you end up that anonymous cog in the machine, unfortunately.

Nick (00:10:18):

And I want to ask you these two follow-up questions, and you keep referencing your age. I’ve had other guests that about your age, and I think I’m about your age, on the podcast before, and you offer this really incredible perspective in my mind. And what that is the evolution of tech in the industry because you got started at a time where a lot of our listeners maybe weren’t as involved, and you’ve seen it evolve into what we have today, which is this incredible Web3 thing that we’re all sort of trying to figure out, but also you were working on circuits. And again, being a non-technical person, I think what we’ve been able to do there, I’m thinking of Moore’s Law and some of the things that kind of came out of the Andy Grove era has been really remarkable. So with your vantage point of being in on the front end and seeing where we are now, what has that right been? That’s got to be remarkable.

Riad Wahby (00:11:06):

Yeah, it’s kind of amazing to look back at how much, even in small ways, how much things have changed, right? Well, okay. Silly example, I was already working at Silicon Labs for a few years before the iPhone came out. And up to that time, it was just like, yeah, sure, I had a flip phone or something, right? And then that’s a sea change. That’s completely different, the way that people interact with technology, right? It went from like, yeah, I’ll go back to my computer and do something to now, I have the computer with me all the time. And really, really, this was a huge change. And I think it’s easy to forget just how big a change that was. When I look back at, I don’t know, photos that I have from around that time, it’s very clear that something changed. Before, it was like, okay, if I happen to have a camera around, then maybe there would be a photo of something. Afterwards, it’s like, yeah, everyone has a camera all the time. That’s just how it is. You’re stuff to Twitter or whatever. I guess Twitter comes later.

(00:11:55):

And then there was this other sea change, which I guess Twitter is related to, which was there was social media up to that point. When I was a student, just at the very tail end of being a student is when Facebook… You could register for a Facebook account, and only if you had an email address at a university or something. And so I had a Facebook account back then, and it seemed like, okay, well, this is interesting, but who cares? And then I kind of fell off of it, right? I saw some friends from high school and then I got busy with work, and that was it. And I didn’t use it for a long time. And then suddenly it was like this monster, right? And now you can barely imagine living without all of these sort of enormous social media companies. So the entire landscape of just the way that we interact with the world and with each other has completely been rearranged.

(00:12:37):

It’s essentially by technology, right? And then on top of that… Okay, that’s just the stuff that’s kind of visible, but then there’s also the kind of totally invisible stuff, like, I don’t know, when I was in college, the first computer that I had was a single processor. Eventually, I had two physical processors to have two cores. And now it’s just like, yeah, no, my machine has 64 cores or something, right? Maybe not that many, but it’s kind of amazing how different the experience of being an engineer building applications is when that’s your target for hardware as opposed to single processor, much simpler system, all of this sort of thing. There’s this snowball effect, right? It’s like the way that we interact with the world has changed. As engineers, the way that we provide content and information and experiences to users has completely changed.

(00:13:31):

I haven’t even mentioned things like the rise of the cloud, which basically sort of enabled this second and third wave of startups that are essentially predicated on the fact that almost everything you need to run a software startup, you can just get with the click of a button through a web browser, which is completely crazy. If you were starting a startup in 1999, you were buying physical servers and setting them up, and there was somebody who was pushing ram chips into motherboards. And who’s done that recently, right? So it’s just everything is different. It’s amazing how much the world has just virtualized itself in the last 20 years.

Nick (00:14:05):

And so then how does somebody like you with that perspective make sense of AI and the emergence of AI? Because I’ve heard people say that the impact AI is going to have on the world is similar to what the internet did. But again, as a non-technical person, I sort of bundle AI with the internet, so I’m like, no, this is just another really cool thing. But how do you make sense of it?

Riad Wahby (00:14:27):

I hope that the emergence of these large language models, and really AI that feels like it’s something I can really interact with, or that I can use in order to do a task, I hope that that will sort of significantly enhance the way that people do stuff, or really don’t do stuff, right? It’s like there’s all this crap that I have to do in my life that’s just the result of being alive. It’s like yeah, I got to do these things, and I got to write some emails, and I got to… Right? All of these things that are just sort of the necessary stuff, but it’s not interesting or fun or anything like that. It’s just like, there it is, right? And so to the extent that as individuals, we’re able to automate away a lot of that, I think it’s super interesting as a way of just opening up potential.

(00:15:09):

It’s like, yeah, but I have better things to do, so why can’t I do those things? Well, maybe now, I can. As an individual, that’s the thing that’s going to be amazing. It’s like, well, okay… So if we think about the iPhone example, it’s like, well, I don’t have a computer with me right now, but when I get back to my machine, I’ll send you an email versus, no, I just have it here. And by the way, probably I’m sending you a signal message or something instead of an email, but it’s just something has sped up a little bit. And now instead, it’s like, well, I have these tasks that I have to do that I have to sort of clear out of the way every day. No, now those tasks can be cleared out of the way for me. And that’s amazing, right? That’s just accelerating us as people.

(00:15:46):

I think on the other side of that, we have to recognize that there is also a lot of potential for upheaval in the sense that there are plenty of jobs that, at least if the project of building AI that is sort of near human level intelligence, or at least able to carry out certain previously human only tasks, if that’s a successful project, it also means that the people whose jobs were previously doing those tasks now have to find new jobs. And I think that’s good and bad. Obviously, it’s bad for the people who are losing their jobs, at least in the near term, and we hope that it can become good in the sense that these people can do things that are more productive and couldn’t easily be automated away, but we have to hope that that’s the case, right?

(00:16:25):

I think if you talk to somebody whose job is writing books or whose job is making art, visual art, they have a very different perspective, which is, well, yeah, it’s not just that AI is doing useless stuff. It’s also doing this stuff that I do that’s sort of personally meaningful and very useful, which on a commercial basis, maybe it’s more efficient to let the computer do it, right? So yeah, I think we’re going to see good and bad, as with many of these things. The internet is the same way and my phone is the same way. I’m hooked to my employer no matter what, or I guess I’m the person who’s doing the hooking. I guess I hope my employees don’t feel that way. There’s good, there’s bad, but I think there will be significant change no matter what.

Nick (00:17:04):

When I was preparing for this interview and doing some research on you, I started thinking immediately of my interviews with Marek over at Celo and Sam Williams over at Arweave, because they were doing some really incredible PhD work, and almost seemed like they were on an academic track more than sort of a private sector track. And so if you don’t mind, can you just talk to us a little bit about your PhD work at Stanford and some of the cool things you were working on as it relates to proof systems?

Riad Wahby (00:17:29):

This was kind of a weird completely unexpected thing. I was in Austin still working at Silicon Labs. I became friends with a person. His name is Mike Walfish. He’s a professor at NYU now. He was, at the time, a professor at UT Austin. We just became friends over beer and ping pong, and he was working on this stuff. He was like, “This is amazing. You have to this stuff. It’s so cool.” And he was working on these things called proof systems, and I… What is a proof system? He told me about it. I read some papers. I was like, yeah, that’s pretty cool. He said, “You know what you should do, is you should quit your job and become a PhD student.” And I was like, “You are crazy because I own a house. I am certainly not going to do that. I couldn’t pay my mortgage.” Although now, in retrospect, my mortgage was criminally cheap. But anyhow, I said, “No, there’s no way. There’s no way,” but I did keep reading the papers because they were so cool, right?

(00:18:13):

And around the same time, actually slightly earlier, I had become aware of the existence of cryptocurrencies. I was actually, for a long time, starting around 2000 and going for about 15 years, those numbers are approximate, I was the administrator of an email list called Cypher Punks that was really all of this sort of culture plus technology, plus especially cryptography. And the early people who are working on digital cash, David Chaum, Adam Back, and these people really early on, a lot of that conversation was going on there. A lot of the folks who are now deeply involved in cryptocurrencies were sort of around back then. And I meet people physically now that I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve been talking with you on email for 30 years.” And so of course, Bitcoin became this huge topic of conversation on the list, especially around how it could change society, how it works technically, all of these different aspects of it. And so I was kind of aware of these things. And at the same time, I was thinking about, okay, proof systems. And I’m not going to claim here.

(00:19:15):

I want to be very clear. I am not claiming that, oh, I put these two things together. I’m the one who… No, I did not. I didn’t put them together. I should have. I was in this mode of thinking about cryptography, thinking about interesting stuff, and then along came proof systems, and I was like, wow, I could do this. I think I could make some improvements to the way this stuff works. And so I actually started working just on the side with Mike. Here and there, I would write some code and I would think about stuff. And eventually, I said to him, “Look, Mike, I think you’re right. You win. I’m going to sell my house and go to grad school.” And he was like, “Okay, except…” Now, he said, “Okay, fine, except I’m moving to NYU.” So I was like, “Great, fine, I’ll just move to New York.”

(00:19:52):

So I sold my house and moved to New York and worked with Mike for a year and a half, almost two years. Yeah, and then in the process, was sort of doing research on proof systems and applying to grad school. And so I ended up at Stanford, which, yeah, fantastic place. You can’t argue with the weather, and great people, of course, of course. Yeah, so we were working on proof systems, really thinking about, how do we make these things more practical? Because if you look back, now, we just take as given like, oh, build a proof system that does this thing, and people talk about building companies around proofs. I think if you went back to 2008 and said to people, “I’m from the future and I own a venture backed company that is building zero knowledge proof systems,” they would say the craziest part of what you just said is that you’re venture backed building proof systems, because it was so far from practical, right? It was like you needed to improve the performance by factors of 10 to the 20 or something, some insane amount.

(00:20:50):

It was this theoretical thing. It was like, well, in theory it’s possible to do this thing. And so all of these folks were sort of early in this project of just making it possible for something. And I was lucky to be sort of among them, and we were thinking about these ways of just making the proof systems more actually practical. You could actually execute the thing and it wouldn’t take a galactic-sized computer galactic age to actually output a proof. At the time, people were like, “Well, yeah, but what is this thing good for?” We would write papers and we would get responses from these academic reviewers. And academics don’t usually demand something has an immediate impact, but they were like, “Well, this seems like a hammer in search of a nail. Who’s going to ever use this stuff?” And then suddenly, somebody had this idea that, wait a second, no, this is the thing that we can use it for. We can use it in the context of Web3.

(00:21:40):

We can use it in the context of this kind of permissionless place where we really do have exactly the setting, we have exactly the setting that we need. I have some data. I want to prove to you that I have the data without revealing anything about it. Classic zero-knowledge proof kind of set up, and that’s just useful all over the place. So it really was kind of this accidental thing where it was like, ah, I think it’s cool, it’s interesting, and it feels like it’ll be something that’ll be fun to work on. And then suddenly, it was this amazing area to just be in as it was sort of exploding and growing into this, not only this academic area, but also now this big fertile commercial area as well.

Nick (00:22:17):

It’s amazing background and some pioneering work on stuff that we do, as you said, sort of take for granted now, so I appreciate you breaking that down. A couple follow up questions. So when you think about Web3 and the emergence of Web3, how do you place it? I ask this question usually like this. I say, is it a revolution against the sins of web two? Is it a natural evolutionary step in the progress of how a species develops technology? I’m also kind of hearing in your story and some of the work you’ve done, maybe this thread of it’s the place in which we can do these novel things that we knew about that we couldn’t do before. So how do you think about that?

Riad Wahby (00:22:59):

I think it’s really all of those. I think Web3 is actually multiple sort of simultaneous waves crashing. So the earliest ones… As I said, my perspective on the very early days was through the lens of the discussion happening on the cypherpunks mailing list, where it was really folks talking about censorship resistance and money that’s not tied to a government, because there this strain of technology will free us from the constraints of fallible governments, or whatever it is. I don’t know if it was quite explicitly that anarchist in all cases, but… So the idea that you could build money that wasn’t reliant effectively on a military to produce the value of the money was sort of very interesting to these folks, right? Technology is enough, right? And so through that lens, it really was this tool of like, well, the government doesn’t need to do this function anymore, and that’s really interesting.

(00:23:57):

And so I think that’s obviously one version of it. And if you talk to Bitcoin old timers and you talk to folks who really have that attitude, that’s the important feature of Web3 and everything else is details. And then, of course, you have sort of another wave crashing, which is all the people who see this as, look, there’s really interesting stuff to do, there’s cool functionality that we could build that completely sidesteps the financial system. And I think you look post 2007, post 2008, sidestepping the financial system was itself a goal because it’s like, well, this thing failed us once. Well, we want to make sure it won’t fail us again. And I think these folks had also in their heads, the fact that not only could we do that, but we could do it in a way that really makes use of interesting cryptography, interesting technology.

(00:24:42):

You basically get these folks who are almost building up a parallel academic system, right? There’s this whole… If you look at the discussion around EIPs or the way that ETH2 was designed, people are kind of coming up with novel technical ideas that definitely are on par with the kinds of novelty and the kinds of the difficulty of an idea that would be an academic paper. But they’re not interested in publishing an academic paper necessarily. They’re interested in building this system out of it, right? So this is basically this parallel track for people to do real interesting research on cool stuff.

(00:25:22):

And then of course, DeFi, well, there are plenty of people who want to make money and who are really good at it, and who have a lot of knowledge from traditional finance or Fintech and can apply that in this setting, and so I think we saw the rise of MEV and things like this, which personally I think of those things as really besides the point and kind of bad for individual users, but certainly they were an inducement for a huge number of people to jump in and can make a ton of money on a certain strain of HFT that’s taking advantage of whatever, some deep technical details, right? There’s many different people who are sort of all into this for somewhat different reasons.

(00:26:04):

And I think finally, finally, finally, we’re starting to see, I hope, consumers who are coming into it because it’s actually providing them some value. We had folks playing games, and that’s okay. There was some play to earn kind of stuff going on. Maybe there still is, but that was the real heyday of that was a few years ago. That isn’t yet quite a consumer technology. That’s still a quite niche thing. I think when we start to see people who are consuming… I don’t know. So for example, I think that the stuff where Nike is selling NFTs of physical objects, that’s interesting because that’s truly a consumer thing, right? If it’s ticketing, and instead of buying a ticket, a physical ticket, or buying one from, I hope not, from Ticketmaster, instead, you’re able to do something else that’s built on top of blockchains. That’s actually making people’s lives better. That’s helping them to do things that they cared about already and not just some new thing that you could do because it’s cool.

(00:27:00):

So I’m hopeful that all of these waves sort of converge, and what we really have is a lot of people in it for different reasons, just as with any other tech, but really a motivation that is not just like, oh, well, there’s some quick bucks to be made here.

Nick (00:27:15):

And so another follow up question about Web3, and then I want to jump back in on your personal story there. But you talked about cyberpunks. This has now become an adjective, right? So I think it started off as a group of enthusiasts, and now it’s an adjective to describe, you could argue, the state of Web3 or the ethos of Web3, but I guess my question would be, how cyberpunk is Web3 now? It probably looked like something when you first got started. Is it still cyberpunk to be in Web3?

Riad Wahby (00:27:44):

Well, just a word of caution. There’s cyberpunk and cypherpunk. Cyberpunk Tends to be associated with, I don’t know, William Gibson and sort of… It’s actually, it turns out there’s a lot of earlier sci-Fi than William Gibson. It’s definitely cyberpunk, and maybe my favorite book will include that. But then there’s cypherpunk, which is sort of this sort of countercultural, I don’t know, crypto-anarchism would be one way to say it, although that’s not true of everyone in the movement, and certainly not true of me. This strain of we have technology, and therefore we, certain laws don’t matter, not because we’re going to break them, but because you don’t even need them anymore. The technology just… It does away with the need for laws against you listening to my telephone conversation because you simply can’t, right?

(00:28:28):

Something like this, right? This idea of using technology to sort of change the way that people interact with one another or the way that people interact with the government, or whatever it is, hopefully for the better, to improve our freedoms, that really is kind of the core of the cypherpunks. And Tim May was sort of one of the founding thinkers in the early cypherpunk movement. He wrote this cypherpunk manifesto. Tim was an interesting guy. He was also brilliant, by the way. He worked at Intel early on and figured out that one of the reasons that their RAM chips were broken was because the ceramic that they were using to build the chips had some kind of radioactive decay that would break the RAM, super smart guy.

(00:29:11):

And then later in life, he became this thinker in the interaction between technology and people and governments. And he had a very direct way of speaking, but he really did think a lot and deeply about this. And so it’s worth… Even if you don’t agree with him, it’s worth kind of reading the Cypherpunk Manifesto. Yeah, so I think basically, the early days of Web3 really did grow out of basically the same thing. It seems very likely that whoever Satoshi was, he probably at least knew about the cypherpunk mailing list. He at least knew this method of thinking.

Nick (00:29:44):

So I want to ask you this question about this point in your life. You’re getting a PhD at Stanford, you’re working on some really cool work that ends up becoming the practical application of proof systems. You’re aware of crypto because it’s sort of the environment where this stuff becomes practical. Is there a switch in your brain at this point that says, all right, I’m going to make a little bit of a career pivot here, I’m going to go work in crypto, I’m going to go build in Web3? What’s going on in your mind at that point?

Riad Wahby (00:30:12):

It wasn’t a switch. It was a kind of a slow slide. So my PhD advisor at Stanford was Dan Boneh, who’s very deeply involved in all kinds of things in Web3. He’s also a super important cryptographer. He’s done all kinds of amazing stuff. He’s fantastic. Really, Dan was the one who kind of convinced me that I should start thinking about this, both for the reasons of interesting problems to solve, but also because the area is itself just interesting. We worked early on, early relative to the area, on stuff like anonymous airdrops. So I want to airdrop, but I want to make sure that the folks who claim don’t have to reveal who they are in order to claim their airdrop, and all sorts of reasons for that. Or we worked on making roll-ups more efficient. We worked on signature schemes that were useful for whatever.

(00:31:00):

We ended up working together on the standard for the signature scheme that became the digital signature that’s used in Eth2, that’s used in the beacon chain. So we had this involvement that was both this forward looking weird stuff that maybe be a small number of people would ever use, but it’s kind of cool as an exercise, and then some other stuff that’s just like now, it’s kind of a core of a major part of Web3, right? And you never know really, when you’re working on something, which one it’s going to be. In the midst of working on these things, I ended up working with some folks who were at the time at Algorand, and we were working on… Actually, this was when we were working on the signature scheme. We were working on some kind of low level technical pieces, technical machinery for the signature scheme. And so they said, “Well, we have use for something that’s similar to that. Can we work together on it?” So I ended up sort of working with them a little bit.

(00:31:48):

And before I knew it, I was like, okay, I guess here I am. I’m kind of full blown in Web3. But it was never like, oh, well, I’m glad that’s where I’m going. It was just like I kind of did some stuff and eventually found myself right smack dab in the middle of it, which, yeah, it’s kind of nice. It was unexpected, but it was fun.

Nick (00:32:03):

So we’re going to turn our attention in a moment here to Cubist. But before we do, I do want to ask, and at least notify our listeners that you’re still in academia. So despite this strong pedigree and this PhD and all these cool things, you have never really left. You’re still teaching. What can you tell us about what you’re teaching, you’re at Carnegie Mellon, and kind of the state of your academic career?

Riad Wahby (00:32:25):

First of all, I have a bunch of fantastic PhD students. They’re working on all kinds of amazing stuff. They’re super cool. They think about awesome stuff. And then every once in a while, I get to meet with them and they teach me about what they’ve been figuring out. So it’s really just an opportunity for me to learn about all kinds of interesting and cool stuff. So one of my students, Joey, this year was a finalist for the Pwnies, which is this award at Black Hat because he was working on this stuff that’s… The side channels in your processors, not only can they be used to steal secrets, they can actually also be used to do secret computation that’s very hard to detect. And so he’s been one of the leaders in figuring this stuff out. And it’s like, that’s cool.

(00:33:05):

That’s going to become important. People are going to have to understand how that works to defend against future malware. It’s stuff like that where it’s like, this is tomorrow happening in front of my eyes, and I just get to be there along for the ride. I feel like super privileged for that. And then on top of that, I also get to teach. This semester, I’m teaching the security course at CMU, the sort of computer security, well, I would say 101, except it’s really 330,, computer security for undergrads. And it’s a fun course. It covers all kinds of really great stuff. One of the cool things about CMU actually is that it has this extremely strong computer security focus. And so I think more than most other universities, we have… Even the undergrad computer security course has all kinds of super intense stuff. So the students are learning modern techniques for building exploits for software. They learn about cryptography. They learn about web security. It’s really this kind of cool and comprehensive class that’s a great way to launch into a career in computer security or a career in research.

(00:34:06):

So I think it’s fantastic because I get to be there for the beginning of it, right? I think generally, the really cool thing about still being in academia is, yeah, exactly this. I get to spend time with my ear to the ground listening for what’s coming next. That’s helpful, right? Not only does it keep me feeling a little bit informed about stuff, but also it’s like we can kind of anticipate like, oh, these are the kinds of problems that we’re going to start to see affect real people. Here’s the kind of computer security problems that we should be worrying about now because they’re going to be here tomorrow. And so having that kind of forward looking perspective is super interesting and helps to be a little bit of a balance with the perspective of how do we delight customers and build the right product and build the right features for the product and all of this, which I think both of those things are really healthy and having both of them at the same time is fantastic.

Nick (00:34:58):

And what do you make of this argument, the next gen talent, people like you, but in present day are heading into Web3 and not so much Web2? You’re out there, you’re meeting with students. Is it true?

Riad Wahby (00:35:08):

My trajectory gives me some hope that it almost doesn’t matter what your first decision out of school is, right? It’s like, go do something. Okay, for me personally, I got out of school, and that first year I spent working as an engineer, I learned so much. There’s just so much to learn about how to motivate yourself, how to be productive, how to break a big problem into small pieces, all these things that you don’t necessarily get from your studies at university. You get something else, but not that, right? And so it almost, I think, doesn’t matter. Find a path that you think is interesting. Find something that you find fulfilling and that is good work and helping people or something, and do that. And then re-evaluate. You’re not on one path just because you’ve decided to go and become an electrical engineer, or whatever it might be.

(00:35:56):

That said, I think there is a lot of interest in Web3. There’s a lot of interest, of course, in AI. I think there’s a ton of interest in the intersection between the two. But fundamentally, it’s a big industry out there, right? There’s a heck of a lot more people working at the Amazons and Facebook’s Google’s of the world than there are in basically the whole of Web3, right? So yeah, proportionally speaking, many more people are interested in that now than they used to be. But I think in absolute numbers, probably Google is still dwarfing us, but that’ll change. That’ll-

Nick (00:36:30):

All right. So let’s do a little bit of time traveling here. Let’s go back then to the very early ideas or early days of what you were thinking about when this idea for Cubist came along. You launched and co-founded Cubist in May, 2022. Take us back in time. What were you thinking about? What were those original seeds of inspiration?

Riad Wahby (00:36:51):

Yeah, so we were thinking, really broadly thinking about making security better in Web3. And actually, we were thinking about totally the wrong thing at the time, but that’s okay. That’s okay. Two of my co-founders, Fraser and Deian are also academics. I’ve known them since Stanford. We’ve been worked together on a bunch of research stuff. And we had actually been thinking about some research questions around building systems where different pieces of the system run, roughly speaking, in different places, run maybe on a different processor or run on a different blockchain, right? And so thinking about all the pitfalls that come from taking one single description of a system and turning it into many different pieces that interlock, and that have to work together correctly. And so what we were actually thinking about was can we build a system or a way, a method for building these kinds of software artifacts where the programmer just has an easier time getting things, has an easier time, just sort of developing the whole thing more quickly?

(00:37:54):

And that sounds really abstract, but concretely, it’s like this. Look, when I build an application in Web3 nowadays, I don’t just build on one chain, right? Probably I have some pieces of it running on one chain, some pieces of it running on another chain. I have to make them communicate with one another. I have to make sure that that communication works well together, that I don’t… Basically, if we look at the history of hacks over the last few years, many of them, I dare say most of them, I’m not quite sure, maybe I’m wrong about that, but certainly a large number of them come from essentially the cracks, the cracks between different chains, the ways that different pieces of software don’t quite line up. And so there’s some mismatch in expectations, and oops, that’s enough for an attacker to get in. So this is the kind of thing that we started out really attacking.

(00:38:34):

I mentioned two of my co-founders. My third, there are four of us in total, is our business savior, our mind, Ann, and she knows how to actually build a product. And so what she said was, “Okay, great. Well, you can build this thing, but let’s see if anybody cares about it.” It was a good question. So we built something and we took it to people, and they said, “Well, that’s really cool, but I have worse problems than that that I need solved first.” And the thing that they told us over and over again was that this small piece that we had just kind of mentioned as a side effect was actually the thing that they really wanted. And the thing that we mentioned as a side effect was, well, when you’re deploying your software, you want to have a sane way of testing and building and automatically deploying.

(00:39:13):

And so there’s going to be this key management piece of the system that’s able to automatically do this stuff for you, and the rest of your system will just kind of hook into that in a nice way. And they said, oh, “Well, what I actually care about is the key management because that’s the problem that I really have today. And so basically, the journey was all about being wrong, except Ann, who was right to say, “Go talk to customers.” And the customers told us what was correct, which was they really, really just needed key management. And we heard all kinds of awful stories about, “Christmas is canceled because the keys need to be recovered,” or, “I worked at a company and then I left and only realized six months later that I had all the keys on my laptop, still,” all this kind of crazy stuff that was going on because people were building these kind of key management systems ad hoc.

(00:40:02):

We said, “Well, this is kind of exactly the kinds of thing that we know how to build.” Right? I work in cryptography. Fraser and Deian work in software security and correctness and verification. So this is like, how do we build a system that handles cryptographic keys correctly, that gives high performance, that basically lets you, as a developer, sort of not worry about anything except the API interface? And that’s what we’ve built. So our system really is about making your life easier for managing all those cryptographic secrets that you absolutely need in order to interact with Web3.

Nick (00:40:38):

And the name, where does the name come from? Do you remember?

Riad Wahby (00:40:40):

Yeah. We were having a conversation. We were trying to figure it out, like, what should we call ourselves? And somebody said, “Oh, well, it would be cool if it were Picasso or something.” And we were like, “That’s definitely taken a hundred times over.” Somebody else suggested another artist. And finally, someone was like, “Wait a second, what if we just said Cubist?” We were naming basically Cubist or Proto-Cubist. I think Chagall came up or something. And so we were like, “Oh, maybe that one’s available.” And it turns out that it was available, and we really like it, this idea of taking things apart and reimagining them put together in a different way, which I think was the inspiration for thinking of Picasso and that sort of thing in the first place. So we really kind of identify with this notion of, well, your perspective on things should be one of disassembling and reassembling and understanding the pieces differently. And so that was how we ended up with Cubist.

Nick (00:41:29):

So as you mentioned, and again, not an unfamiliar theme with guests on the podcast, you started off with this thesis about security and you landed on key management, which is what you’re currently still working on. Let’s build some context, and mostly for maybe non-technical listeners. Why is key management still a problem in Web3, and how does it sort of relate to crossing this chasm, maybe ushering in the next sort of inflow of users?

Riad Wahby (00:41:58):

Yeah, that’s a fantastic question, and it really does actually wrap up a bunch of different things. So okay, the simplest possible answer to the first part, why is key management important, the simplest answer is basically everything that you do in Web3, you speak through a key, right? It’s like if I want to send a transaction, how do I do that? Well, I have this special key and I sign the transaction with it. And I send the transaction to the chain, and then okay. Basically everything that you want to do is mediated by a key. And so what this means is every function in your… If you are a Web3 company, that means your operations are going through Web3, maybe you’re paying your employees, maybe you have accounts receivable, you’re issuing NFTs as business, as part of your application, whatever it is. All of that is keys, right? All of that is key management.

(00:42:47):

So usually what we’ve seen in companies that have grown up from small, and then got bigger and successful, is basically the sort of strategy for managing keys was just sort of grown organically. And so that usually means, well, there are some warts, right? So if it’s just two people sitting around a table, maybe the fact that they have a couple ledgers and that’s all is enough, right? But at some point, you have a pile of ledgers and you dig through them for the right one, and that doesn’t get the job done, right? And if your company’s operations are bottlenecked on the person who’s rummaging in the pile of ledgers, or the person who has the secret key laptop, don’t do that, that’s a bad idea, that’s actually a serious problem for your ability to operate as a company. Your company is a machine, right? It’s a machine for turning worker productivity into money. And the machine has to do stuff.

(00:43:40):

It has to pay people and receive payments and produce a product, and all of these things. And all of that machinery. And Web3 is mediated by keys, which means if your key management is bad, your company is fundamentally inefficient. To me, this is the reason that, as Web3 people, we need to be thinking about this. But that’s true also for end users, and that’s why the second part of your question really resonated with me. Because if I’m a new user in Web3, okay, what do I want to do? What I want to do is I want to go and buy an NFT, or I want to go and trade my Eth for whatever, for Solana or whatever, right? All of those things require a signature, but I’m just a person. I just want to do something, right? I don’t know about cryptography and the different key formats that Ethereum uses versus Solana and the fact that, well, okay… All of this stuff is just like details, and it’s not details that the user actually needs to understand, for the most part.

(00:44:37):

Now, I’m all for people diving in to the maximum level of detail, but I’m not all for requiring everyone to dive into the maximum level of detail. There’s a big difference, right? And so I think about it this way. If I can build a product that my dad is happy using, then… He doesn’t care about digital signatures. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work. But he does care about whatever the application is, right? He’s like, “Well, I want to go mess around with meme coins or something.” I don’t know, maybe he does. Maybe he doesn’t. To me, it’s get the barriers out of the way. And I think in Web3 in general, we tend to kind of… We trip over our own feet here a little bit. And I think the reason… I’ve thought about this a lot. Why do we do this? I think there are a few reasons, but the main one is all of us, the people who are already here, we’re all diehard bleeding edge fanatics, right?

(00:45:29):

We’re like, we’ve learned all this stuff. I spent so much time reading these media articles and digging through whatever, blogs and chats and all of this stuff. I’ve spent so much time learning this that other people should learn it too. Well, that’s the wrong attitude. That’s like, well, we got to haze everyone who comes in. It’s a common attitude, but it’s not a good one, right? It’s not like one that’s going to actually get people in the door. The other part of it, of course, is I’ve spent all this time learning this stuff, I’ve spent all this time steeped in it, I think about it every day, and so it’s like breathing. I don’t even notice that I’m doing it, right? I don’t even notice that I’m thinking about seven different signature schemes, and oh, well, I need to bridge from here to here, and only this kind of bridge can be used for this hop, and maybe I can reroute in a different way and make it cheaper.

(00:46:14):

All of that is this ambient knowledge that all of us have that we don’t even realize that we have, and that’s a huge barrier to the people who don’t have it. So being able to step back and say, how much of my everyday experience is just based on all of this knowledge that I’ve built up over years of practice? And how much of this is me sort of thinking, well, other people should also have to suffer too before they can play in this space? How much of that is there, either intentionally or unintentionally? And so, okay, that was a long winded thing. But I think fundamentally, getting to the point where we can get people to click a button, log in with Google, these are the kinds of things that they’re already used to doing, and they don’t have to worry about seven different signature schemes and 13 different bridges, right?

(00:46:59):

Eventually that can all come, but let’s get them in the door first. Let’s get them using it. Let’s get it useful for them before they decide to invest all the time and effort to learn all of the stuff that we’ve built, right? We’re so proud of it that it’s like, oh, they should learn. But no, no, we have to make it so that they don’t have to learn, but they do want to. And so this is, to me, the reason that we really need to solve the key management problem first, because that’s their interface. That’s the thing that they must touch in order to actually interact with Web3. Everything else to first order is optional.

Nick (00:47:30):

Well, I know as a new user to Web3, four years ago when I got started, key management was my greatest source of anxiety. And it was a small thing in the greater retrospective of everything that I was working on, but it was still something that gave me the most anxiety. So let’s talk about the long-term vision here then. So as you chart the path forward for Cubist and this particular problem you’re working on, what’s the vision here?

Riad Wahby (00:47:56):

Well, I think there are a couple different things. So my previous answer, you kind of saw. I kind of separated the universe into these kind of two different camps, right? One is, if I’m a new user or just a user, forget about new, if I’m somebody who wants to interact with Web3 as a person, I need to have a reasonable user interface. And by the way, not just one that I can understand, one that also helps me stay safe, encourages me to do the safe things, and maybe subtly discourages me from doing the unsafe things. Not saying you can’t do stuff, but saying, Hey, maybe this way would be better, or maybe that’s a scam, right? Helping me to discover information like that, I think that is super important. And then on the other side, for businesses, for people who are interacting with brand new protocols, making that fundamentally safer and fundamentally easier.

(00:48:42):

So as an example, in the last few months, there’s been a huge amount of activity around sort of Bitcoin staking, Babylon, all of this, right? And if you dig into it, and I couldn’t help myself, I did. I dug into it, it’s super complicated. It’s really cool and interesting, but also, it’s really hard to get. And so we actually spent a lot of time building an API that makes it much, much easier to get it right and harder to get it wrong, right? So this is the kind of thing that I think is really important. Every new technology, there’s rough edges to it. There’s a time when it’s getting the bugs shaken out. Then eventually, we hope that people will be able to use it and to sort of interact with it in a way that is fundamentally safe and fundamentally good in terms of developer productivity.

(00:49:27):

Getting from point A to point B is really about investing in tooling. And for us, that means the tooling around managing key. So if you’re running a Babylon validator, you need a bunch of stuff. You’re running infrastructure, we can make that infrastructure easier, right? The same is true… We have folks running Ethereum LSTs, same thing. We build tooling that makes your infrastructure easier to run. The same thing for people who are selling a wallet as a service. If you’re using our backend to do this, your wallet is… Basically, if you have a wallet product, you have a consumer facing thing, and we are your backend. We just give you a bunch of stuff that we’ve already thought through that’s already secure out of the box. Getting to the point where this kind of thing just exists for all of the functionality and all the things that we want in Web3 is super important because that makes the developers more productive, and it makes the end users happier.

(00:50:21):

And so I think that getting to that point where the distance between an idea and a product is as short as possible, and the security interface to the world is as small and as secure as possible, right? All of these things are… That’s what we’re striving for in Web3. And we’re getting there. We’re not there yet. But to me, that’s like… We’ll know when we’ve arrived, when it’s as easy to start a new product in Web3 as it is to go to AWS and, okay, I need Elastic Beanstalk, and I need this kind of network security, and I need like DNS, and I… All these things, I can just push a button on a menu, there’s nothing like that in Web3 right now. We’re getting closer. We’re getting closer, and some of our customers are building really cool stuff that looked a lot like that, but that, to me, is when we will really start to get this flywheel moving faster and faster and faster.

Nick (00:51:12):

And so for listeners that are curious about what you’re building there, the community at Cubist, what’s a good way to sort of get started, and learn more and kick the tires?

Riad Wahby (00:51:20):

Come visit us at cubist.dev. Feel free to ping me or send an email at [email protected]. Ping me on Telegram. I’m kwantam spelled funny, K-W-A-N-T-A-M. We’re always happy to talk. We would love to hear about the problems that you are facing and talk about how we could help.

Nick (00:51:33):

So I want to ask you just a couple final questions, and then I’m going to ask you the GRTiQ 10. Long time listeners at the podcast know I ask these 10 questions each week of every guest of the podcast that are a lot of fun, let us get to know you a little bit better and learn some things. So the first one as we end here is, as you think about Web3 and the thing you’re building with Cubist and key management, how does this puzzle piece of decentralization fit into all of this? And what is the philosophy there on how important that is?

Riad Wahby (00:52:06):

So I think that decentralization is a super important aspect of a lot of the systems that we’re building in Web3, right? A lot of what we’re trying to do as a community is build systems where the people that I have… It’s not just that I have to trust one person or this whole thing breaks down, right? I know that there are all these people that I’m interacting with and there’s some incentive set up such that I can trust some subset of them, and that’s good enough. And so I think to me, decentralization is sort of another tool in the security arsenal. It’s the one that lets me build systems that govern interaction between people, not just between computers, and set things up so that the other people I have to rely on are actually going to act correctly. So yeah, this is one of the most important and interesting aspects of Web3, is the fact that we have not just cryptography, not just networking and computation and all of this. We also have this sort of economics… What’s the term? This sort of algorithmic game theory kind of perspective on things.

(00:53:09):

And that’s fundamentally… Decentralization is where that comes in, and basically this is about setting up the incentives such that the people in the system will behave in a sane way that will allow us to work together productively, even if we don’t actually trust one another.

Nick (00:53:23):

And I want to ask you this question about entrepreneurship. So you’re clearly a very brilliant guy. You’ve done some really great stuff in tech. You’ve got this background in music, so you’re able to break things down. And you’ve already said a couple of times that that’s probably a lens you use pretty frequently, breaking things down into smaller pieces. So if we apply all of that to this idea of entrepreneurship, what have you learned about entrepreneurship that you could share with us?

Riad Wahby (00:53:50):

Oh, geez. There’s so many important things. I’m not even sure what the most important one is. But from my perspective, what’s been the most helpful is thinking about it in terms of, as you said, breaking things down into pieces, but thinking about how I can be always making forward progress, right? So as a founder, I’ve got a million things that I need to get done. We’ve got things to worry about with product. We’ve got to continue interfacing with our existing customers. We have to push to new customers. And basically one of the big failure modes that I think we see everywhere, and I see it in myself, is this sort of, ooh, I’m overwhelmed. I can’t get anything done, right? And so I think taking comfort in always making forward progress on something. And there’s always something that you can make progress on. I think that’s to me a way of, number one, staying motivated, and number two, staying productive.

(00:54:43):

I’ve seen a lot of founders end up in a situation where it’s just like, there’s too much. I’m going to shut down. And it’s like it’s only getting worse because there’s a faucet dropping more stuff on your head, right? So just keep paddling, right? To me, that’s the fundamental.

Nick (00:55:00):

And then the final question is, harkening back to everything we’ve talked about thus far, you could probably go, you yourself, and work in a lot of different sectors within tech and industry. You’ve done some pioneering work that’s super cool. You seem very well networked. Why then is someone like you optimistic about the future of Web3?

Riad Wahby (00:55:20):

The question that I didn’t answer earlier when I said there were all these waves that are kind of crashing together is which one I’m in. And I think I started out in the sort of like, ooh, this is cool technology. Let’s play around with it camp. But recently, I think… I want to say I still think it’s cool technology, and I love technology, and I love to build, but I think the one for me that’s the reason for optimism is I keep seeing, when I talk to our customers, more and more stuff where it’s like, oh, that’s actually going to make people’s lives better. That’s actually going to change the way that we do things. And when I see things like, oh, well, we couldn’t ever get a market for clean energy off the ground in an efficient way before, but now, because of Web3, we can, and by the way, that’s going to encourage adoption of clean energy, I’m like, wow, that’s cool.

(00:56:07):

It is empowering people. People without a ton of leverage, it’s giving them the lever that they need to build these sort of technologies that will actually change the way that we interact with the world. And so that’s why I’m optimistic about it, because I think this is sort of the rails on which the next big shifts will ride

Nick (00:56:25):

Well, as I said earlier, now I’m going to ask you the. These are 10 questions I ask each week, and I do it because I think listeners like to learn something new, try something different, or achieve more in their own life based on the answers from guests like you. So Riad, are you ready for the GRTiQ 10?

Nick (00:56:53):

What book or articles had the most impact on your life?

Riad Wahby (00:56:57):

Okay, this one is easy. The book that’s had the most effect on my life, although I don’t necessarily recommend reading it because it’s sort of outdated, is a book by Bruce Schneier called Applied Cryptography. When I was in middle school, I saw it on a shelf in a bookstore. I said, “Wow, that looks amazing.” And I bought it, or actually I convinced my dad to buy it for me, and I started to read it. Fundamentally, that’s what made me interested in cryptography and cypherpunks, everything. Really came back to randomly spotting this book, Applied Cryptography, on a shelf. Now, it is not a book that you should read to learn cryptography nowadays. It’s about 30 years old and some of the stuff in there is outdated. For me, that was a springboard.

Nick (00:57:38):

And is there a movie or a TV show that you would recommend everybody’s going to watch?

Riad Wahby (00:57:42):

I love movies that are really technological, and I don’t know, that’s maybe not quite the right word, like a heist movie or something like this. I think the one… And actually, I got this from Dan, Dan Boneh, his recommendation, and I’m parroting it because totally right. The movie that’s the best representation of real hacking is Sneakers. It’s a great movie. It’s a fun movie. Totally worth a watch.

Nick (00:58:07):

How about this Riad? If you could only listen to one music album for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?

Riad Wahby (00:58:12):

Oh, geez. That’s so hard. Okay, I think it would be probably an album by Baroness, and I would be down to either… Gosh, I’m going to make somebody mad no matter which one I say. Let’s say I’m going to go with The Purple Album by Baroness. A fantastic album. Yeah, strangely, it was produced by a guy who had previously produced a bunch of music with The Flaming Lips. I also love The Flaming Lips, by the way. So it’s like this really interesting confluence of Flaming Lips kind of weird acid rock and also metal from Baroness.

Nick (00:58:43):

And what’s the best advice someone’s ever given to you?

Riad Wahby (00:58:47):

Oh, wow. Two words, be careful. So, okay, my dad was a surgeon and he… Very, very, very meticulous. I think from him, I learned that there’s always time to slow down and get something right. In his words, it was always just, “Hey, be careful with that.” But really taking that attitude of actually thinking through things, actually trying to get something right and being careful, to me, I try to live my life that way.

Nick (00:59:17):

And how about this one? What’s one thing you’ve learned in your life that you don’t think most other people have learned or know quite yet?

Riad Wahby (00:59:22):

Oh, okay. This one’s silly. When I was working at Silicon Labs, the first product line that I worked on was for landline telephony, which nobody remembers anymore, but was basically the phone company’s end of a telephone line, the thing that actually controls your telephone line. And so since I was working on these chips that were doing this, there’s all these specifications that have grown up. If you take a phone from now, or well, okay, a phone from 100 years ago and plug it into the wall now, it still works because we still use basically the same standard. I have a deep and kind of unreasonable knowledge of the Bellcore telephone standards, which is… I don’t recommend anyone else learn that, but that one comes to mind.

Nick (01:00:05):

Amazing. And how about this one? What’s the best life hack you’ve discovered for yourself?

Riad Wahby (01:00:10):

Okay, the one that I use really frequently is… I frequently find myself, I have a million things to do, I got to get something done, and I frequently find myself distracted by everything else from the thing I’m currently trying to do. And at least for me, one thing that works really well is putting on an album, maybe Purple by Baroness, but something else too, maybe something by The Flaming Lips. Put on some music as a way of just forcing myself into that focus mode. Basically anything I can do to manufacture that flow mode, I find myself immediately able to get more work done. And for me, it’s like music. It’s really, really, I can kick myself into flow that way.

Nick (01:00:46):

And then based on your own life experiences and observations, what’s the one habit or characteristic that you thinks best explains how people find success in life?

Riad Wahby (01:00:54):

Being stubborn. I see this in my PhD students a lot. One of the things that I see developing in students as they navigate the system, they have to submit papers to conferences or journals, they get rejected, just being sort of resilient to that and stubborn and knowing, yeah, people didn’t like this, but it’s not because it’s a bad idea. It’s because I said it wrong. Let’s try again. Or this didn’t work. Let’s debug it. Let’s figure out why. It’s not because it’s fundamentally broken. It’s because there’s something small about it that we can fix. So just having that sort of willingness to bash your head against the wall, but really just sort having confidence that if you do, you’ll make some progress.

Nick (01:01:33):

And then Riad, the final three questions are complete the sentence type questions. So the first one is, the thing that most excites me about the future of Web3 is-

Riad Wahby (01:01:42):

The users. We’re going to actually have real applications that’ll pull in real users, and we’ll know that it’s happening when there are sort of regular people on the street who are like, “Oh, I’m using Web3 for X, where X is something that’s actually real, like buying concert tickets or sporting events tickets, or whatever it might be.

Nick (01:02:01):

And how about this one? If you’re on X, again, I always call it Twitter, you should be following-

Riad Wahby (01:02:07):

William Gibson. His handle is GreatDismal, which I think is a reference to a swamp. He’s a fantastic follow on Twitter. He writes cool, interesting stuff. He himself follows cool and interesting people. He’s a great writer. Yeah, he’s a great, great fellow.

Nick (01:02:23):

And then finally, Riad, the final question is, I’m happiest when-

Riad Wahby (01:02:30):

I think the answer to this is writing code. I’m happiest when I’m solving a problem. I really like to get into that flow state and just think deeply about something for a while, and then come out the other side knowing that now it works.

Nick (01:02:52):

Riad, what a pleasure to meet you and to hear about all the interesting things you’re working on there at Cubist, but also to get this insight into your background, your motivations of some things you’ve learned on your journey. I really appreciate that you took the time. For listeners who want to stay in touch with you and stay connected to the things that you’re working on, both maybe in academia, as well as in the things at Cubist, what’s the best way to stay in touch?

Riad Wahby (01:03:13):

I’m not a frequent poster on Twitter, although I do manage to post here and there. I’m Kwantam, K-W-A-N-T-A-M. I’m the same on Telegram. Feel free to ping me there. I’m always happy to have a conversation. And of course, follow us. I think we’re Cubistdev, all one word, on Twitter as the company. Come visit us on the website. Yeah, we’d always be happy to talk.