GRTiQ Podcast: 198 Sean Robb

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Sean Robb (00:17):

Where Graph is really able to help builders is that they don’t have to re-understand that entire data set every single time. They can have a nice fast indexable query that they’re able to build an incredible UX or incredible back-end that plugs right into The Graph and they don’t have to worry about wrangling all of that net blockchain data that while always available maybe is not always manageable.

Nick (01:06):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Sean Robb, Technical Product Lead at Flow. Based out of St. Louis, Sean’s journey into web3 started with a background in computer engineering where he worked on flight control systems before moving into roles at CenturyLink and MasterCard. His path through CenturyLink’s cloud computing division and MasterCard’s Edge computing network eventually led him to web3 where he first helped build Dapper Labs’ wallet product before taking on his current role advancing Flow’s blockchain protocol. At Flow, Sean is working to revolutionize how developers build consumer-facing applications, particularly focusing on digital collectibles and making blockchain technology more accessible. I started the conversation with Sean by exploring his roots in St. Louis, Missouri and his early passion for sports.

Sean Robb (02:01):

Love it. Yeah, so I’m based out of St. Louis, Missouri, one of the few no-coasters I think in the North America area for web3. About myself, I was just super, super into sports as a kid and ended up playing lacrosse through high school and college, which was a lot of fun as well. Yeah.

Nick (02:17):

So you ended up studying computer engineering at, is it Trine University?

Sean Robb (02:22):

Yep. Yep.

Nick (02:23):

Talk to us about why you chose this field and sort of what the thinking at the time was for your career.

Sean Robb (02:30):

I’ve always been a fan of technology and ended up really liking the middle ground of computer engineering through school as that’s more focused towards electrical engineering as well as software engineering. So you kind of build out robots and embedded systems and that ended up being my first job actually. I was building flight engine controls for airplanes and that was a really cool job. It’s just a problem set of how airplanes and all the environments they’ll run through and how that impacts electronics as well as the software that’s written on the chips. So did that for a while and really ended up enjoying it and ended up pivoting a bit more into software engineering instead of computer engineering, mostly because I’m not great at circuits and not good at the electrical engineering part of it and learned that through just trial and error of my first job and dove further into software engineering and that’s how I started down this track.

Nick (03:15):

Was that introduction through computer engineering, did that sort of set you up for success in that move to software engineering or did you feel like it actually set you back a little? What’s that dynamic?

Sean Robb (03:26):

I think it definitely set me up for success as it saw different sets of problems. I was behind in just raw algorithms and some of the stuff you might dive deeper into computer engineering, but all of those things, I don’t think you need a college course for, and I would argue I probably learned it better on my own outside of college individually. So I think it just gave me a more diverse understanding of the impact of hardware in particular when you try to build software that fits on smaller chips or embedded systems, you respect those challenges that you’d run into much more than I think if you picture always a cloud computing environment that you have unlimited RAM and not limited CPUs.

Nick (04:04):

So Sean, as you’ll pick up as we go further into this interview, but as long time listeners of the podcast, know I’m not technical, I don’t have a technical background and so I can’t [inaudible 00:04:13] to interview people like yourself that are super technical and oftentimes, I am a few steps behind, but when it comes to web3 and sort of that computer engineering, that hardware side of things, this is mostly a software based type of industry with not a lot of hardware or is that sort of a faulty characterization?

Sean Robb (04:31):

When you look at the blockchain space, it’s more impacted by hardware than many other software solutions. If you look at in particular for blockchains and Ethereum, in that case, they end up constraining themselves on hardware pretty significantly because of the benefits that they want around decentralization. So while this system might be able to run better on a single server in the cloud, they end up choosing to run on smaller hardware distributed across the globe where you do run into those physical problems that you end up having to solve within embedded systems in robotics much more.

Nick (05:02):

And so I’ve heard that before. And does that then explain sometimes why you might hear the argument in web3 that the unit economics of that hardware thing makes web3 a little bit more expensive than, like you said, there may be web2 or cloud-based type solutions, is that also a fair characteristic of that argument?

Sean Robb (05:21):

If you look at the raw problem set of to have a decentralized computing network that you’d have to be able to run and verify the same computations multiple times, it’s absolutely going to be more intensive than running it once in a trusted source. But I do think there are ways to scale and ways that we actually ended up building Flow that we can talk about a little bit later that I do think break through that problem set and actually changed the economics or the dynamics of that problem itself.

Nick (05:47):

I’m super excited to learn more about Flow and we’re definitely going to spend a lot of time on your role there and some of the innovation that Flow is introducing to the industry. Before we get there though, let’s go back to your story for a moment here. So what did you do after university? You mentioned that there a minute, you were working a little bit on, if I caught it, some airplane and computer software related airplane, but what can you tell us about that?

Sean Robb (06:06):

Yeah, so I built out the fine engine controls for a lot of airplanes at my first company outside of school. How you can picture that is basically the controls that either make the engine go faster or can change the wing flaps that control where the plane goes. So if you look at those systems and you look at the requirements for those systems, they are expected to fail and so you have to have redundant systems and then redundancies on top of those redundancies because if something goes wrong there, there are hundreds of people’s lives at stake often, and so you want to make sure that you have a reliable redundant system and to do that, you very much have to heavily engineer and heavily test those. And so that was a lot of my initial job and role, which was very different or interesting than being able to focus on the shipping and impacting quick and early.

Nick (06:54):

So you pivoted though out of that, right, and moved into some really large firms, firms like CenturyLink, which for listeners outside the United States, that’s a very big, I would guess what, telecom type of company in the United States and then of course, MasterCard, which is a global traditional finance. So what’s the story of how you pivoted into those?

Sean Robb (07:12):

How I ended up at CenturyLink is they were building on a cloud computing platform at that time. They wanted to compete with the Amazons and Googles of the world and we were number four for a while in the size of cloud computing. And what they really needed to do is they had an awesome set of data centers due to their telco background. They had all this footprint and they wanted to be able to use that to foray into cloud computing and they needed applications to be built on top. So if you’re a developer, you go to the AWS or go to Google itself. It’s all the services that you can plug and play together that makes you building apps more simply. That is the true power of being able to use a platform like that. And at CenturyLink, that was my first role there is adding those services on top of the cloud itself.

(07:53):

Actually, during that time at CenturyLink is when I learned about Bitcoin itself and that actually drove me into going into MasterCard is I bought Bitcoin in 2015 through with some friends at CenturyLink and we initially built out an application and product that would spin up nodes that run different software or different blockchain nodes on top of CenturyLink. Through that time, I really bought in more and more to this blockchain and web3 space and decided that I’m based here in St. Louis, Missouri, I’m not moving anytime soon. What’s a way that I can go deeper into the rabbit hole and understand the problem set more? And it was looking at a large decentralized network, a large distributed network I should say, like MasterCard. MasterCard has a tech hub here in St. Louis, and so I went and worked there, focusing on their next generation computing, specifically their Edge compute network for a few years.

Nick (08:45):

When you think back to those days when you first became interested in Bitcoin, is it the conventional story that I hear so often told on this podcast where initial interest was in the speculative nature of what is this asset class and it looks like maybe there’s some future value gains available here or did you see something in the tech, in the distributed nature of it that drew your interest? What was that initial push?

Sean Robb (09:08):

Yeah, so I think for most people, right, it starts with the Bitcoin rabbit hole and for me, understanding that there was this capability for a network to have an untrusted system that everyone could agree on the source of truth even though you don’t have to trust the individuals is incredibly radical and very like cypherpunk. So I end up buying things probably to my own detriment, things that interest me versus things that I think are right and Bitcoin was one of those. I bought it and I think everyone goes through that first week or two of, well, I’m going to lose everything that I just bought with Bitcoin, but I ended up persevering or not being overly concerned of the monetary impact because of just the technology was novel, interesting, and intriguing and I just wanted to have a part of that.

Nick (09:56):

Did your background in working at MasterCard and then of course your work at CenturyLink on building out that cloud product, was that a primer for what’s happening at web3 or was it more just an education in the emergence of new tech and what that life cycle might look like more than being an early what analog of what web3 might try to disrupt?

Sean Robb (10:20):

I’ve never actually thought of it in that framing, but I think you’re very accurate in the sense of how I picture what the protocol problem. If you look at the protocol problem for web3, it’s very much how MasterCard sees its network and you have all of these tribute nodes, you have to be able to get information quick reliably across the globe and you need to be able to do that I guess in a very standard, robust way because it is money that you’re moving. That’s direct impact and value that you’re running.

(10:44):

And then if you look at the cloud computing network by CenturyLink, that’s very much how I think more and more people are evolving to this and that’s the promise I think of smart contracts, which is to be this open world computer. When we look at web3 and how it wins, you’ll see much more logic built on chain than off and you’ll see whole applications that are built on chain. And so I think those platforms that are trying to push applications forward will be the ones that are most interesting to me and be the ones that really are revolutionary to the space.

Nick (12:20):

Well, Sean, in 2021 you eventually go full-time into web3 and join Dapper Labs. Before I ask you about the backstory there and why you made that move, I do want to double click on something about your experience at MasterCard. And so a reoccurring question on the podcast is how do folks like you that sort of had an inside view of these very large traditional finance or web2 type companies, how do you view their ability to make a move or a response to something like the emergence of blockchain in a web3 world? Can they make that move?

Sean Robb (12:53):

If you look at the core business of MasterCard or even Visa credit cards in general, they have three phases of a credit card cycle and you’re actually, I think you’re seeing them really start to begin to explore the third phase, in particular, settlement. The settlement part has been such a challenge for these companies because there’s complex ways that you have to move funds across. You’re moving dollar amounts, you’re summing up total weeks. It often takes days or weeks to settle those funds. So when you see or hear of those MasterCard or Visa experimenting with web3, it is just that beginning phase, is how I’d argue it.

(13:30):

It’s a settlement of tokens. It’s moving of a standard token like a USDC to settle. And I think that is the entry point that many of these networks will consider. What I think gets really exciting and I don’t know how far down the rabbit hole each individual company has gone, but when you’re doing more than settlement from bank to bank and you start being able to settle directly to merchants or you’re starting to be able to settle directly to individuals, how that could impact how those networks see their landscape or how they want to be able to build what’s next, I think that’ll be really interesting and I’m really excited to see how they look to tackle that problem for their products.

Nick (14:09):

All right, so let’s talk about that move then, full-time into web3, joining Dapper Labs in 2021. What’s the backstory there? And take us back in time. What were you thinking? It seems like you were pretty established. You had an opportunity in a large organization with your hometown that has a global reach like MasterCard. You were on a safe trajectory there. Why make a move like this anyway?

Sean Robb (14:30):

You and a lot of family friends asked the question similar to that. For me, a couple things. So I ended up signing with Dapper Labs a few weeks before NBA Top Shot went viral. And so I remember telling all my family and friends that I was going to work for a company with, at that time, the biggest thing they had was selling digital cats online. I introduced it as, “Hey, I’m going to work for this company. They sell NFTs, they do these cats. Trust me, it’ll be cool, you’ll hear about it in a few years. I got to go do this.” And many of them, while looking at me like I was crazy, understood that I wouldn’t just simply make a move like that unless I truly believed and I have been talking about blockchain and in particular Bitcoin for years at this point. So many were excited while they didn’t necessarily understand why that was a move I wanted to make.

(15:18):

But in particular, for Dapper Labs and the role that I played when I first joined was driving and running the Dapper Wallet product. And so if you look at that Dapper Wallet product, it was on and off ramps of funds. It was working with a lot of banks, it was a custody of assets for people and if you break that problem space down, that wasn’t as radically different from what I would be able to understand and build, whether that is at CenturyLink or MasterCard. It just kind of had this web3 twist on top of it. I was really excited to kind of dip my toe in there and really start to see not just building the blockchain itself but building applications on blockchains and understanding all of the nuance and complexity that existed there.

(15:59):

So that was a really enjoyable shift and it was very fun to get people excited about it. And in particular for me, that two weeks between me signing and joining, Top Shot went viral. And so then literally I got the… A week later or when I’m telling all my friends and family, “Trust me. In five years, this’ll be cool.” They’re like, “This is the company you’re going to work for or this is the one you’re working for.” And I was like, “Yeah, that’s me.” And so then they got it in a matter of five weeks versus five years. So I was way off on my timeline.

(16:29):

One of my most exciting and my most beloved moments I think while at Dapper was I really focused on onboarding more and more ecosystem applications and empowering those users themselves. And then as many I know that one of the next products that was launched was an NFL All Day for Dapper. Being able to come to my family dinner with my parents on Sunday and my dad telling me about how excited he was about the NFL All Day pack that he got and who was in his NFL All Day pack was just awesome. That happened in a matter of months of things that I thought would take years or decades to have family members get it and understand the opportunity there while they maybe didn’t understand all of the inner workings of how that happened.

Nick (17:12):

It’s an amazing story, very serendipitous, not everybody’s as lucky when they make the move into web3. I want to ask you about that introduction then to the industry via that experience at Dapper Labs. And so as you might suspect, I’ve had a lot of guests on the podcast who, once they make the move into web3 full-time, they have various experiences in that first sort of touch with the industry. It’s as varied as all the different guests I’ve had. But for you in particular, it sounds like a very positive thing. What did you learn or what ideas did you have confirmed about the tech, about the opportunity space here in web3 by virtue of joining Dapper Labs as your first touch point in the industry?

Sean Robb (17:53):

Yeah, the thing I like and I continuously have my mind blown by people that are either still within Dapper Labs or joined us as we spun out to Flow is just how deep they understand applications and building in particular consumer applications and all of the hurdles that exist for web3, that some of which I don’t know if they can be fully like band-aided over for how it exists. And I think there’s this constant push and pull of centralization versus decentralization and what is the appropriate amount of that spectrum.

(18:28):

And so that was, in particular for me with Dapper Wallet, that was always a conversation to have and understand, “Okay, yeah, we know we could snap together a couple of services that would provide something for an end user that would do A, B, or C, but should we go build that on-chain? Should we write a smart contract? Why would we write a smart contract versus not writing a smart contract?” And those in particular were the most fun conversations and I am really excited the ones that we did decide to go write a smart contract for, they’re still being used and they’re heavily used today across all the applications. And so it was really cool to be not just building a machine but building the car around the engine itself and being able to understand every single piece inside of there what went into just a car at the end of the day.

Nick (19:12):

So what’s interesting to me about your story is that you started in the industry with what I perceive and I think a lot of others would agree as the main problem for web3, which is more consumer-facing applications, and that is often characterized on this podcast through interviews as the next big important milestone. So having started in the space with an organization that really focused on consumer-facing dapps, I know you were working on the Wallet, but you still probably had lots of exposure there. How has that sort of developed your understanding and appreciation, assuming you agree of this really important thing of we just need more consumer-facing dapps.

Sean Robb (19:54):

I’ll maybe twist the question a little bit in the sense of why don’t we see more consumer-facing dapps? Right? I think this was often in the debate that we would go back and forth of whether we would build something on-chain or as a backend service. And right now, if you look at writing Solidity code and the risks that go into having your state be open or the security concerns around having controls being decentralized in the API, that’s always on and available and at risk, those risks are very high for many people. And so what they end up doing is focusing on building little tools or little components that could be built towards the end consumer app because those things are less risky. Those things will always have utility or ways that they could work to sell, where if you’re building a consumer-facing application, you’re taking a huge risk to build out whatever we want to put on chain.

(20:47):

If you’re putting logic on chain or not, you’re taking a huge risk that not only is your tech going to work, but you’re going to find product market fit to people that you’re going to have to convert into these crypto friendlies. And all of those hurdles are massive. And I think you can even look back to the CryptoKitties stores, which was my first introduction to Dapper Labs. Like I said, I was in blockchain 2015, 2016. CryptoKitties, 2017, it came out. And I remember listening to a Planet Money podcast and they were just talking about the 12 steps you need to do to own a CryptoKitty, one of which was installing this extension that looks kind of funky on your browser and you give it a lot of access and then you have to go to this other site that had nothing to do with the first site you talked about and give them your passport and then put in money and hope that you can get the funds out within the next couple of days before you can go buy your cat.

(21:39):

And we’ve made huge strides since then, but I also think it’s pretty revealing that we still aren’t as easy as Amazon in buying things and selling things, and I think if we’re very clear in what we want to be able to do, e-commerce isn’t new, the patterns aren’t new, and we really got to start using that as our standard of patterns here and really learn from those patterns. And so what does consumer applications look like? What is converting people into crypto? It’s having that first experience look a lot more like the Amazon Web Store than it does today.

Nick (22:11):

So in early 2024, you moved into a role at Flow, we’re going to talk about that today, as technical product lead. What’s the backstory here of that move from Dapper Labs to Flow?

Sean Robb (22:22):

Yeah, I was at Dapper Labs really enjoying Dapper Wallet and being much more of the person that was pushing consistently for Dapper to do more and more things on chain and building the reasoning why we would want to push to do more and more of those things on chain, whether that is composability with the rest of the ecosystem so that Dapper can build pieces and components that would benefit other developers within Flow or whether that is just being able to make it so that there’d be tooling that would be able to monitor all of these things as you go to like NBA Top Shot, you’ll see a lot of tooling around the marketplace or offers or all of these different ways to evaluate collections, but if we built all those things off chain, we would’ve had to build APIs and that would’ve been absolutely painful versus pushing to be on chain.

(23:03):

So I was consistently pushing for more and more of those things on chain and then an opportunity opened up at Flow and they’re like, “Well, all of this stuff you’ve done for Dapper Wallet we really enjoyed, but what if you could do that for more of the ecosystem? What if we didn’t just hold you within the Dapper products? What if you can really take those lessons, take that understanding and really scale up the rest of the ecosystem and really pull Flow forward in this way?” And so I get very excited in that in the sense of I’m now able to engage with a lot more products, a lot more applications, and a lot more builders. I’m at different phases and stages and really kind of meet them where they’re at and help take them to the next step.

Nick (23:41):

So let’s do a little bit of a reset here for any listeners that aren’t familiar with Flow and how it fits into things, but how would you describe what Flow is and what makes it unique?

Sean Robb (23:50):

Flow is really the blockchain that was born out of the problems that Dapper Labs as an app builder ran into in building with protocols. I really like to say Flow is really built from the ground up for consumer crypto, and while consumer crypto is a narrative we’ve maybe started seeing on Twitter over the past six months, it’s really what Dapper Labs has been doing for the past few years. Flow was built out of all of those problems and hurdles that Dapper saw, whether fundamentally within the protocol or within the programming language itself. So when Flow was built, we thought, okay, we need something that is able to handle not just a few hundred of transactions or a few thousands of transactions. You need something that can operate at the scale of a consumer application like Facebook and you have millions of people, even billions of people operating on it.

(24:35):

What would a blockchain look like to do that? How could you be able to operate at that scale while still maintaining decentralization? Okay, let’s look at decentralization. What’s the true problem there? You want to make sure that consensus is decentralized, but it doesn’t necessarily matter if execution is decentralized as long as consensus can verify the execution state, and so you end up seeing Flow introduce itself as a protocol with different node types or node rules is what we call them. And so you have node rules that are able to do very specific tasks very well. We modeled that off of how a CPU works within your computer and then we were able to maintain decentralization, keep scalability, and maintain speed without really compromising many things. What that did do, instead of having all of that complexity and headache exist within the app developer or the user, we effectively pushed it to our protocol engineers so they’re handling all of those headaches, all of those problems to their own enjoyment.

(25:32):

They really kind of enjoy solving these technical problems and making sure that app developers just go, “Okay, I have a single state that I can build my applications within.” Or a user being like, “Oh, let me understand. I have an account that I can switch out the keys for and I don’t have to worry about if I lost my seed phrase, I can use newer technology, whether that is like a secure enclave on my iPhone, turning it into a hardware wallet itself so I don’t have to carry around this little USB drive looking thing and bury it in my backyard. All of those things are really thought through from the user, whether that is the consumer or the builder and thought, “What would a protocol need to look like so that we can achieve those goals?” And that’s really what borne Flow is.

Nick (26:13):

If I’ve got this right, you joined Flow at a time when there was an important upgrade related to Crescendo and that was something that, as I understand it, enabled EVM equivalents. And so talk to us about that time you joined at a point when there was a massive upgrade coming called Crescendo. What is that and why was this EVM equivalent so important to Flow?

Sean Robb (26:34):

We thought a lot of things on how to build on Flow and how to build web3 applications, and that required a lot of time I think to really mature those technologies and get them to a certain point. If you look at Flow of what it was in 2021 when Top Shot was out versus what Flow is today in 2024, they’re pretty radically different. Like Crescendo is our first named release that we’ve really come out with, otherwise they’re like DOT1, DOT1 versions, but we named this one as Crescendo and this is really the version that we think is out of that initial phase and trying to understand what the blockchain needs to be fundamentally. And so in that, we upgraded our programming language called Cadence, and through that tightening of the programming language or solidifying it, we understood that you actually run other VMs inside of Cadence itself, almost like to get a little technical, like a Docker container on your machine, you can run VMs inside of Cadence and we thought the best one that we would want to do that with is the EVM itself.

(27:31):

And what we ended up seeing is there was a lot of people that saw Solidity code, saw it was painful, but knows there’s a product that uses that exact Solidity code and they want to run that product and they’ll figure out how to enhance it later on. What that meant for Flow today is they would always have to rebuild everything just to come run, deploy on Flow, but with EVM equivalents and running the EVM inside of Cadence itself, it made sure that they could pick up their code, they could become multi-chain if they wanted to and just simply add Flow like any other network as well as Flow being more higher throughput, being faster than any other EVM chain, having a tighter consensus layer as well as introducing the ability to have a more advanced programming language like Cadence all or these additional hooks that we introduce to developers is just kind of making their lives a little bit easier and letting them just focus more on what they’re trying to build, which is awesome applications.

Nick (28:22):

So as I mentioned earlier, I’m a non-technical person, so there’s a couple of things I just sort of want to ask you and I ask for your forgiveness if they’re dumb questions, but there’s a lot of blockchains in the blockchain industry and you’ve got Ethereum of course. A lot of people know this, don’t know this, Bitcoin’s a blockchain. Now we’ve got Flow and then we’ve got the emergence of all these L2s. And so talk to us about why something like Flow is necessary when you’ve got what seems to be and unlimited amount of options and something even like an incumbent chain like Ethereum and then these emergence of L2s. Just help me understand how Flow fits into all that.

Sean Robb (29:03):

Flow, as a protocol, was built for people that built apps on top of, and if you look at Ethereum, it was my introduction to the space. I have a deep passion and love for what it did. It’s really good at allowing for people to create tokens, move tokens, and you saw the DeFi ecosystem really pick up from that. Where Ethereum overweights or weights heavily is on their decentralization and their security of the network itself. And that’s why you see lower block times. That’s why you see the different challenges that many app builders run into on Ethereum is because they need to be secure and decentralized and they’re really trying to build with that in mind.

(29:40):

The benefit of why someone would come want to build on flow is you don’t necessarily have to worry about adding 12 pieces to your stack. You don’t have to know, “Okay, yes, I’m running on Ethereum but I chose this L2 which ends up using this roll-up technology and because of that roll-up technology.” I actually can interact with these other chains but not that chain over there and you don’t have to worry about if you’re in the right party or not, right?

(30:03):

It’s a fully open and composable interoperable L1 that if you’re running on Flow, you get all of the benefits of running on Flow, you can compose with anyone else running on Flow and you can all of the users have that open environment to engage in. When I look at Flow and you look at the stats around Flow like block times or transactions, we focus on not necessarily having the eye-popping number, but what is needed for the best application experience.

Nick (30:29):

So based on your sort of seat on the bus and this bus in this industry, what do you see as you look out into the future? Is it a multichain feature and just the continued proliferation of L2s or at some point do we sort of settle on a couple or a set of blockchains, something like Flow for consumer facing apps that are easier for devs to build on and then maybe a blockchain that does this and a blockchain that does that? What do you see?

Sean Robb (30:54):

The three analogies that I consistently think of when I think of this problem and who really knows where it ends up is it’s either going to end up like the search engine space where there’s just someone that has 90% and everyone just uses Google, it becomes a verb and that’s it and it dominates or you’re going to be able to find more of the social networking pattern where there’s different flavors of similar things and this concept of social network maybe like blockchain is really intentional of the use case itself. So you see these use driven blockchains and that absolutely could be it as well. Or you could look at the example of operating systems.

(31:31):

Probably the most used operating system is Linux because it runs all of our web servers and everyone knows it, but if you were to ask the average person on the street what operating system to use, they’re going to say iOS and so it could be much more who is using those systems and what they understand as well. To put a bow on those thoughts, there’s likely more than one, I intend to think it’s going to end up looking a lot more like the search engine space than anything else where there’s going to be one that is very, very dominant and maybe one or two others that are very purpose-built and very, very intentional in what they do well for specific use cases. I can see one the benefit of having a single environment drive most of that.

Nick (32:10):

Since your time in this space, so going back to Dapper Labs and now of course your time at Flow, where’d you come in on this sort of, I don’t know if it’s a debate or just sort of an observation about the total number of devs actively building in the web3 space. There’s a few industry reports out there that report numbers. I’m always a little skeptical of how they arrived at that number, but when you think about total available market today along with how that’s either grown or maybe it’s stayed the same since you got in the space, but talk to us about that observation, what you see and sort of projected to the future for us of what you think we need to see.

Sean Robb (32:49):

Yeah, I definitely think we need more developers really pushing what’s possible. We have a lot of developers that are very curious and wanting to experiment with the technology, have a feeling it’s the thing that’s next and understand it’s novel and interesting. But I do think we’re looking for those use cases that are obvious that people go, “Oh, I’m going to go build this. What I think we’re seeing a lot of right now is I’m web3-ify this web2 experience, and I think that’s necessary as a technology evolves, but I don’t think that’s what the end state will look like. And so how many of those developers that maybe start with web3-ifying web2 use cases, then understand, “Wait a minute, if I add this little extra bit, this is something that’s just unachievable in web2, and this is absolutely incredible and this is going to be the next killer app.”

(33:36):

And I think you just really need almost like working out, you need a lot of reps to be able to understand those things and I think we’re at the early phases of getting those reps, but I think realistically, there’s going to be the next breakout app, whether that is CryptoKitties in 2017, that really draw everyone’s eyes or whether that is a Top Shot in 2021 that drew everyone’s eyes, the applications draw interest, and then really get people further and further into the space, which I’m really excited to see what that next thing looks like.

Nick (34:07):

Assuming that you either have these conversations yourself or you’re in internal meetings where these conversations are being reported to you, do you get the sense that developers at this stage in the evolution of web3 really care about decentralization? I often hear people say, “No, no, it’s UX. No, no, it’s cost. No, no, it’s UI.” And sometimes I hear people say, “No, no, it’s decentralization.” But what do you…

Sean Robb (34:32):

I think there’s a lot of purity tests we put on ourselves in the space that maybe initially drew us. I see decentralized as one of those hot button issues. What I think developers look for is pretty much the same of what they look for in the web2 space of “What can I do with this technology? Do I have an opportunity to make money and do I have a way that I can actually draw people to it?” And I think if you’re able to answer those three, then developers will gladly dive in and use it.

(34:58):

I think principally when I came into the space, maybe more than anything else, we would want those things to be decentralized, those principles are important and you should want to be able to show you the value of the decentralization more than anything else. Where right now, we’re so early in the space, only people that have maybe been around since the hard fork of ETH Classic or understanding Bitcoin SV can understand the risks of having over centralization and we haven’t really had a big battle like that in a while. So you really can understand the benefits of decentralization when you have a controversy like that.

Nick (35:32):

Let’s talk a little bit about this concept of digital scarcity. I think it’s central to Flow’s strategy and sort of the thinking there, but can you break that down for us? What is meant by digital scarcity and why is that sort of a pillar for Flow?

Sean Robb (35:46):

Digital scarcity, the best way of looking at it is really trying to make sure something can maintain its value regardless of how many times it’s been copied or reused. So digital scarcity allows for an asset to exist digitally or on the internet the same way an asset would exist in the real world. So whether that’s like a LeBron James rookie card, you can absolutely Google that, look it up and enjoy the view of it, but actually owning, having that tangible rookie card allows for you to buy, sell, and engage with fans of LeBron James or fans of the NBA very differently.

(36:22):

What’s incredible about that is now we’re going to be able to do that on the internet and do that globally, which has just not been able to be achieved before. I don’t know how you will tried trading cards on eBay. It’s a tougher world than if you go to something like NBA Top Shot and you can just engage pretty freely and understand the realness of these assets, understand how many of them are actually created a perfect data around how many of these things are alive and well and being used.

(36:47):

It’s a pretty radically different introduction to what can happen with digital assets and really changes the paradigm for both users and understanding what they can truly own in digital world. They don’t just own the access to something, they actually own the asset itself as well as creators where they can again, rely on themselves to create the assets that give people the utility that they want to give instead of relying on a platform to be a gatekeeper for the access.

Nick (37:12):

Well, Sean, I want to ask you what I think is probably a difficult question, so you can sort of answer it however you like, but I want to ask this question about again, working at Flow, having experience at Dapper Labs as sort of being at the forefront of consumer facing dapps with some very large brands. You’ve mentioned the NFL, you’ve mentioned NBA Top Shot, Mattel, Disney, these are all global, very well-known, very well established brands, and now we’re talking about digital scarcity and sort of this digital collectible sort of segment of what web3 can do.

(37:43):

The question is where’s the friction in appetite? It seems like large global brands have an appetite for probably increasing the value they can create the world by partnering with Flow and other sort of web3 type entities. It seems like there’s an appetite established on the consumer side. People love collectibles, they love brands like Disney and the NBA, and then we have the infrared, right? People like Flow and other participants in web3 that have to sort of deliver or be the mechanism to deliver that collectible. So the question is where’s the friction here such that we’re just not seeing this everywhere yet, like a proliferation of this stuff. If my assumption is wrong and it’s proliferating, of course, correct me as well.

Sean Robb (38:24):

Right now it’s a little bit of having people understand truly what digital assets are. So I’ll use Disney and Disney Pinnacle as an example here. So Dapper Labs, we sent one of our Flow team members to join them at D23, which is a big Disney conference. And they had an awesome table and they were showing people Disney Pinnacle and they were allowing for you to just swap these pins digitally. The first day, I’ll tell the story from one of my coworkers, the first day people come up and they go, “What are these things? How can I buy them?” They’re like, “Oh, well they’re digital pins. Here’s how you can trade them. Here’s how you can enjoy them.” And some people were a little disappointed when they first kind of talked to, they go, “Oh, I saw these awesome images. I wanted the pin.” He was continuing to talk to them.

(39:02):

They ended up installing the application. They would get the digital pin. It’s the fully 3D objects, you can spin it around. It’s really cool. And he goes, the cool part about that is all of those people that he talked to that were skeptical at first came back the next day to get the next day’s pin and they came back the third day to get it. It was such a frictionless experience that they saw the value of doing that as well. And so what’s preventing it from spreading even further? I really think it’s the matter of, okay, what’s next for it? So yes, you can own digital pins, but what can I do with my digital pin that I could never do with my physical pin? For example, I’ll say why I personally like digital collectibles, I can look at them, I can enjoy them way more.

(39:41):

I can pull them out of my phone, I can show my friends and family, “Look at this thing I have,” versus “Come with me into my basement. I’ll show you this binder of incredible things I have and I’ll walk through it.” It’s a very different way of enjoying those collectibles and I think the more and more that people can understand digital items as being assets, the more we’ll see this usage. And I think it’s really just that first hump that we have to pull people through and making sure that when you pull people through that first hump, there’s not so much friction they want to walk away.

Nick (40:11):

It makes a ton of sense to me. So before we leave the topic of Flow, and I just want to ask you a couple sort of industry level questions. I do want to ask this question about Flow’s interest in DeFi and sort of moving more into that segment. And I think there’s a strong argument to be made that to this point in time, web3’s sort of been a DeFi industry sort of built around and supporting that, but clearly things that you’ve done in your career as well as people working in gaming and other sort of segments are pushing that more broadly. But what’s Flow’s vision for DeFi and how does it sort of want to get active in that?

Sean Robb (40:47):

Well, plainly, a little bit of my love for DeFi as well, and in the use case of web3, DeFi has been an incredible way for us to understand composability and interoperability, being able to move these tokens across, being able to use them to trade assets and exchange with them and why Flow is focusing on it now is I think of it more of the ecosystem economy than the actual DeFi aspect itself. So why would someone want to come to your chain versus other? You have an awesome economy for the same reason someone would want to run a business in New York City versus other places. There’s an incredible economy there. There’s people walking by all the time. You want to be where the action is.

(41:22):

So for Flow, we’re focusing on DeFi now is because we need to bootstrap that economy. We need to make sure that builders that come build on Flow, they have opportunity for users, which we are onboarding people through NBA Top Shot, NFL All Day, and our team over at Dapper Labs as well as there’s the opportunity for them that can run and deploy on the same infrastructure and have an incredible economic opportunity as well.

Nick (41:43):

If people want to learn a little bit more about Flow, all the different things that are going on there. And of course, there’s going to be listeners that are into collectibles and really love this idea of digital scarcity, what’s the best way for them to sort of learn more and get active in that community?

Sean Robb (41:55):

The best experience I think that exists today on web3 is NBA Top Shot or if you go to nbatopshot.com, you’ll go there. You’ll be able to sign up and get an NFT I think with just your email address and you’ll be able to start opening packs and experience that you almost feel like a kid again, opening those Pokemon packs and seeing what’s inside. You’ll be able to play games with those packs, to watch the NBA games and kind of speculate on who’s going to be able to get certain rebounds and you’ll be able to see utilities of NFTs and you’ll be able to really see that frictionless experience of onboarding with your credit card and purchasing items.

(42:27):

So I would heavily encourage NBA Top Shot. I think it opened up the doors to a lot of people for NFTs in 2021, 2022. I think that the product is an incredible spot today, and so if you haven’t seen it since then, go check it out again. It’s evolved a lot and it’s really, really changed, I think for the best. I’m a football fan as well, so NFL All Day is my other secret one. I mentioned before I’m in St. Louis, and so I go out there and I collect all the St. Louis Rams moments.

Nick (42:55):

Amazing. Well, I’ll put links in the show notes for anybody that’s interested in checking this out and encourage listeners that want to learn more to do so. As I said, Sean, I want to ask you just a few more questions before I ask you the GRTiQ 10, these are 10 questions I ask each week. The first question is I want to, given your experience, allow you the opportunity to give advice to any listeners who are a little bit like you, they either graduated recently or maybe it’s been a little while. They’ve worked for some very large sort of maybe global type companies. They fill on a safe career path, but they’re very interested in web3, and they sort of hear that call that you probably heard. What’s your advice to them to making that transition and sort of getting started in the industry?

Sean Robb (43:37):

I think there’s many different layers that people can engage with as far as if you’re a technical or an engineer and wanting in to building with web3, I would highly suggest the ETHGlobal Hackathons, they run I think six every year. They’re in different locations all over the globe. There’s one this past year in Bangkok, San Francisco and Singapore, and what’s awesome there is you’ll be able to see all these different companies you’ll be able to build on top of their tech. You’ll be able to engage directly with that team and you’re really able to understand the issues with the space, the challenges you’ve run into and talk to people that are working in the space as well. And having those connections and understanding the problem set, I think is a really leg-up that you can have.

Nick (44:18):

Another question I want to ask you is about The Graph. And a lot of the listeners of this podcast are enthusiastic about The Graph, but also just web3 data in general. And as you know, The Graph will work with chains like Flow towards integration, which enables indexing query of blockchain data to devs building on that blockchain. How important from your perspective of blockchain and the problem set that Flow’s working on, how important is that data indexing layer for web3 to that builder experience and to sort of driving greater, I guess, utility of blockchain data?

Sean Robb (44:56):

Yeah, absolutely. I think if you look at the two things that blockchains really bring to the table, it’s to be able to have these open APIs that many people can engage with as well as an open state that anyone can be able to read and understand. Where Graph is really able to help builders is that they don’t have to re-understand that entire data set every single time. They can have a nice, fast indexable query that they’re able to build an incredible UX or incredible backend that plugs right into The Graph and they don’t have to worry about wrangling all of that net blockchain data that while is available, maybe it’s not always manageable. And so I look at The Graph individually versus others. Having this data be at its core decentralized resonates with me personally as that’s what brought me into the space and having not just the execution environment of Ethereum, but having things like your data or your consensus be open, decentralized and permissionless is very critical.

Nick (45:49):

And then the final question I want to ask you before, the GRTiQ 10 is about AI. It would seem like anybody I talk to now today through this podcast, I should ask them about sort of AI and the implications it’ll have on the project they’re working with. So maybe from that perspective of Flow, how are you all thinking about AI and sort of what it’s going to do to web3?

Sean Robb (46:11):

I thought a lot about this, and the thing I’m most in particular excited about for AI is really giving it more tools to be able to do more that’s useful to us. So if you look at our interactions with AI today, AI is really good at distracting us, whether it’s by just creating a bunch of content and we have no way of being able to consume all the content it creates or requires us to input and then take their output, process it and put it somewhere else.

(46:36):

If you’re able to have a blockchain that has open APIs and open state and it’s able to read and engage with the other bots or other humans the exact same way I, as a human, would read or engage to it, it’s a really pretty open door of what utilities can be for us. And so I’m really excited to have a AI personal system of sorts that can go and move money around if I needed to move money around or I say, “Hey, this is generally what I want to happen. AI, just tell me how to do it best.” I don’t really care how it gets done and it will achieve it. You see things like this, like Wayfinder I think is a good start of this in the blockchain space, but really being able to see that move beyond just simply money will be really exciting.

Nick (47:17):

So now I’m going to ask you the GRTiQ 10, 10 questions I ask each week. I always ask them because again, it just sort of makes the interview fun. We get to learn a little bit more about you and your personal interests, but I always hope listeners will learn something new, try something different, or achieve more in their own life. So Sean, are you ready for the GRTiQ 10?

Sean Robb (47:33):

Let’s do it.

Nick (47:45):

What book or article has had the most impact on your life?

Sean Robb (47:49):

Start with Why by Simon Sinek. It is one of the first books I read outside of college, and I can see myself going back to the principles of it pretty often.

Nick (47:57):

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

Sean Robb (48:01):

Ted Lasso. We all need a little optimism in our life.

Nick (48:06):

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

Sean Robb (48:10):

Again, as a St. Louis, and I have to say Country Grammar from Nelly. That’s the only answer I can guess.

Nick (48:17):

Well, what’s the best life advice someone’s ever given to you?

Sean Robb (48:21):

It’s more valuable to be direct and concise than verbose and overly detailed. That’s typically the hardest thing to do, especially for things you’re very passionate about. But if you can get things down to a couple sentences or bullet points, you’ll get a lot more out of that information.

Nick (48:35):

Sean, what’s one thing you’ve learned in your life that you don’t think most other people have learned or know quite yet?

Sean Robb (48:40):

I forget the principle exactly, but it’s the amount of effort that you’d put into gathering information directly impacts how you value that information. So why is it valuable to understand the principles of how some things like math or electronics are done is you value that information that you had to fight and gather much more than if you put it into a search engine and they’ll stay with you longer.

Nick (49:03):

What’s the best life hack you’ve discovered for yourself?

Sean Robb (49:06):

Don’t wear a smart watch. They’re just distractions.

Nick (49:10):

I’ll quickly take mine off. Based on your own life experiences and observations, what’s the one habit or characteristic that you think best explains how people find success in life?

Sean Robb (49:23):

People that have success, they often have confidence in their perspective, in their opinion, but they also maintain the humility to learn where they might be wrong.

Nick (49:30):

And then 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…

Sean Robb (49:38):

Treating our digital assets and rights and capabilities the same as we treat our physical space. That is going to be a huge unlock for us.

Nick (49:47):

And how about this one? If you’re on X or Twitter, whatever you call it, then you should be following…

Sean Robb (49:52):

You should follow me, @SeanPRobb.

Nick (49:55):

And then complete this sentence, Sean. I’m happiest when…

Sean Robb (49:59):

I’m happiest when I’m solving puzzles and problems that directly impact the people and communities around me.

Nick (50:13):

Sean, thank you so much for joining the GRTiQ Podcast. It was a lot of fun to hear your story, and I think you’re the first guest I’ve had on from that part of the country, so it was fun to sort of get exposure to that region and all the interesting things that Flow is working on. And I’m really sharing for any project in the space that’s working on solving that consumer-facing application. And so I’m wishing you and of course, the team, best of luck. If listeners want to stay in touch with you, follow the things that you are working on, what’s the best way for them to stay in touch?

Sean Robb (50:43):

My personal Twitter handle is SeanPRobb, S-E-A-N-P-R-O-B-B, or the Flow Blockchain Twitter, which is Flow_Blockchain.