Transcript



Ashley:

What's going on y’all! This is Culture and Code, a podcast brought to you by Render Atlanta. If you're not already familiar with what Render Atlanta is, we are an organization dedicated to increasing the presence of black and brown people in all stages of the tech pipeline. We do so with different events and at experiences focused on not just tech, but also culture and how it brings people together. Our main experience, which I am personally super excited about, is our annual Render Atlanta conference held in Atlanta. Our next conference will be June 1st through fourth in 2022. It is super exciting. We have a ton of great speakers lined up some amazing food, and even an after party music festival, it's going to be incredible. And I absolutely cannot wait for y'all to experience it. You have got to get in on it if you haven't already. To learn more about us and keep up with our events, you can visit our website renderatl.com. You can also follow us on Twitter or Instagram @renderATL and join the conversation on our Discord at renderatl.com/discord.



Hello and welcome. This is an episode of Culture and Code brought to you by Render Atlanta. I'm Ashley. Today, I'm here with Harper Reed, who is the CEO and founder of General Galactic Corporation. And we're going to be chatting a little about the Future of web3. So, I actually had the privilege of speaking with Harper a couple months ago on our Render Roundtable, Twitter spaces about web3 already. So, I've just been really excited to continue this conversation. So, how's it going, Harper?



Harper:

It's going great. I'm super excited to be here.



Ashley:

Thank you so much for coming on. So, just to get started, I want to dive in a little bit on your background, how you got into tech and just how you got to where you are today.



Harper:

I'm a self acclaimed web boomer. So, I've been in tech for a billion years. I'm one of those kind of now unique people who got my first computer when I was very, very, very young. I think I was four or five, start programming computers. It was Logo obviously, and just have continued to do computer-ing for my whole life. I grew up as someone who knew I was going to be a computer programmer. What I mean, even when I was very young, that's what I knew. I'm always a little uncomfortable with describing that because it's not a replicable path. And I oftentimes wonder what use it is to describe a path that no one else can replicate, just because it's more time and place. But with that said, that's where I got started. My first job was a Java programmer in 2001, building encyclopedias.



Then I really discovered the magic of online and internet communities. And so I started focusing more on that and worked at a company called Threadless, where I helped build a lot of technology around eCommerce, but mostly around crowdsourcing, which was really fun. And then from there I just kind of quit my job just randomly and then started working for the Obama campaign, where I was a CTO for the Obama campaign. That was really fun for Barack Obama's reelection in 2012. And we invented all this really, really fun and great technology to help reelect the president. We won and then the Republicans used it against us in 2016, the same tech that we had invented. And then we lost, and that was less fun to be like, "Doh, cats out of the bag." A lot of what we had done was used for misinformation campaigns around Ukraine and around Europe, in the US and whatnot.



So it really taught me a lot of really strong lesson around, you have to be careful with your tech, what you build. Just because it works for you, we have to think of what is it going to work for in the future? So, that was a really interesting lesson. After that we started a company, me and some of the people from the Obama campaign started a company called Modest, which we sold to PayPal that did e-commerce. And then that was in 2015. And then in 2019-ish, I started this company called Galactic. And then it really came to fruition in 2020, where we started building some kind of metaverse solutions for video conferencing. And a lot of that had a lot of web3 built into it. And so we started focusing on more of the crypto side of web3, after we launched that product, which is called Galactic Camera. Here we are today.



Ashley:

That's amazing. That is such a wide range of experience. So, it's really cool. Thank you so much for sharing that.



Harper:

It's time. This is time. This is mostly time and luck. That's all it is. It's about standing in the right place at the right time. I can tell you exactly, if I would've been out of town in 2011, this one week in 2011, I would not have been the CTO for the Obama campaign. It had nothing to do with skills. It was purely right time, right place.



Ashley:

Nice. That's always so interesting to think about is what opportunities do you get or do you not get out in just the most minuscule moments it seems like? That's really cool.



I've seen a lot recently on Twitter and other platforms about the pushback regarding web3 is, that it's really hard to get into it basically is what a lot of people feel because of all of this lingo. Even learning what an NFT for me was very difficult until I actually saw in a tangible concept. So, how do you anticipate if it will at all? How will you anticipate it to be easier to get into that in the future?



Harper:

It's a hard question. I mean, my first time I looked at NFTs or not NFTs, but looked at smart contracts was in 2017. And I remember very specifically sitting and looking at this and just being like, "This is impossible. No one knows what the fuck's going on here. This is a nightmare." And what changed for me, I think this is what changed for a lot of people is suddenly there was an application that I could wrap my head around. And I think it has to be, I think if we, as creators, oftentimes do a bad job of describing what we are creating. I think part of it is I remember it's actually I think fun to watch people describe to people NFTs. Like say, "Okay, I have a JPEG, it's worth a lot of money. What does that even mean?"



That doesn't mean anything. That's not a real thing, you know? But you try and really describe what it means. And the problem right now is that we don't know. I think the issue is that there are people who are able to get into this, like my brother or all the people around us that we know that are successful in this space. And a lot of that has to do with luck, more than has anything to do with anything else. It has nothing to do with skills. That doesn't mean that the people who are in it aren't skillful. It doesn't mean that they don't have skills, but being in the right time, in the right place is not a skill that you can practice for. What it does mean though, is that there are a lot of opportunities for skilled people coming up.



I think that part of the problem that we have is people already in here is we aren't very good at describing what we need and what the world is going to become. We don't know. What ends up happening is, and I saw this, I onboarded my team into Ethereum. Most of my team hadn't used Ethereum before I kind of dragged them in. There's a lot of hurdles. Gas, gas is a hurdle. I don't know how many times I heard swear words and then gas, just in the slacks or in the video calls. There's a lot of concepts that are very unique and complicated. There's a lot of things that seem like magic that people are like, "What does this even mean?" Like air drops, like someone would get a big air drop.



They're like, "Why? Where does the money come from?" There's all these question. Taxes, nobody knows what's going to happen there. All these things, there's a lot of legality. So it's very complicated to try and for people even inside, I think it's complicated to try and figure out some of these concepts. So, if you're outside, it's 10 times worse. The concern I have is that we aren't doing enough to make it accessible. I don't think this means building things for people who don't know or building new user stuff, but literally make it accessible.



And then there's the other thing, which is that there's a lot of gatekeepers. There's people who don't want it to be accessible because they themselves are finding success. They know that if they bring other people in that they won't have as much opportunity. I have always felt that the more people that are here in this party, the better. I don't ever think it's been better when it's smaller. So I look forward to more people being in there, but I do think there's a lot of things we have to solve and we have to figure out how to fix these things.



Ashley:

What's going on y'all? If you're loving this episode so far, we'd love to invite you to join the conversation about it by hopping into our Discord at renderatl.com/discord. We'd also love to have you at our upcoming conference this year, June 1st through 4th in Atlanta, you can visit renderatl.com for more information. You can also find us on our updates on Instagram and Twitter @renderATL.



Do you ever think that there will be a time where web3 and just the way that the web is evolving in general will transcend into public policy, whether just in the US or internationally?



Harper:

I mean, every day it does, we don't have to wait for that. That's happening as we speak in every country in the world, not just about web3, but the internet has caused great disruption. It doesn't matter what country you look at, where you are at, what you're doing. It has caused great disruption and policy has, in many cases, follow that disruption, not necessarily in a way that is productive for the citizens or the workers, or sometimes in ways that just support people in power, sometimes in ways that just support industry without consideration of workers. But regulation and policy are always going to come from technology. The complicated thing about that is technology is always the leading indicator for that stuff. Then the other thing is we don't have a very iterative approach to law making or policy.



It's much more. We do a lot of work, we define it and then we expect it to work for a very long time. I think we have to find some midpoint between those two spaces where you have the policy work, but you also are allowing it to be iterative or allowing it to be editable. Maybe I just think it, we can't say like things are moving so fast. If we just think about the internet, the rules that we made about the internet in '95 are very different than the rules that were needed to make in 2005, which are very different than the rules that were needed to make in 2015 and so on and so forth. If you think about 2005, there are big macroeconomic issues that were different. For instance, we had not yet had 9/11 in the United States.



If you think of 2015, we had had Facebook and all the same Facebook software, but we had not yet had the 2016 elections where the United States started thinking about misinformation. The software is always there, but the reaction to it is very different. Whether it's the Patriot act or whether its congressional investigations and a misinformation. Whatever it might be, whatever the reaction is to the technology, the software was there before. I think the same thing will happen to web3. What I hope happens is that we don't wait until something catastrophic happens to be able to make that. I mean, we've seen big ransomware attacks, we just need one huge one and have the administration, whichever side is empowered at the time to be able to just ban it whole, much like Estonia has just done for their their anti-money laundering stuff.



But what I hope is that we have some reasonable regulation that actually just sets up some rules for crypto that doesn't outlaw it, doesn't get rid of it, makes it so that you pay taxes where it makes sense and it understands it. And is built as a framework that can be built upon as things move forward. What I worry about is we have this some knee jerk reaction that is the Patriot Act of crypto, and we end up stifling innovation and all the innovation ends up moving offshore. That's something that has happened already for much tech in the US, I don't want to continue happening.



Ashley:

That's very interesting to think about, and it's already such an international space itself, so it would be interesting to see whether, or if that does end up shifting in the long term.



Harper:

I don't think it will shift from international, but I could see it shift more towards international. The US has a choice and we always do, which is, we can choose to continue to be a leader or we can choose to step aside and let other people lead. In some cases we have chose to step aside, based on our investments. You look at AI compared to China, it's an order of magnitude different of investment in China than the US. It's that will impact us in the future, so we need to fix that. You see a lot of things, a lot of lawmakers are talking about this and I forgot Endless Horizons or something like that. I think the law was that I don't know if it even passed, I'm not even sure. But the point being that this is not like I'm not this person has invented this idea.



This is a pretty broad idea, but it is something that I do think is related somewhat to web3 in that we can have regulation around crypto and still allow for innovation to happen in the US. Or we can have regulation about crypto and stop innovation around crypto in the US and it'll just move somewhere else. If there's a movement around developers to those things, those developers will move on as well. They'll move to other places or what have you, or we've seen brain drain in other countries like we could see it here.



Ashley:

For sure. I wanted to ask you also a more Render fun question. I do want to know what food reminds you the most of home?



Harper:

What food reminds of home...? Oh my gosh. I don't know. I'm thinking about this recently, because my parents were visiting and either there's some chicken noodle soup or some random meat loaf that's wild that you're just like, "What went in this?" But you eat it and it's not bad, you don't want to admit that it's not bad because you're like, "This seems mystery." Or like my parents, my mom used to make this thing called mushroom steak, which was can of mushroom soup and some sauce on some beef steak. When we were little, that was like the bee's knees.



When the mushroom steak night happened you just knew that it was going to be a good day. It was so exciting. But I think all the food that reminds me of home, I don't think I'm super into these days, which is interesting. When I think of home, if I think of something that reminds me of home, like my house home, where I live. Good sushi or a solid hamburger or some tacos? But all the things that remind me of growing up home are a little bit, I think I outgrew them.



Ashley:

That's definitely relatable to me as well. I feel like I alternate, it depends on how nostalgic I'm feeling or what time in my life I'm in. Maybe one day you'll return back to that.



Harper:

Maybe one day. I don't know. I have a very complicated relationship with nostalgia.



Ashley:

All right. Well I think we are right at time and as always, it's really great to chat with you and it's so interesting to hear all of your perspectives on what's going on currently in the web3 Space, what you think will happen in the future. I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me and then to close out. I just want to see, is there anything that you'd like to plug, whether it's yourself or an organization or cause you support?



Harper:

Oh boy. Well, if you want to give some charitable donations, one of the organizations here in Chicago that I really like and just have always enjoyed is GoodKidsMadCity, which is gkmcteam.com. They're great, really doing a lot to stop gun violence here in Chicago, but doing it from the kids up, rather than the adults judgment down. I really like and support them. I also want to shout out to my team, we just pushed out a fun little app called Watcher. It's a way to stalk your friends on in the web3 space. You can pop in their addresses and every time they do something, you get a little push notification. It's just like, "Yo, Harper traded some stuff or whatever." It was pretty fun. Well thank you for having me as always. I'm always here for Render and let me know how I can help out.



Ashley:

Of course. Thank you so much. Thank you for plugging those things. That's amazing. I'll definitely have to check out the Watcher app and also the organization you plug too. I just want to say thank you so much to everyone for tuning into this episode of Culture and Code. We will see y'all next time. Please don't forget to stay looped in on all things Render by following us. We can be found @renderATL on Twitter and you can also join the conversation at renderatl.com/discord. You can also find me on Twitter at @ashley_in_tech. Thanks so much everyone and we will see y'all next time.