How Blockchain Provides Business Services for Enterprises: Interview with the Commercial Product Director of Mysten Labs

Recently, we interviewed the Director of Commercial Products at Mysten Labs to discuss how blockchain technology can provide business services for enterprises and why certain blockchains are particularly suited for these use cases.

The following is the content of this interview:

Q1: Please briefly introduce yourself, your role, and how you got started in the Web3 space?

Currently, I lead the commercial product team of a certain company. Generally speaking, commerce encompasses everything; it can be the foundation of most things, involving various business sectors such as gaming, retail, loyalty, travel, ticketing, and more.

This is my sixth year exploring the blockchain field; I started getting involved back in 2017. I took a break for about 14 months to care for my child and am now preparing to re-enter the workforce. I want to work on interesting, complex, and challenging tech stacks. Previously, I worked for a long time on a leadership team at an institution, so I feel very satisfied with this part of my career. I want to tackle unsolved problems; I no longer want to rely on selling "let us build you a company homepage" or "let us create another retail checkout page." I feel that many problems have already been solved online, and I want to address those that remain unresolved. Through mutual friends, I was guided into the blockchain field, during which I underwent an amazing process that gradually helped me understand blockchain. Many of those things also left me feeling overwhelmed.

My past work experience has been on the user experience level. Therefore, I pay great attention to optimizing the "least common denominator", which is to find the simplest way to understand this issue. I found that, just like now, the information about Blockchain at that time was almost chaotic. Most of the information was confusing, and much of it was related to finance. Ultimately, I began to believe in the problems that Blockchain could solve; some people describe Blockchain as a solution-seeking tool. But in reality, I think it can solve a very clear problem, which is asset ownership and digital agency. In traditional Web2, we do not have this. My data does not belong to me, and my online behavior does not belong to me; they belong to the companies that interact with me.

Blockchain has disrupted everything; my transactions are mine, my assets are mine, my results are mine. Additionally, I am very interested in the privacy implications of certain blockchain technologies. I have always had a strong interest in zero-knowledge and how to accomplish things online in a way that protects privacy more easily rather than sacrificing it. Zero-knowledge is like a very intriguing proposal to me. Therefore, I fell in love with blockchain in 2017, but due to the funding being pulled from the startup I was with at the time, I went on to do other things while still keeping in touch with the blockchain world. This year, I finally had the opportunity to return to the blockchain space in my current role.

I like Blockchain, not as a standalone entity, but as a foundation that can improve the infrastructure of the Internet as a whole. Some Blockchains actually have this potential; it is suitable for the infrastructure of the Internet. I think many other Blockchains are great, but they often have slower speeds and higher costs, making them less suitable for enterprise use. However, I believe certain Blockchains have more potential to easily tackle all these challenges. I am really looking forward to validating my personal hypothesis about Blockchain and the impact it could have on the entire Internet.

Q2: How do you guide established companies in the Web2 space to think creatively about the problems in their business and how Blockchain can be a solution?

Let's look at this issue from a business perspective. In business, we often talk about the sales funnel. At any given moment, if I attract 100 people to the top of my sales funnel, some of them will drop off, and some will engage more deeply; this part will also have drop-offs, and the people at the bottom of the funnel will be those who ultimately convert, those who actually make a purchase or take the action I need them to take. This funnel game is a fundamental principle of any business, whether you are a movie theater or a shoe retailer, you are trying to attract as many people as possible to the top of the funnel so that through natural drop-offs, as many people as possible ultimately reach the bottom of the funnel and convert.

For example, the top of the funnel is a very complex place, basically where the ads are located. You try to attract as many people as possible to learn about your business, understand your products, and engage with your brand. My previous job was at an e-commerce platform, which can be said to be an advocate for small businesses. Their mission is to empower more and more people to become entrepreneurs, giving them the ability to define their own business and destiny. The biggest challenge faced by every entrepreneur on that platform is acquiring customers. This involves how to tell my story? How to find people who want to buy the products I sell? How to adjust my sales approach to cater to those who might be slightly interested in my products? How can I sustain sales so that even if I perform excellently this week, I can continue to build on that success next week? These are all long-term challenges faced by small businesses. But for various reasons, these challenges have become very formidable in the current internet environment.

First and foremost, the most important issue is privacy. Web2 and the internet have progressed along the path of "I need to collect as much data about you as possible in order to show you ads." I remember when I first engaged with the internet, there was a lot of super personalized content that made you feel like you were having a very special experience while interacting with websites. The problem is that the only way to achieve this is to collect and hold a large amount of very personal and private information. Thus began a transaction of selling such information, and the advertising world became addicted to purchasing private data. This is why we created rules like GDPR and California's CCPA, which are designed to protect individuals so that their information is not shared or even collected without consent. Now, unfortunately, this also means that the quality of data required to build customer channels has declined. Therefore, while I could previously obtain your gender, name, and home address from dealers with high confidence, I can no longer purchase that information. So now I have to guess this information or try to infer this data. This just happens to provide space for certain large tech companies to monopolize the advertising market, as they have applications that grant them the right to collect this data. They have become the only place you can look for new customers.

For example, on a certain e-commerce platform, a tech company changed its privacy rules, so on iOS devices, specifically iPhones, we observed a significant decline in sales for merchants on that e-commerce platform, as many of these merchants relied on collecting advertising data from a certain social platform through mobile phones. Although it was not intentional, this basically stifled the marketing channels at the top of the funnel for thousands of small businesses, as they do not have the million-dollar budgets of large brands. We are talking about your part-time or corner stores, these small businesses that hope to find target users in their communities.

So the question is how blockchain contributes to this data ecosystem and how to use zero-knowledge technology to feed information about people's behavior back into the internet, but without sharing private information. Zero-knowledge allows individuals to verify facts more intelligently. The speed and scalability of certain blockchains make them the most suitable places to provide services for real-time internet queries using zero-knowledge.

How can I tell my story? How can I find people who want to buy the products I am selling? How can I adjust my sales approach? How can I maintain consistency? These are all challenges that small businesses face in the long term.

However, not all issues have been resolved, but it is certain that just as the entire online advertising world was built in the early 2000s with the online behavior, we now see that Blockchain can be used to reduce customer acquisition costs.

You can think that many blockchains offer zero-knowledge proofs. I believe that certain blockchains stand out because they can provide this service at internet speed and predictable costs.

To give another example, loyalty. Every time I encounter a company that wants my email address, I think, what have you done for me that makes me feel satisfied? Why should I be loyal? With digital asset ownership, you can give me something that will always belong to me, that can be updated, changed, and developed. Certain Blockchains have the capability to provide dynamic, composable NFTs (at internet speed and low cost), so suddenly, loyalty programs may mean much more to customers, as it can actually offer more than just more emails and discount codes.

Q3: Is this to add Blockchain to your tech stack to achieve what you are trying to do in a broader business model?

This is something I firmly believe: certain Blockchains are an essential type in your technology stack. The era of cloud computing has essentially introduced us to the idea of rapid scalability. Now, if you are a business starting tomorrow or investing in your infrastructure, you will absolutely include cloud computing because not doing so would be foolish. I believe certain Blockchains represent a Blockchain era that you can think of in a similar way. Some things are only possible through such Blockchains, or only using such Blockchains can ensure security, so trying to accomplish these things in other ways would be absurd. Certain Blockchains are still new in this field, and they require partners willing to build with us and embark on this journey.

Q4: In many ways, what you describe is the opposite side of what is typically considered with Blockchain, namely building Web3 businesses.

Interestingly, the distinction between Web2 and Web3 is only useful when helping to describe the difference between Blockchain technology and standard foundational internet technology. There will come a moment in the future when this distinction becomes irrelevant, as we are not trying to create an internet to access; we are just striving to make the internet you are already using better for everyone. A win-win should be for everyone, including end users, and right now saying Web2 and Web3 can help you describe this distinction. But at some point in the future, we are just talking about the internet and generalized internet behaviors and activities, and what will become a norm.

We are not trying to create an internet that you need to go to; we are just trying to make the internet you are already using more friendly for all participants.

Q5: What role do end users play in understanding the value of decentralized technology and Blockchain, as this relates to their own privacy? Do you anticipate that they will make more demands on businesses, and once businesses are ready to provide benefits, will they start to receive them?

The above has all been said, let’s start with the decentralized technology stack. What’s incredible about this decentralized blockchain is that there will be many people involved to make it a reality. Many have invested a lot, not just the company that created it, and not just the investors, but all the participants. This collective investment is based on successful open-source technology, and it has been so for years. However, there has always been this notion that if something is open-source, it cannot make money. What blockchain does is tell you that you can make money within this open-source culture because the decentralized technology stack allows you to do both at the same time, especially blockchain technology. Some people will dive deep into all aspects that require active operation and good functioning of the economy to stabilize the blockchain network's global availability, such as verification nodes, staking, and node operation. Another group of users will be very concerned about what it means for their activities.

I think there is another group of people who, to be honest, do not really care about blockchain or anything else. They just want a very good loyalty program and they want to enjoy a safe experience online. They hope that the companies they trust will not use their information for malicious purposes, they hope.