Rethink Trust 2018: Kristen Stone, Interview
Recording: Rethink Trust 2018: Kristen Stone, Interview
okay Kristen so thanks for amazing talk I have a few questions for you and like first one what is your role in blockchain economy and what was the career path bring you here to working with like blockchain yeah great and Maxim great to see you again it's so exciting to be here so right now I work at coin base which is one of the largest consumer platforms and it allows customers to come on to use their regular fiat currency US dollars or euro in order to buy cryptocurrency what we consider this we consider this a bridge a bridge from the regular finance into decentralization into a cryptocurrency which is great and my specific role I'm a product manager one of our back-end technical teams that connects all of the coinbase apps to the blockchain cool so now a lot of hype around blockchain technology so what do you think the real business problems that we can solve with blockchain that is a great question and it is one I think all of us are trying to answer this industry has amazed me over and over again because everything I thought I I thought it would first be remittances that we would solve and I thought that we would be solving problems for the unbanked but the very first problem that this solved was speculation investment the ability to invest in a new type of asset class which was amazing but it was not what I expected at all so I think that what we'll see as this industry continued to evolve in a really interesting way and people will utilize it in new ways we hadn't even thought of yet and so I don't even I don't even bother to guess anymore because it'll just surprise me cool so and you're talking with it like with the customers maybe internal customers what are their qualities like expectation from the blockchain technology one thing we all realize is that blockchain technology is very new so our expectations are pretty low right now we've realized the promise and the opportunity it has but we also know that anytime a technology is created there are a lot of challenges to overcome there are a lot of experiments that will happen there are a lot of areas that you need to improve and modify and iterate especially as a technology company you know look at the Internet look at the first cell phone but you know what we have now is so incredible so all of our customers anyone who's in the space right now really understands that this is very new technology and that we want to use it now to get it right as more customers come on cool and like a you are technical product manager so what is the most technical challenge that you face it with the blockchain technology so today I spoke about Forks and I would say that's one of the top technical challenges is how do you reduce the technical experience for people and give them a familiarity of this type of technology because how are people how we really think through how are people utilizing us today and what would allow them to draw an understanding that we could really provide this information to them and then help them understand this over time so we do this with asset pages what we do is you know we show customers really describe how these different block chains work okay cool and like as a technical product manager what they think like what should be a skill set for product managers who work in blockchain industry flexibility there has there have been more days than I can count where I woke up and every every assumption I had from the day before was gone and so the ability to be flexible the ability to you know not not create and not get attached to an outcome because you're probably gonna be wrong the best thing you can do is be flexible watch customers talk to them really understand what they need cool and like as a community what can we do to prevent like blockchain winter to solve real customers problem with book chain as individuals the best thing to do is to start using it really start trying these out understanding where they work understanding where they don't come up with new ideas it's it's blockchain is so popular right now and there are so many opportunities so many business needs that exist if more people are out there trying it experiencing it understanding problems they can create what could be the next application that changes the world what will the we finally got smartphones we finally improved the technology of the internet far enough that applications like uber and Facebook could be built on top of it what what are those technologies what are those applications you know what do you need is a consumer and go and build it get excited get involved cool that's excited and last question how is going friend so far it's really great and I hope everybody who's here has had I know they've had an incredible time smiles from everybody and lots of good good conversation cool thank you very much