Davos Recap with Hedera Independent Board Member Monique Morrow

Welcome to gossip about gossip. Powered by Hedera Hashgraph. And each episode will cut through the hype of blockchain promises and explore real world examples of organizations creating the next generation of decentralized applications, which will bring trust back to the internet for us all. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the latest episode of gossip about gossip, the podcast where we talk about real world applications of distributed ledger technology. My name is Zenobia Gods talk, and I'm the SVP of communications here at squirrel's labs, helping to grow the Hedera ecosystem. Today, we welcome back to the podcast, Monique Mauro, who is an independent board member of the Hedera governing council. Hi, Monique, how are you? I'm fine, Zenobia. How are you doing? Good, good. I think we are both recovering from a very busy trip to Davos, and we asked you to come on today to just share with our community some insights on what you saw there, the kinds of conversations that you had there, and some key takeaways. So if we're going to jump into it, maybe just overview your initial thoughts. If you're at a cocktail party and people ask, how is Davos one word intense, one word intense, one week and intense. And what I would like to say is if people did not know what Hedera was about during that time, they knew. They know now. And with regards to the various organizations that Hedera is part of which I found fantastic, whether it's world lapse world's labs, the foundation Hashgraph association, it's a magnificent group of colleagues, and it's the first time I had a chance to actually visit with them. But, you know, the sessions that were. I have to say, whether you were talking about policy, whether you were talking about, you know, how do you actually use these technologies to create what we call trust and why it's trust? One of the aspects that I personally was participating in various conversations about what differentiates Hedera from others, and that is trust. And it's not easily said, but it's enterprise driven that are companies have joined the council, have joined the group. They drive the conversations with Hedera. We have, you know, people who are responsible from the policy side of the house. We have you know, we have somebody who's a CFO. We have communications officer as yourself. I mean, we have and also you have lawyers who are involved in making sure that we do have governance. And that's a differentiator, a differentiator from what people have, you know, from what people have experienced in the past. And, you know, we are very inclusive. For me, wonderful conversations. Hedera actually Hedera house actually hosted Africa house. And the conversations they're hosted just, you know, what's happening with regard to the continent itself and the types of investments we could have. And I had a chance to visit Ukraine house. mean, Ukraine is a big topic as we all know and in our world today and the opportunities to have conversations there and why it matters. So it it's kind of intense, as I say so state but but also, when you have people when there you have people who are comparing Hedera with other types of chains or layer one chains or like two chains or whatever you want to call them. The thing that I go back to in what's data driven, you know, with Sao Paolo, Tosca, I'll just mention his name because it's public in terms of University College London. And what's the data that's driven there, you know, in terms of how energy is used. The bigger conversations really is about sustainability, you know, and I think we have a fantastic people working on sustainability and how we use energy and how we can use, how we can create a better future to grow together. It was a big topic overall. Davos is certainly a great topic within Haidara house and certainly driven by fantastic leaders in the organization who are doing a super work try and looking at how we can create a sustainable world for ourselves and using and being able to talk in those terms. That was a huge topic at our house also. I just wanted to so state. So, you know, if people didn't know who we were as an independent director, I'm proud to serve as an independent director. And having met wonderful people within the organizations, as I stated before, that are related. They know now, they know now. And I will have to say that people were coming in and out and in and out, in and out in terms of trying to check in and participate. It was hard to it was just standing room only. So in these conversations and some of the conversations that you yourself have led to. Right I mean, that is, you know, important. So it's cross vertical. I mean, whether you're in fintech, of course, is a sort of fintech kind of drives an initial conversation or whether you're looking at, you know, what it means for health care, what it means across organizationally, what it means to create new standards around it and new partnerships, you know, all in flux. But I will have to say that we came away came away with all my goodness, we thought we got things to do to tie up, to make sure that we follow up. And that's really, really, very, very key. And I think one point I do want to say is one of the groups that I'm going to be very closely working with is had had their Hashgraph association, which is Swiss based and again, all working. And I think this is important to say all working within the communities. Right all working within the communities itself. And here, you know, you're looking at use cases that are quite important to pipeline abuse cases, whether they occur in various parts of the world and the continent of Africa. You know, things around sustainability, issues around sustainability, issues around and as examples, one of the wonderful aspects that I'm also learning from Hashgraph association is the training there, which I think is fantastic, is how do you actually certify and become trained in and what we're doing. And I think that's always missing about when we're talking about nodes. And now that, you know, being able to operate a node and cetera. But it's also about the training. And so Hashgraph association is really committed to making sure that people who are interested in training will have received the training and they'll receive different levels, whether it's for developers or whether it's for people who are business development. So they have an entirely developed training law. And I raised my hand up in the air to take one of the training, one of the courses. Basically, it'll be mainly on the business side of the house. But certainly if you're interested in learning how to code, there is that model too. So they have a whole certification, well developed, well-structured team and quite impressed with what we're doing. Yeah and I think, you know, one of the things that we heard from even the community members who were there. And one of the things that struck me which by the way, you've mentioned a ton of threads I want to pull on, but just this, you know, the realization that post pandemic and post all of these splits, right? We have split out the organization. So we can be more decentralized. But I think this was probably the first time that we had board members from Hedera and management from Madeira, as well as worlds labs, as well as the Hashgraph association, as well as the H bar foundation, all in the same room, and the ability to send people where they needed to go, right? If they were looking for those kinds of trainings, if they had an application that needed, you know, potentially funding, but also some engineering support to be able to send them to the Hashgraph association, to be able to send potential council members to have conversations with current council members and say, hey, this is what it's really like and this is what you're involved in day to day. And to see those council members collaborating with one another and kind of generating those ideas for what else they can be doing. I think there was certainly a lot of that where we saw we saw that ecosystem all working together for the first time in person in a long time. Yeah and I think that's a great point. An area of it's know, it's been it was certainly my first time to meet people in person. It was certainly it was really fun to all I can say is that we have a fantastic ecosystem of players here. And, you know, that's what I meant by intense because we could go in and we could point people to other people, as you stated, especially when they came in to their house, by the way, which was really well situated. So it was quite on know, on the promenade itself and very well situated and well well done by the team. So indeed, and now it's like, OK, now you come away from such an intense week is how now how are we going to keep up with that momentum, especially up to davos? You know, where do you actually start to replicate this? Where do there's not a lack of interesting ideas in this space, but I think it's just more or less where do where do we have these opportunities, per se? And I think this is something that perhaps we need to think about mid to long term. But it is kept us with these what I call hybrid decentralization. I mean, you know, it's kind of hybrid in that sense, but certainly one that is probably a great model to strive for. And we had other folks coming in from other chain organizations wanting to tap into the types of examples that they see. Right and so those are the kinds of, you know, wonderful structures of I wouldn't say debates, but really sharing the conversation and. I think what we were able to do was basically set the bar high for the industry. Yeah and I think, you know, it's interesting to see because while there were fewer crypto or blockchain companies at Davos than there have been in the past, there is almost a sense of maturation in the industry. I mean, I think you and I have been in technology long enough to recognize that there's no technology, industry or wave that just has one player that wins. And across collaboration is really important. People are going to choose their favorite tech stack and they are going to then also say, well, if you can integrate with that, then I'm more likely to use you. So it did feel like the industry was coming together and having those discussions to say, look, we can't be in these fiefdoms, right? We have to collaborate if we all want to grow as an industry and make this, you know, make this ocean bigger for everyone. And point well said. I always say you pick the right, you pick the tool for the right tool in the toolbox for the right problem and/or opportunity. So whether you're talking about artificial intelligence, which, by the way, as we all know, was a big sets of conversations or whether you're talking about some level of blockchain or chains or crypto or maybe not, they're all structured. And even the metaphors, they're all structured together. You can't they're all part of what I'll call tools in the toolbox. Right so so they're not don't necessarily have to separate them. And I think those are this is not only the ecosystem, but how ever way we want to create business in this more business drivers to going back to that point of trust. So yeah, I mean, where we're at. We've already crossed the chasm on this topic, really. I've done that. And I think it's more or less OK. What what are the examples of use cases? What can we do to create even more drivers around those use cases, whether it's in banking or whatever that may look like? And so I think that they continue continue and I've had a recent conversation not at Davos, but it's also about how do people deal with you know, how do you deal with the recruiting and trust, right. Are you you know, and so could this be a use case itself and why where you are actually in the center? Actually, that was actually one of the examples. It was an example. But it's interesting that is coming out that one of our colleagues actually had demoed at adara house, you know, where what do you want to disintermediate? And you can imagine, you know, it's a quite wide it's know, what is the art of the possible here where we can actually think of this, these levels of transformation about you and your career goals and how you are the driver of that. So, yeah, interesting. Well, I think, you know, people have been complaining lately that LinkedIn has become this know, it's become noisy and it's become a lot of posturing. If you could really kind of get down to the truth of who people are and what they've done and what they've accomplished. There's value in that. And there's value in getting to that kernel of truth across a number of different applications. Certainly, you can tokenize yourself. You can tokenize your own. You can actually tokenized not only recruiting, but you can tokenize actually your own career development. And so on. I mean, we have been stating so for many years right now, for so many years. But now we are in a tokenized token, tokenized or token economy. And so we have to think about how do you take people on a journey, whether they are regulators or policymakers? And I think this is a very important point and why the value of y, we were there is to be able to talk to the policymakers. This is why we have policymakers, people who have an experience in policymaking in Hedera to be able to have that conversation, you know, and to take those folks along the journey, because they're still sort of riveted about the negativity that has been associated with what's been happening in the industry. But rather, hey, now this has value and it's value to, you know, to people overall. Here's why. And so I think that is quite an interesting that's for me was a takeaway, too or as an observation is that the policymakers making the components of a has been quite active and quite active and having these conversations with other policymakers. Yeah and we have know, we have a new chief of staff and Head of Global policy who has, you know, brings a lot to bear there and had a lot of experience. And a lot of connections there. It did strike me how much that conference is about that bringing together of policy and government and the private sector. Right so that you can have these conversations that not that you're going to solve them in a week. Right I think people feel like, well, gosh, you went there and then what has happened? But these organizations don't move quite that fast, but that it is amazing to see all those people together in one place. And that's correct. And as I said before, you know, now there are folks kind of looking at Hedera as an example in the industry. It's quite a bit to learn on and to learn. But I won't say this that we're going to see an end to sexual intersectionality between, you know, we're talking about education, between being in computer science and/or being in a law or being we're talked about also security by cybersecurity as an example. I think security is going to be also fundamental, not so much talked about, but it's going to be very fundamental to what groups like adara do in the end. And I think this is going to be very, very key because, you know, what are the risks? Risks that we see? How can we mitigate risks? And so on and so forth will be a great conversation to have. That's one take away. And you and I know about that because you have that background also. Yes and it struck me. So Jonathan dotan, who spoke from project Starling and the Shoah foundation, was on. He he spoke at multiple things, obviously, around the conference, but in the house as well. And one of the comments that struck me was he said, we need to get back to the basic understanding that crypto does not stand for cryptocurrency. Right? crypto stands for cryptography, which is a 100,000 year old science that we are going to be able to now apply at a much broader scale. So if we think about it that way, you started to see some of the conversation shift from, you know, gosh, these bad actors, all of these things that have happened in the industry to wait a minute, can we flip that on their head? And if we take cryptography as the underlying fundamental truth and source of the growth of this industry, then where can we go? Yeah, he was spot on. And I think that is quite important is to take that notion of what crypto is right and so and cryptography and understanding that there is this notion of keys and people need to understand that. Now one aspect here is to make sure that community not only understands it, but actually other folks understand it because we tend to get very, very deep in the technology aspects. We have to take people along the journey. You have you lockbox, I call it a lockbox. You have this is yours, yours to keep up. And here are examples of why you have to keep it safe and then sort train people and teach people that, you know what it means and spot on in terms of bad actors. Let me just say one thing about that actor. The early adopter of technologies are always going to be the bad Apple. I'll just say that you see it in every industry, right? You see it in every industry. So let's. Let's not even go there. What what we have seen is the need for governance. We know we have it. We have it. So we have it. By the way, the leaders who are in his era and related all the other the leaders. You've got key leaders throughout who are very, very responsible leaders. So we have that. And so I think that now it's more or less OK. We we're creating that trust dialogue and we're creating it with a new no nomenclature for people to actually grasp. I think that's a very important one. One of the takeaways and Thank you for pointing that out with regard to Jonathan starling, that I certainly will have you coming away from an intense, very intense Davos. That's what I said. I need to sort of, you know, come down to Earth from that. But you never do. Right I mean, and if anything, it's like, OK, we create those dialogues. We continue to create the dialogues. And I'm proud to be part of the. Yes, we've created an exponential amount of work for ourselves, which is what we did to begin with. We we certainly have. And I And here's the I mean, this is just so cool when I say that and all. Really really. I mean it that it is really cool and is really a fantastic work that we're all doing together in this Fanta and this ecosystem. But it continues and continues in ways that we probably have never thought about before. And I, I have a batch of use cases that are coming back and, you know, just kind of mounting use cases that'll be a topic of perhaps another conversation. But one thing that I will say is Davos. Congratulations to Hedera for all that Soros labs, the spa foundation has Hashgraph association, fellow board members and all the leaders there. That's a fantastic job. And I just I can see by people who were coming in and out and wanting to know more and by what we were doing in terms of hosting conversations that matter. And continued. And so for that, I say, well done. Well, Thank you, Renee, and Thank you for joining us. I know the community, you know, those folks who weren't there, certainly appreciate the insights and sharing everything that you experienced. And I hope we will get to talk again soon. Fantastic Thank you. India