Mobility Innovators

Jaspal Singh [01:17]:

Everyone. I’m so happy to welcome all listeners from around the world to the Mobility Innovators Podcast. I’m your host, Jaspal Singh. Mobility Innovators Podcast invites key innovators in the transportation and logistics sector to share their thought about the key changes in the sector, about their work, and what is their forecast for the future.

This is our second podcast with Boyd Cohen, an expert on blockchain who has recently launched two new initiatives WheelCoin, Earn3Move an app and Web3 on the Move podcast. Just to recap, Boyd is a CEO and co-founder of Iomob, a decentralized internet of mobility network.

Since obtaining his PhD in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado. In 2001, he spent the last two decades, focusing on accelerating the path to a low carbon sustainable economy. This includes publishing three books and starting a handful of ventures in the smart city and sustainability area.

I’m so happy to welcome, Boyd Cohen, CEO and founder of Iomob. It’s now time to listen and learn.

 

Hello Boyd. Thank you so much for joining us again on this show. I’m really looking forward to our conversation today.

Boyd Cohen [02:22]:

Thanks for having me. I mean, I feel honored to be on the podcast two times in a row now, two times in a few months.

Jaspal Singh [02:30]:

You are the first guest who is repeated on this podcast. There’s a reason for that. We know that. So we recorded our first podcast three months back and time flies, I didn’t even realize it. It’s been three months already. I think many things have changed over the period of time. I saw a new product launch. I saw new funding round and I saw expansion at Iomob. So do you want to share some key updates from Iomob?

Boyd Cohen [02:57]:

Yeah, I mean, I think when we spoke the first time, we had very recently closed our most recent round and that was tied to a very important sort of evolution or revolution in Iomob because when we were founded in 2018, we wanted to build Iomob as a blockchain-based to centralized mobility network. And we discovered we are four years too early and of product market fit. So then we went back to more centralized, classical way of trying to build a software company.

And, you know, we have clients from that sort of Web2 world in Europe and in North America. But we always wanted to go back to our roots and decentralized the whole architecture because we felt it was the right path for what we wanted to build a global decentralized internet and mobility network is basically a public good and owned by the token holders around the world, not just a private company.

Boyd Cohen [03:51]:

And so we decided to, to do that and we’ve been on that path. And I think since we last spoke one evolution is that we went through a lot of different blockchains Layer1 and Layer2 to try to figure out what was the right underlying blockchain to build our solution on. And we actually discovered that Cosmos.Network was the best fit. In fact, one of the founders of Cosmos is based in Toronto. I believe Ethan Buchman. Really visionary guy and Cosmos a really cool blockchain architecture. So we’re building that. And then you know, we’re continuing to build out that decentralized network then as you know the product launch you’re referring to is we had this bug in the US for a while that, you know. I think when we spoke, we may have already been, we were talking about the Metaverse and NFTs at that time.

Boyd Cohen [04:44]:

We still have that initiative underway with our first client Vueling Airlines as part of that. We won’t go into details on that, but then we been tracking the move to earn segment of blockchain and probably a lot of your listeners are not that familiar with Move2Earn and I know I’m probably interrupting what you usually do, because you always like to start your podcast with definitions of what things are that were discussed, but I’m going to do it this time. I’m taking the words from your mouth.

Move2Earn is a new segment in blockchain, which is about, so there, blockchain gaming is taken off around the world. Metaverse virtual worlds blockchain-based gaming where you own the skins and the NFTs you think of roadblocks and Minecraft, but instead of your kids or you are spending money on these skins that you don’t own, actually, you can’t sell them.

Boyd Cohen [05:41]:

You can’t do anything with blockchain. You can own those as digital assets and you can sell them in the open market and exchanges and the rest. And so a lot of people are innovating around how can you use this blockchain technology to improve the gaming environment. So you have people all around the world, living potentially sedentary lives engaging in virtual worlds, traveling the world from their computer, or playing video games or whatever. And in the last year, several people who embraced blockchain started thinking there must be a way to leverage gaming mechanics and blockchain to get people out of their seats and moving. And that’s where the idea of Move2Earn came from. There are a few projects – Genopets, STEPN, SweatCoin that basically you download the app and the app tracks your movements.

Boyd Cohen [06:37]:

Primarily walking is the main thing. The most of the Move2Earn games are either walking, running, or some kind of like Fitbit kind of thing that tracks your exercise routine and you get rewarded with tokens. You acquire NFTs and the more NFTs you have of certain level allows you to earn more of the token and that token can then be sold in an exchange in a public exchange. Or you can exchange those tokens for other things like inside the game. Okay. So that’s, what’s happening with Move2Earn right now, but no, one’s launched a Move2Earn game, leveraging blockchain and gaming mechanics to get people to move in green mobility or yeah. In green mobility, I will say, because that’s our focus. So what we’re launching is a product called WheelCoin. We accelerated the launch because we had an overwhelming demand.

Boyd Cohen [07:27]:

So we were saying by the end of the beta, we wanted to have 5,000 beta users to learn from their behavior. And it’s global from day one. So you could be in Mumbai or in Mozambique or in Singapore or in Barcelona, doesn’t matter. You can download this app, the app detects your movement, leveraging the hardware from your phone, things like your GPS, your accelerometer, how the phone is moved and it can pretty accurately detect. Are you walking? Are you on a bike? Are you on a train? Are you in public transit? Are you in a car or are you on a plane? Those are the things that can detect automatically. So once you’ve downloaded and onboarded yourself to the app, you don’t actually have to open the app for it to track your movement. You just have to authorize the app to have access to your GPS and everything else.

Boyd Cohen [08:16]:

And just by living your day in a greener way, you accrue WheelCoins, which we like to think of as like air miles for green mobility. So you basically earn this WheelCoin that you can then exchange for discounts on green mobility services. It will be available in a token exchange, like in a crypto exchange, you can on a decentralized exchange in others where you can actually sell your WheelCoins, you’ve earned. You can convert them to other things inside the game and all the rest of it. So, we were going to launch on September 15th, but we actually, and we were going to do a three-month beta with the goal of getting to 3000. By the end of the three-month beta, we got to 5,000 in like 10 days, even though we didn’t spend any money on marketing, just people started hearing about it and they’re like, wait, this is cool. I get paid. I get paid tokens to move green. I want that. So we actually have like a wait list now people who want to get in it. So we are accelerating. We’ve already sent the app to the app store and it goes live before the end of this week. So the week we’re recording. So by the time this comes out, it’s probably already out in the app store.

Jaspal Singh [09:23]:

Well, that’s great. No, in fact, I was about to ask you how to resist. We already told it’s already full and one need to wait now. And I think this Play2Earn app concept, which like you mentioned started with this with three and blockchain space, where the gaming industry was paying people to earn. And to be honest, I don’t really like that concept too much because you were giving money to people or giving some incentive to people, sit in front of computer. What I really like about WheelCoin is that you’re actually telling people to have good behavior and you will be rewarded. So good behavior is moving to this green mobility by leaving your car. And like you mentioned, you will track through their extra meter and different device.

Jaspal Singh [10:06]:

I know like Google map do that. Like they tell me how many kilometers I travel by bus or by car or by plane and by walk and you can reward on based on that. So my next question is because what you always try to do is you try to launch a new category in itself. And I think what you just mentioned the WheelCoin is again, creating a new category of paying user to use green mobility using blockchain technology. There is no other app. There are different app, which are encouraging walking behavior gaming behavior, but there is no other app like this and idea for Move2Earn model is that we can use a natural movement to earn money. And using this nudge theory, you are nudging people to move forward with the good behavior.

Boyd Cohen [10:54]:

Exactly. Yeah.

Jaspal Singh [10:55]:

And with the WheelCoin app, you’re also trying to influence people, behavior, like you mentioned that you will reward user movement while walking on public transit and rail. And by you will not reward users who are traveling in a car or a plane, so you don’t want to reward that that kind of a behavior.

So my question is, do you think that the Move2Earn will emerge as a concept to change people travel pattern? Or is it full step toward a personal carbon credit reward system? Because that’s one of the area, I’m very fascinated about how to reward people for saving carbon credit.

Boyd Cohen [11:28]:

Yeah, that’s really interesting because I think I would rather not say it’s either or / and say it’s a bit of both really. In fact, the way we’ve designed it is intended to be both, it’s a nudging. It’s a nudging component for your listeners. Many of whom are familiar with Mobility as a Service MaaS. In MaaS, there’s been a long history of discussing the four levels of MaaS, which is like, you know,

The entry level is nothing that everything’s fragmented. You have to find your own different, download the apps, and nothing’s connected.

The second layer, the level one they call it is like, you have some information about what journeys are out there what different services you might connect, but you can’t actually do it in the app. Level two is you can actually book the services in the app. So you have access to like this marketplace. And that’s what we’ve been building Iomob for a while.

Boyd Cohen [12:15]:

Level three is sort of like, you know, the classic mosque global solution around bundling services and allowing people to have a subscription.

And Level four, no one’s really achieved is embedding societal incentives inside to a MaaS app. The funny thing is, and I’m writing a post right now. That’ll come out probably tomorrow is that we’ve been playing in the MaaS world because the clients, we have rail operators and transit agencies, and airlines and others are interested in sort of a Moss kind of solution.

But actually WheelCoin is doing we’re turning the pyramid upside down. With WheelCoin, we’re starting with number four, the societal incentives and not doing the others yet. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as even more so after you, some of your listeners may have seen, there were some news about MaaS Global, really struggling financially right now.

Boyd Cohen [13:18]:

And you know, they’ve been, you know, the pioneer of MaaS for forever. They were incorporated in 2015 or so is that maybe we’ve had it all wrong in a way, like maybe trying to do all that heavy lifting of hyper, local, deep integration of all these mobility services. Maybe trying to get all these players who don’t like to who don’t like each other to also agree to be bundled together in a subscription. And that all that had to happen before we could even try to get to level four incentives.

Well, you kind of alluded to this about me liking to take on challenges that people haven’t done yet, but like, you know, no one’s done the Level Four yet. And yet Level Four is the most important thing. If we’re going to help the planet in society, you know, move fast enough. We’re all worried about climate change right now, this summer made it really like painfully obvious to people who try to deny it.

Boyd Cohen [14:13]:

So why did we have to do all that hard stuff first? Why not gamify and make it fun to go green without like having to get everyone to agree in a bundled together in every city and every part of the world. Why not launch a global app from day one that encourages green behavior. And as you said, I’ll get to the second part of your question right now, because you said, could this be used as a personal carbon credit? And it definitely could because you know how we’ve designed the WheelCoin. One kilogram of avoided emission is equal to one WheelCoin. So we’re not obfuscating the metrics somehow that you can earn in different ways. And we decide on our own, how many points you get? How many? No one coin is one kilogram. So 970 coins is a ton of CO2 avoided. We believe in the future, there will be a market voluntary offsets or otherwise where companies say airlines.

Jaspal Singh [15:15]:

Yeah

Boyd Cohen [15:16]:

Airlines right now, what they do is they buy offsets from, you know, reforestation projects somewhere, which is fine. But you know, if you’re in the transport industry, why not do something that’s fun and engages users and going green in your own industry and mobility and transport. So they could maybe buy some of their offsets from the users themselves who have a record of how many WheelCoins they’ve earned. And it’s directly one to one to how many kilograms they avoided in emissions. So I think it could be both. And I’m excited about both.

Jaspal Singh [15:48]:

Well, that’s great. I agree with you, you know, when you have this verified carbon credit off set, why not buy from the users? And in fact, they can track users movement. How did they travel from their home and how did they travel to the destination? And I remember I saw a little bit of sneak view of the high Iomob work. And it’s quite interesting that how you can build your journey around your air travel. Like how do you start from your home? How do you reach the airport at the destination and reach to your hotel or office and whatever. And with this WheelCoin, you can earn it. So it’ll be quite interesting to see how people will they change their behavior if you reward them state away. And I like your model of this reversing the pyramid, like start with the incentive of using all kind of connected mode rather than start with the single mode and then try to bring all the players together, which is becoming like an impossible task right now.

Boyd Cohen [16:45]:

And. It’s a challenge.

Jaspal Singh [16:46]:

It’s a challenge. And I remember three years back, there was a lot of hype about MaaS and everybody was predicting that the MaaS and everything else will be replaced, but we are still far away.

Now you mentioned about MaaS and actually that’s my next question is what’s your plan to integrate WheelCoin into the Iomob MaaS Mobility as a Service in the future. I’m curious to know why you think that the reward feature will be a game changer for MaaS app?

I mean, you mentioned about the pyramid thing, but why you think it’ll be a game changer and probably there’ll be more acceptability for MaaS app rather than what we are seeing now.

And my second question is how city or public transport operators can get benefit out of this, because that’s a key question. They will be the one who need to be part of this whole ecosystem. So can these agencies also earn carbon credit from the rider’s behavior? And that’s what like Tesla is doing by selling electric car. They are earning more money from actually Tesla users.

 

Boyd Cohen [17:47]:

Those are some interesting, interconnected questions. So yeah, the first question around MaaS and WheelCoin is, as you said, we’re embracing the pyramid, but we’re not ending on Number Four, we’re starting on Number Four. So we’re starting on the incentives. Our ambition is to grow a global user base in markets where we already have mobility supply because we still use our mobility network and deploy it with our enterprise customers. We have customers in the US and Europe and, and a few more coming. And when we get this big demand, we call them demand partners. So like an airline, a rail operator becomes a demand partner for the mobility network. So they want mobility services so that their passengers can travel door to door. So when we get a big client like that, so for example, in the US, we have Brightline trains in UK.

Boyd Cohen [18:43]:

We have London, North-Eastern rail. These are really big move millions of people that allows us to actually have the incentive. We need to encourage the mobility supply to connect to the Iomob network. So the scooter companies, the taxi companies, we have companies like bolt and Tier and Voi and Via from New York and many other big companies have connected to our platforms specifically because we have these big partners. That move millions of people and they want to optimize their fleet utility and connect them to that. So that’s working. So when we have those services already in the network, let’s say London, because we’re deploying with London, Northeastern rail on October 1st, roughly October 1st. So we have several services already integrated into the platform there. Well, we also have many people using WheelCoin that are going to be using WheelCoin when it goes live in a few days that are living in London or the UK.

Boyd Cohen [19:37]:

Well, as we get enough users in WheelCoin to justify it, we can start to insert the mobility network that we’ve built in the network inside the WheelCoin. So what we’ll be doing is like as per region basis deploying the mobility network when it makes sense whether if we already have the network or like, you know, surprising to me the highest number of people who signed up for the WheelCoin, take a guess what city they’re from. Let’s see, you know, the world so well in mobility patterns, take a guess. Do you want any hints?

Jaspal Singh [20:15]:

Is it from Asia?

Boyd Cohen [20:16]:

Yes.

Jaspal Singh [20:18]:

Is it from India? I mean, there are a lot of people

Boyd Cohen [20:23]:

No, India is our third high as a country. It’s I think our third highest sign third highest. So Tokyo, you’re not far on that.

 

Jaspal Singh [20:28]:

Okay. So probably Singapore or Malaysia, something like that. Tokyo,

Boyd Cohen [20:32]:

Tokyo

Jaspal Singh [20:33]:

Ah,

Boyd Cohen [20:34]:

Interesting, right. Or the very high volume of public transit use. So there’ll be a lot of earning, a lot of earning coming from Tokyo. So, you know, let’s say we don’t have an enterprise client in Japan. And so we haven’t actually deployed the mobility network there, but what if we get 50,000 – 100,000 people in and around Tokyo using WheelCoin, that’s a big enough demand driver to go knock on the doors of the EV car sharing fleets and the taxi fleets and the scooter companies say, Hey, we’ve got all these really green consumers who get rewarded for using your own services anyway. How about you connect your service? And what if we offer, will you be willing to take the WheelCoin as a partial discount from users to sort of support their choice to go green with you?

Boyd Cohen [21:27]:

I will say on that note, we just had our first partner join. It’s a e-bike sharing subscription service. So you, instead of buying like you know, multi-thousand Euro electric bike, you can pay for a monthly subscription to it. And they were the first company we reached out to say, Hey, would you be interested in accepting wheel coin as a discount for our community? And it was a yes, within like 80 seconds. And then it was just question of reaching agreement on which we have now on exactly how much discount will be offered and how many WheelCoins did they have to present to actually get that discount. So I think it’s already sort of being validated with the community and the market that this makes so much sense to bring that green community of mobility users together with mobility providers, which goes to your next question around the most arguably the most important mobility provider are the transit agencies and transit operators.

Boyd Cohen [22:27]:

And what’s their role in all of this. And I don’t, I mean to say, I don’t know is kind of saying, I haven’t thought about it all and that’s not true, but we haven’t spoken to any yet. Partially because you know, better than I do with all the work you’ve been doing the last decade or two it’s slow going to try to talk to a transit agency to consider embracing a blockchain-based WheelCoin loyalty program that has NFTs and, you know, try putting my hat on and going to a Toronto Transit Agency or whoever and pitch it to them. And you know, it’s going to take you six months to get somebody to even like, well, maybe not you, because you probably know them all and they’ll pick up the phone right away. But if I do and they don’t know me, then yeah, it’s going to be, we don’t have patience for that.

Boyd Cohen [23:17]:

I mean, our enterprise business is slow, right? Like, you know, you get to a rail customer to agree, to use our technology and then to deploy it, it’s slow. And that’s one of the reasons we came up with WheelCoin is we, the world can’t wait this long. We got to just start making change happen, especially around climate change and inclusive mobility, which is really important too. so WheelCoin is really like about getting out, moving fast, being agile. And you know, once we get enough users in different communities, it’ll be easier to have conversations with transit agencies. And one thing on that I think is fascinating and this goes to something you and I were talking about offline that I’ve discovered surprisingly to me that there are no existing community groups, worldwide of people who care about this stuff as a collective.

Boyd Cohen [24:11]:

We know billions of people around the world care about transit and care about green mobility and care about climate change. It’s not enough people care about it. Like most of the world cares about it. The problem is there’s no way to reach that audience and we’re hoping WheelCoin can be part of it. And one of the reasons I bring that up right now is to a point you made off-air around, you know, part of the reason that probably doesn’t exist is how many aspects of transport are very local in nature. And you bring up transit agencies and how things are you know if a bus is the schedule’s off or whatever, that’s not something somebody in Tokyo needs to know about if it’s in Toronto, some of our community, and this was really interesting to me.

Boyd Cohen [24:58]:

So the way our algorithms work, yeah. We create a standard like rough estimate emissions per kilogram for different modes of mobility. So bike walk, train, public transit. And it’s not realistic, especially if you’re being agile to try to customize this all around the world for every use case. Right. So we had some of our users say, well, how do you know, like if I’m in Mumbai or I’m in, I don’t know, and career Teva, Brazil, how do you know how many emissions like our transit system has? And are you counting for that? And I said to begin with though, we’re being agile, we’re launching, we’re using a, like a global standard for public transit emissions for fleets. But some of our communities said, you know, as this grows, we’d like this to be more optimized so that, you know, wheel coin reflects the actual emissions of a transit fleet in different cities around the world.

Boyd Cohen [25:52]:

And so, if you live in a city, that’s got a low performing fleet, then you’re going to reduce, receive fewer WheelCoins for your journey. And you know, what I thought about that inspired me is like the WheelCoin community incur in Curitiba, well, that’s a bad example because they’re very green there, but in another city where they’re not super green with their mobility in their fleet, the community could start to pressure the transit agencies to ask them to modernize their fleet because they’re contaminating the city and their emissions are not like, you know, you could have a ranking of the emissions of the transit fleet to Latin American. You know, why is our city 94th? Why aren’t we in the top 10? You know? And what would it take to get there? And you get like public interest in driving that because the people want to earn more WheelCoin.

Boyd Cohen [26:43]:

Yeah. And they they’re competitive. Like we’re going to have leader boards. Right. And so you could be like a leader in, I don’t know, let’s say Santiago, Chile, and you had the greenest mobility pattern for the month of May. And you want to see, how does your mobility patterns compare to the best of the Latin American continent? So you have the best leaderboard in Columbia and Chile and Brazil. And the guy from Santiago says, why did this lady in Curitiba get so many more WheelCoins for using public transit? She actually used less public transit than I did. Oh, the Curitiba fleet emissions are like one third, the fleet emissions of Santiago. And that’s what, we need to organize and get our transit agency to modernize. You know, you never know where this could go. That’s very ambitious. But I would like to believe that collectively the community could collaborate on things like this in the future.

Jaspal Singh [27:40]:

I mean, it will be very interesting dataset as well. Like you mentioned some of the city they have there, electric fleet or electric buses, some of the city are using Euro6 or Euro5. And some of the cities are still at Euro2. And so basically you can create kind of a global heat map and showing even if it’s public transport, but it’s not that green, it should be.

Boyd Cohen [28:02]:

Exactly

Jaspal Singh [28:03]:

So it can create some kind of advocacy tool for these user group to push and ask the CO₂ chain. And I also love your strategy because I work with Uber. So Uber followed the strategy. They didn’t knock at the door of policymaker or licensing authority to start with because they know it’s, it was hard task too, to do slow yeah. Too slow. So what they did, they build the user base and they had a lot of user base and then their user became their advocate. So this is a strategy, the same strategy follow world over. In Dubai, they launch, and they didn’t go to RTA or any other transport authority. They just start in Dubai, they have a user base. Then they got like millions of user, not millions, like hundreds of thousands of user. And then RTA said like, okay, we cannot ban them because people are using it.

Boyd Cohen [28:54]:

Maybe people want it.

Jaspal Singh [28:54]:

Exactly. So I love your strategy of follow that footprint of you know, not going to transit agencies in first step, because it’ll be hard. But once you have a strong user base, which are using those system and network and they became ambassador of Bitcoin and they can go to the transited thought and say, Hey, we are using this. Why don’t you reward us? Or why don’t you become connected systems? So you can also claim some money out of it, or we can also claim. So love your staff. And, and I see a lot of similarity with Uber. What are you doing now?

You mentioned during this Move2Earn app thing or display to one app thing, the biggest challenge is that these app keep collecting data silently. When user walks, we will go from one point to another. So the app will keep collecting the data about their journey, about their pattern, what time they’re leaving, what time they’re going. This also raised some question in people’s mind about the data privacy, because people are concerned about the data privacy, especially these days, when there is a lot of discussion on this data privacy. How do you address this data privacy issue with the coin?

Boyd Cohen [30:03]:

Yeah, that’s important. I mean, first of all, the users, when they onboard themselves to the app, they have to authorize the app to use this data for the purpose of providing the rewards. This is true for all them move to earn apps, right? So all of them are doing this. They’re all gathering the data from their mobility patterns of the users in their case, they’re using the walking and the running in our case. We’re using more. I do agree with you that there’s a risk there and a concern there. I think you know, what’s interesting about our model is we don’t even have to know who the user is. They can set up a profile, it can be an anonymous, they can have an avatar. We don’t care. We don’t need to know who they are.

Boyd Cohen [30:48]:

And there isn’t necessarily even a financial transaction between them, at least in the beginning. And this is kind of important too, because some Move2Earn games, have a pay to play model where the only way you can actually use the service is to buy an NFT to start. And, and then it’s, depending on the quality of your NFTs affects how much you can earn. We believe you have to have a free to play model where to make it more inclusive. So anyone can join. There’s not that barrier around, I got to pay a hundred bucks or something for an NFTs. And so I’m bringing that up because we don’t have to have users data really. We just need to have they need to set up a wallet and not in the beginning, because we’re in a beta, so we’re not doing it in the beta, but after the beta they’ll need a wallet that allows us to the crypto wallet, right.

Boyd Cohen [31:42]:

That allows us to transfer NFTs and transfer a WheelCoin, which is a token to a wallet that they will have in the app that allows them to then sell the tokens or use them for other things. So the short story is we don’t have to have the user data that we don’t even have to know their name. We don’t have to know anything about where they live. And of course, in our case, it has nothing to do with our interest in what we’re doing with them. We’re trying to encourage greener mobility. We’re not trying to like to leverage their data for some other business model. We’re not trying to sell advertisements based on, you know, your travel patterns or something.

Jaspal Singh [32:20]:

That’s great. I love your honesty about this. Like because some of the founder will say like, oh, there is no data privacy thing and nothing to worry, but you are upfront and saying, okay, there are some concerns, but you are addressing those concerns. Like you don’t want to know the real identity of the users, which is you have to do in other cases because you have to have link your bank accounts and all those kinds of financial transactions. So, you’re safeguarding users. In fact, Google map, they keep track of my data. So every Sunday I go for grocery. So they tell me in advance like, you need to go grocery at this time. And there’ll be a traffic condition. Sometimes it’s good. But at the same time, you feel like, so they know more than me. Like what time I need to leave and what time I need to go. So thanks for, thanks for sharing that.

Boyd Cohen [33:07]:

Does Google remind you that you don’t have any more zucchini in your house or they don’t know that much about.

Jaspal Singh [33:14]:

Not yet, but I think that’s the second part when it’ll be connected with my fridge and then it’s coming, you know, like Amazon bought this cleaning robots. So one of the idea is that they want to collect a lot of data about people, housing and all those kind of a stuff. So there are a lot of concern. Now you are working in this with three and blockchain space for quite some time, and you must have noticed this big downfall in funding activity in all sectors, especially the Blockchain and Web3. And there is this funding, winter is coming. I would say you are on the right path because you raise your fund before these things started kicking, starting in and all. But my question is why you still bullish about blockchain and the three after this funding slowed down. And what is your message to the founder who are building this startup in this space? Should they wait for summertime, or should they pivot? What is your idea during this period now?

Boyd Cohen [34:20]:

Yeah, I mean, I think the whole world’s economy is a bit bearish right now, obviously post COVID supply chain issues, the war, you could go on and on about the reasons for it, but you know, the world is struggling and it’s true that funding, I wouldn’t really say it’s dried up in crypto. There’s a lot of large venture funds that in the last year closed round of funds of $500 million to $1 billion or more. They have what we call in the venture world, dried powder. They have money to potentially deploy. Now you do tend to find that venture funds in these kinds of economies tend to want to hold their funding for their portfolio company. These companies, they already have. So, they’d rather like help their own companies survive than invest in new ones. So that is a risk that they sort of shift more of their deployment into their existing portfolio.

Boyd Cohen [35:22]:

Definitely would not advise pivoting, I think, I mean, going to your question around blockchain, I’m extremely bullish on the future of blockchain. I think people who are paying very close attention to sort of evolution of software, I think even in our first podcast, I mentioned to you that, I’m one of, I don’t know, probably a million people but not that many who’s actually been directly involved in some way in three major disruptive sort of software related transformations of the past 15-20 years. So you had you know, the dot coms and I mentioned, I think in your podcast and dot.com, I got really excited about it, the end of the 90s. And I got my PhD in entrepreneurship at University of Colorado and my dissertation was on dot coms.

Boyd Cohen [36:12]:

And what influences are valuation fast forward? My third company I ever started was a company called Third Whale, out of Vancouver. And it was a green mobility app company. We were the first company in the world to build a Mobility apps for green consumers in 2009. And now blockchain. So you had web, mobile and blockchain. These are absolutely disruptive paradigms that have that. At least the first two transformed everything we know about how to live our lives practically and blockchain. I think blockchain will end up being more transformational in a lot of ways than the other two. It’s kind of hard to do it that way because like blockchain is like a new version of the internet as well. Right? So it’s like it’s building on web and mobile innovation to actually transform those industries and basically every industry and that’s for me. Why I think it’s maybe even some ways bigger in the sense, for example, into mobile, like blockchain goes into mobile and WheelCoin is mobile.

Boyd Cohen [37:20]:

You know, lots of mobile apps are using Web3 technologies. Fair enough. But like blockchain is transforming everything – supply chains, banking, climate change and tracking of carbon offsets, decentralized finance, consumer experiences around social media. You know, artists musicians are using NFTs to as a way to basically take back power over the record labels. It’s a decentralizing force that gives power to the people and helps solve human coordination problems at scale. And we’ve really never seen anything in the history of the world that could do what blockchain can do across every kind of aspect of like real estate, fractionalized real estate. I mean, you can’t really think of an industry that’s not affected by or won’t be affected by blockchain. So I’m very bullish on it. I would definitely not advocate founders’ pivot. I think blockchain is not just here to stay. It’s going to be the transform, the number one transformative technology or that we’ve seen in the last 10 or 15 years. So I would say like a lot of people like to say, this is in the bear market, it’s time to build so focus on building something you’re passionate about. And hopefully by the time you’re, you know, the market’s ready as well, and you’ll be able to monetize it or, or generate investment.

Jaspal Singh [39:00]:

I love your last line about like, this is a bear market. So take time to build and when it’s be bullish, then you can start selling it. It’s like in Europe during winter, you stay in house, you stay indoor and you build and then once it’s a summertime, you come out, and start selling your stuff. And exactly, I’m also equally bullish about blockchain and especially use in mobility because I see one of the sectors in mobility is bringing this trust and bringing this connection, which is important. Lots of people must have read that Google is came out as one of the biggest investors in blockchain technology in couple of years. Last month, Blackrock recently tied-up with Coinbase for providing services to institutional buyers. So there is acceptability of this whole ecosystem. And I agree with you is just focus on building the product, building something which is useful, not like a Boring Ape and that kind of stuff, but making, having some real use cases. So I love your answer.

Now, what one change have done over the last three months is you also launch your new podcast, which is Web3 on the Move. And I love the idea because you are doing what I was educating is how to bring blockchain and crypto in the mobility sector. Do you want to share a little more about your podcast and what topic you’re covering in that?

Boyd Cohen [40:25]:

Yeah, sure. Thanks for asking. And your listeners might find out even more soon because you’re going to be on the other side of the microphone. Pretty soon as well. So Web3 on the Move, I’ve been listening to podcasts mostly in blockchain for the past couple years. I don’t know if any you or your listeners are familiar with the concept of like, if you want to be an expert in anything, you have to spend 10,000 hours doing it as an expert. I’m not claiming to be an expert host of a podcast, because I’m definitely not, but I’m definitely an expert listener podcast. If you measure expertise by how many hours you listen, because I literally listen to 10 hours or more a week of blockchain podcasts. So, I listen on my commute. My commute one way is almost an hour.

Boyd Cohen [41:11]:

My bike to my train, to my walk to the office is an hour. So I do that both ways when I walk to launch, if I’m not going with colleagues when I walk my dog, I mountain bike every weekend on Saturday and Sunday, I used to listen to music a couple years ago. I switched entirely to blockchain. My wife thinks I’m insane. She’s like, even when you’re on your bike, you’re trying to learn like, can’t you just like shut off your brain for like a minute and just like enjoy the outdoors and listen to music. But so I’ve been listening to blockchain podcasts for a long time. And I learned so much every day on the podcast I listened to, but I never heard one that was focused on what I wanted somebody to focus on.

Boyd Cohen [41:56]:

And I kept feeling there was a gap in the market that somebody had to fill because I wanted to hear more conversations about these topics. So no one did it, so I was going to do it. So Web3 on the Move has three interlocking topics – Blockchain, Mobility and Move2Earn. So the use of blockchain for mobility and getting people outside and moving. And the third one is Blockchain and Climate Change. Because for me, they’re all interrelated, and they all relate to everything that I’ve been working on in blockchain for many years. And those three topics independently don’t have a lot of coverage – Blockchain mobility. I don’t think there is a podcast except for mine that I’m aware of move to earn. There’s no podcast about move to earn, but there are podcasts from specific projects and move to earn yeah.

Boyd Cohen [42:48]:

That are focused on their project. Like STEPN has a community podcast. I listened to a lot that is like people from the community, talking about the latest in the step and move to earn game and all the rest. But there isn’t one that like talks more broadly about the industry, looks at the different projects and all the rest and then blockchain and climate change. That’s the one that closest, there’s one called GreenPill that I like a lot. Okay. That is an actually under the BanklessNetwork umbrella. And it’s the host is from Gitcoin, he’s the founder of Gitcoin – Kevin Owocki. And he does talk a lot about, well, the theme of the podcast is regenerative crypto economics. So how can token economics be applied to create regenerative societies, regenerative economies, and regenerative planet. So he does have a lot of climate related topics in there.

Boyd Cohen [43:46]:

There’s also a Crypto Altruism Podcast. I think they’re out of Canada as well. And they also have a focus on like crypto for good, which has some overlap in those things. So, those are the three topics we’re covering. I have this thing that I’m trying it’s an experiment really. Once, many years ago I was a speaker of TEDx and they, you know, they have this policy of you can’t speak more than 18 minutes. Yeah. Because that’s like the concentration time of people, I don’t know. They have science behind why they say 18 minutes is the maximum you can speak on stage. So I’m trying to hold myself to 18 minutes when I’m doing my own podcast without interviews. So I do a blend of interviewing and then my own content. I’ve done two shows on my own without interviews and I haven’t hit the 18 minutes unfortunately, but both of them are around 22 minutes. So that’s, you know, it’s not too far off. I was getting close. And then my when I interview someone, my goal is to not go beyond 36 minutes. So the idea is 18 + 18 combined. The two of us can spend 36 minutes to chat. So that’s basically the theme of the podcast and the frequency is roughly once a week, and you will be the next guest on the podcast.

Jaspal Singh [45:04]:

Thank you. It’s my pleasure. And you know, honor for me to be joining this because the concept like you mentioned, and that’s what I tell in transit space is how to create more awareness about blockchain. And one of the ideas I loved last time you mentioned, I remember very clearly is to learn and educate people to know more about it, not to sell, not to tell them that they should do this or to that but tell them like how they can learn more about this concept. How can they see the use cases and potential and benefit of it. And that’s what I did so far now is not to tell people like this is the only solution but encourage them to learn. So, I think your podcast will definitely help and would love to promote to, to mobility innovation community and, and other places.

Jaspal Singh [45:51]:

Because I think that’s the first step they should take is learn about this because blockchain is a big thing, a lot of people think it’s just all about crypto and all, but they forget the real technology, the underlying technology, which lies behind it.

Thank you, Boyd and I would love to share my experience now being on other side.

Now you remember, we had this Rapid-Fire question round and we already did with it, so I don’t want to repeat the same thing, but then I thought you have so much of experience and knowledge. Why don’t we use this time to have a new set of question for you? So, you’ll be again, the first guest who will be addressing these kind of question on this.

Boyd Cohen [46:32]:

Also, I had no time to prepare for this exam. That’s not fair.

Jaspal Singh [46:37]:

But that’s the fun of it. So again, I’ll ask five questions and you just need to answer them quickly. Whenever you’re ready, I’ll just then kick off.

Boyd Cohen [46:44]:

Let’s go.

Jaspal Singh [46:46]:

Okay. So my first question is what keep you awake at the night?

Boyd Cohen [46:52]:

Work constantly, blockchain, WheelCoin. I am part of what I mentioned before my wife saying that my brain never turns off. Unfortunately, when I’m sleeping, I’m still processing ideas and thoughts from the day and what I want to do the next day. It’s a curse. I think, because it does affect my sleep, but I do love what I do.

Jaspal Singh [47:15]:

But if you do what you love to do, I think it’s kind of become like a part of your life. So it’s part of your soul. You can never leave it away. Now my second question is what is the best advice you ever got either a personal or professional?

Boyd Cohen [47:33]:

Hmm. I don’t even remember who gave me this advice the very first time, but it was definitely find something you love and dedicate your life to that. And don’t get caught up in what career might make you more money or whatever else find what you’re most passionate about and dedicate to that. And I try to share that with especially my older son, he’s 18 now. And you know, he always stresses about, he doesn’t know what he wants to do his next 10 years of his life. I’m like, nobody knows what they want to do for the next 10 years. Don’t worry. You’re not alone but what I’ve conveyed with him and this is part of that same logic. And I don’t remember where I learned this from, but like having a five-year north star. So where would I like to be five years from now?

Boyd Cohen [48:29]:

Do I think I want to be five years from now. It’s okay if I deviate from that, but if I don’t have a North Star, I’m just wandering and I’m trying to look at the star to figure out where I am. But if I think if I can try to find a way a place, I think I want to be in five years, then I have a direction and I can move in that direction. And if I change along those five years, so what I create a new five-year North Star. And I’m quite sure that if I dedicated myself for those 2-3 years of my life to a North Star, that’s no longer my north star. I’m sure that was productive use of my time. That will benefit me in my new North Star. So don’t get hung up on the long term, but don’t focus on tomorrow only you got to have like a midterm horizon you’re striving for and dedicate to be the best that you can be at that thing that you want to be in five years and be open to pivoting and moving your trajectory of your North Star.

Boyd Cohen [49:26]:

If some new information comes in

Jaspal Singh [49:29]:

Well, that’s a great advice. In fact, I follow that is like, you never know, where will you be 10 year later? And if I look back when I was in 2010, I never thought I’d be here in 10-year time. So, it’s hard to project the future. What you can do is have a bigger goal and just go for it.

Boyd Cohen [49:50]:

Exactly. Now.

Jaspal Singh [49:51]:

Third question is what one thing do you wish you should have learned early? I know you’re not that old, but still.

Boyd Cohen [50:01]:

Oh yes I am. I’m plenty old. What would I have liked to have learned earlier in life? And it took me a while to learn it? Well that’s a tricky one. Because I’m thinking about a lot of things I’ve learned, but I’m trying to think about like, if it was one thing, I’ve learned that I wish I would’ve known earlier.

Jaspal Singh [50:31]:

Yeah.

Boyd Cohen [50:32]:

For some reason I’m going to something around it kind of it’s like, it’s almost like calling me a hypocrite by saying this, but it’s like, I was an academic off and on for 20 years and it took me, so I got my PhD in entrepreneurship in 2001 and it wasn’t until I was like, I was teaching entrepreneurship at business schools in Spain and Canada and other places, Costa Rica, and then like four years into it. And I’m like, you know what, what’s weird. I’ve never been an entrepreneur. And it’s weird that I’m teaching people to be an entrepreneur based on my PhD, which is like anybody who’s done a PhD knows you never learn anything practical in a PhD. Like you’re not learning how to be an entrepreneur in a, in a PhD program. That’s just not happening. So I guess it’s kind of similar to answering your question, but like I kind of wish I would’ve, would’ve tried that earlier.

Boyd Cohen [51:33]:

It took me like four years in to figure out that, you know what, I should have been an entrepreneur to be teaching it. And I always say like, I feel really bad for my students I had in the first three or four years of my journey after my program, because I didn’t know what I was talking about and I’m teaching them how to start a company. So I guess, you know, tied to that, I wish maybe I would’ve like given into my entrepreneurial bug eat faster, and not given up, like I’ve had times when I’ve had an exit or a company we had to close it down. And then I like retreated from entrepreneurship for a couple years because it’s like, oh, it’s too hard. But now in retrospect I think I, I would wish I would’ve just kept going with my entrepreneurial tendencies because that’s what I most enjoy.

Jaspal Singh [52:18]:

I actually love your answer because I was thinking like by doing a PhD in entrepreneurship, you will learn that much, but just by launching something or being an entrepreneur, you will kind of do the PhD. So it’s actually a reverse process. So launch something and then you’ll be completing your PhD.

Boyd Cohen [52:39]:

It is so funny you say that because I’ve said that many times that I feel like I got a second PhD in entrepreneurship. Once I started my own companies, because then I actually learned what it really was to be an entrepreneur. It was nothing that I thought it was so yeah. So you’re totally right about that. You read my mind.

Jaspal Singh [52:57]:

Yeah. See we are aligned. So my next question, which is also something similar to entrepreneurship and what advice would you give to young entrepreneur and how best to start?

Boyd Cohen [53:10]:

Hmm. I think the first thing I would say is just start don’t overthink it. Embrace sort of agile, embrace, lean startup, don’t overthink and over plan things. Be prepared to make a lot of mistakes. Be open minded, but also have a conviction. Like if you have conviction and you’re pretty much know there’s an opportunity here and you’re on the right track. Don’t give in so easily to people who are just going to try to cut you down and convince you that it won’t ever work because that, you know, I used to love using this example, I think was Fred Smith, the guy who founded FedEx, he supposedly this is the rumor that he got, like “C” on his business plan. He submitted for FedEx in his I think it was at Yale for his MBA or something like that.

Boyd Cohen [53:59]:

Like 40 years ago, whenever it was, oh it was something the quote from the professor was something like this idea will never work at scale or something like that. So my point is even smart. People will have bad advice, but you also need to look for people who are willing to challenge you and be open to constructive criticism. And when people you trust are listening and not trying to cut you down, but saying, you know what, there’s a flaw in your business model. There’s a flaw in your strategy. You should probably listen.

Jaspal Singh [54:34]:

Yeah I agree with you. And in fact, I was reading day before yesterday the guy who founded the RING, which was acquired by Google for $1 billion, he actually pitched his idea at Shark Tank in the US. And that time his company name was something like Door Knob or something. And he was asking for $700,000 for 10% equity and they rejected his idea. They said like, oh, it’s crazy who want to put camera on their doorknob? Nobody would like to do that. And later he renamed it as RING and sold it to Google for $1 billion. So sometime the smartest people can’t even think how the world is going to change. So you need to be bit lucky totally to find out.

Now, my last question is, if you, and probably your wife will be happy to, to know the answer of this question is if you could clone yourself, what would you like your clone to do?

Boyd Cohen [55:28]:

Wow.

Jaspal Singh [55:29]:

I don’t think you want them to do the blockchain again.

Boyd Cohen [55:33]:

What could I have, could I clone myself so that they could listen to 24 hours a day podcast? So then they could then insert all the knowledge into my head after they finish listening? Well, honestly I think if I could clone myself and, and appreciate the experience of both people simultaneously, I would have one person working 24 hours to build WheelCoin, and I am all, and the other person spending 24 hours with quality time with my family and my kids and my mountain bike. That’s probably what I would do.

Jaspal Singh [56:04]:

I wish we can do that, but good to see that for you, the work and the family are equally important, and you want to do that. So thank you so much, Boyd really always have fun to chat with you and learn more about it and wish should launch global community, because I see a lot of attention and your vision of creating this global community of global advocate for public transport and green mobility. So thank you so much and I wish you good luck.