Mysten Labs Commercial Product Director Discusses Blockchain Technology's Business Services for Enterprises

Recently, we interviewed the Commercial Product Director of 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 at Mysten Labs. Generally speaking, commerce encompasses everything, it can be the foundation of most things, involving various business fields such as gaming, retail, loyalty, travel, ticketing, and so on.

This is my sixth year exploring the blockchain field, having ventured into it as early as 2017. I took about 14 months off to take care of my child and am now preparing to re-enter the workforce. I want to work on an interesting, complex, and challenging tech stack. Previously, I spent a long time working on a leadership team at an agency, so I feel very satisfied with this part of my career. I want to solve unsolved problems; I no longer want to rely on selling "let's build you a company homepage" or "let's create another retail checkout page" type of things. I feel that many issues have already been resolved online, and I want to tackle those unresolved issues. Through mutual friends, I was guided into the blockchain field, which has been an amazing journey that gradually introduced me to blockchain. Many aspects of it have also left me feeling overwhelmed.

My past work experience is on the user experience level. Therefore, I pay great attention to optimizing the "least common denominator," which means I need 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. Eventually, I began to believe in the problems that Blockchain could solve; some described Blockchain as a solution-seeking tool. But in reality, I think it can solve a very specific problem: that 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. Moreover, I am very interested in the privacy implications of some blockchain technologies. I have always had a strong interest in zero-knowledge and how to achieve online activities in a way that protects privacy more easily rather than sacrificing it. Zero-knowledge seems like a very intriguing proposal to me. Therefore, I fell in love with blockchain in 2017, but since the funding for the startup I was in was pulled back at that time, I went off 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 just as a standalone entity, but because it has the potential to improve the infrastructure of the internet as a whole. Some Blockchains actually have this potential, and they are suitable for the infrastructure of the internet. I think many other Blockchains are great, but they tend to be slower and more expensive, making them less suitable for enterprise use. And I believe that certain Blockchains have more potential to easily address all these challenges. I am really looking forward to validating my personal hypothesis about Blockchain and its potential impact on the entire internet.

Q2: For companies that have already developed well in the Web2 space, how do you guide them to think creatively about the problems present 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 into the top of my sales funnel, some of them will drop off, and some will engage more deeply; this portion will also experience drop-off, and the people at the bottom of the funnel will be those who ultimately convert, that is, the ones 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-off, 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 advertising is located. You are trying to attract as many people as possible to learn about your business, understand your products, and interact 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 enable more and more people to become entrepreneurs, empowering individuals 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 to maintain sales so that even if I perform excellently this week, I can continue to grow from that basis next week? These are all long-term challenges faced by small businesses. However, for various reasons, these challenges have become very daunting in the current internet environment.

First and foremost, the most important issue is privacy. Web2 and the internet have followed 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 encountered 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 the website. The problem is that the only way to achieve this was to collect and hold a large amount of very personal and private information. Thus began a trade of selling such information, and the advertising world became addicted to buying private data. This is why we established rules like GDPR and California's CCPA, designed to protect individuals from having their information shared or even collected without consent. Unfortunately, this also means that the quality of the data needed to build customer channels has declined. Therefore, previously I could obtain information like your gender, name, and home address with high confidence from dealers, but now I actually cannot purchase that information. So now I have to guess 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 places where you can look for new customers.

For example, on an e-commerce platform, a certain mobile phone brand changed their privacy rules, resulting in a significant decline in sales for merchants on the platform, as many of these merchants relied on collecting advertising data from a certain social platform via mobile phones. Although it was not intentional, this mobile phone brand essentially stifled the marketing channels at the top of the funnel for thousands of small businesses, as they are not large brands with million-dollar budgets. We are talking about your part-time job or the store around the corner, these small businesses that wish to find target users in their communities.

So the question is how blockchain contributes to this data ecosystem and how zero-knowledge technology can 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 place to use zero-knowledge to provide services for real-time internet queries.

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 sustainability? These are 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 established in the early 2000s with the online behavior, we now see that Blockchain can be used to reduce customer acquisition costs.

You can think of many blockchains providing zero-knowledge proofs. I believe some blockchains stand out because they can offer 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 satisfied? Why should I be loyal? With digital asset ownership, you can give me something that will always belong to me, it 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 more to customers; they 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 in: certain blockchains are an essential type in your technology stack. The era of cloud computing essentially introduced us to the idea of rapid scalability. Now, if you are a business starting tomorrow, or you are investing in your infrastructure, you will definitely include cloud computing, as not doing so would be foolish. I believe certain blockchains represent a blockchain era, and you can think of it in a similar way. Some things can only be achieved through such blockchains, or can only be guaranteed safe by using such blockchains, so attempting 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 in helping to describe the differences between Blockchain technology and standard foundational internet technologies. 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 simply striving to make the internet you already use better for everyone. A win-win should include everyone, including end users, and for now, saying Web2 and Web3 can help you describe this distinction. But at some point in the future, we will just be talking about the internet and generalized internet behaviors and activities, as well as what will become the norm.

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

Q5: What role do end users play in understanding the value of decentralized technology and Blockchain, as it relates to their own privacy? Do you expect them to demand more from businesses once those businesses are ready to provide benefits, allowing them to start reaping those benefits?

All of the above, let us start with the decentralized technology stack. The incredible thing about decentralized blockchain with this capability is that many people will participate to make it a reality. Many have invested a lot, not just the company that founded it, and not just investors, but all participants. This collective investment has been the foundation based on successful open-source technology for many years. However, there has always been the 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 needed to actively operate and run a well-functioning economy to stabilize the globally available blockchain network, such as verification nodes, staking, and node operations. Another group of users will be very focused on what it means for their activities.

I think there is another group of people who, to be honest, don't really care about Blockchain or anything else. They just want a very good loyalty program, and they want to have a secure experience online. They hope that the companies they trust will not use their information for bad purposes.