I moved to Taiwan with Jack about three years ago. We started this company, Kronos. We do machine learning. We do quantitative research. We watch markets. We do a lot of work in cryptocurrency.

Part of the work that we’ve been doing with Tyler is trying to understand what we can do with Taiwan because we’re here, we’re part of Taiwan. We want to understand what we can do with Taiwan.

We joined the Talent Circulation Alliance. He mentioned that it would be great to talk to you, learn more about what you do and see you, what things that we can together, how we can work together and tell you more about our company. That’s the reason that we’re here.

What’s your activity in the Talent Circulation Alliance?

We just started working with Tyler recently. We’ve done some interviews with Tyler mostly about talking, telling him about some of how we got started. Jack and I, we moved here from the US. It was fairly rocky for us when we started because we didn’t know too much about how to create a company here, how to hire people here.

Hank is the CTO of our company. He is educated in the United States, but he grew up at…

Born and raised in Taiwan.

Born and raised in Taiwan. He joined us about a year and a half ago. He’s been really helpful in helping us grow our company and manage our team because he understands the US culture, as well as the Taiwanese work culture. These are some of the things that Jack and I were struggling with when we started the company.

A lot of the work that we’ve been doing with Tyler is explaining to him from our perspective some of the difficulties that we’ve had as employers and as innovators here in Taiwan, and trying to understand what we can get together working with people in government, as well as others in the private sector, to try to improve things here.

That’s awesome.

For example, one of the difficulties that we’ve had in terms of hiring is that we come from a very US centric type of this management culture, where the style of work is one in which there’s more of a teamwork style of culture. Where it’s more widely accepted for employees, as well as management, to challenge each other more often.

A little bit more confrontational.

Yeah, more confrontational. It’s not seen as necessarily a…

A bad thing.

…a negative type of thing. It’s just seen as a normal type of thing.

We do that all the time here.

This is something that was very foreign for a lot of our employees, and was something that was very difficult for us, too. To get them to open up and ask questions. I know that this is something that you’ve spoken about. About trying to create change, especially within the K 12 education system here in Taiwan.

That’s right.

I have two children here in Taiwan, and they’re in the local school systems as well.

Public schools? That’s awesome.

This is something that’s been difficult for them too, because they started off going to school in the US, and then now they’re in Taiwan. They see the change in the school system firsthand.

One of the things that we’ve been trying to grapple with is, what we can do as employers to decrypt this type of change as well. These are some of the things that we deal with, and that we talked to Tyler about.

That’s awesome. Anything from the two of you?

Also, what we do is abstract. These guys come from quantitative trading backgrounds, high frequency. We’re applying all these novel approaches to cryptocurrency so that when we recruit here or do branding here, it’s hard for people to understand what we actually do. That’s another avenue that you’re going down with Tyler, right?

Do you think it’s a mostly communication issue, or a culture issue in terms of the legibility of your work?

I think it’s both.

It’s both.

Yeah, I don’t know. What do you think?

Legitimacy. Trust.

Negative association with the word cryptocurrency. [laughs]

For startups. Usually, Taiwanese culture, at least on the parent generation is more conservative. We’ve had issues when we’re hiring. Then the parents step in and say, “Oh, this is a startup, don’t go there. It’s very risky.”

“Wait until it’s five years old.”

That is a very common advice.

Five years?

It is advice for five years, is no longer a start up.

I see. Two more years to go.

The reputation for us is starting to shift because we’re in year three. The past couple of years, it would be common for a lot of the other startups, they are facing the same issues.

Definitely. What about the communication side? Are your flagship products easily conveyable to policymakers or to investors who have more experience?

More and more so.

More and more so?

We have two separate companies now.

Is this Wootrade?

Wootrade is just about democratizing the access to financial products.

That’s easy to explain.

It’s really easy. You get on the platform, you can do anything you like. It’s free to trade. Kronos is harder to explain. It’s like, how are you making the money? Are you predicting the direction? Are you doing arbitrage? It’s a mix of a lot of things. Where the signals come from? What are alphas? It’s so hard to explain.

If you can’t explain that well, then sometimes people think well, maybe it’s a fraudulent company. Maybe it’s a scam. It’s difficult at times.

There’s not a lot of companies here in Taiwan that do this type of work both in terms of cryptocurrency as well as on the quantitative research side. A lot of times when we interview candidates, when we approach people at job fairs, or schools, there’s a lot of apprehension about this type of work because of that.

Some of the work that I’ve been doing with Tyler as well, is to try to understand how can we educate young people about different career paths. Part of it also is that a lot of times, young people, they gravitate to what they see is very common amongst their peers. They find it difficult to step outside the boundaries of what their friends do.

Part of the challenge that we have is to try to show them about alternate career paths, and especially with new industries that can be very difficult.

What about community building? I’m also running this startup ish thing called the RadicalxChange. It was originally Puttering, Glenn and friends. One of the things we do is to make sure that there’s local chapters and meet ups and things like that, because those ideas were radical.

If you connect it to like 100 different cities, then people feel that there’s a sense of tribe, and on their sense of belonging, they may be the only one in the municipality to hear about RadicalxChange. If they log in online, under immersive environment, there’s hundreds of different cities going on. Are you connected to that sort of communities?

Right now we’re not. We’ve spent some time going to some of the schools here, doing more education, more outreach. That’s something that we do want to do more of. Sometimes we’re not really sure what is the right avenue aside from going to the schools. Happy to learn more if you have any suggestions.

The more active communities in Taiwan, they share this hashtag called GZero or gov0, which is not a organization per se. It’s more a shared hashtag of people who see a government service usual additional service something.go.tw. They think that “Hey, I can do it better.” Then just register something that is gzero.tw.

Changing an O into a zero gets you into the shadow government, I guess, and deliver the service in a more open source and better way that always was the open source and creative commons copyrights, civic ads.

When the public sector says, “Hey, it’s a really good idea,” whether it’s a bunch of visualization or air quality visualization or a distributed ledger, to make sure that multiple writers to those air quality measurement devices can cross correlate with one another into one.

They can be merged back into the government quite easily without going through procurement of things like that because it’s open source to begin with.

It’s a pretty sizeable community. There’s at any time thousands of people and it’s responsible for a lot of counter COVID measurements last year. That’s one of the communities that I’m more directly connected to.

OK. We should take a look and see how we can get involved. In terms of blockchain and cryptocurrency, what’s your view for globally in Taiwan?

In Taiwan, one of the places where people can say, even though there may be some negative associations with scams and things like that, but people can say very easily and plainly that I’m working on cryptocurrency. It’s a good thing that in Taiwan there is a sector around this already.

It’s interesting how many Taiwanese startups do standardize and even though the gas price may be high at times, it seems like something a de facto standard for each thing, which I don’t have a good explanation. It’s purely anecdotal.

I also think that we do have a lot of people here who care about blockchain governance spot, not necessarily the cryptocurrency application, which may be the pilot application, but in Taiwan, we have a pretty strong fiat anyway.

People think about using it to reduce the auditing costs like for environmental measurement devices is a cool way to just get legitimacy fast or in a cross country like foreign labor and migrant workers, things like that, to make sure that a contract is on both sides and things like that. It’s more like an accountability and legitimacy building device.

Most of the applications have seen on the Power Blockchain Alliance on the TBA, which is supported by the Taipei Computer Association and the National Development Council but I’m not sure whether you’re active in the TBA or…OK.

We have been just heads down building in front of us and then immediately Wootrade .

OK.

I don’t know if our vision, though, how to realize our vision in the context of Taiwan, Fiat banking controls and the current regulations because we’re heading down this DeFi and open financial market path. As far as we can tell, the Taiwan regulatory system around financial transactions and investment products are very strict and old school.

The fintech sandboxes in particular because it’s heavy government supervised. The cases that go into the sandbox, only when they deliver something that no existing traditional services could deliver and for these other complementary products and services, the sandbox is useful.

If the old system can do it just slower or more costly, like optimization based ideas don’t tend to go through the sandbox, that smoothly is a fact.

What’s your advice for cryptocurrency companies or companies like ours, in terms of trying to advance cryptocurrency awareness and legitimacy, particularly within Taiwan?

Some real experiences for come on people, especially legislators and their assistants.

That’s the reason for assistance.

…and for them to have a first hand experience on some aspect of that. That helps.

What’s the best way to do that?

I remember in my office, which is not here, this is my cabinet office, but I have a real office…

…and a Social Innovation Lab. We run for a couple of years mobility, hackathons with self driving vehicles that are of tricycles, very slow, looks completely harmless, very cute and inviting people to hack it in the sense of adapting it into everyday needs.

After the local city councilors and legislators and things like that see that they can easily adapt these designs into something looks completely harmless, it’s free mighty open source hardware and all that, they become much more willing to take a larger step in their self driving vehicle sandbox, which is more permissive than that of the tech sandbox, which was the previous sandbox act.

Exposure to the first hand experience helps in the sense that if the legislators think that this thing is going to cause trouble, at least they know about such trouble. Otherwise, if they don’t have the first hand experience, it’s boundless and then if you have boundless risk, then you don’t do anything right.

What are the different avenues to have these legislators try out our services or products first hand?

There’s plenty of commissions, councils in the parliament. There is the Digital Economy group. There’s the Digital Governance group. There’s many groups in the legislation by the MPs that are more willing to try out these new things. I was such as stick out there activities.

Got it. Cool.

Just give them something easy and fun to use.

Not many exist in crypto that are easy and fun.

Crypto kitten?

That’s true.

NFTs.

NFTs, I guess.

NFTs are easily explained much more easily with kitties than, say, artwork. [laughs] With all the respect.

Interesting, is there anything you think a company like ours or a group like ours could help with?

I mostly think about the legitimacy of the concepts involved in cryptocurrency I’ve taken in the past couple of years to say Dotty’s distributed ledgers or just ledgers because it’s the most neutral, the term with the least negative or positive connotations.

In Taiwan. If I say, “分散式帳本” nobody raises eyebrow, but if I say, “區塊鏈” [laughs] it means something else entirely. I would think it’s both a communication issue and the legitimacy issue.

There’s very little we can do directly on the legitimacy issue because that’s just a natural progression of how these emerging technologies that we can improve on the communication side by making sure that we deliver fair and science based responses due to things like that.

I just watched the news yesterday, and the news was saying that Bitcoin now burns through electricity, like the mid sized country, and things like that. [laughs] If I replied to the journalist asking me that, saying things about if they’re in 2.0, and things like that. Then, they not necessarily all get it.

Yes.

If there’s some communication material that can say, “It is just a phase. It will pass.” It’s not necessarily a bad thing, because electricity generators are in a place that’s far off the population centers. It delivers positive value, which may be true to a point. [laughs]

Anyway, [laughs] there are communication strategies that can make people think twice before blindly criticizing the crypto space in general. That’s something we can all help because we’re all stakeholders here.

It’s more on education side.

That’s right.

As a company, we’ve tried to be a lot more transparent and open than other companies, especially on the trading side, something that we want to do. Even when we started the company, a lot of companies that do trading activities tend to be very close and tend to be regarded but we’ve tried to be more open about it.

This is actually caused us some difficulties as well because it can be difficult to do, for instance, a lot of machine learning algorithms and work with a lot of proprietary technologies and also try to be open even within your company because there are competitors that will try to take your intellectual property.

I know that you’re a big proponent of openness and I saw on your Twitter, you even have a poem that talks about machine learning…

Collaborative learning.

…and collaborative learning. So what’s your…

…and singularity.

I’m actually curious about your thoughts about how that thinking plays into intellectual property and specifically trade secrets and that type of those contexts.

When it comes to think about your Mandarin company name is literally a singularity.

Or unicorn clarity.

Surely intentional.

Yeah, my current work, it’s easier to go full open source. We don’t have essentially shareholders. We have co op members which vote every four years. [laughs] The organization is already at work. That’s what republic means when we don’t have too many words.

It is already a republic that’s governed by what we in the blockchain cause participatory governance or stakeholder base governance. It’s quite democratic anyway. The governance incentives align with my personal incentives to be maximally transparent and open.

We have no problem at all, to convince the, for example, Cabinet Office saying that our transcripts are going to be free of copyright even though that we could only publish by request, according to a Freedom of Information Act. We preemptively publish it before anyone asks it.

That’s more radical, but that’s considered under generally right pass for the republic. We have no problem getting approval from the Cabinet Office. With that said, I do see dads for cutting edge research, the funding to get such research data in the first place, necessarily requires some “intellectual property,” especially on the trade secrets side.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I’m a big admirer of John Carmack, who releases the id Software’s Doom engine, Quake engine and things like that. Essentially, whenever he wrote out a new game, the game dealt with the previous one, two generations before it goes open source.

Which of course fosters learning, and which in the long term actually is helpful to id Software too, because it makes it much more easy for them to recruit people who are already versed in ecosystem and so on. I think the time lapse between the cutting edge research and eventually commodity, if you communicate it in a transparent enough manner, then it’s to the benefit of everyone.

It’s a good a point. We use some of these floating point functions.

Does that answer your question?

Yeah.

How did you decide to go this path that you’re on? I’m sure you have so many different options. What’s in your future?

In Taiwan, we’re looking at this post COVID. We’re not yet post, [laughs] but it feels like post COVID. We’re looking at a situation where most of the Silicon Valley or other startup Nexus and the switch to at least partially in some fully teleworking.

We’re seeing a record number of influx of people who are like you, who enjoy working on international issues, but choose to base in Taiwan due to, I don’t know, either the healthcare or the food or both.

These are our two main selling points. [laughs] In the future time is going to be much more transcultural. We used to have a pretty strict immigration law, even for it is entrepreneur visa or Gold Card that’s still far less transcultural than I would like. Starting last December, it’s all relaxed.

Nowadays, the Ministry of Science and Technology will sponsor you a Gold Card, even if you have never been to Taiwan if you have the potential to contribute to science and technology.

Obviously, potentially.

Everyone.

It’s now essentially, if you want to be in Taiwan, in 30 days, you will be in Taiwan. After half a year start to enjoy healthcare and family and everything. This is a truly different, not on immigration, but on the ideas of innovation.

The Buckminster Fuller, put it best, when you see an old system that’s full of problems, instead of fighting or struggling against it, build a new one that makes the old system obsolete.

For all the drawbacks, and conservativism of the Taiwanese angel, and investments and communication and academia and all that, it’s not necessarily a bad thing when we were specializing in hardware and have to interval cycles at the hardware industry.

For the Internet based services support works like the work you do, we’re now seeing many angel investors and so on that is based in Taiwan, but works toward a global audience. This is the new system, a new core, that’s much more accelerated and much more world or planetary facing.

That’s a really good direction to work towards. Instead of changing the old system, we’re saying their old system is excellent to produce semiconductors…

…that can power this other work. Let’s build a new startup ecosystem without interfering with the old one.

Does the government sponsor any default community for these Gold Card visa holder?

Yes. Actually, the gold card portal, goldcard.nat.gov.tw is built by the Gold Card holders. It’s actually a gov0 move, because the website and the digital service wasn’t good at all. They started this GitHub project called taiwangoldcard.com. That forced the original website, I also contributed.

Once they reached critical threshold, this team then gets hired as consultants, like mentors to the MDC. Now if you check out goldcard.nat.gov.tw, it’s brilliant. It doesn’t look like a government website anymore. They have so many gatherings into them.

That’s something we should get involved in.

Jack and I had a lot of difficulties when we first moved here to understand how do we stay in Taiwan.

How do we manage this process. Even now we’re trying to understand how do we get citizenship.

Yeah, you’re already the pre COVID pioneers.

We were here before, even since COVID we’ve actually hired a few people from the US, but then…let’s hear from the US and now they’re living here. They’re working for our company and they’re very happy to be living here.

We also hired many of the few students that were supposed to go study abroad and they deferred their admission at several schools and they’ve chosen to Stanford one and another at Carnegie Mellon…

Carnegie Mellon.

They just come to work at our company. In one case, he’s actually deferred multiple times and we’re hoping that we can actually keep.

[laughs]

…post COVID and so I guess it’s a function of what happens to US, in our culture, and how much we pay them.

That’s right.

We’re hopeful that this…in some ways, it’s good for Taiwan, definitely, companies like ours that we can reverse this brain drain.

It’s called circulation.

Speaking of circulation, in the Taiwan Tech Arena, the TTA is also setting up an office just for circulation, for not just Gold Card holders, just people who didn’t know how to find a school for their kids in Taiwan or they didn’t know how to navigate the bureaucracy of setting up new companies or things like that.

That’s also one of the places where, of course, we all can kind of test drive its guidelines and recommendations but the more eyes on it, the better, especially people who have gone through the more difficult path and so on.

In addition to NDC, which I already mentioned, to go to Portal and Blockchain Alliance, the Ministry of Science and Technology with specifically its TTA, may also be a good community to connect to word.

OK. All right, TTA.

TTA.

The Taiwan Tech Arena台灣科技新創基地.

OK.

It is a pretty heavenly place.

I see.

We should get more involved in the community.

There are some meet ups literally every day.

Really?

Yeah.

OK. Do you attend these meet ups sometimes?

Usually by prerecording.

I do visit and because in the Social Innovation Lab, which is my real office, they hold many activities stands as well because I went there every Wednesday and sometimes other days as well. So if I happen to get around and just have lunch together.

I see. OK.

What do you spend most of your time on these days?

It varies by the day of the week [laughs] like Monday is for team gathering, for working with the conference to my office and so on to make the weekly plan. Wednesday is office hours. It is working with social innovators who can pretty book my time. Thursday is meeting and board of Science and Technology meetings, the more formal stuff.

On Tuesday and Friday usually just tours around Taiwan or just go to the places where our young previous mentors or our local social innovators, they have a local issue that spans more than two industries is the interagency issue and sometimes they raise it by petition on the joint platform.

Sometimes by going to the Youth Advisory Council and anyone who reach 5,000 petitions, even if they are in the south of Taiwan. I go there and have a collaboration meeting with them and connecting to the central government through a conference, if necessary.

Such collaboration meetings can pinpoint a more constructive solution to emerging phenomena such as E Sports or things like that. It’s a multi stakeholder meeting.

Since my partnership with foreign service…

…in the past couple of years, 07:00 to 9:00 and 5:00 to 07:00 PM [laughs] has been reserved for great international connections. The first one was the East Coast of the South and North America and even in Europe and Africa.

I talk to about five times per day.

My gosh.

It’s like three jobs in one.

…there is the start of facing part of that. There’s the bureaucracy facing of the international face.

I wanted to ask you which one you like the most.

I like it when the three of them work together. I like the Presidential Hackathon that’s also something that many people in the blockchain space have contributed to.

It’s an annual hackathon and every champion team, five of them every year, gets this trophy from the president and is a micro projector an intern on projects that the president promising whatever they did in the past three months would become policy in the next 12.

It’s an executive power as hackathon prize. No money but a presidential promise.

That’s much better.

That’s right. All the winning teams need to be three sectors, so all those three sectors need to work together as a team. It’s also worth checking out because there’s many creative use… for example, the Zero knowledge Range groups checking the health conditions of people entering marathons without revealing their full medical records.

That’s a good Zero knowledge application is not necessarily blockchain, but it’s something that conveys a more positive outlook on crypto, like crypto derived technologies.

There is also Humomorphing encryption plays a large part. So there’s health and environment seems to be the focus in the past few presidential hackathons and that’s also something that can connect you as the private sector to the public service, to the social sector of the community much more because then you have to come up problems to work on.

Do you have any ideas on things that we can do as a company in particular? One of the things that we’ve been wanting to do is to do the things that are still more…all the things that we can do to help. Some of the resources that we have, for instance, are we have lots of data. We captured data from all the major crypto exchanges around the world.

At some point, I have some residents, youth and professors, and every so often I’d pitch them if they want to do some research on this, but other than doing research on other topics, they don’t know the right professors. It takes us a lot of time to pitch this and it’s not our core focus.

If you ever have ideas or if there are things that you think we can help you with, something that we’d be happy to think about as well.

OK, I’ll keep that in mind. You’ve my email, so…yeah.

Curious to know of, how do you see decentralized finance playing out, Audrey? Let’s say, decentralized finance in Taiwan gets really big. A lot of the Taiwanese wealth gets into this ecosystem where there’s no KYC, no AML, and the returns are much higher than the banking sector can offer here. How do you see this playing out?

First of all, it’s not like there’s no KYC. People will be motivated to do some sort of KYC, just not necessarily by the traditional institutions, like the reputations through peer to peer evaluations and things like that. These are like regtech, but by the community. That’s the idea of DeFi, not supervisory technologies. These are regulatory technologies developed by stakeholders interested in self regulation, and so on.

I’m all for it. I think it’s a great thing that we can experiment with different ways of governance and accountability giving, and things like that. Taiwan’s society…A lot going for it is that people are eager and willing to try new things, and share what they have learned about the properties of such new things with one another in ways that improves at least legibility, if not legitimacy.

On the other hand, the social sanction is also very high. If something is perceived to be not reliable, not secure, like violating privacy norms, or things like that, then you can also face a very large backlash.

The development of accountability giving and also legitimacy giving technologies is essential, if anything like DeFi is to capture a large share of…mindshare, not just the share of money from the Taiwanese society, you should go for it.

Go for it?

Yes. Am happy about it, because if you don’t give the legitimacy through regulatory technology developed by the community, then sooner or later you’ll face social sanction. Taiwan has that really robust social sector that takes care of this.

Interesting. Thank you. Anything you like to know about us, we’re pretty transparent.

Everything’s on the website.

It’s not much there.

Not transparent.

There’s many coverage by the tech press about you. I’ve read that but it’s quite clear, which is why I asked my first question, aside from the outre everything else the journalist seems to be struggling to…

…as these three paragraphs, but essentially reiterating what you have on your Web page?

We’ll figure out how to better communicate ourselves.

Do a better job.

…get a few press events for the Q&A and everything with them.

Because it’s not good enough.

It’s not a necessity at this moment because you’re, after all, not like facing everyday customers, that you’re not working off any port kiosk function.

…as some other crypto players are [laughs] but even if you’re not working in family [laughs] port function, it helps to have a clear portrayal for the social values, not necessarily environmental, but it’s becoming more and more important nowadays, at least the social value, the positive social values that you bring to the table.

That will make connecting to the TTA, FC or other stakeholder community is much easier.

Yes, it’s a very good point.

It’s a very good point. What’s clear to us the value, but we’re just about communicating that outwards. We’ll do a better job.

Yeah. All right.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

You think we can take quick photos with you?

Yeah. Maybe outside.

OK.