Eric Tang. He’s a computer programmer and co-founder of Live Peer, a decentralized video live streaming platform incentivized with the blockchain. He was introduced to the blockchain in 2014, and it’s pretty much everything that Eric thinks about now.

Famous Five:
Favorite Book? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things
What CEO do you follow? – Jerry Colonna
Favorite online tool? — MetaMask
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6.5
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Eric would tell himself to be more focused and worry less

Time Stamped Show Notes:
01:06 – Nathan introduces Eric to the show
02:07 – Wowza does video transcoding in a centralized way
02:30 – One of the big CDN players is Akamai
02:59 – There are two different cases for why people would use Live Peer over the other players in the industry
03:05 – Live Peer is in a decentralized world
03:11 – App developers nowadays are building decentralized applications
03:18 – The applications do not have a server
04:13 – They can duplicate their projects over the blockchain
04:17 – Live peer is the only solution for decentralized apps
05:20 – The government wouldn’t be able to figure out the IP of Live Peer
06:06 – The idea of blockchain is the participants are the stakeholders
06:16 – When you use Facebook live, you’re just a user and not actually benefiting from it
06:27 – In a decentralized world, if you’re a participant of Live Peer, you earn tokens which grow and become more valuable
07:07 – From an ecosystem standpoint, the companies building businesses around bitcoin and ethereum are early coin holders
07:28 – Joseph Lubin, Ethereum’s co-founder, is now hiring 400 people for ConsenSys to build applications around the ethereum ecosystem
07:55 – Ethereum provides a smart contract platform which bitcoin doesn’t provide
08:47 – How Ethereum and bitcoin are competitors and how they are not competing explained
09:17 – Anyone can build their own bitcoin blockchain but they won’t be always successful
10:18 – Eric thinks co-blockchains will also exist
10:50 – Eric thinks bitcoin is a great way to hold value as it has a great network now
11:11 – Ethereum has its own value and for a completely different purpose
11:29 – We use the ethereum platform to hold our tokens
11:50 – In the open blockchain world, anyone can be an investor
12:10 – There’s just more risk in investing earlier
12:44 – Can someone cheat the system by having fake miners grow the value earlier?
13:00 – Some are pumping the tokens and selling them
13:13 – When a company comes, Eric would have them hold their tokens at first
13:48 – If you have a lot miners, you’re already contributing a lot to the network
14:00 – The network will leverage the access capacity
14:12 – if you spun out a bunch of miners, Live Peers will have a large capacity in terms of amount of transcoding and live streaming work we can do
14:23 – This creates a cheaper price for the amount of live streaming
14:43 – Nathan makes a comparison using Live Peer 1 and Live Peer 2 as competitors
14:49 – When investors spend money on the 2 companies and contribute more resources, the prices of the service will go down for the consumers
15:07 – The longer they spend money, the more users they can drive
15:55 – If Nathan launches an email marketing tool, how can he create traction if people don’t understand crypto
16:18 – There’s actually a need for people to simplify the complexity of crypto
16:59 – Eric is thinking of providing incentives for individual stakeholders to get new users on board
17:23 – The big investors can put aside a big percentage of tokens and just incentivize it
17:37 – It’s like an employment equity pool
17:54 – The early participants will benefit more from the ecosystem
18:03 – The first bitcoin transaction was 10K bitcoins for a pizza
18:16 – The bitcoin price to buy a pizza is a little over $2500 (a coin)
20:30 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:
More developers are building decentralized applications because of the security piece.
The participants in the blockchain are the stakeholders as well.
The one who will win is those who can spend more money and contribute resources for a longer span of time—this will attract more users and create cheaper prices for the consumers.

Resources Mentioned:
The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

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759: He Shares How He Built His Company On Top of Cryptocurrency Ethereum and Why