In this episode, we dig into the strange world of blockchain. Thankfully, we have Lisa Gus as our guide. Lisa is Co-founder and CEO of WishKnish, the company behind the distributed ledger technology knish.io. Lisa is also Co-Founder of VeeSee.org, and Investment and Startup Lead at the Government Blockchain Association. We talk not only about payments and cryptocurrency, but also about childcare, the reporting of sexual harassment, and the mental health of founders. Lisa's work with blockchain encompasses all of these issues and more. Find out more at knish.io
01:14 What is blockchain?
05:42 Big potential and broken promises
10:00 Why Lisa began knish.io and how she hopes to tackle some of the challenges of blockchain
15:09 How can blockchain help with payments?
18:25 Providing a system for triple-bottom-line initiatives
20:09 An initiative to track sexual harassment
24:00 How blockchain can be relevant to governments
28:58 Can blockchain help fight a global pandemic?
31:18 Supporting women and minority founders through COVID-19 (and beyond)
Find out more at knish.io
Alice Merry (00:04):
Welcome to the podcast that takes a feminist look at the world of money. My name is Alice Merry, and this is the Feminist Finance Podcast.
Alice Merry (00:16):
Today, we dig into the strange world of blockchain. Thankfully, we have Lisa Gus as our guide today. Lisa is Co-founder and CEO of WishKnish. That's the company behind knish.io, which is a distributed ledger technology used by corporations, government agencies, and nonprofits. Lisa's also co-founder of VeeSee.org, and she's investment and startup lead at the Government Blockchain Association. You'll hear more about both of these later in the episode.
Alice Merry (00:45):
Today, we're going to talk about topics which you might not expect to hear in a conversation about blockchain. In this interview, you'll hear us talk not only about payments and cryptocurrency, but also about childcare, the reporting of sexual harassment, and the mental health of founders. Lisa's work with blockchain, addresses all of these issues and more. Let's get stuck in.
Alice Merry (01:06):
Hi, Lisa, welcome to the Feminist Finance podcast. Wonderful to have you with us today.
Lisa Gus (01:11):
Well, thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.
Alice Merry (01:14):
Today, we're taking on the somewhat complicated topic of blockchain. So I'd love for us to start by you explaining to us what this blockchain thing is all about.
Lisa Gus (01:25):
Absolutely. And let me tell you, I will do my best to handle it better than Reddit has done. Every time I'm asked what the blockchain is, I'm reminded of the very first time my current partner and I asked that question, and we went to Reddit to get an answer. Now there is a specific subreddit there called "explain to me like I'm five". Now I have an almost five-year-old, and let me tell you, he would not be able to understand the answer I got. And in fact, neither could I.
Lisa Gus (01:55):
So let me see if I can do a better job. Blockchain, the most basic sense, it literally is a chain of blocks, except not in the traditional sense. A block is a piece of digital information collected at any given time and stored in a public database which is called the chain. It literally is a chain of knots that has exact same information. So each of these knots basically verifies and creates trust in every other one. That's your blockchain.
Alice Merry (02:31):
Thank you. That was certainly much clearer than the versions of this that I've heard when I've searched for blockchain online. I want to dig a bit deeper. Often when I've been looking up this topic, I've seen the word "decentralized" come up a lot, and this comparison of traditional centralized databases and so on, with the decentralized nature of a blockchain. Could you explain to us what that means, what that's all about?
Lisa Gus (02:57):
Yeah. That's a great question. I'll start with an example. Let's say you're deciding to move to a different doctor and you need the results of your previous tests. What do you do? You actually go to the hospital where the testing has been done. Very likely, you pay for the disk to be able to bring it to your doctor. It's a hassle. And once you give that information to your doctor, you still have no possession of it yourself. That's because every single group, hierarchy I described, is centralized. Everyone has their own data. You're supposed to trust that they have not changed it, and you very likely have no way of verifying it.
Lisa Gus (03:38):
When you come to a decentralized version, it means that you and other entities are all part of this chain I have described, and everyone has the same data. And you, specifically as the owner of the information that pertains to you, have the right to a self sovereign data, where you decide who has it for how long and whether you trust them not to change it. That's the whole difference between a centralized and a decentralized system.
Alice Merry (04:07):
In the example that you mentioned from the hospital, this would be something like, I have access to my medical records no matter which doctor's filling them out, and then I have the power, I suppose, to allow a particular doctor to see them and to change them, if I trust that doctor and their diagnosis or their assessment?
Lisa Gus (04:29):
Exactly. When you think about here in the US for example, there has been still a lot of pushback, let's say, against LGBTIQ community. Let's say you don't want your doctor, because if you're going there with a strep throat, you do not need to know if you ever had to, I don't know, change your gender. Why do you need to share all that information? You don't. So you decide even how much of a particular data someone deserves to know and needs to know.
Alice Merry (04:54):
I feel like I have to mention it, because every time you look in the news and hear something about blockchain, what you immediately hear about is Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Can you help us understand, what's the difference between Bitcoin and blockchain? How do these concepts fit together?
Lisa Gus (05:10):
Well, to me, cryptocurrencies to blockchain is like email is to Internet. It's one of the applications of it. Certainly not the last, because you can also do providence of data, supply chains, identity, all of these are also part of what a blockchain is empowering you to do. And Bitcoin, it's almost like Yahoo mail to the whole gamut of other email services. It's just one application and one way to think about what blockchain can do.
Alice Merry (05:42):
Interesting. When you came into this whole blockchain world and started looking on Reddit for how to explain it to a five-year-old, I guess you were seeing this potential that you were mentioning around privacy, like you talked about in the hospital example, and some other benefits. How did you see the blockchain ecosystem at that time, when you first came into it?
Lisa Gus (06:06):
Well, it had so much promise. That much I can tell you. It had the promise of saving money on transporter transactions. It had a potential of creating privacy, self sovereign identity. There was so much good that it could do. But at the same time, in 2016, it was at the same time, so much of a wild West. Everyone was in a gold rush. Everyone was making promises. Not many of these were kept, and there was little in the way of making sure that the political capital that we came into the picture with has not been squandered.
Lisa Gus (06:45):
Marc Andreessen, one of the top VCs in the world, has said eight years ago that the importance of this breakthrough cannot be overstated. Given that, for example, if you get to unlock $1.3 trillion dollars in financial trade in blockchain by the year 2030, he is perfectly right. That's exactly what everyone was talking about in 2016. Unfortunately, we were just too early in the game to make sure we could do that and actually keep all the promises that were made to investors
Alice Merry (07:18):
What kind of thing where they promising? How were those promises being broken?
Lisa Gus (07:24):
Well, Bitcoin has proved a very successful experiment. When people look back at how ... I think the first pizza cost, by now, $30,000 or $40,000, considering how much those little Bitcoins ... Well, Satoshis, which is part of a Bitcoin, cost when you paid for that pizza back 10 years ago. So everyone was like, "Well, we want a piece of that pie." So everyone was creating an idea of what you could do using blockchain. Some of those ideas were kind of weird, to be frank, because blockchain is not a panacea. It's a great idea, and it's a great concept, but it's certainly not something that you could apply for literally anything.
Lisa Gus (08:08):
The ideas went from something really useful, which is, for example, helping self driving cars negotiate with one another, or having your toaster speak to your microwave. They also went to something completely crazy, like tokenizing the flock of birds, of chickens, that was supposed to hatch because you had to ... I don't know, count them before they hatched? Like I said, they were ridiculous. Everyone was really using those promises to hype one another and hype they in that ecosystem, so that at one point, the monetization of Bitcoin and the entire crypto market was right up there with Goldman Sachs and companies like that. Certainly, there was not, in no way, as many customers, not as, in many ways, as many applications of the technology that it could honestly deliver.
Lisa Gus (09:05):
When people wised up to it, then suddenly the SEC came into the picture. It started pushing back here in the United States. Other regulators did so in countries outside of the US. So everyone was suddenly waking up to the idea of like, hey, you know what did you promise and how can we make it happen? The technology is not even ready for this kind of prime time. So a lot of political capital has been lost, so the ideas of blockchain became diluted with the promises that never materialized. And then again, there are companies like Hyperledger, like Iota, like EOS, that have absolutely done what they have promised. So I'm not saying all of it was for naught. I'm just saying a lot of it was.
Alice Merry (09:50):
There's definitely a sense, I think, that a lot of what blockchain had delivered was a mixture of get rich quick schemes and scams.
Lisa Gus (09:59):
Exactly.
Alice Merry (10:00):
What's interesting is to think about, beyond the get rich quick schemes, beyond how many pizzas can you buy with your Bitcoins... I guess the question is, how can these kinds of systems be useful for most people? What's their applicability in the real world? I think that seems to me, something that you were trying to address when you set up knish.io. Tell us a bit more about knish.io and how it tackles some of the problems in the blockchain space.
Lisa Gus (10:28):
Well, we came into the blockchain space from the purely user's perspective. When we came in, we didn't mean to become knish.io. We wanted to be a WishKnish, a decentralized marketplace and blockchain. We felt that Amazon was really destroying its vendor ecosystem. And by the way, turns out we were right. Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago came out with an investigative piece that has proved us right. Four years ago, it was an open secret, and we wanted to create a more equitable peer to peer marketplace.
Lisa Gus (11:01):
Unfortunately, having built out the front end, we started looking for the backend, the actual blockchain technology, to make the backend work and allow for this kind of trust and spirit of commerce. That's when we realized that, well, the emperor at the time really had no clothes. So, we pivoted and decided to create the kind of ecosystem and the kind of tools, I guess, to create an ecosystem we wanted.
Lisa Gus (11:27):
So we became an infrastructure provider, where we feel that we have solved a lot of the inefficiencies in terms of privacy, security, interoperability, which I think the blockchains and distributed ledgers technologies of 2016, didn't even think to tackle. We have emerged out of stealth in 2019 with a product that I feel has answered a lot of the problems we have identified as a potential user of the technology three years ago.
Alice Merry (11:57):
So Knish.io is kind of a blockchain-backed system that various different customer facing applications can use, if I understand it correctly?
Lisa Gus (12:08):
Exactly. We are not actually a blockchain. We are a distributed ledger technology, which is doing exactly what the blockchain does. But remember how I explained the blockchain is a series of blocks? Well, the idea is that the blockchain is linear, hence there are some of the inefficiencies that come in. For example, until one block is verified, the second block cannot start, so it actually all depends on your peers.
Lisa Gus (12:35):
In our case, we have created is what we call a post blockchain ledger, meaning it serves a similar decentralization function, but we do it with an infrastructure that resembles a web more than the series of blocks, with the benefit of allowing people to get the validation and verification that they need as quickly as a centralized system, but still taking advantage of the decentralized nature of what a distributed ledger does.
Alice Merry (13:07):
Okay. The idea, I guess, is to avoid some of the criticisms of blockchain systems that they're very slow, they're very cumbersome.
Lisa Gus (13:15):
And expensive.
Alice Merry (13:18):
They're expensive. I don't know if this would be relevant in this case, but I've heard this criticism that they use up so much computing power, that they're very environmentally damaging, some of these schemes.
Lisa Gus (13:28):
Oh, you're right. Well, bitcoin, for example, that you mentioned, absolutely does. These days, to power one Bitcoin transaction costs as much as it takes to power electricity to 25 US homes for one day.
Alice Merry (13:46):
Wow.
Lisa Gus (13:47):
It's crazy. However, I wouldn't say that all of them are like that. There are some that use markedly less energy. That being said, I think there's some issues with their consensus mechanism. But by and large, I think the community finally is waking up to the fact that it can't call itself modern technology if it doesn't solve for its carbon footprint. Do you know that for a while, the Chinese government kicked mining farms out of China just because they were so environmentally horrible?
Alice Merry (14:19):
Wow. So these are the people, the computing, these great rooms full of computers that are providing the computing power to mine these coins, right?
Lisa Gus (14:30):
Exactly, and basically validate transactions. Yep.
Alice Merry (14:32):
Wow. So these were kicked out of China for their ... Yeah, it makes no sense at all right. To design a new technology that kind of fails the great challenge of our time, which is the climate crisis. Wouldn't make any sense at all. Coming back to Knish.io and the work that you're doing, so lots of the people who listen to this podcast, obviously, our focus is very much on finance and lots of the people who listen are working in finance. And I'd love to know a bit more about how this kind of distributed ledgers, and Knish.io in particular, how can it be applied within financial services and payments?
Lisa Gus (15:09):
Well, first of all, it allows you to cut down on middlemen, because a lot of it is verifying trust in those who are verifying it for you. If you can plug in that verification right from the start, then suddenly you kind of go, "Well, if so and so trusts you, so will I." All of a sudden, you don't need to go through three or four extra steps in making it happen. Sometimes it takes a certain transaction in a commodity space 10 days to go through, just because every single person needs to sign off and check if there is enough balance on your bank account, if there are enough trust in that particular institution that's giving you a permit to operate, and so forth. When it comes to blockchain, it could really get cut down to less than 24 hours, sometimes less than 10 minutes.
Lisa Gus (15:59):
So you can imagine the kind of efficiencies and savings you get off the bat. Not to mention, you do not pay transporter fees, you do not pay banking fees. So all of a sudden, all of it is expedited and all of it is cheapened by a huge degree. Just coming back to Amazon. Did you know that for some transactions, it takes over 70% of revenue. It's unbelievable. So when you go to P2P, that is maybe some minor percentage for the upkeep, but that's about it. 70% that would have been lost, goes back to the creator, which allows the creator to pass on the savings to the consumer, saving more money, allowing more buying power, and so forth. So it's really quite amazing.
Alice Merry (16:46):
This is 70% in banking and transaction fees for using the platform?
Lisa Gus (16:51):
And market access fees and what have you.
Alice Merry (16:52):
I wanted to ask you about something that I've sometimes reflected on in this context, because it seems that by using blockchain or distributed ledger for finance, you can reduce the fees related to middlemen fees, like you say, precisely. But I sometimes wonder about the consumer protection element of that if you take those middlemen away.
Alice Merry (17:15):
I was just thinking about, we had a series of scams here in Lima recently with people stealing phones and making transactions and stealing money from people's accounts and credit cards. I just was reflecting on something like this. If this had been on some kind of a decentralized blockchain, there would be no bank to appeal to. There would be nobody to appeal to, to say, "This was a scam. I need my money back."
Lisa Gus (17:40):
Yeah. That is true. However, very likely, it wouldn't have probably happened. All of a sudden, you have not just a bank responsible for checking the validity of the transaction, but it's happened programmatically. Before anything is even taken out of your account, a question gets asked of all the peers in the network, whether, first of all, this person has a right to ask for that money, whether they have a right to send the money from your account. And if they don't, then no money ever gets sent. So in a way, it actually takes away the need to appeal because this probably wouldn't occur in the first place.
Alice Merry (18:25):
Interesting. Interesting. So could you tell us a bit about how Knish.io, and maybe some of the services that it works with that use payments or that use Knish.io as its back system?
Lisa Gus (18:39):
Well, we have always, even from the very beginning, focused on triple bottom line projects, both the in-house ones and those we've worked with. Obviously, we're opportunistic and if we want to have to do something, I don't know, for NASDAQ ... hey guys, call us ... we would. But in general, we want to focus on things like helping sustainable fisheries succeed, working with groups such as the Supreme Court of Tennessee, where we helped maintain the ledger structure to check for online dispute resolution cases.
Lisa Gus (19:15):
Our focus ... Well, there is also dealing, for example, which connect groups like NGOs and businesses that want to support them and Knish users that are looking to fundraise on behalf of the NGOs. So basically, we are looking for ways to bring efficiencies to impact projects. I guess, to answer, it's the sweet spot. It's what the blockchain was created for. I feel like that's the market we're most able to function in, because unlike the traditional blockchains, we are not focusing so much on financial transactions as much as the data around transactions in general. So it's almost, we're calling ourselves a blockchain, that ledger of data. When it comes to high volume, low value transactions, that's where we shine the most, and that's where we feel we add most value to our customers.
Alice Merry (20:09):
You sent me some information before we spoke about this, and one of your initiatives really caught my eye. It was called GenderGuard. Could you tell us a bit more about that? I think it's an initiative that uses your system.
Lisa Gus (20:23):
Yes. GenderGuard is a group that we have signed an agreement with, and they're working with the UN Women, and they are looking for ways to track, basically ... Okay, so basically track sexual harassment and gender bias in the workplace on a macro scale. The interesting part about blockchain is it allows you to get the data immediately instead of waiting until it gets published in some journal, or gets a study out there somewhere, because you literally have the same access to the data as everyone else.
Lisa Gus (20:53):
So they are looking for a way to use our technology to track how policy changes and how training right there in the workspace would affect the instances of sexual abuse. That's really what they're hoping to use the technology for.
Alice Merry (21:11):
Pretty interesting. So, that would be workers logging cases of discrimination or abuse to provide overall data to track?
Lisa Gus (21:24):
Exactly. We can also do it anonymized fashion, so there is no way for the data to come back to haunt them, because do you know that only 25% of sexual harassment cases are ever reported? And most of them are reported five years after the fact, because women are afraid, or I guess not just women, but the victims, are afraid to speak up and then lose a job that they have, and lose the reference that they can use to get a new job.
Lisa Gus (21:51):
That is really difficult to track just how much of it happens and in what way, and how much is to do with basically secondary bias. And some of it is actually violence and so forth. People just can't speak up, and we are looking to change that by allowing everyone to have freedom to speak, to be verified as someone who's not a bot potentially. But at the same time, keep that identity sufficiently secret that there will be no chance of retribution.
Alice Merry (22:23):
What's the difference in using blockchain for a project like that compared to, with my extremely basic tech understanding, I'm just thinking, putting a Google form that people can anonymously fill out. What is it that blockchain gives an initiative like that?
Lisa Gus (22:42):
Well, I think you might've heard about the recent scandal in Florida, as recent as this week, where the counties in Florida are actually changing the number of COVID-19 cases that they're reporting, because they want to make themselves look better. Same in Russia. Do you know, for the country of its size, not to mention the fairly basic healthcare system that they have, they're only reporting 3,000 deaths from COVID-19, which is 12 times better than a country like the UK, for example, on the opposite scale.
Lisa Gus (23:23):
That's unbelievable and no one, even the Russian citizens themselves trust it. So what we would do is allow everyone the access to the data and an ability to change the data. Because every one of those that I was talking about holds that data. Suddenly, you know who's trying to change it. You know, for whom it will be beneficial and you would be caught immediately. That immediately creates trust in the kind of large-scale projects where you need to know macro information. Not necessarily who it belongs to, but the general statistical data.
Alice Merry (24:00):
It's interesting that you mentioned these kinds of uses related to public health and so on. I noticed that you're part of the Government Blockchain Association. I'd be really interested to hear how you see the potential of blockchain for governments or in a state context.
Lisa Gus (24:19):
Well, government is all about knowing what's going on with the citizens and supposedly, hopefully, providing for a way to report on their own issues and being able to deliver assistance to citizens. What the government blockchain association does is allows training for government practitioners and access to information about what blockchain technology can do. In fact, I'm really fortunate in being a part of it as its investment and startup lead, in terms of actually connecting startups that are working with blockchain industry to venture capitalists and potential M&A partners who might be interested in the usage and funding this kind of technology.
Lisa Gus (25:08):
And of course my colleagues on the more government facing side are working with the governments to create frameworks for potentially voting, for recording information about, let's say, health data. This is really an educational organization for government officials, and also trade organizations for those of us that are part of this business.
Alice Merry (25:31):
It's interesting to me, because one of the ways that blockchain has often sold itself is being almost anti-government. It offers itself as like, breaking free of this kind of top down control. It's decentralized. It takes away middle man. Do you find that the governments are open to that kind of position? Or is that just, anyway, a fake understanding of blockchain?
Lisa Gus (26:02):
Well, partially, I think it's all about education in the Government Blockchain Association. In fact, leaders that are coming through right now are breaking that paradigm. In fact, if you might've heard about W3C web standards, it's groups like the Department of Homeland security here in the US for instance, that have paid for a lot of the studies around creating decentralized identity standards that are going into a general infrastructure these days for the blockchain space.
Lisa Gus (26:35):
So the government is definitely waking up to the potential of blockchain. But you also need to realize and consider the fact that a lot of the blockchain structures are locked into their current data providers for terms from five to seven years. And blockchain technology has not even been in the picture when those contracts were signed. So it might not be so much the government is against it. It's unable to adopt it as yet because they're already locked into their structures.
Lisa Gus (27:03):
But now that those previous arrangements are coming to a close, the government is actually actively exploring both here in the US and, as far as I know, definitely from our advisors in the UK and EU, they're waking up to the need of adopting and the benefits of adopting blockchain technology. When you think about countries, developing countries like parts of South America and Africa, there is actually even less of a pushback because the legacy systems are already nonexistent or in bad enough shape that such new applications are already welcome.
Lisa Gus (27:40):
I think it's more like, if you educate people enough and if you give them options, they will definitely at least talk to you about it.
Alice Merry (27:48):
Interesting. What kind of applications are governments seeing blockchain being useful for?
Lisa Gus (27:54):
Well, it could be even, let's say, something like tracking weapons and supplies across the border. It could be tracking the identity of citizens coming into the country. It could be, really, COVID-19 and being able to check the number of use cases that are being under reported or over reported or what have you. There is definitely a lot of use cases where it could take advantage of it. The distribution of funds, the distribution of electoral money, and so forth.
Lisa Gus (28:27):
I think the possibilities are endless. In fact, when you can see that that the governments are supposed to, ideally, work for the people, what would there be to hide? I think eventually, we will see almost as much of the use of potentially permission chains, meaning it might not be necessarily open in all respects to the public, but at least there will be enough trust amongst several institutions that as much using blockchain as not using blockchain.
Alice Merry (28:58):
You mentioned COVID-19, and I don't think we can get through a whole interview without mentioning it. I know you're working with an initiative to better track the development of COVID-19. This is such a topical issue at the moment in so many countries that I wanted to ask you a little bit more about this.
Lisa Gus (29:18):
Well, everyone is doing it. Well, not everyone. But a lot of people are doing it because first of all, we had a lot of time on our hands. But at the same time, everyone does want to help. I think fundamentally, if you give people an opportunity, we'll do the right thing. Well, at least maybe 95% of us. I've been fortunate enough to work with groups such as Silicon Harlem, such as several organizations within New York city, around tracking and tracing the COVID-19 and actually doing so in a lot more of a community-centric way.
Lisa Gus (29:52):
A friend of mine, Ted Schulman, is putting together a group together with one of the top epidemiologists, in terms of finding community-centric approaches to tracing it, rather than relying strictly on technology, the trust in which has eroded, and finding ways where you could incentivize staying at home, for example.
Lisa Gus (30:14):
But we are looking to ... talking to Netflix for example, and saying like, "Hey, if people are sick, then you get two weeks of Netflix for free just to help you stay busy if you stay at home."
Alice Merry (30:27):
That's a great idea.
Lisa Gus (30:28):
Yeah, and to not share it around. Well, thank you. It's all about, really, helping people to do the right thing and potentially coming together as a community to prevent the spread, because it's ultimately not helping anyone. So we've been really fortunate to connect with people in all walks of life who are really interested in helping. I think blockchain is uniquely suited, again, to waking up those urges and having them take shape.
Alice Merry (30:55):
One thing that I found interesting when I've been learning about your work leading up to this interview is that lots of the examples that you shared in your slide deck and you shared with me, they are very closely related to real social needs and real social problems. I wasn't that surprised to hear that you had initiatives reacting to the COVID-19 situation.
Alice Merry (31:18):
One of the other initiatives that you have at the moment is addressing the experiences of female and minority founders during this COVID-19 crisis. Can you start by telling us a bit more about what you were seeing among these founders? I suppose you were also part of this group, so what were the challenges you were seeing that women and minority founders are facing at this time?
Lisa Gus (31:41):
Well, some of it is, we have had it pre-COVID-19 obviously, and that's lack of resources like legal and mental health aid, like a support framework, especially for geographically diverse communities. There is lack of actionable data to affect policy change. And really, the lack of the insight into the VC and banking space for underserved founders, such as women, LGBTQ, and minority founders. When you think about it, when you're applying for funding, you're supposed to give all the information about you that's relevant and might not be relevant, up to and including the name of your childhood pet.
Lisa Gus (32:26):
You don't really know who it is you're addressing most of your future too. So we are looking to change those basic inequalities, as well as allow founders and small business owners to get access to funding and to M&A opportunities. Because, let's say, before COVID especially, over 60% of new businesses were launched by women and minorities, and that's a global number. And yet less than 3% of funding went to women, and 0.2% went to women of color.
Lisa Gus (33:01):
That is unbelievable. But before you can change it, you need historical data, and even that was absent. We wanted to create a framework for getting this kind of trusted data, same as with GenderGuard, same as with COVID-19. But once COVID struck, then we realized that while we're doing all the great things, but if business are closing ... For example, in Dubai, over 70% of businesses are expected to close. In the US, one out of three has already closed. There is a huge, huge issue with childcare facilities. Over 50% of them are either already closed or looking to close, and they're mostly run by women.
Lisa Gus (33:41):
So how do we actually make sure that all the good things that we have in store are going to be relevant if the businesses are not there to begin with? So our next initiative is about to roll out, and that is a barter marketplace where you're able to exchange goods, services, and skills with your fellow business owners, or sell those same services for cash or for cryptocurrency. Those keep the lights on until such time as the economy changes and you can charge money across the board, or continue exchanging it on a barter basis in a very taxable state or a government friendly way.
Lisa Gus (34:21):
At the same time, allow businesses to keep going. Because if you cannot work with the customer and if you can't have access to them, then certainly no loan, no government finance, is going to make it worth your while to stay open. And we're hoping to make sure that they do.
Alice Merry (34:37):
So the idea here is, if I'm a small business and I'm offering some kind of service that I can't reasonably give you right now: a haircut, repairing something, painting a house, whatever, that I could barter and offer the fact that I will do this in the future.
Lisa Gus (34:55):
Absolutely. Or potentially, you could even barter it for it now. And you could say, "Hey, I can do 10 hours of development work for you if you do five hours of marketing for me." So some of it you could do barter for immediately, and some of it you could defray to the future, yes.
Alice Merry (35:13):
Interesting. I wanted to just backtrack a little bit. You mentioned this idea with your organization VeeSee, part of the challenge that you're trying to improve is this issue of needing data in order to tackle this problem that such a minuscule percentage of founders getting funding are women, and an even more minuscule are coming from ethnic minorities. What kind of data are you talking about? What does that look like?
Lisa Gus (35:43):
Basically, the kind of data of how you were treated. Were you able to get funding? Where did you get the funding from? What needed to change? Do you have access to, let's say, childcare? Do you have access to ways to make it much simpler to actually put you on the same footing as your male colleagues? For example, Royal Bank of Scotland has put out the Rose report, which has identified childcare as one of the main reasons why female entrepreneurs are unable to succeed. So we need to find ways to make this kind of a discrepancy solvable.
Lisa Gus (36:23):
Because if our work is not taken seriously enough by our community or our families, and you're being told that, "Hey, you're not working already. Your entrepreneurial business is something that you do in your spare time. You should look after your kid." How are you supposed to have the same access to funding and to opportunities if you're not taken seriously enough? So this kind of data is what we are hoping to put together and hope to put in front of governments and see how we can solve for those entrepreneurs that are lacking those kind of basic necessities of being able to function in the business community.
Alice Merry (37:07):
I love that we finished this interview on the topic of care. It's been a topic that's been central to our discussions on this podcast, but not one I expected to see addressed through blockchain. As a skeptical outsider looking in, the whole blockchain world can sound like a Silicon Valley boys club and a collection of shady, get rich quick schemes. What I found so interesting about speaking with Lisa was understanding how her company and initiatives focused on applying block chain in much more down to earth ways, in ways that are relevant and useful for the wider population. Thanks for joining us today. Please take a moment to give the podcast a rating and review, and to share it. See you next time.