Mysten Labs Co-Founder & CEO Evan Cheng sits down with Yahoo Finance Live to discuss acquiring funding for the company’s plan to build out blockchain and crypto infrastructure, how the platform hopes to integrate Web3, and the NFT market outlook.
Video Transcript
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RACHELLE AKUFFO: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance. Now, how do score top talent away from Silicon Valley’s biggest tech giants in an already tight labor market? Well, let’s welcome Evan Chung, Mysten Labs co-founder and CEO, who’s doing just that while securing a $36 million funding round. Evan, welcome to the show. So talk about your journey here, how you went from your position in R&D at Facebook to then your goal of launching Mysten Labs and now having Andreessen Horowitz lead a $36 million funding round?
EVAN CHENG: Well, it’s been a long journey. It’s something I’ve been building towards for many years. So I always had the ideas of building some kind of infrastructure company for deep, the hardest technology in the space. So when the opportunity came, I just took a chance and went with it, along with my co-founders, some of the top talent in the space.
RACHELLE AKUFFO: So then how have you been able to attract talent from other startups, as well as some of the biggest, storied Silicon Valley tech giants who obviously have much bigger budgets?
EVAN CHENG: Yeah, we’ve been pretty lucky to have attracted some top talent from Facebook, from Google, and many other companies. I think it starts with the track record of the founding team. We have all been kind of in the industry for a long time, have some good kind of reputation. And we’re known for being builders, building cutting edge work. So that attracts a lot of attention.
And combine that with a market that’s really developing. And it’s really, really exciting to many kind of engineers at these big companies. And provide with an environment that is comfortable to them. Startups these days are very, very different from startups from many years ago. There’s more funding available, especially for teams that have serious ideas, a good mission, good vision.
So we are able to offer the kind of compensation it requires to attract them. So a combination from of reputation, funding, compensation, benefits, and the most important thing is just the vision, the exciting vision and the exciting space.
RACHELLE AKUFFO: That forward thinking that you’ve been talking about in this space, we hear this buzz word Web 3.0 or Web3. What should people understand about this next phase of tech? And how does Mysten plan to be competitive in this space?
EVAN CHENG: Yeah, so in Web3 is sort of a general term to encompass a lot of different ideas. Fundamentally, the change is ownership of assets can now be tracked on a technology called blockchain. And that’s a decentralized technology. And so you are not beholden to some middlemen, kind of black box, big companies, a bank there, holding on to your assets.
The whole idea is for consumers to have ownership, have control of their assets. And they can temporarily give permission for services to utilize them, which is very, very different say, than, today’s giant services, Instagram, Snapchat. If you give them your assets, it kind of belongs to them. And they may give you a cut if they’re able to make money from it. But you are no longer in control of your asset.
So this is going to change quite a lot of businesses, a lot of different economic models, and product experiences.
RACHELLE AKUFFO: And I want to ask you about NFTs. Obviously, we hear a lot of people talking about them. We know that there’s a lot of debate as to whether people think they’re useful or not, how worthwhile they’re going to be in the long run. But we have seen trading in NFTs up 21,000% in 2021 according to nonfungible.com. But we are also seeing a decline this year. What are your thoughts on the potential and the limitations of the NFT market?
EVAN CHENG: So NFT is a general technology. It’s called non-fungible token. The idea is you can represent any kind of asset on chain that’s nonfungible right now, like a US dollar. $1 is the same as another US dollar. We’re talking distinct assets.
So the current NFT infrastructure doesn’t really allow you to do that kind of modern risk assets. But that’s going to change. We’re doing something about this. So right now, what you’re seeing in the market is fairly limited. NFTs are being used to represent mostly digital artwork and in some cases, maybe music.
These are completely static assets. So there’s been a bit kind of– it’s interesting. It’s new. It’s kind of open access to everyone to a new market, digital arts. So it’s gathered a lot of interest, just like any other new market.
There is some speculation involved, and there’s some real opportunities ahead as well. So I think what it’s going to happen is NFT is going to be used more broadly in other kind of products and in a way the consumer is not even aware of. The key thing is for make sure they have ownership, control of the assets. And that’s what we are about.
RACHELLE AKUFFO: All right, well, very insightful there. Thank you so much. Always interesting to explore the NFT world. Thank you so much Evan Cheng there, Mysten Labs co-founder and CEO. Thank you for your time.
EVAN CHENG: Thank you very much.
