SKALE Labs’ Stan Kladko: Building A Decentralized Amazon Web Services

Host Tom Shaughnessy talks to Stan Kladko, Co-Founder and CTO of SKALE Labs. They discuss the evolution of SKALE Labs, the decentralization of finance and social networks, and the current state of artificial intelligence. This builds on our previous episode with SKALE's CEO and Co-founder Jack O'Holleran.

Episode Highlights:

• Stan Kladko did his PhD in Germany in physics and moved to Stanford and Silicon Valley.
• Stan joined a past start-up and raised about $50 million but it wasn’t making money.
• Stan Kladko was introduced to Jack O'Holleran, the other co-founder of SKALE
• Cryptocurrency is still not totally popular in 2020.
• “Crossing the Chasm” is a book by Geoffrey A. Moore about going beyond early adopters with technology.
• SKALE Labs is looking to be a competitor with Google and AWS.
• Decentralized social networks are increasing in demand from younger users.
• We need to get people to utilize decentralized social networks.
• Are people going to build out their own data centers eventually?
• People don’t realize how vulnerable things are in the crypto space.
• Stan Kladko shares his opinions on whether companies can decentralize over time.
• You can’t just build a solid system on algorithms.
• SKALE has been coding nonstop for about two years with 9000 commits in their source code, with between 10-15 engineers.
• They are looking for people to stay and use their service for at least a year.
• An effective use of SKALE’s services are inside private enterprises and replacing Oracle.
• AI is currently very centralized.
• Neural networks are affecting our lives by telling us what to buy or read.
• The hardest technical hurdle SKALE has to overcome is fixing bugs.
• SKALE is looking for contributors and developers.

Key Points

1. Decentralized finance, decentralized social networks, and gaming are popular in 2020.
2. People are unfortunately very reactive in their choices regarding security and and not very proactive.
3. When you understand the structure, you are able to create a secure system.

Quotes

• “The problem is when you are competing with companies like Google or AWS, these huge giants, it is very hard for a tiny start-up to actually sell things because people may like your product. But the question they ask, are you going to be there like next year?” –Stan Kladko

• “As a start-up, it is very important for you to understand what the market needs in a particular year.” –Stan Kladko

• “To move the technology from early adopters to the mainstream you need to somehow cross the chasm and in the process of crossing the chasm you kind of change things a bit and make some compromises.” –Stan Kladko

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