Onward to 2024

Rendahl, Florian, and Étienne from the Klave team discuss their achievements and challenges throughout the year 2023, including the development and deployment of the Klave platform, their objectives, technical uncertainties, brand awareness, social media presence, and their experiences at various events and conferences. They also talk about Klave's goals and aspirations for 2024, focusing on adoption, improving the developer experience, and exploring the application of confidential computing in different industries.

Transcript

Rendahl: 0:04

Hey guys, welcome to 203 on Klave. My name is Rendahl and I'm joined today by Florian and Étienne. I'm very excited about today's episode as we have not recorded one for a while. It has been a very busy year for the Klave team, hasn't it?

Étienne: 0:21

Yeah, definitely a full year. We come up with the product, and we started from scratch, so yeah, a lot on our hands.

Florian: 0:30

It's very exciting. It's been a long while since the previous episode for sure.

Rendahl: 0:37

It has been indeed. Well, now since it, since 2023 is almost over, I think it's a good time to reflect on some of the objectives that we had set for ourselves at the beginning of the year. First, perhaps from a technical perspective, let's remind our listeners what did we look to achieve and what would you say were the challenges that we've had to overcome in order to get where we wanted to be?

Étienne: 1:04

Oh, sure. So I can, I can give you a quick overview. So maybe we can take a little step back here because We started the year without a product. Our objective was basically to be able to deploy Klave with our privacy enabling zero trust platform as a service. And we started basically from scratch. The first commit on Klave was done on the 9th of January 2023. And looking back, I think we can more or less split the year in three different steps. The first step, I would recall would be mainly working on a POC, a proof of concept, and to have something ready by the end of Q1, because we were attending the PET Summit. So the Privacy Enhancing Technology Summit in London. And we wanted to start spreading the word about Klave during this event. And then after that we had our first trustless meetup as well, where we wanted to demo the proof of concept of Klave. And this happened in April. The second step of the year was mainly in the second quarter and that's where we were focused on adding the main capabilities to the product for usability and making sure that the developers can play with it. The objectives here was to be able to do a full demo at the Intel Innovation event at the end of September, so at the end of Q3. And then from Q3 up until now, at the end of the year, my focus was on releasing the candidates public version, and making sure that we have the monetization in place for the platform, so it was quite challenging. And also continuing to spread the word during the, the web summit that we attended in in November.

Rendahl: 2:53

Oh yeah, that, I remember, that was pretty fun. So, you mentioned about being able to, Showcase the full capability of Klave, by doing a demo at the Intel Innovation Event. How did, how did you think that went?

Étienne: 3:05

I think it went well Florian, you were there as well.

Florian: 3:09

Yeah, I was there. Quite an exciting adventure. As you said, Étienne, it was a, it was a long time coming for us to get Klave on the road. Perhaps for those who have listened to us before, they will know that we have worked on many other things prior to that. But I think Klave is a pivotal point in the work that we're doing. I think to put that into context again, the point of Klave really is to make sure that we can bring all of these modern safety and compliance technologies to a much greater audience, but try to achieve that in a way that is friendly for developers. We are obviously in a landscape where people are looking to adopt more and more confidential computing technologies or privacy related technologies. And there are obviously other approaches on the market. Perhaps the people who follow those sorts of news will be aware that Intel recently launched TDX as well, which is a more lift and shift type of technology. It's important to understand our place as well as Klave in that world and how the offering that Klave puts on the table is different and how it's different. So managing to build this up in the past 11 months and successfully do a public demonstration of that technology, explaining those differences on the Intel floor in late September was was extremely rewarding. And I think there are many more challenges ahead and I think we can perhaps go over some of these as we continue this conversation. But it's been a great exercise in understanding better what people are looking for and how we can help provide this better.

Rendahl: 5:05

So it's interesting that you mentioned that Intel obviously presented their roadmap and talked about some of the new technologies that they developed in the hardware space, like TDX, for example. And how does that impact Klave, if it impacts it at all, or does it not affect the offering that we have, or does it make it better, does it make it worse, or does it have anything to do with us completely?

Florian: 5:32

Well, I suppose that Klave is a product that demands a complete rethink about how people design and program application. I think a lot of them will typically relate perhaps to the concept of Web3, something that has been talked about a lot over the past many years. It really demands a complete rethink about how you manipulate your data. How you think about the processes with which you manipulate that data. And then finally, re engineering of how you then implement and code these processes. And that comes with a lot of benefit that plays great on the table. Benefits that it inherits from the entire technology on which it is built, but not exclusively. As well as its value add. So, to answer your question, I think the people, and I think this is also echoing what I said earlier, Intel is trying to diversify its portfolio to be able to enable a lift and shift paradigm where people with existing workflow who have little amount of resources workflows into a more confidential world have the ability to do so using technologies like Intel TDX. But for companies and organizations that want to rethink the way they talk about security and safety and confidentiality of their data, for whom it is one of the critical objectives, then that lift and shift scenario isn't enough. And so this is kind of where Klave can help. And Intel TDX itself is built on the very same principle that Klave is built on. So it's more of a sister technology which has very specific fields of applications rather than something fundamentally different.

Rendahl: 7:33

Okay, that, that's really interesting. Étienne, you mentioned that some of our objectives for this year is basically to deploy Klave, platform as a service, zero trust pass do a POC, a public demo, which we feel we've managed to successfully achieve in 2023. But it would be interesting to hear what technological uncertainties or what those specific challenges are that we've had to face in the year.

Étienne: 8:01

Yeah, sure. So I think with Klave, as Florian mentioned it with the discussion around the Intel technology, we are nibbling and playing with Quite advanced technology and quite young technology as well. So Intel SGX, the technology we are leveraging on for Klave for instance, has been around since 2016. So it's quite advanced, it's quite young, so you need to, it's more involved in the development. On top of that, to open Klave to every developer, we are leveraging on WebAssembly, which is another young technology. It's been around for 10 years now. But the standard is quite young and still currently being defined with the community. So obviously it's quite challenging to evolve in an environment that is quite new. But it's also, I would say, motivating in a way because we, we are playing with. New stuff. So it's quite it's quite good. So the integration of those technology was quite a challenge, to be honest. And it's not finished. We still have more to do on on in 2024. Another challenge that I have in mind was the, the monetization aspect. How do you provide platform as a service and a monetization that corporates or individual developers could relate to and understand? It's, it's a bit complicated for us because Klave is, is in between trustless technology and the world of Web3 and blockchain and a proper platform as a service, which is more the world of the cloud. On one side, on the cloud side, you have usually subscription based or usage based monetization, and on the Web3 side, it's based on the concept of gas, most of the time. So, as Klave is a platform that is powering blind services. It's the zero trust aspect. We don't know what's running on our platform. We can't even look into your process and your data. Therefore, we need to find a way to, depending on the monetization we put in place. To cut the usage exactly why it needs to be cut. And then we need to come, we had to come up with a kind of monetization that is in between the world of Web3 and the world of the cloud. So it's usage based, but we we try to make it easy for the user to understand. But behind the hood, yes, it's a credit system that is modeled upon the gas of Ethereum, for instance.

Rendahl: 10:30

And do we think that we managed to get there in the end, or is there still quite a bit of work to do to refine the model?

Étienne: 10:38

There is, there is still quite a bit to do to refine the model, especially for the usage base. We also propose a licensing model, that is more the model that the corporate companies are confident with. And it's easier as well to for us to expose that. But yeah, more has to be done on the monetization for sure.

Rendahl: 10:55

One of the most exciting things that happened in 2023 is the beta version of Klave going live. So what was that experience like for you guys from it, from a tech perspective? Was there a lot of work behind the hood that needed to happen or was that quite a stressful time?

Florian: 11:16

Yeah, I suppose in, in in any field, you know, having a deadline or the release of a particular piece of software brings really a certain degree of stress and lots of things to do. But also, I suppose for most developers people will be used to the idea that releasing is effectively a day like any other. And, and the work is, is far from being finished. We have so many more things, so many more projects that we're willing to work on. One of the challenges of of Klave and, and sort of echoing what Étienne just said, is finding the right way of making it approachable, making it usable by developers who don't necessarily have a lot of experiences with those technologies. And this is one of the core functions of Klave. And by that I'm not necessarily demeaning the necessity for appropriate design of a software application. I think we can perhaps go on that again later. But one of the things we want to pioneer is a more, a privacy by design paradigm where people able, developers are able to create applications that are more responsible around the manipulation of the data and, and the effective auditability that you have on those processes. But it's not just a question of the underlying technology. It's an enabler. There is still a lot of education to happen at the level of developers using products like Klave to make sure that this vision is true. So much work still on the table for us. It's gonna be a, it's gonna be a busy new year for 2024.

Rendahl: 13:07

I can imagine. Yes, I can imagine. Well, it's, it's very exciting. As I understand it, we now have beta subscribers, so we just gotta keep working hard to get those numbers up. The second thing that we set out to do in 2023 was to create brand awareness and grow our social media presence. We've traveled quite a bit this year. I was part of some of those travels. We proactively created some content, and joined leading technology membership organizations, both in the UK and overseas. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Étienne: 13:42

Yeah, sure. So, I think with brand awareness for this year was one of our main objectives, as well as with Klave. It's a new product, so we have to, to get the word out. What I liked about that is that we learned a lot, especially with our messaging that has evolved during the year and we started with the trustless aspect first, explaining to people and during our meetup and also convention we attended to what's trustless, what it means, what we mean by trustless. And sometimes the message was complicated to pass and it's complicated to understand for some of the people attending. So we adapted that and we came up, for instance, with the Zero Trust wording. Which works way better with corporate users and also investors. So we have evolved on that side and moved a little bit the wording around Klave. During the summer, that's where we did a push on the most basic feature to add in Klave. And we had a plan to do a video for each of the features. And we managed to do that. And I think we increased our presence on the socials a lot. So we started at the beginning of the summer with like zero followers. And now we have more than 300. So it's not a lot, but I mean, it's starting to get to be not bad. I think we made a lot of progress on that side.

Rendahl: 15:09

Do you feel that after all of our hard work and effort to get everybody to understand and resonate with the term zero trust or trustless, that now people actually know what we mean when we talk about trustless or zero trust?

Étienne: 15:24

I think more and more people start to understand, especially in the regulated industries, because they are the ones that are looking for that kind of technology. But also within our competitors. Start to see our competitors websites, the same wording being used now. Wow, okay. Where it was not at the beginning of the year. So, it means that maybe they found, they found out that it's also maybe the sweet spot.

Rendahl: 15:48

Do you guys have any favorite events, conference or events that we attended in the year? And what was your experience like? Because obviously we went to the Intel Innovation event in San Jose, California in September. But also we attended the Web Summit in Portugal. And I know Florian, you've been having meetings as well with very important people in the year. So tell me, what for you is like the most memorable experience that you've had in terms of talking to people about Klave?

Florian: 16:21

Well, it's quite interesting because I think I have an odd answer for you there. Because the, the, so, the work that I do on Klave as part of the team is very much towards the developers that will be using the technology. So Étienne can relate to the other aspect of it, more of the foundational layer of how Klave is built. But for my side I work on the user interfaces, how people get to experience Klave. And when it comes to the most exciting moment to talk about Klave, I might say it happened earlier in the year, in March, sometimes at 1am, something like that, where I was at home working on that piece of UI, and I was listening to that music I can still remember. And for the first time, the UI functioned, got to life, so to speak. Actually worked from the beginning to the end. Through, of course, a lot of work prior from the team in the backend working on that technology. But it was the first moment that this experience that we had conceived and dreamed of effectively functioned. And so the most exciting communication I did on Klave this year was to our own team to say, "it's 1am, it's working now." That was, that was the moment.

Rendahl: 17:50

That was an amazing feeling, yeah, as well.

Florian: 17:53

Yeah, but obviously you did mention the Intel Innovation. This was a marvelous moment to share with a number of people. of the team here. Lots of people on the floor there. We go to meet and greet, and show Klave too. It's you know, it's always interesting to see that feel of a nascent community and sort of topics that are not always easy to talk about because we don't yet have a vocabulary, but very rewarding nonetheless. Yes, indeed it has been a very productive 2023, you know there was an article on Forbes about playing, we've won some awards like the G20 Tech Sprint AML Challenge and we've won also the A-Team's most innovative data privacy by design award, we've joined some prestigious membership organizations such as the Trust Valley in Switzerland, Tech UK, OVH Open Trusted Clouds, and of course the Intel Partner Alliance group that allowed us to attend the Intel Innovation events. But enough about 2023, 2024 is just around the corner. So if Klave was a person, What do you think would Klave New Year's Resolution be? i. e. what do you think would be our goals and aspirations for the year, plan development, roadmap, and maybe perhaps events that we're planning to participate in?

Étienne: 19:19

So if Klave was a person, I would say, let's say Klave is a child, okay? It's very young. Adoption, basically. The focus for 2024 will be for us making sure that we bring the community on Klave, people using Klave, and we need people leveraging on Klave to give us feedback on the features on Klave. So that would be the, the main focus, I would say, to achieve that we have very large technical roadmap on on specific technology. For instance, on, on Wasm, we need to adhere to the standard. We need to open source our code as well. We need to be able to manage multiple programming languages to bring a larger community of developers on Klave. So all of that will help toward adoption, obviously. And yeah, you will likely see us way more in developer events next year.

Rendahl: 20:12

So in essence, we want to be closer to the developer community, obviously to understand what critical features need to be built on the Klave to make it easier for them to use. So it's literally working on the developer experience, basically improving that in 2024. Does that sound about right?

Étienne: 20:30

Yeah, but as Florian said, Klave is all about user experience. It's making it. easy to leverage those technology, trustless computing, confidential computing for developers.

Florian: 20:41

And I think there is a, another dimension to that as well, which is that now that the technology is here, there are a number of, I would say use cases that perhaps we've thought about or that we have conceived of evolving to a more confidential computing based world. And whereas it's been rather difficult to imagine how to achieve that, I'm thinking in certain use cases in complex bioinformatics, in healthcare, certain things in energy data safety, data assimilation. This year, 2024, is going to be a great opportunity for us to actually give it a try. Actually work with our partners and academics as well in understanding – now that the technology is there – how well does it apply to these problems and then help us continuously define the road map that we need to lay in front of us to see what we work on next. There'll be no surprise that, you know, a lot of the world is focused heavily on artificial intelligence and all sorts of advanced mathematics problems. And it is still something that is rather difficult to achieve in the confidential computing world. Many people are looking at this from various angles, from the approach that we've taken with Klave, to other more algorithmic approaches. Homomorphic Encryption is one of them. And so, understanding how these use cases apply. And where the bottlenecks, where the problems could potentially be and how we solve them is going to be a rather interesting part of 2024.

Rendahl: 22:30

Oh, absolutely. I mean, we've partnered and worked with large financial institutions over the years. Would you say more accreditation, perhaps even getting certification in some areas would be very helpful in 2024?

Florian: 22:43

Yes, I mean, it's an interesting prospect. I suppose to a degree, this is kind of, perhaps, where the difference is between Klave – the product – and the open source that we're doing out of it, the work for developers that we're doing out of it, and, on the other side, the company. There's a few things that, as a company, we have objectives for, and working towards various degrees of certification will certainly be rather exciting.

Rendahl: 23:14

Well, thank you very much, guys. I'm very excited about the New Year, indeed. It's been great chatting with the both of you. I look forward to the next Klave podcast episode. And to all of our listeners, thank you. We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Florian: 23:30

We certainly do. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everyone.

Étienne: 23:33

Thank you very much, and Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.