What goes into making a social media app? What kind of planning does it require? Today, we are discussing product management and taking a deep dive into our brand new self-sovereign messaging app Manyone. To discuss this, we’ve invited Geoff Glave, Co-Founder of Manyone, and Chief Product Decentralist.
Geoff has over 25 years of experience in product management, shaping visions from inception to real world products that bring value to individuals and enterprises. Geoff believes that the Internet is meant to be a decentralized peer-to-peer platform made up of self-sovereign users. In the premiere episode of Season 2, Geoff Glave tells us how Manyone will make this happen.
What goes into making a social media app? What kind of planning does it require? Today, we are discussing product management and taking a deep dive into our brand new self-sovereign messaging app Manyone. To discuss this, we’ve invited Geoff Glave, Co-Founder of Manyone, and Chief Product Decentralist.
Geoff has over 25 years of experience in product management, shaping visions from inception to real world products that bring value to individuals and enterprises. Geoff believes that the Internet is meant to be a decentralized peer-to-peer platform made up of self-sovereign users. In the premiere episode of Season 2, Geoff Glave tells us how Manyone will make this happen.
Henry: Hey everyone. It's Henry, Mike and Chris, and we welcome you to the second season of The Decentralists. This time we're going to be discussing product management and taking a deep dive into our brand new decentralized messaging app, Many One, and our guest is Geoff Glave Glave. He's the co-founder and the chief product essentialist at Many One. He has over 25 years of experience in product management, shaping visions from inception to real world products that bring value to both individuals and the enterprise. As a strong awareness of market transforming technology trends, with the ability to contextualize those trends for both technical and non-technical audiences. Working with stakeholders, he engages in business case analysis, requirements definition, use case modelling, technical liaison and training functions. Market readiness, product evangelism, and industry thought leadership to ensure Many One is the market leader. Geoff Glave believes that at its heart, the internet was always meant to be a decentralized peer-to-peer platform made up of self-sovereign users. Decentralization means bringing the internet back to those roots and back to what it was meant to be. Welcome, Geoff Glave. Great to have you on The Decentralists.
Geoff Glave: Thank you, Henry and thanks Michael and Chris for having me here today. Should be a great conversation.
Henry: Okay. First question. I have to tell you, it can be a little bit confusing for some. But what exactly is product management? And I know that leads to a product roadmap for those who may not be familiar, please illuminate us.
Geoff Glave: Sure, and I will say that the term and the job description has evolved over time. It means different things to different people in different sides of the organization. If you were in a presentation and there was a big PowerPoint slide, it would probably say something like a product manager facilitates the strategy execution and user understanding.
Mike: Couldn't they just simplify that by saying you do everything.
Geoff Glave: That's a bit terrifying and keeps me awake at night. So, I prefer not to think that way, but yes, that's often the case. But what do those bullets mean? Well, it means that a product manager, in a nutshell, identifies what the users need. The users, the stakeholders, the customers and articulates what the product needs to meet that objective. So if the customers need a mechanism to be self-sovereign over their identity, if they need a means to communicate securely, if they need a means to build groups of interest without big brother watching. Then articulating what the product needs to meet that objective. So within an organization, the product manager or the product management team is the voice of the customer and the voice of market.
Geoff Glave: Sometimes, a sales guy like you Henry might say, well, I thought the sales guy was the voice of the customer. The sales guy might be the voice of one customer, or might be a voice of a territory or a sales patch. But a salesperson tends to have a short term vision. Product management tends to have a longer term vision. Tends to try to act as the voice of the market and tries to define that vision and then align those stakeholders to that vision. Does that help?
Henry: Yeah, absolutely. So, how does this lead to a product roadmap Geoff Glave?
Geoff Glave: Yeah. So that's a great question. You have this vision, you can see where you want to be and then you need to know how to get there and how to get there is the roadmap. For those of us who are old enough to remember the days before Apple maps and Google maps, you had a map in your glove box and you got it out, and that was your roadmap, and you figured it out.
Henry: Oh, you could never fold it back in and put it back.
Geoff Glave: Not at all and, you know, if your vision was, get the family to Disneyland and the station wagon, the roadmap would, would tell you how to get there. So, if we have a vision for what Many One will be in in three years, the roadmap is the steps both the big and small features that will get you there and over time. Similar to the way a roadmap in the glove box of your car, your journey is determined by how fast you can drive, how bad traffic is, what your fuel economy is. A software development roadmap is similar in that the amount of resources that you have, the amount of developers, the amount of time, how hard it is, whether something's technically possible. These all feed into the roadmap as well. Your roadmap is driven by you know, we'll be honest things that are of value and that you can sell. So if you have something that's fairly easy to implement that will have a great impact, and lots of people will want that thing. Then that will, you know, necessarily appear earlier on the roadmap than something that for which there isn't a lot of demand, won't excite a lot of people and therefore isn't as important. So priority also drives the roadmap very much.
Mike: So, to use your analogy of the station wagon going to Disneyland, right. If you're in Vancouver and you open up your map and you say, I'm plotting my course to Disneyland, you can see many different paths, right? I mean, seriously, there's millions of ways that you could drive from your house to Disneyland, right? So you have your end goal, which is what is, in this instance, Many One going to be in five years? How do you deal with the fact that what you're looking at is, almost like, I want to say a three dimensional map, right? Because you've got the factors of, like you said, time and resources. You've got the factors of whether you could call them distractions, of all of these different potential ways to get to Disneyland. Then you've also got like a time constraint thing. So how do you manage all of those things when it comes to a product roadmap?
Geoff Glave: You manage them by looking at the market. By seeing which of those things deliver the greatest value to the greatest number of people, as well as the greatest value to Many One. You also evaluate things that are innovative. I'm sure we remember that quote from Henry Ford, if I'd ask my customers what they wanted. They'd have told me a faster horse.
Henry: Oh, that's beautiful.
Geoff Glave: You know, so Henry Ford's vision was to take what he was hearing and say, well, actually what people want is an automobile that everyone can afford. That the kind of people that are working at my own factory could afford. Because previously automobiles were luxury items. So it is certainly bringing in those inputs from customers, but understanding that customers don't always know what they want until you show it to them. That is the 3D piece of the equation that you're talking about Michael.
Henry: Isn't that similar to, I don't know, the philosophy of Steve jobs. He didn't do any surveys. He thought, he knew what people wanted and the way he justified it was the fact that the people can't even imagine, they can't really articulate what they want. So that's kind of similar to what Ford thought regarding the horse versus the car, perhaps and that's all part of product management.
Geoff Glave: It is. In my opinion, it's somewhere in between. Because everybody thinks about you know, everyone loves to think about the successes that Apple had. The Macintosh, the iPhone, you know, iTunes, iPod, you know, all of their great successes. But everyone continuously and conveniently forgets their many failures. The Apple Lisa that came out before the Mac. The Newton tablet.
Henry: I remember that vividly Geoff Glave, because it was a failure at the time, because there was no internet, but as soon as there was, it resulted in the iPad.
Geoff Glave: The Newton, which was cool for its time, nobody bought it, right. So your definition of success, I suppose, is relative. But there are lots of examples of Apple struggling to defend a laptop that looked like a toilet seat. We probably all have one in our basement. So in my mind, you really want to sit somewhere in the middle. You want to ensure that you are being visionary and you are to some degree telling customers what they need or helping them realize that decentralization is important and here's why. While at the same time, also listening to the market, when the customer says, Hey, I really need a little red dot to appear in the app if I have a new message. Or at least I need a way to decide whether or not I want that red dot might be a more correct way to put it. So it is, in my opinion, as successful product manager is, have a foot in both camps really.
Mike: Right. So, what you're starting to touch on is something that I've always felt is the knife edge of product management. Because I've always felt that the most value in product management, right, is this ability to kind of have a foot in two camps, which is, you're the voice of the customer, right. I think that's a term that you've used. You're the voice of the customer, but you're also the voice of the company and the dev team. You have to communicate both back and forth. So in the Steve jobs example, I think the actual quote was, people don't know what's cool until you tell them what is. So, if you think about kind of the traditional product management situation and getting to a roadmap, right, you've got this factory. You can make cars or faster buggies or whatever, and you have to make a choice as to what you're going to do. This car is something that is, you know, you're inventing something. So, if you think traditional product management, where you say, okay, what we want to do is build this car. I think this is where a lot of product managers get almost, I don't want to say in trouble, Geoff Glave, but I think it's where the companies kind of change things. To me, you bring in a product manager to say, look, this is what we're doing. This is what we're looking at. Please help us focus this development effort on a goal that will be marketable. Okay. But then often what ends up happening is product managers will get hired into a place where the opposite happens, where they say, I have this product it's called an automobile. Go out there and find a market for it, you know what I mean? And what happens if you don't find one?
Geoff Glave: Yes, exactly. Right and this is why one of the essential skills of a product manager is also the ability to speak truth to power. To be able to say within an organization and not just say you're stupid and that's a stupid idea. You need to be able to have the facts to back you up. But to be able to say this idea Mr. Vice president, that you have will not be successful and here is why, and this is what the market is telling us will we need and what we should be building and with finite resources, this is a better idea. You will not always win, right. Because it takes a very mature organization to be able to accept that. You, to some degree need to be a company man, where if the company then says, well, we're going to do this anyway. Both Michael and I have been at other organizations where this was the case where you say yes, sir. Yes, ma'am and you put your best face forward. But at least you can sleep at night knowing that you attempted to speak truth to power. That you'll have the ability to say, I told you so a year later.
Mike: Which I'm sure always makes you popular.
Geoff Glave: Yes. Very popular. Let's just say I rarely quit the jobs that I've had.
Mike: So, kinda like a sales guy.
Henry: Oh, kidding. So Geoff Glave, I would assume then, based on some of the information that you've shared, that a product roadmap can't possibly be a straight line that doesn't deviate. There must be changes that occur down the line that you may have even foreseen.
Mike: Yeah. That's an interesting question, Henry. Like, is it more important to anticipate the future developments than it is to maintain a clear focus on one course?
Geoff Glave: It depends how far out you're looking. If you're looking out six months, then your roadmap better be pretty locked in stone. If you don't know what it is you're building over the next six months and you're going to pivot on a dime away from that. Then that's not a good place to be. So, the next six months should be pretty solid. Then the six months after that, things can be a little bit hazy. So, the market might say, well, it's more important for me to be able to share videos in the app or the market might say, well, actually I want to store my loyalty card points within the app and own them myself. Or I might want to do whatever. So, that is less committed and subject to change and then a year out, it might be even more subject to change. So, you can imagine it like a flashlight beam where if you hold the flashlight in very close to the wall it's a very small disc. But when the flashlight is shining out 50 feet at the campsite it spreads out wider and a roadmap tends to be like that. It also varies by market. I mean, if you are making software for a spacecraft that is going to land on the moon in 2024.
Mike: There's only one market pretty much.
Geoff Glave: Yeah. There's one market and there's not a lot of variation there. Or if you're making mission critical database software, that's used to operate nuclear reactors. Again, it's very tight. Whereas if you're making a product where you are setting the trends and the world is your oyster, then it's a different story. So who you're building for and why, is also key to that as well.
Mike: Geoff Glave, when did you become a decentralist and when did that start becoming important to you?
Geoff Glave: That's a great question. I would say it's really when the internet started to make me uneasy. When every time I look and particularly, you know, within social media, but whenever I started to look around and just become uneasy and annoyed. It's somewhat of a tired example, but, you know, we all perhaps remember that point when we're shopping for a new hammer or we're shopping for shoes, or we're looking for something. Suddenly that thing that you're looking for is appearing everywhere you go online.
Mike: I had that happen to me and it was literally the saddest thing ever because it was a set of flowers. I was buying for somebody's funeral. All I got for three weeks was a constant banner ad reminders that a relative of mine had passed away. So it was sad.
Geoff Glave: You know, it's kind of like, why is this going on? Or when I type my name into Google and I end up seeing pictures of my children and it kind of makes me uneasy, right. You know, why is that appearing? It was just the compounding of things that would make me uneasy and annoying me. Like you might be watching, I don't know, Star Trek clips on YouTube and you fall asleep and you wake up three hours later and YouTube is still going and it's still showing you all these different things and auto generating this content. You know, it's true if you fall asleep in front of HBO, I mean, HBO is just going to keep playing on your TV all night. But it's not curating that content for you. It's just what's ever on after the Sopranos and then what's ever on after Game of Thrones and, you know. But for YouTube to be just, instead of saying the video's done, what else do you want to look at? It's just constantly showing you things. It just keeps playing. It's just uneasy and it's not just the internet and the software. It's the hardware that we use to interact with the world, the online world as well that make me uneasy. I mean, I can remember 40 years ago, you know, I would open up my TRS-80 and solder wires onto the chips and actually interact with the hardware. You fast forward to, I mean, we talk about how great the iPhone is, but you fast forward 40 years to the iPhone. I can't even get content on and off the thing, because it lives in this walled garden where Microsoft not Microsoft, I'm sorry. Where apple determines what can beyond that thing. Right. So if I have a video clip that I want to just copy onto it, to watch on an airplane, it is a struggle to do that it right. It's like, look, I bought this thing. Just let me, you know, let me interact with it however I want. So, all of those sort of things converged into me becoming a decentralist. Where it comes down to say, I want to own my stuff. I want to own my data. I want to share it with who I choose. I don't want the whole world to be following everything I do. I would say the final piece of it that I've mentioned when we're just having conversations around the water cooler is, the thing that's made me a decentralist is I've become suspicious of things that are free.
Henry: Absolutely.
Geoff Glave: Where you go to the app store and you want an app, it's counterintuitive. But if an app in the app store is 1995, I actually trust it more than I trust an app that is free. Because the first thing I want to know, when an app is free is how are they keeping the lights on, how are they paying their developers, how are they paying their rent? You know, how are they operating their service? Where is their money coming from? And invariably, wherever they're getting their money from is quite clever. But it's also a bit devious and strange where it's like, well, we're selling metadata on interactions of users in Vancouver compared to users in Seattle to data mine, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, don't make money from that. You know, make money from building something of value and selling that thing of value.
Henry: Yeah. You'd be happy to pay for it.
Geoff Glave: With a profit margin that supports what you're trying to do. So that sort of thing makes me a decentralist as well, where all of the traditional means of economics aren't value anymore. Where building and selling cars is not profit anymore. Ford makes money off its data now. Right. It's like, whatever happened to just building a car and selling it, why do you have to make money off the metadata and the financial data of everybody who's buying your cars right. Long answer to a short question. Those are all the things that have turned me down this down this Decentralist path.
Henry: You know, you must have been very intrigued when Mike, you approached Geoff Glave about joining us to head the product management department.
Mike: I mean, it was years of smoking cigars and damaging my health to get Geoff Glave to join us. No, I'm kidding. I've always Henry, as you know we both come from a sales background. Okay. Part of the challenge is from a sales perspective, it's really easy to think of people like Geoff Glave and product managers, as people whose job is not so much to create and manage a roadmap it's to take the current pitch and massage it in such a way that the customer will buy what you're selling. You know what I mean? Like take the tin and put another label over top of the real label, you know, type of thing. So, what I wanted to do is just ask a further question on this, right? Because Geoff Glave, you know, I've always respected his ability to speak truth to power. You know, we would sit outside and we would talk about these things. So, one of the things I wanted to ask you, Geoff Glave, on your last comment was, you and I are sitting outside, we're apple employees and we're product managers. We are out there talking to people like a Geoff Glave Grave about this ecosystem. That is the iPhone. We're saying, you know what? Like people, you know, it doesn't make any sense. People are kind of grumbling about the fact that they can't take that video and easily load it on their phone so they can watch it on the airplane because we've got this closed ecosystem and they're angry about it. How do you speak truth to power in a place like Apple or a place like Facebook or a place like, you know, Google, if all of a sudden, you're a product manager? You become a decentralist and you want to go in and tell people it's crazy to charge $1,200 for a phone and not let people do whatever they want with it. I mean, how do you tight rope walk that? Or is it basically your tight rope walking yourself out into the parking lot?
Geoff Glave: I think it comes down fundamentally to you know, you have to be comfortable with what it is you're doing, right? I mean, if you are in a product management role at a company that's making handguns, then you have to be comfortable with, you know, gun rights and what's going to be used with your gun and what might happen. All of these kinds of things, you have to have already done that. Similarly, if you're making software for drones that are operating in the middle east or, you know, something much more mundane writing software for a closed ecosystem like an iPhone. What you simply say is, well, Geoff Glave, the ability for you to copy a video on is an edge use case that's only used by 3% of our users. The majority of them are just downloading things from iTunes and or streaming from Netflix. They don't care. So, you are asking us to sacrifice convenience for a feature that is used by, that is asked for by a very small percentage of people. It's not an unfair thing to say. The other thing I will say is you know, they're unique compared to any other company in the world really, where they can do things that seem strange and then their customers will turn around and accept it and evangelize it. Right. Even little things like getting rid of the headphone jack, everyone's like, are you crazy? What are you talking about? Everyone's grumbling, and I'm never buying another Apple product. Well, probably what did they lose a quarter of a percent of their users by getting rid of the headphones jack. Now, by the way, when you drop it in the toilet, it'll still work. So unlike when all the water ran in the headphones, you know, so it's just a matter, you know, as a product manager, you have to say, what are we selling here? Am I comfortable defining the market and selling that thing or not? And if you aren't, then you need to go work somewhere else. So, it's not really a Pollyanna answer. Out of anybody within the organization, the product management team is the best positioned to be able to move those goal posts to help shift what the product is and how it's presented. But if you're working for Raytheon making targeting rate, you're not really going to shift the goal posts into making Fe's, that's just not what Raytheon building.
Henry: I forgot all about Fe's Geoff Glave, you know, being the product manager for Many One at the PI group, we're trying to do something different and that is build a decentralized solution. Can you share some of the challenges because it's different than what's out there?
Geoff Glave: That's a great question. I think part of it is now that wireless internet is fast and servers that are put in the cloud central solutions, you can connect to them quickly and they can serve up content very quickly. It allows users to have what they perceive to be a great experience, right? Like you go and tap like on something on Facebook, and it immediately pops up on everybody else's devices that like this picture of you at the beach. Or you're raking in all these Instagram likes it allows, right. The centralized nature allows for gratification but allows for an experience that people really like. So if you want to build a decentralized solution users have to sacrifice some of those experiences. So, I would say one of the challenges is giving users an app or an experience that is positive while at the same time, helping them understand that the fact that it's decentralized means not everything is going to behave as quickly. Or as much of a flying way as it did before to use Michael's word, which is a great word. So, one of the challenges is to deliver as close to that experience as you can. So that Joe and Jane average user doesn't say, well, this is silly while at the same time, delivering a decentralized experience where all those likes and all those comments and things aren't living for all eternity on a central server that can be mined by a third party.
Mike: So, a certain part of it is in this instance is you seem to be talking about. I totally believe you on this, as a proactive product management role. You know what I mean? We talked earlier about, okay, you talk to people, you find out what they want, and you translate that into a roadmap to get from Vancouver to Disneyland. But now what you're almost talking about here is one of the challenges is you almost have to take an initial first step and say, I need to convince people that when in Vancouver or that they want to go to Disneyland.
Geoff Glave: Yeah, exactly.
Mike: Because you've got to educate a little bit first.
Geoff Glave: Yeah. Or another example might be that Disneyland is a better destination than Las Vegas and here's why.
Mike: Right. You have kids and you're looking for a holiday destination. Don't take 'em to the Flamingo, take 'em to Disneyland, that type of thing. Yeah.
Geoff Glave: So, that's kind of an abstract answer, but let's go down in the weeds a little bit perhaps, and explain what I'm talking about. Yeah. An example. Imagine that, I want to connect to you Henry. You and I both have an app and we want to connect to each other so we can you know arrange an afternoon of golfing, or I want to send like a message, any kind of messaging app. Right. So how do I connect with you? So, if you were to look at Facebook, if you and I were both on Facebook then Facebook would link our accounts together. So, now I'm you're my friend. We can message through Facebook servers. I know Facebook gets to know everything and see everything. So decent. We go, well, that's no good. Exactly. We don't have those servers and we don't want to do that. So how do I connect you? So, we say, aha, let's look at perhaps using your phone number, because my phone has a phone number. So, let's connect the phone numbers together and that's how Henry and Geoff Glave will connect. Well, except what, if we, as decentralists don't want those phone numbers, right? There are all these breaches underway right now related to phone numbers. We don't want to be a honey pot. We don't want any phone numbers. Yeah. I don't want to share my phone number. You don't want to share your phone number so now how do we connect you together? And a good example of this recently for me is I recently installed signal on my device, right? Signal connects people together, via phone number. They're supposed to be like the greatest secure, private messaging application in the world. Yet the second I installed it, it blasted my phone number off to a central server, blasted it off to everybody who had Signal, who had my phone number and their contacts. I'm getting messages from people I haven't heard from for five years, because they've connected by my phone number. Right. A phone number is the key, right. There needs to be some kind of common key and the fact that you have my phone number in your address book is like the common key. So, when we say, no, we don't want to do that. We don't want the phone number. We want privacy. What else can we use? Let's choose email address. No, that's no good. Because people will have multiple different email waitresses. Right? So, then you come back and you say, okay, well, if I met you at a party, Henry, how would I meet you? Well, you'd say, hi, I'm Henry. Hi, I'm Geoff Glave, can I get you a beer? You know you would have that physical connection. So that's kind of the word. That's kind of the way to connect, right? So that's an example of a challenge in building a decentralized solution. How do you connect two people together without having a server that stores all this data without wanting this data? But somehow being able to, and the term you would use is key, you know, key off those two people together. So, that's one example. Another example I'll give you is 20 years ago, you might have a website you're showing your photos or you're writing your blogs, or you're an artist and you're showing your display, displaying your artworks. You might have a server under your desk that's running a web server that is listening for requests for people that hit your web server and say, show me your art. Then they're serving up that art. So, this web server is plugged into the internet all the time. It is plugged into the wall all the time for power. It's listening all the time for requests. Then it's serving one up when it's asked for one, right? Well now let's imagine we create an app and we put it on the phone. That's trying to do the same thing because we want to say, well, we don't want to have a server. We just want to have an app on your phone that's listening for messages. That's saying Hey, who's got anything to tell me. Who's got pictures to send me, what's going on. So, you have an app on your phone. So, you build that and then Apple says, oh, if you run an app, we're going to put it to sleep every three minutes.
Chris: Right. Yeah.
Geoff Glave: That's an example of a challenge to build a decentralized platform because a centralized solution would be to say, well, you dump all these messages onto a server. The server then pushes a notification down to you when there's something, your app wakes up, collects them and pulls them down. But what if there is no server? How does that work? So that's another example of a solution or a problem. A challenge that you have when you're trying to build a decentralized solution.
Chris: Geoff Glave, I'd like to just take this moment here and do maybe a little bit of a 180 and ask about our competition here. WhatsApp, the private messenger that's currently made by Facebook. They're changing their terms of service next month. Specifically, their privacy policy on a secure messaging app. The irony. They've issued an ultimatum to all their users just letting them know that this change is coming. Why don't you talk a little bit about that? How will Many One be different?
Geoff Glave: Sure. So, that's a great question. I think you heard me talk about Signal a minute ago. You heard me talk about Facebook messenger. But of course, Facebook messenger and Instagram messenger and WhatsApp, they're all going to blur together into some Monolith soon. We haven't talked too much about Telegram, but you know we can certainly talk about how Many One will be different against WhatsApp, but I think it’s also helpful to talk about it kind of in the broader picture. Which is the key difference being every design paradigm in our product is defined by this central notion of how can we not have your data? Like how can we not have your data drives everything we do, right? How can we connect two people together and not have your data and still give them a good experience, right? How can we the app to people and not have their data? How can people pay for the app? And we don't know who? How can people buy new features? And we don't know who they are, right. If the authorities ever come knocking on our door and say, Hey, we want to know about Geoff Glave, how can we end up being in a position of saying we have nothing to give you? And it's not that we just deleted it. All right. It's that we never had it in the first place. If you start from that principle that, you know, how can we not have people's data and how can we ensure that whenever possible, we don't know who our users are, unless they choose to tell us. Unless they want to join a commute or evangelize for us or so on. But, you know, if somebody in Redding is talking to somebody in Pittsburgh and, you know, we don't want to know who they are. Then, that drives everything we do. Really that is the key to how anyone will be different. So you can talk about features. You can talk about no central servers as kind of the end game. You can talk about the fact that, you know, our backup will be encrypted and WhatsApp backup isn't encrypted, you know, this kind of minutia. But really, it's, I think if you start with that broad brushstroke about not wanting that data. By extension providing that benefit to others by not having that data, then everything else trickles down from there.
Mike: That was actually a very awesome description. Thank you. So let me ask you a question, Geoff Glave. So, on this point, so now we've got this central tenant where whatever we do, our guiding light shall we say, is not collecting data. Okay. In order to do this as they, I think it was somebody sent a meme around the other day, Jack Dorsey, you know, way back in the early days, he still looked like he was 12 years old and before the beard and he was saying, you know, at some point you just have to release it. Right. So, you know, we've been getting to your point, Geoff Glave, where we've been wanting to build some kind of a decentralized solution that people could practically is what I like to say use, and we're ready to release that. Right? So, we're basically going to be starting with people coming in and helping us essentially Q&A and test an early version of Many One. So, what can they expect?
Geoff Glave: They can expect an app that first of all gives them self-sovereignty over their identity. So, they're going to create this identity on their device, their name, their city and whatever else they want to share. We are not going to say, Hey, you just entered your name as Ted, but we know your name is Bill. What's going on. But they're going to be able to create an identity over which they are self-sovereign, they're going to be able to define their terms of connection. So, they're going to be able to say, Hey, if you want to connect to me, you have to agree that I don't want to see any white supremacist nonsense. I don't want to see any homophobic stuff, and you have to agree that the original series is the greatest series of Star Trek ever produced. If you don't agree to that you can't connect to me.
Henry: So, what you're saying, Geoff Glave is people get to create their own terms of service, that's right? That's fantastic.
Geoff Glave: Yeah, and then once that's done and they've installed the app, whether it's on an iPhone or an Android phone and your Linux, folks stay tuned. We'll have an announcement for you soon, but whether it's on one or the other you can then start building out your own personal network by connecting to your friends and your family and your colleagues, and how are you going to do that connection? Well, you do that connection by sharing your identity with somebody else, by showing them a QR code. So, you show them a QR code. If you're meeting them face to face or you might fire up, you might send them a picture. You might fire up an online chat and show them the code, but you're going to connect one to one. Once that connection is made, your profile information is going to be with them. They're going to agree to those terms of service to connect to you, that terms of connection. Then you'll be able to securely message to those people without fear of your messages being intercepted or being seen by anyone else, without fear of your metadata being collected, you'll able to send messages, send pictures back and forth without fear. You'll also be able to join the Manyone community. You'll be able to actually help shape what is going in the product. In future releases, you're going to be a builder, a Manyone builder of what we have to come.
Henry: Geoff Glave, that's fascinating, but we've determined that there's no collection of the metadata. There's no personal data that's going to be sold to advertisers. So therefore, that revenue does not exist. I mean, I know the answer, but why don't you share how people pay for this? What do we do?
Geoff Glave: You heard me touch on this earlier when I said, I don't trust an app that's free. Or I want to know if it is free, I want to know where the money is coming from. Even apps that have a Patreon, like Signal just funded by, you know, a billionaire with a bottomless wallet. Apparently, they are starting to do dodgy things around cryptocurrency and things like this because sooner or later, you know, the people with the bills always come calling. So, what are we going to do? Well, we're going to sell the app. If you buy the app, if you want to use the app, you're going to pay for the app in the app store. When you buy it we're not going to know who you are. We're going to leave your app store provider to do that. Again, you Linux open-source guys don't get uppity, sit tight. We'll have more news for you later. But you know, for Apple and Android people we are going to ask you to pay for that app and what are you paying for Netflix $250 a year, maybe to $200 a year? You know, what are you paying at Starbucks? Well Starbucks is closed these days, but when it's open, you know, there are people spending $30 a week or more at Starbucks. So, you know, what is your privacy worth to you? This is one of the questions we'll be asking our users, our builders over the next couple of months is knowing what this can do. What is this privacy worth you? How much would you pay for this? In order to ensure that your data's not being sold, you're not getting ads, it's all secure and safe.
Henry: Well, that's great. It's kind of like going old school you know, 20, 30 years ago when you'd buy a piece of software from Microsoft or anyone and you would pay for it and then it's yours. Yeah. It's completely different way of offering communication messaging and the experience decentralization is certainly the future. Geoff Glave, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. Actually, you've generated so many more questions in my mind. I'm certainly hoping that we can have a chat with you in the future a few more times.
Geoff Glave: I would love that.
Mike: Oh, for sure. Thanks, Geoff Glave. It was fantastic. As always, an enlightening discussion. Thank you.
Geoff Glave: Thank you, Henry. That was fun.