Speaker 1: This is the Startup Still Say podcast. Thank you for
Speaker 1: tuning in to us a favor like subscribing YouTube LinkedIn
Speaker 1: and be sure to give us your feedback.
Speaker 2: Hope you enjoyed this episode.
Speaker 1: Come on to another episode of start if They'll Say.
Speaker 1: And today I am co hosting again with Anthony and
Speaker 1: we're welcoming under pallicuper Money today to our podcast. And
Speaker 1: why don't you cut us into what your journeys be?
Speaker 1: Then a bit about yourself.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me today.
Speaker 4: Well, okay, so in brief, I come from a math
Speaker 4: and computer science background. So I did my undergrad at
Speaker 4: Indian instru Science, Banglore, which is a four year like
Speaker 4: Pure Sciences program. Typically the journey of somebody who goes
Speaker 4: to a university like that at Pure Sciences University is to.
Speaker 3: Do a PhD.
Speaker 4: Nineteen nine percent of the class that I graduated with
Speaker 4: is actively doing a PhD right now. So yeah, so
Speaker 4: I come from a very research oriented background.
Speaker 3: And primarily math.
Speaker 4: In fact, when I joined university, wanted to be a
Speaker 4: theoretical physicist and a year and a half entered it.
Speaker 4: You realize the field is so saturated. The number of
Speaker 4: like seismic breakthroughs happening in recent times. I think the
Speaker 4: last size with breakthrough maybe was like forty years ago.
Speaker 4: The field is very saturated, and so I quickly shifted
Speaker 4: focus over to math because my professor told me, if
Speaker 4: you join math, you can do anything later in life.
Speaker 4: It can be like the latest Nobel Prize in chemistry
Speaker 4: went into like computational analysis of proteins or something like that.
Speaker 3: So like math takes you, makes you do anything.
Speaker 4: So yeah, So when I realized theoretical physics may maybe
Speaker 4: not right for me, I quickly pivoted over to math
Speaker 4: and computer science, and that's where my journey kind of starts.
Speaker 4: So I graduated in the year twenty twenty. That's the
Speaker 4: same year that COVID hit. So I was getting ready
Speaker 4: to start applying for different PhD programs follow the same
Speaker 4: part as my classmates. But that's the year you realize,
Speaker 4: or even if I do join a good PhD program,
Speaker 4: the first year year and a half is going to
Speaker 4: be all online and you're not going to be getting
Speaker 4: the full experience out of it. So I spoke to
Speaker 4: my professor and asked him, Hey, I'm a little unsure
Speaker 4: about this thing. You know, I'm going to be spending
Speaker 4: the next five six years of my life pursuing a PhD.
Speaker 4: And if the first year is going to be all online,
Speaker 4: and if that's how it starts, I'm not sure I'm
Speaker 4: going to be too enthusiastic about following up on this.
Speaker 4: And so he tells me, why do you even want
Speaker 4: to do a PhD in the first place?
Speaker 3: As somebody who's done a PhD.
Speaker 4: Let me ask you this, do you want to spend
Speaker 4: five years of your crime, which is the twenties of
Speaker 4: your life, marginally increasing the body of knowledge out there?
Speaker 3: And that kind of hit me, like, damn, that is
Speaker 3: what a PhD is.
Speaker 4: You're spending five years of your prime marginal the body
Speaker 4: of knowledge out there.
Speaker 3: And yeah, maybe one out of like like.
Speaker 4: Ten thousand PhDs might be something substantial and spectacle, but
Speaker 4: you know, it's it's you never know what where you're
Speaker 4: going to end up. So that made me pause and
Speaker 4: thin for a bed, and I decided, Hey, let me
Speaker 4: just take a year and decide what I want to do,
Speaker 4: and in this year, after this year, if my interests
Speaker 4: will lie in research, then maybe I'm going to go
Speaker 4: ahead with my pH d program. But let me just
Speaker 4: go into it with all kuns of blazing. Make sure
Speaker 4: I'm properly motivated to get.
Speaker 3: Into this thing.
Speaker 4: So I took a year, and in that year, we
Speaker 4: were all stuck indoors, and it did kind of open
Speaker 4: up a little bit. But every establishment that you went to,
Speaker 4: like you go to a movie theater, the first thing
Speaker 4: they're going to ask you is your phone number. For
Speaker 4: the sake of I don't know if you remember this,
Speaker 4: but there was this idea of contact tracing back then,
Speaker 4: wherein wherever anybody went to, their phone number had to
Speaker 4: be collected because if COVID kind of started spreading, use
Speaker 4: those owe numbers to kind of create a map and
Speaker 4: figure out how to a bit.
Speaker 1: Like.
Speaker 4: I don't think it worked at all, because you know
Speaker 4: what happened happened, But every establishment started collecting your phone number,
Speaker 4: and the excuse was contact sharing. Hey, we have to
Speaker 4: do contact sharding. You come to you've come to a restaurant,
Speaker 4: let's get your number. You've come to a grocery shop,
Speaker 4: let's get your number. So I was like, hey, look
Speaker 4: now they're collecting my number because of the sake of
Speaker 4: contact racing. But I bet you a year from now
Speaker 4: when COVID's gone. This practice isn't going to stop. And
Speaker 4: that's exactly what happened. Once these businesses realize the tremendous
Speaker 4: benefit of having that piece of identify for you, they're
Speaker 4: never going to stop. So I don't know what the
Speaker 4: state is in the US, but in India, every single
Speaker 4: establishment that you go to kind of asks for from
Speaker 4: buying groceries to getting a cup of coffee. Now there's
Speaker 4: this new trend of them making you download and app
Speaker 4: every time you go to a different establishment. And it
Speaker 4: turns out, even for like a like a five percent discount,
Speaker 4: Indians are super happy giving out the number. And so
Speaker 4: I just in that period of time, I just felt like, hey, look,
Speaker 4: this is not healthy at all. It is not healthy
Speaker 4: that everything we do online and offline gets aggregated around
Speaker 4: one single identifier. Plus that's also the main identifier that
Speaker 4: they can use to target stuff at you, call you,
Speaker 4: bother view spam you.
Speaker 3: So we just figured out, we just asked ourselves, can
Speaker 3: we figure out a way that.
Speaker 4: People can connect and communicate, maybe connect with businesses, connect
Speaker 4: with other people without having to share any sort of
Speaker 4: personal identifiers for themselves like a phone number or an
Speaker 4: email idea or anything like that. And so the first
Speaker 4: idea that you approached is maybe we'll create something like
Speaker 4: a virtual identifier, something that's not so sensitive that people
Speaker 4: can share, in which case they don't have to worry
Speaker 4: about their primary identify, their phone number, being exposed. But
Speaker 4: the problem there is the problem with any sort of
Speaker 4: contact info. Once you have a unique personal identifier for
Speaker 4: a person, even if that's a virtual identifier or something
Speaker 4: more concrete like a phone number, they can be linked
Speaker 4: with each For example, if WhatsApp comes out with WhatsApp
Speaker 4: user names, your WhatsApp user name can be linked back
Speaker 4: to your phone number.
Speaker 3: So it's only as good as.
Speaker 4: The first exposure event where it gets linked back to
Speaker 4: your original identity. And all contact info has this issue.
Speaker 4: If I give you my contact info, you now have it.
Speaker 4: There's no way for me to take it back. Plus
Speaker 4: I don't get to control who you then share it with,
Speaker 4: Like I can't stop you from sharing it with Anthony,
Speaker 4: I can't stop you from selling it to three thousand
Speaker 4: other people. So the fundamental nature of contact info, any
Speaker 4: contact info.
Speaker 3: Is that.
Speaker 4: You have no control over it. You can't take it back,
Speaker 4: you can't control who it spreads to you can't control
Speaker 4: the data that gets aggregated aroound it. So any true
Speaker 4: solution here for this problem would mean that we would
Speaker 4: have to create something that does not use any sort
Speaker 4: of contact info. And that kind of ignited that the
Speaker 4: math brain in me kind of trying to figure out a.
Speaker 3: Good cryptographic solution to this huge privacy problem. And that's
Speaker 3: the birth of our company numberless.
Speaker 4: What we do is we build in NERDS speak, we
Speaker 4: build authenticated identified less communication protocols. What that means is
Speaker 4: I can connect with you, you can connect with me,
Speaker 4: but there's no contact in for identify it ever exchanged.
Speaker 4: So like we're creating a world where you are in
Speaker 4: complete control of who we are connected to, how much
Speaker 4: access they have to you, and whether or not they
Speaker 4: can connect you with other people, and none of your
Speaker 4: personal infoy is ever exposed.
Speaker 3: And yeah, that's our journey so far.
Speaker 2: It's incredible.
Speaker 1: You've definitely scared me off of PhDs.
Speaker 2: Yea, that is very true.
Speaker 1: Right, Like most places, we are adding our phone numbers
Speaker 1: for any sort of accounts, discounts, whatever it is.
Speaker 2: It's a very easy transaction to do.
Speaker 1: And you're right, we forget and or are these sensitized
Speaker 1: about it's just a phone number, right, but there's a
Speaker 1: whole lot of information that's connected to us.
Speaker 2: So that's a brilliant, brilliant idea of that. Sorry, Anthony,
Speaker 2: I know you.
Speaker 5: Were asking question all good, so so a rather brilliant story, right.
Speaker 5: I mean, every every founder goes through that pain point
Speaker 5: before you say okay, I mean this is a pain
Speaker 5: point worth solving for, So thanks for sharing that. I mean,
Speaker 5: having spoken to you for an hour or so, I
Speaker 5: mean that that part didn't come out, so it's it's
Speaker 5: it's a good learning. So based off of that, what
Speaker 5: what made you decide saying okay, I mean you have
Speaker 5: number less, right, I mean, this is the way you
Speaker 5: want to solve Did you look for any existing technology
Speaker 5: that might have existed for you to take and piece
Speaker 5: it together to solve it? Because I mean the reason
Speaker 5: I ask is you've also created a brand new protocol
Speaker 5: called the port protocol as part of number less.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 5: I mean what so in a way, you're kind of
Speaker 5: starting from scratch from the ground floor, if you will, right,
Speaker 5: I mean, why why did you decide that you needed
Speaker 5: a brand new protocol despite being so many other protocols available.
Speaker 4: Well, I think in this space, I don't think there's
Speaker 4: a lot of protocols available. I think most of the
Speaker 4: communication and authentication protocols out there rely on every individual
Speaker 4: having a career public Even if we go web direction,
Speaker 4: your public identifier is your public key, in your public
Speaker 4: in your key are it's a publicKey, that's your identifier,
Speaker 4: So you still have a unique public identifier that's exposed
Speaker 4: to everybody else. So if the problem that we're trying
Speaker 4: to solve for is data aggregation and stopping people from
Speaker 4: aggregating data around the central identifier, I don't think there's
Speaker 4: been a lot of protocols developed to kind of solve that.
Speaker 4: So I think in that way, we were new and
Speaker 4: I couldn't find too many examples of good protocols. There
Speaker 4: are a couple of them out there, but just the
Speaker 4: fact that they haven't been, you know, used enough, is
Speaker 4: kind of an indicator that maybe the protocols not sound.
Speaker 4: So that's what made us like reluctant to piggyback on
Speaker 4: somebody else's protocol and maybe build our own protocol with
Speaker 4: our own set of proofs that it is secure and reliable.
Speaker 5: Okay, Okay, that makes sense, and I mean just fresh
Speaker 5: out of college in your case, right, I mean obviously
Speaker 5: you said, I mean a lot of this happened during
Speaker 5: the COVID time, but I mean, given that you were
Speaker 5: math and science major, I mean, this is a huge undertaking, right,
Speaker 5: especially for someone I mean who spent the year thinking
Speaker 5: about what you did. You're also thinking about, Okay, how
Speaker 5: are you going to you know, make ends meet? And
Speaker 5: you jump into something so challenging, but at the same time,
Speaker 5: I mean, the world needs this. What are some of
Speaker 5: those things that spurred you on and pull together or
Speaker 5: write people to kind of bring numberless together?
Speaker 4: Well, you're right, absolutely I had to make ends meet.
Speaker 4: But thankfully, because it was COVID, one of the advantages
Speaker 4: is you could just crash with your parents, and in fact,
Speaker 4: they wanted you to live with them because they knew
Speaker 4: you were saved and secure and all that. So I
Speaker 4: didn't have to worry about rent, I don't have to
Speaker 4: worry about food.
Speaker 3: I had no expenses at all, so there was no
Speaker 3: financial pressures per se, so I could pursue things that
Speaker 3: did not make sense in the movement.
Speaker 4: Plus, plenty of my friends were stuck at home to
Speaker 4: all itching to do something can't get out, can't do
Speaker 4: something out there, so they were all stuck at home.
Speaker 3: So I was really.
Speaker 4: Lucky that I found my co founder, who's who I've
Speaker 4: known my entire life. So he was a University of frount,
Speaker 4: a computer science guy, and he was also he was
Speaker 4: close to his final year of university, again similar to me,
Speaker 4: and he was also stuck at home.
Speaker 3: And it made a good team. I came with my.
Speaker 4: Math background so I could back up the theoretical foundations
Speaker 4: of it, and he, with his computer science background, could
Speaker 4: help me with the implementation of these protocols. So a
Speaker 4: team was born and we spent about six to eight
Speaker 4: months developing these protocols. And at that point COVID had
Speaker 4: kind of lifted, but we had this MVP kind of
Speaker 4: not you. I wouldn't even call it an MVP. It's
Speaker 4: just proof of technology, proof that it can be done.
Speaker 4: The first what we realized happened the first thing. West
Speaker 4: time we suggested something like this, people thought, hey, can
Speaker 4: this even be done? And so our first step was
Speaker 4: to just show people that, yes, it can be done.
Speaker 4: And so once we had something to show that it
Speaker 4: can be done, such a technology is viable, then we Hey, look,
Speaker 4: we have to raise more resources. We have to raise
Speaker 4: more funding. So that's when we started shopping around and
Speaker 4: we met a lot of people. We showed this too,
Speaker 4: and the people who found it who were extremely supportive
Speaker 4: and could see kind of the vision behind it where
Speaker 4: folks at Catamounsers and so we raised our seed round
Speaker 4: of financing with them, and then we had a lot
Speaker 4: more resources to kind of get an office higher, more people,
Speaker 4: put the product together in a more professional way, improve
Speaker 4: the user experience. All of that improved some marketing efforts,
Speaker 4: et cetera. But yeah, now that's where we are. We
Speaker 4: were in the middle of it are product port launched
Speaker 4: a couple of weeks ago and we're getting good users
Speaker 4: growth so far.
Speaker 2: That's great. Congratulations with that.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate, right because right now with privacy, you're right,
Speaker 1: most of the effort or attention goes to how can
Speaker 1: we protect that unique identifier? But you're actually looking at
Speaker 1: like how can I refuse a situation where you need
Speaker 1: to aggregate it? So now like you know you have
Speaker 1: all of this done in future, this is online, how
Speaker 1: does that experience look like going back into the movie
Speaker 1: theater saying I'm not going to give you the number.
Speaker 2: What does that look like?
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, so, because the protocol hasn't spread enough yet,
Speaker 4: I still can't go to a business and say, hey,
Speaker 4: I'm not going to give you my so right now.
Speaker 3: The practice is I just.
Speaker 4: Tell them I don't so they'd excuse.
Speaker 3: Now, the brilliant excuse of getting my number is them.
Speaker 4: Saying, we're going green and so we don't want to
Speaker 4: print out an actual movie ticket or a receipt. We'd like,
Speaker 4: just send it to your raft phone, and that's why
Speaker 4: we need your number. I'm like, that's okay. I don't
Speaker 4: mind a little bit of global warming if you can
Speaker 4: print a ticket for me. So I just asked them
Speaker 4: to print a physical ticket. Now, same thing with grocery stores.
Speaker 4: I don't mind a physical receipt. But yeah, But the
Speaker 4: plan is we think a lot of businesses are actually
Speaker 4: losing out on quality customers by taking their phone number.
Speaker 4: Imagine the last time you encountered a website and you
Speaker 4: wanted to know a little bit more about the service
Speaker 4: they provided, the product they sell, and you know, you
Speaker 4: opened up their chat pot or you opened up their
Speaker 4: contact page. The first thing you saw was they're asking
Speaker 4: for your number of personal information. How many of those
Speaker 4: times where you turned off by that and you said, hey,
Speaker 4: it's not worth me putting in so much of my
Speaker 4: personal information just to know a little bit of information
Speaker 4: about that. So I think businesses are actually losing out
Speaker 4: on their best customers because they're asking for this information.
Speaker 4: Because they're best customers people who are affluent and reasonably intellectual.
Speaker 4: These people are people who would be super turned off
Speaker 4: by giving away the personal information. So what we're trying
Speaker 4: to do going forward is set up small pilot programs
Speaker 4: where we can actually make the case improve the case
Speaker 4: that hey, you will actually increase your net lead creation,
Speaker 4: and you can you will actually increase the number of
Speaker 4: customers onward just by not asking for their personal info.
Speaker 4: And we were in the process of setting those experiments up.
Speaker 4: It's still going to be a couple of weeks since
Speaker 4: until we set it up. But yeah, if those experiments
Speaker 4: go well in a couple of years from now, I
Speaker 4: would love to go to a movie theater and not
Speaker 4: give my number.
Speaker 1: More power more power to that, right, because especially right
Speaker 1: coming up, like you said, right, intellectual afflent doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: We also have protective population, right, Senior citizens' kids that
Speaker 1: are coming into the space, I would love to have
Speaker 1: a mechanism in place that protects them from giving out
Speaker 1: that information, which.
Speaker 2: Is going to be a huge thing. Right Yeah, that's the.
Speaker 1: Point eventually for a lot of scams too. So that's
Speaker 1: a really impa.
Speaker 4: Think about AI. Think about the other side of AI. Look,
Speaker 4: AI is only so powerful because of the data you
Speaker 4: feet into it. And right now there's a lot of
Speaker 4: data available because all of this data has been aggregated
Speaker 4: around our personal identifiers. And right now, even though AI
Speaker 4: is proceeding at a super good pace, the worst it
Speaker 4: can do is still not that bad. The worst it
Speaker 4: can do is like sell us on some stuff, not
Speaker 4: just to do this or that. But it's going to
Speaker 4: get even more sophisticated and complex, and I don't think
Speaker 4: it's safe for us to be so vulnerable too. AI
Speaker 4: is going bad. Think about it right now. The worst
Speaker 4: thing you get is a spam or scam call. You
Speaker 4: can most of the time you can tell something as
Speaker 4: a scam that some of these calls and spam you
Speaker 4: can easily identify spam, but only because most of these
Speaker 4: spam calls are other humans on the other end trying
Speaker 4: to orchestrate it.
Speaker 3: But as AI gets more and more sophisticated, these cams
Speaker 3: are going to be harder and harder to recognize, and
Speaker 3: it's going to be very hard to continue a communication
Speaker 3: system where everybody.
Speaker 4: Is so accessible to everybody else. It's not hard for
Speaker 4: people to get my phone number. My phone number is
Speaker 4: published online. They just have to do a little bit
Speaker 4: of googleg or the first business I have to give
Speaker 4: my phone number two, they can just scrape my phone
Speaker 4: number of that business.
Speaker 3: So it's going to be very easy for AIR to
Speaker 3: reach me.
Speaker 4: Plus, all this data aggregated around the phone numbers is
Speaker 4: going to make it very easy for AA to use
Speaker 4: that channel of communication into me to make me do anything.
Speaker 4: So I think going into this AI era, we have
Speaker 4: to recognize the flip side of data aggregation and try
Speaker 4: to make sure we're not just numbered sheep in the
Speaker 4: face of AI. And there's some level of individual human protection.
Speaker 5: That makes sense on RUTH So especially in the in
Speaker 5: the world of AI. Right, I mean, we we just
Speaker 5: can't be feeding into that big machine.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Right, So let's let's talk a little bit more about
Speaker 5: the technology itself, or maybe let's just speak to the
Speaker 5: poor tap itself. Right, So if I understand right, Let's
Speaker 5: say you and I want to connect on it. Let's
Speaker 5: say we meet at an event and we want to
Speaker 5: stay in touch. You show me both of us download
Speaker 5: the poor tap, You show me a QR code of starts,
Speaker 5: I scan it, and you and I get connected. And
Speaker 5: let's say tomorrow you don't want to keep in touch
Speaker 5: with me, or you just want to lose me. I
Speaker 5: mean you can just say, you know, lose Anthony or whatnot,
Speaker 5: and you know I can never ever get in touch
Speaker 5: with you, right, I mean, that's certainly, at least in
Speaker 5: the face of it, that's what I've seen happening.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 5: First of all, I mean you can validate me if
Speaker 5: that's right. But I mean, and secondly, maybe just for
Speaker 5: the audience, I mean, just just tell a little bit
Speaker 5: about how port works, what are some of the use
Speaker 5: cases that people can use port for? And then maybe
Speaker 5: once you're done with this, let's say phase zero or
Speaker 5: phase one. I mean, what's your vision with quote if
Speaker 5: you can talk about that a little bit lbs so.
Speaker 3: Sure sounds good support.
Speaker 4: The way we designed port is we want a port
Speaker 4: to work in any situation that a phone number would work.
Speaker 4: So the central idea behind the port app are these
Speaker 4: instruments called ports.
Speaker 3: So typically when we.
Speaker 4: Want to connect with somebody, the connection instrument that we
Speaker 4: use would be a phone number or an email ID
Speaker 4: or a username. So the connection instrument in the port
Speaker 4: product port app is something called a port. Now, the
Speaker 4: difference between a port and a phone number is a
Speaker 4: port is not a unique identifier ToView. A port is
Speaker 4: a piece of single use cryptographic information. It can be
Speaker 4: used to form a secure, intern encrypted connection. So and
Speaker 4: that port so that information can be put into a
Speaker 4: QR code, It can be put into a link, It
Speaker 4: can be moved through NFC, so you can have to
Speaker 4: phones touch each other and that information can get exchanged.
Speaker 4: But basically a port is the information, not the modality itself,
Speaker 4: like a QR code or a link. So so typically
Speaker 4: if somebody were to meet face to face conventionally, they
Speaker 4: would share exchange phone numbers. Here, you would put the
Speaker 4: port into a QR code, show that QR code, the
Speaker 4: other person's can sit and you're connected, as simple as that.
Speaker 4: And once the connection forms, the port itself and the
Speaker 4: information in it becomes unusable even to attackers, even to
Speaker 4: anybody else. So now basically on the port app, you've
Speaker 4: basically created this connection and turn encrypted secure connection.
Speaker 3: I know it is you on the other end.
Speaker 4: You know it's me on the other end, but there's
Speaker 4: no phone number, there's no identify involved. So if I
Speaker 4: want to stop talking to you, or if you start
Speaker 4: bothering me and I don't want to talk to you anymore,
Speaker 4: I can just disconnect, kill the connection and walk away.
Speaker 4: And because there's no identify it for me, for you
Speaker 4: to like spam back or target back, I don't have
Speaker 4: to worry about unnecessary follow ons or unncessary spam, unncessary
Speaker 4: unwanted things.
Speaker 3: All of that stuff.
Speaker 4: Similarly, if I met you online or LinkedIn something like that,
Speaker 4: and typically I would exchange my phone number with you,
Speaker 4: and unlets say LinkedIn chat or something like that, you
Speaker 4: can send a port. I can send a port to
Speaker 4: you as a as a simple link, you click on it,
Speaker 4: we're connected. The third way people connect with the phone
Speaker 4: number is maybe I want to connect you with somebody
Speaker 4: else and I share your phone umber with somebody else.
Speaker 4: In such a situation, you can I can basically share
Speaker 4: a port that connects to you to somebody else only
Speaker 4: if you allow it, so you are in control, so
Speaker 4: only you can control who I can connect you with,
Speaker 4: and as usual, you can take back. It's reversible, unlike
Speaker 4: giving away a phone number, which is not reversible. A
Speaker 4: port is completely reversible, so you can disconnect whenever and
Speaker 4: walk away, and you have complete understanding of where every
Speaker 4: connection came from, whether it's face to face where you'll
Speaker 4: know if somebody connects you with somebody else, you know
Speaker 4: exactly how that connection came to be because you know, hey,
Speaker 4: this connection is via Anthony Prakash, So there is I
Speaker 4: trust this connection because I trust the person who connected
Speaker 4: me with this person. Yeah, so basically any situation you
Speaker 4: would use a phone number, you can use a port.
Speaker 4: Port's work offline as well. So if you're on a
Speaker 4: train you have no internet access, you can still create
Speaker 4: a port and show it to the other person and connect.
Speaker 3: So yeah, that's basically how ports work. Their piece of
Speaker 3: cryptographic information that need to be exchanged to form a connection,
Speaker 3: and you can do it in any situation that you
Speaker 3: would be exchanging a phone.
Speaker 5: So under the whole, is there some sort of decentralization
Speaker 5: or I mean, what is there a It.
Speaker 4: Is highly decentralized in the sense that if you download
Speaker 4: the Portact, the first thing you'll notice is there's no
Speaker 4: account creation process, so there's no submitting an email or
Speaker 4: submitting a phone number, waiting for an otp adding a password.
Speaker 3: None of that exists.
Speaker 4: You just download the app, enter your name, and you're in,
Speaker 4: and this name never gets sent to us our servers,
Speaker 4: so in fact, our servers basically don't see any identifying
Speaker 4: information about you. So even if let's say our services
Speaker 4: are preached in any way, the worst that can be
Speaker 4: done is maybe the service is down for a couple
Speaker 4: of hours until we get it back up again, but
Speaker 4: they can't get to know any information about you. Plenty
Speaker 4: of other platforms, even let's say something like WhatsApp, which
Speaker 4: claims to be into and encrypted, if their servers are compromised,
Speaker 4: they might not be able to get the message data,
Speaker 4: but they'll still be attackers with which phone numbers spoke to,
Speaker 4: which other phone number at what frequency, what your social
Speaker 4: graph is, so they can figure out who your wife is,
Speaker 4: who your girlfriend is, who your son is.
Speaker 3: All of that stuff can be figured out very easily
Speaker 3: just by understanding.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, so the metadata is almost no metadata is
Speaker 4: available on the Port servers that does not make sense
Speaker 4: to any attacker and cannot be traced back to the
Speaker 4: original person.
Speaker 3: So in that sense, we're.
Speaker 4: Highly decentralized in that only the people and the people
Speaker 4: that they're speaking to know what needs to be known
Speaker 4: to speak with each other, and our serversion don't even
Speaker 4: know your name. So we've made sure we've taken every
Speaker 4: effort to ensure that people's individual privacy is respected and preserved.
Speaker 1: I wanted to dig into that, right, So you're right, privacy, right,
Speaker 1: re issue.
Speaker 2: But then on on.
Speaker 1: The alongside, that is also the integrity or the authenticity
Speaker 1: of the human behind it.
Speaker 2: So how's that guarded?
Speaker 1: Like you mentioned right, there's no account creation, there's not
Speaker 1: personal information.
Speaker 6: So are you all already thinking about those protective mechanisms
Speaker 6: to be in place but tomorrow or like, these are
Speaker 6: not accounts people create, So.
Speaker 4: Even if a couple of fake accounts are created, what's
Speaker 4: the damage they can do? In the sense that because
Speaker 4: because of how Port works, there's no spam that's even possible.
Speaker 4: So I can never reach you if you don't want
Speaker 4: to be reached, because there's no identifyer that I can
Speaker 4: reach you at So even if somebody were to create
Speaker 4: a bunch of fake accounts, who would they connect to
Speaker 4: is the question? Who would they bother? Who would they spam,
Speaker 4: which itself is impossible. So the safeguard in port is
Speaker 4: every connection involves implicit consent. When I'm meeting you face
Speaker 4: to face and connecting with you, I'm consciously showing a port,
Speaker 4: You're consciously scanning it, and that's.
Speaker 3: How the connection forms.
Speaker 4: So you know me on the other side is authentic
Speaker 4: and you on the other side is an authentic person.
Speaker 4: If I were meeting you on LinkedIn and there I
Speaker 4: would like I send you a link, then you're determined by.
Speaker 3: The authenticity of LinkedIn, Like you have to.
Speaker 4: Be sure that the person on the other side of
Speaker 4: your LinkedIn chat is real. So that's something that the
Speaker 4: user has to be a little aware of. And contact sharing,
Speaker 4: you know that the person, like I know I've connected
Speaker 4: with Anthony and I know he's real, and if he
Speaker 4: connects me with somebody else, I know that it's him
Speaker 4: who connected me with somebody else. So I know you
Speaker 4: have to be real as well, because I trust Anthony.
Speaker 4: So every connection involves some level of implicit consent, and
Speaker 4: because of that the risk of connecting with the fake
Speaker 4: profile or somebody bad is very low compared to conventional platforms,
Speaker 4: where the risk is huge. Tons of scamps happen today,
Speaker 4: where some random number reaches out to you claiming to
Speaker 4: be your long lost friend, blah blah blah. And yeah,
Speaker 4: so all of that stuff can never happen because spamming
Speaker 4: essentially becomes impossible on port, So you're never reached out
Speaker 4: to by somebody you don't want to talk to.
Speaker 2: That's actually great, it's getting some of those human connections.
Speaker 5: Back, right, Yeah, yeah, In simple terms, I was going
Speaker 5: to say, there's a handshake, firm handshake that needs to
Speaker 5: happen before the you know, you start talking from A
Speaker 5: to B R B two A right, without which it
Speaker 5: doesn't get initiated. So enough of technical stuff. Let's talk
Speaker 5: a little bit about the CEO, right. I mean, so here,
Speaker 5: you're a math guy. You're a science guy, and somebody
Speaker 5: who wanted to do PhD but in a way COVID
Speaker 5: forced you to start a company, and obviously you love
Speaker 5: your science and our math. I mean, so between abin
Speaker 5: of who is your CTO and yourself and you guys
Speaker 5: came together, how did you guys choose and pick saying
Speaker 5: oh you've got to be CEO versus CTO.
Speaker 3: I mean, how did that come? Aback? I think it
Speaker 3: was kind of.
Speaker 4: Because I was the one who approached Ubina and said, hey,
Speaker 4: here's what I'm doing, here's the product I have in mind,
Speaker 4: here's the protocol I have in mind. Kind of like
Speaker 4: because I came up with the proposition, I think that's
Speaker 4: kind of I would trust me. I would love for
Speaker 4: the equation we flipp. I would love to just be
Speaker 4: the CEO all day. It's not fun being apart from
Speaker 4: the like the two seconds of prior do you get
Speaker 4: from calling yourself CEO? Other than that, just not a
Speaker 4: fun journey. Eighty percent of the jobs fun. But most
Speaker 4: of the fun I get is out of working on
Speaker 4: the tech. So yes, we just became because he was
Speaker 4: better at me than on the tech stuff, and I
Speaker 4: came to him with the idea.
Speaker 3: So I think that's how I fill in place.
Speaker 5: You're not alone, because I mean I've come across so
Speaker 5: many startups where it's it's deeply technical, right, I mean,
Speaker 5: and both the founders are all the three founders are
Speaker 5: all technical. I mean, they just want to move away
Speaker 5: from the CEO of stuff and give it to somebody else.
Speaker 5: They'd rather be coding twenty four to seven or work
Speaker 5: on infrastructure twenty four to seven than do with the
Speaker 5: day to day stuff. So, but having been the CEO,
Speaker 5: how is the journey of benefit? I mean, orould you
Speaker 5: do this again? I mean, what are the learnings that
Speaker 5: you've told yourself saying okay, these are things? Is that because?
Speaker 5: I mean, right now people are dependent on you. You know,
Speaker 5: you've raised around of funding. I saw, you have a
Speaker 5: wonderful team around you. You've got to build a culture.
Speaker 5: There's so much more than you just thinking about Porte
Speaker 5: and what Porte can do. I mean, you've got to
Speaker 5: drive a company and build something right, I mean, how
Speaker 5: does how has that evolved for you? And how's that
Speaker 5: journey been for you?
Speaker 4: I think it's it's been kind of difficult in the
Speaker 4: sense that I think I was kind of pushed into
Speaker 4: the defend in terms of building a team and all
Speaker 4: of that, so I had to learn how to swim.
Speaker 4: So that's that's, in a nutshell, that's how it's been.
Speaker 4: We've made plenty of mistakes in hiring people, plenty of
Speaker 4: mistakes in not delegating work properly. We've made a lot
Speaker 4: of mistakes in terms of not prioritizing your work properly
Speaker 4: and kind of getting delayed. So it's been like like
Speaker 4: learning the hard ware kind of thing. So it took us.
Speaker 4: It took us six months to kind of be comfortable
Speaker 4: in issues and make those mistakes and correct ourselves based
Speaker 4: on those mistakes. So now I have a good team,
Speaker 4: but it took us like ten months to build that
Speaker 4: team properly. Plenty of people went, came and went, and
Speaker 4: you know, you never understand how good somebody is until
Speaker 4: you work with them for a couple of months. But
Speaker 4: in case of an early stage startup, you only have a.
Speaker 3: Couple of months to work on something otherwise your runway
Speaker 3: is going to run out.
Speaker 4: So there's a lot of challenges. But I think the
Speaker 4: best learning for me is to try and figure out
Speaker 4: how to trust your people. And maybe they don't get
Speaker 4: it in a day, but if you keep spoon feeding them,
Speaker 4: they wonn't expect that you will do it eventually, So
Speaker 4: you just have to like delegate something and trust them
Speaker 4: to see through.
Speaker 3: If they don't see through, then you know.
Speaker 4: Hey, if you're not able to delegate something of this
Speaker 4: level of complex deed to your primary engineer. You know,
Speaker 4: maybe they might not be best suited for that, but
Speaker 4: if you cannot delegate properly, you cannot basically start building.
Speaker 3: And that's where I've struggled the most.
Speaker 4: And now I think over the last month two months,
Speaker 4: I think I've become better at delegating stuff. Hopefully a
Speaker 4: month from now, I would like to be completely out
Speaker 4: of tech and just focusing on growth and technology adoption.
Speaker 4: Even though I would miss tech like crazy, I think
Speaker 4: that's where I should be given my role in the company.
Speaker 5: Right now, you can secretly code in the night and
Speaker 5: do the would SEEO job.
Speaker 1: That was the maturity of now getting into the CEO,
Speaker 1: right you already acknowledge where you need to focus and
Speaker 1: let others pick up some of that burdens.
Speaker 2: So that's me great.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and given that this is your first rodeo so
Speaker 5: to speak on it right after college, I mean, how
Speaker 5: did how did your family take it? How did your
Speaker 5: parents react saying, hey, you're not going to go work
Speaker 5: in in a Google or a Microsoft instead of going
Speaker 5: to work on a protocol. How did your family react?
Speaker 3: Being an only child, I think.
Speaker 4: It's uh, it's it's I think they've been incredibly supportive.
Speaker 3: Obviously, they get stressed out quite a bit. They're like
Speaker 3: they see me working myself and they're like, how are
Speaker 3: you working? Like how are your life?
Speaker 4: Sometimes literally ask me how for the first time in
Speaker 4: my life, I'm getting scolded for working too much. All
Speaker 4: through college is like study study, you're not working hard enough.
Speaker 4: You have to go back and study and do that stuff.
Speaker 3: This stuff. Now I'm getting big lectures for working myself
Speaker 3: with death and like take a break, do this, do that.
Speaker 3: So I think.
Speaker 4: They kind of see that this is kind of like
Speaker 4: I'm in the zone right now. I'm kind of working
Speaker 4: on something that I believe in. I think that makes
Speaker 4: them happy, and so they've been incredibly supportive, been blessed
Speaker 4: that way. But yeah, they're they're not comfortable watching me
Speaker 4: work very long hours and getting down healthy habits like
Speaker 4: not eating, skipping meals.
Speaker 3: That stuff is something that bothers them more than anything else. Yeah. Good, Really, No.
Speaker 2: I was gonna say, I'm like they might.
Speaker 1: That would have been an incredible conversation explaining them this
Speaker 1: concept because I'm sure right like like finally we've mastered
Speaker 1: all these data clients and information and our communications work
Speaker 1: just fine, and you're going to come in and do
Speaker 1: the disruption. I don't know how that conversation would have gone,
Speaker 1: but I'm glad that they're supportive because they see the passion.
Speaker 4: That's yeah. So what's happened now is so they're all
Speaker 4: poor users. Now, my parents, my family, we have poor
Speaker 4: groups and poor chats. So what's happened is they know
Speaker 4: if I get a message on board, I'm kind of
Speaker 4: obligated to reply to improve adoption. And so now the
Speaker 4: frequent see at which I get messages from them has
Speaker 4: just skyrocketed, like hey, what time did you sleep last night?
Speaker 3: Did you eat that stuff?
Speaker 4: And and I kind of have to reply because they
Speaker 4: do this annoying thing where if I don't reply to
Speaker 4: them quick enough, they kind of text me on WhatsApp
Speaker 4: or signal or something like that.
Speaker 5: They know which buttons to push, ess, you know exactly, Yeah,
Speaker 5: after all your parents, all right, so let's before before
Speaker 5: we before we go. Uh, this is a great start
Speaker 5: for you guys, And you know, it's a it's a
Speaker 5: universal problem, right, not just in India where you know,
Speaker 5: to your point, people are collecting their your phone numbers
Speaker 5: for at every possible junction. But privacy is just obviously
Speaker 5: much more than phone numbers, right, Uh, you you're I
Speaker 5: think you would admit that. I mean, you're barely scratching
Speaker 5: the surface with what trying to do with just sport.
Speaker 5: But whether nonetheless as a company number lesson or the
Speaker 5: port protocol, what's your like your long term vision that
Speaker 5: you have in here?
Speaker 4: So the long term vision is I like to think
Speaker 4: of the roadside vendor in in India. So somebody selling you,
Speaker 4: let's say fruit on a roadside cart. All they care
Speaker 4: about is you paying them something, and all you care
Speaker 4: about is getting fruit from them. So the transaction is
Speaker 4: really simple now the way the world is each transaction.
Speaker 4: Let's say I want to buy fruit online. The transaction
Speaker 4: is I give them all this information about me, including
Speaker 4: where I lived, to my phone number, to all this
Speaker 4: information attached to my phone number. I give them my
Speaker 4: biodata just to get buy something from them.
Speaker 3: So same thing with communication, just to connect with somebody.
Speaker 4: In the olden days, it was like you mentioned a
Speaker 4: firm handshake, Anthony, in the olden days, it literally was
Speaker 4: a firm handshake. I introduced myself as a neither. You
Speaker 4: introduce yourself as Anthony firm handscheck, and we're connected. Now,
Speaker 4: I give you so much information about myself in the
Speaker 4: sense of giving you my phone numit just to connect
Speaker 4: with you. So the vision is to kind of regress
Speaker 4: human nature a little bit, to make our digital transactions simpler,
Speaker 4: almost as simple as our physical transactions. So with numberless,
Speaker 4: I think that is something that's achievable. We can make
Speaker 4: connecting some things seem very similar to a firm handshake,
Speaker 4: in that I know your name, you know my name.
Speaker 4: We're connected, We have a communication channel and that's about it.
Speaker 4: You don't know anything else. And I want to expand
Speaker 4: that into other digital places where things become simpler, the
Speaker 4: transactions become simpler, as simple as these roadside when transactions.
Speaker 3: So that's where the broader vision is.
Speaker 4: But I know that's far away, and I know that's
Speaker 4: a hard problem to solve. Sometimes market forces are in
Speaker 4: your direction, sometimes they're not. But like you said, I
Speaker 4: think it's like my professor said in your twenty is
Speaker 4: just do something crazy, work on a crazy problem or
Speaker 4: scarce scenario, don't solve it, and then you can do
Speaker 4: something safer.
Speaker 3: So I just want to try it, try my hand
Speaker 3: at it.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's great.
Speaker 1: So for people who are listening to the podcast, investors
Speaker 1: or anyone, what can they do for you?
Speaker 2: If you have an ask out there, check.
Speaker 3: Out Pard, try out Poard. Become a user who is
Speaker 3: not actively sharing their personal information everywhere. Just start with
Speaker 3: a good personal digital hygiene.
Speaker 4: That's the most you can do for us at this point,
Speaker 4: a couple of months from now, if you believe in
Speaker 4: this movement, if you believe in the technology that we're building,
Speaker 4: and we're a couple of months from now, we're planning
Speaker 4: on raising more resources to kind of put this vision
Speaker 4: at play. That's when I think we would be raising
Speaker 4: more resource in terms of not just money, but connection
Speaker 4: and send doors to be open for us, and there
Speaker 4: they can help us a little bit as well.
Speaker 3: But first, just download port see if this makes sense
Speaker 3: to you, to you as a user.
Speaker 1: That's all right, Anthony anything or.
Speaker 5: Thanks so much, honey for jumping on on a holiday
Speaker 5: in India. So happy sort as they say. So, we'll
Speaker 5: speak to you soon in good luck with everything you do,
Speaker 5: and to you and your team for number less in
Speaker 5: Port and we'll be sure to publish all these details
Speaker 5: on the podcast as well. Thanks any good luck to
Speaker 5: you guys as well. I've been listening to some of
Speaker 5: your content.
Speaker 4: I've been doing a great job, so I'm looking forward
Speaker 4: more content coming up. I just subspect to you guys,
Speaker 4: so I'm just going to keep seeing your content now.
Speaker 3: Yes, weekly, okay, perfect, See you guys.
Speaker 5: Bye Ba