Jim Myers, CTO of Flipside Crypto, on the Intersection of Data and Community, Growing Startups, and Incentives | Ep. 228

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Jim Myers, CTO and Co-Founder of Flipside Crypto, talks about growing successful startups, tips and tricks for growing during crypto winter, and why open source data is so important to the future of blockchain.

About Jim Myers

Jim Myers is the CTO and co-founder of Flipside Crypto. Prior to Flipside, Jim developed the core technology that took products from 0 to 1 at companies such as Mylestone, Pluralsight (IPO), and Smarterer (acquisition). Jim joined Pluralsight in 2014, following the acquisition of Smarterer, a machine learning-based skill assessment company. At Smarterer, Jim was an early engineer that built advanced machine learning technology and enterprise software adopted by Fortune 100 companies.

Jim’s introduction to crypto began shortly before the public launch of Ethereum in 2015 when a group he was part of began tinkering with smart contracts. He co-founded Flipside Crypto in 2017 to help empower crypto communities to create and share data-driven insights on the projects they care most about.

Jim’s passion for building extends to the broader startup community as an angel investor to several local startups, including Broadlume (formerly Adhawk) and LinkSquares. Jim attended Gettysburg College, receiving a B.S. in economics.

Jim Myers gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com. 

Highlights Of The Interview

  • Growing successful startups 
  • Why is open access to data so important to the future of blockchain?
  • Tips and tricks for growing during crypto winter 
  • Web3 = incentive design + human behaviour + software 
  • How Flipside Crypto has grown over the crypto winter

 

 

 

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab 
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We are buzzing as always. Big Leafs win last night. We love to see that. We’ll get into that a little later. And my guest is coming from Boston, our arch nemesis. Today we have Jim Myers, the CTO and Co-Founder of Flipside Crypto. Prior to Flipside Jim developed the core technology that took products from zero to one at companies such as Milestone, Pluralsight which IPO, and Smarterer, which also had a nice acquisition. Jim joined Pluralsight in 2014 following the acquisition of Smarterer, a machine learning based skill assessment company. At Smarterer, Jim was an early engineer that built advanced machine learning technology and enterprise software adopted by Fortune 100 companies. Jim’s intro to Crypto began shortly before the public launch of Ethereum in 2015, when a group he was a part of began tinkering with Smart contracts. Wow, nice and early. We love that he Co-Founded Flipside in 2017 to help empower Crypto communities to create and share data driven insights on the projects they care most about. Jim’s passion for building extends to the broader startup community as an angel investor to several local startups, including Broadlume , which is formerly Adhawk, and LinkSquares. Jim also attended Gettysburg College, receiving a BS in Economics. Jim, pumped to have you on. Welcome to show my friend. 

Jim Myers 
Thanks for having me, Matt. Really excited to be here. 

Matt Zahab 
You have a very cool background. Successful startup after successful startup, not easy to do. You know the recipe for some secret sauce and we love that. We can’t wait to get into that. Walk me through joining Pluralrsight in 2014, obviously getting acquired IPOing. Any stories you have, any lessons you learned? Some of the ingredients in Jim secret sauce. Walk me through the whole jumping into the corporate world and then startup life. What was that all like? 

Jim Myers 
Yeah, I think one of the greatest lessons I’ve taken away from the time at which I started my career at Smarterer and then growing from those companies on is just surrounding yourself with amazing people. People that have skills that complement you, that are going to push you. And so my co founders, actually in my company today, came from those early days from Smarterer, actually I first met my co founder, Dave Balter, he’s the CEO of Flipside. He hired me at Smarterer. He was the CEO there at the time. And I remember he called me up and I never met him. First call I’m getting from him out of the blue, and he says, hey, is this Jim? Yeah, this is Jim. Are you a rock star? And I was like, it’s an odd way to intro. Well, I don’t play guitar, but I can program, so yeah, let’s talk. And so I got my start there. That was a small company at the time, around five people, and we were building some really cool cutting edge tech at the time, using machine learning to develop adaptive test technology. And there were some pretty interesting components of lot product at the intersection of data, product, and community. And I would say the general theme as we’ve built various companies over the years and various products is always finding that intersection of how do you leverage community to basically drive growth, drive distribution to enable your product, and how do you use data in compelling ways? And so we’ve figured out sort of how to do that through different various ecosystems over time. And that plays a pretty crucial role in what we’re doing today at Flipside. 

Matt Zahab 
What got you so intrigued and interested in data like, from the get go? Seems like that’s a recurring theme. What in particular? And obviously for the listeners at home, if you guys haven’t checked out Flipside, it’s just beautiful dashboard after dashboard, just a bunch of beautiful data platforms that make your life and your research 100 times easier. It truly is a stunning product. And I’m not even blowing smoke here, it just is. But what about data got you going so much? 

Jim Myers 
Yeah, so if I rewind all the way to college, my focus in college was around was sort of at the intersection of programming, economics and math. And I focused a lot on experiments, microeconomic based experiments. And data was at the heart of a lot of what these projects were, these research projects that we conducted. And it fascinated me by what you could a reveal about the world, but how you could determine outcomes in various situations through analysis or through data science. And that sort of took me into machine learning and figuring, which is kind of a really predecessor to where we are with AI today, but figuring out how you could predict human behavior and you could predict outcomes based on data. And so when I fast forward eventually to crypto, it was most of the experiments we would design when I was back in college in labs where you’d spend hours, like painstaking hours, figuring out how to control for all the right variables in an environment. And this idea that, wow, on a global stage, you can actually program human behavior and you could run these experiments almost like games on a global setting. And at the foundation of that is Blockchain data is data powers everything from analytics all the way to all the applications that we’re running and developing. 

Matt Zahab 
It just sort of puts my mind in a pretzel. Like when I think about the sheer size of data that is on the internet and then just even specifically on Blockchain, like just crypto, Web3 Blockchain. It’s crazy. I watched a couple of documentaries about Google and Apple and Facebook’s fiber optic wires or whatever you want to call it, going under the ocean. It’s just like, where is all this stuff even stored it? Absolutely mind blowing to me. And then you just brought up AI and machine learning. I’ve sort of been taking a deep dive into AI on the consumer side of things. Yes, that’s in my pay grade, but the coding and the machine learning and everything else in that realm, it’s just it’s way above my pay grade. And like, it’s just so difficult to understand. It’s pretty crazy. Before we get into Flipside, and you really getting into crypto in in 2015 Jim, let’s just buzz on AI for a sec. How crazy has these last couple months been? And again, I’m only 28, but the only time in my life where I felt this type of momentum and sort of revolutionary change was probably in 2021, when the crypto bull market was just on fire and had just a stupid amount of steam and momentum with NFTs DeFi just protocols popping up left, right and center, companies raising eight and nine figures like it was going out of style. What we’ve seen in the last two months is absurd. My whole Twitter feed is filled with it. I’m a product hunt guy. Every single product on product hunt every day is AI related. The tools that are coming out are just incredibly useful. Crazy amounts of utility. Pretty darn easy to use too. What’s your whole take on all this? Because, again, you actually understand the tech behind it. So I’m intrigued to hear your two cent. 

Jim Myers 
Yeah, I mean, I think the rate of acceleration was hard for a lot of people to predict and see, so that certainly caught my attention how quickly we moved. If I look back to some of the things that we were doing in 2013, which were considered cutting edge back then, they look like small toys compared to what we have today. And that rate of change just happens so fast. If you look at, like, GPT-4 and the time it took there to get to that next stage, I always think about and I’ve seen a lot of companies jump on the AI bandwagon the past few months, but I always go back to what is most useful for your users. And so we get asked a lot like, are you integrating AI? And what’s your LLM roadmap? And I’m like, we don’t have a specific AI roadmap. Our roadmap is how do we make the best possible experience for our users, how do we reduce friction for users. In some ways, like, AI is great for that, and we’ll bring that in. And I think what’s interesting about this round of where we’ve gotten to with AI is everyone has access to these tools now as a baseline, where if you rewind back to again, to 2013, a lot of this tech was very proprietary, and so not everyone had access, and it was really difficult to build. But now anyone could get an API key and build on top of open AI. And so I think it sets a new baseline for expectations on what good UX UI is. And so we’ll start to see a new standard being set, I think, across a lot of products. But I also think you have to balance that with being smart about it. Because if you’re using ChatGPT, and you sometimes get that what I call the hallucination effect, where it makes up essentially what seems like a Wikipedia article. And as you start to integrate this stuff into your product, people might not realize that, oh, that’s coming from an AI. And then a bad response becomes the face of your brand. And so it’s really important to figure out, how are you implementing these in actual ways that are useful and they’re not just grabbing a new shiny object that’s out there. 

Matt Zahab 
Yeah, you brought up really good point. That’s something I’ve heard just a stupid amount of times over the last couple of weeks and months. What’s your AI strategy? That was the same as in Q3 Q4 2021, where it was, what’s your Web3 strategy? Every brand, like multinational fortune 100 brands are getting what’s your Web3 strategy? And they’re doing stupid activations just to, hey, we’re on the bandwagon, now that’s happening with AI. You nailed it on the head. It’s crazy to see. 

Jim Myers 
Yeah, it happens every cycle with every new, like hype cycle of some new tech. But I would just say to any brand, any company that’s going down this like, is it actually useful for your users? What problem are you solving for them? Does it move the needle? And if it does, great invest in it doesn’t, then you’re just chasing a shiny object. 

Matt Zahab 
Well said. Let’s go back into the bread and butter here. Let’s get back into crypto. This isn’t the AI news pod, but we do love talking about AI on the Cryptonews Pod. Walk me through your crypto inception story. 2015, you jumped in shortly before the public launch with Ethereum, started tinkering with smart contracts. What was your sort of light bulb moment? What was that AHA like, holy shit, this is for real, I need to mess around with this. 

Jim Myers 
So going back to my I have a background in economics and math and going back to the we used to design these experiments in labs that we would run and you’re essentially designing games that people can participate in. And so my light bulb moment, I think decentralized money is interesting and it has immense implications for the world, but I like to think that there’s this bigger thing that can come about around. How do you coordinate mass groups of people around the world to tackle really hard problems and to tackle big issues really all just through incentive design. And that’s the amazing thing to me. When you look at smart contracts and you look at how you can set up incentive structures, you’re essentially designing games on a global scale with real world consequences that anyone can opt into. And so that was what initially got me tinkering with smart contracts that eventually turned into, as I got further into it, realizing that actually it’s really hard to build these things and it’s really hard to make sense of data. And then using a lot of my expertise in building data systems to try to build data systems on top of Blockchain to make them easier to use and interface with. 

Matt Zahab 
You had one term there that blew my mind incentive design. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard that before, but that is literally. That’s insane. That’s literally the catalyst of growth behind everything. It’s like, why do life revolves around incentives? Why does Matt or Jim do what we choose to do for incentives? It’s all it is, and I’ve never heard that before. That’s crazy. 

Jim Myers 
And incentives are typically given out by a central authority. Even showing up to work and going to work and doing a job is incentive. I sometimes talk about you have Web2 and you have software that you build, and it can be a tool. In Web3, what we’re building is a combination of human behavior and software together, and together that creates an entirely new experience or a type of product. And that’s what’s so unique about Web3. 

Matt Zahab 
Jim, you’re absolutely on a roll right now. I mean, these are some nice one liners. Have you always been the one line king here? 

Jim Myers 
I don’t know. I’m glad that it’s working. Glad that’s helpful. 

Matt Zahab 
So Web3 equals human behavior plus software. Another one which I’ve never heard of before. I love this point as well. Very interesting. Okay, talk to me about Flipside. Why did you guys start Flipside? And for those at home, Flipside is really the intersection of data and community. It just provides beautiful data platforms for users, more specifically analysts, I’d say. But again, there’s a lot of casual users like myself who aren’t analysts. It just gives you beautiful dashboards on dashboards plus platforms, you name it, where you can see what’s going on in real time in a sort of a sexy way as well. So the floor is yours. Why did you and the team create Flipside? 

Jim Myers 
Yeah, I always like to start with our mission when we talk about what we’re doing at Flipside, and that’s to help Blockchain ecosystem succeed. I think often about, like, how are we going to get to the next billion users in crypto? And one of the main reasons you get there is users show up when there’s compelling use cases. Compelling use cases get built when builders are here building and you have more and more builders. But builders today face a lot of friction. And a lot of that friction, in my opinion, comes down to data. And data can be used for all different things, from analytics to actually building DApps or applications. And so our goal is to reduce those barriers of friction with the data platform we’re building and to enable more and more use cases to get built inside of these ecosystems. We have a couple of different product lines that address that, the one that’s been our core for a number of years. I’ll talk first about that. That’s called Community Enabled Analytics. And we partner with a Blockchain foundation to essentially curate their data in an open way. We’ll partner with engineers that are at the foundation that help build the core tech all the way to people that are building protocols on top that we get introductions to. And our goal in that is, how can we make the data look exactly like, say, the docs you’re reading? So if you’re say reading the Uniswap V3 Docs, and you go look at the data, you want those terms and the docs to exactly match so you actually know how to use it. And so that’s the idea of how do you build the most open data platform that humans can understand and they can work with. And on top of that, once you have that data, all sorts of things become possible for these foundations. And we have a large focus on helping them drive acquisition and retention within their ecosystems. And I can get more into that in a bit, which I can go pretty deep on. But the second part of the business then is enterprise data. As we grew the community enabled analytics CA business line, we had companies started showing up and it’s funny, they started showing up, asking and asking for our data, saying, you guys have spent so long building this amazing data platform. Can you just give us access us to that so that we don’t have to start where you began? We can actually start by focusing on our core value, prop our product, right? And for a while we resisted, and then eventually we decided, let’s actually turn that on. And so we’ve turned on that business. And the goal is, how can we be a foundation for other companies that are trying to build inside of these ecosystems? So we’ve moved from not just a supporting individual analysts or builders and ecosystem, but how do you support companies so that they can really start at their idea instead of having to start at the foundation or have the expertise that we have? And so those two lines sort of form this foundation of reducing that friction for builders and then enabling growth in these ecosystems. 

Matt Zahab 
And that’s where the money is too on the enterprise side, it’s always just got to catch those big fish. 

Jim Myers 
Yeah, I mean, it’s on the enterprise side. And we’ve also had a lot of success with our CA business in partnering with the Blockchains themselves. Those have been very fruitful relationships. 

Matt Zahab 
Yeah, you got to walk into that. I know before the show, you and I were talking about the crazy partnerships. How do you guys go through that? Like, walk me through the partnership process from sort of first meeting to finding the value props to finding the long term non transactional relationship goal. Like, walk me through that whole process. 

Jim Myers 
I always like to say our goal is to become a pillar of the ecosystem. And so what does it mean to become a pillar? You’re not in a transactional relationship. We’re here for the long term. We spend a significant amount of upfront costs investing in these ecosystems. And so we have this saying internally, the pane of glass. What’s the pane of glass on an ecosystem? Is it worthwhile us investing our time in that ecosystem? And so we’ll choose ecosystems that we believe have long term potential. We won’t partner with just anyone. When we do partner, we typically like to show value up front. So we actually run our own bare metal infrastructure, and we will set up our own validator nodes. We will stake our own funds to those. And then we’ll go to them and say, hey, look, we are actually running a node. We’re supporting your ecosystem. We also have a team that’s involved in governance, so we might also get involved in some governance stuff and try to help out. We’re helping make sense of proposals that are out there, but we like to show our support to the ecosystem in advance, and then we’ll work through that deal over time. Essentially, what we are seeking in these deals is to become a pillar in your ecosystem, to do everything we do from curation to helping you with acquisition and retention. We want a large delegation, and we’ll take that delegation 50% we split it 50 50. So 50% of rewards come back to Flipside as revenue. The other 50% we will use for campaigns to help grow your ecosystem. 

Matt Zahab 
It’s a pretty darn hard offer to turn down. 

Jim Myers 
When it gets going, it works extremely effectively, but there has to be trust on both sides, and we’re building a relationship over time, and so it takes some time to get going. But for the partners some of the bigger partners we have, such as FLOW and Solana, it’s worked extremely well. 

Matt Zahab 
And that’s a part of crypto that’s so paramount to success as well. You need to sort of piggyback off of each other’s, I guess community is the right word, but really, just reach is probably the more correct word. Right? It’s like by you guys partnering with these bigger chains and protocols, they are introducing all of their fans, their community, their users to you guys and vice versa. And it’s like, for lack of better terms, just a big old circle jerk. But it’s really what needs to happen in order for crypto to grow. 

Jim Myers 
Yeah. And I mean, there has to be trust to do that, right? Like you’re kind of putting your reputation online as you introduce your entire community to us, and vice versa as we get our community involved in your ecosystem. 

Matt Zahab 
Yeah, now, very good point. Jim we ought to take a quick break and give a huge shout out to our sponsor of the show PrimeXBT. The team at Cryptonews loves the team at PrimeXBT. We’ve been friends for a hell of a long time. As they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. After making your first deposit, 50% of that first deposit that is 50% of that first deposit will be credited to your account as a bonus that can be used as additional collateral to open positions. The promo code is CRYPTONEWS50. That’s CRYPTONEWS50 to take advantage of this offer and receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Now Jim, you are a great follow on Twitter. One thing that I got to ask, I know you guys have tons of APIs that you’ve created for users. What’s the whole mushroom ethos that you and the team have going? It’s in your Twitter bio. I believe you guys have it’s somewhere in my notes here. I want to call it the Mushroom API or something. What’s the whole thing with mushrooms? You guys just throwing a couple down the chute and getting trippy and making some beautiful code? What’s going on here? 

Jim Myers 
We initially launched our SDK or API last July. We like to have some fun with our brands. In previous companies, we’ve done similar things, and we found just things like that really resonate with the community. It’s much more fun than just saying we have API and SDK. Shroom DK. It kind of works. 

Matt Zahab 
Yeah, I see. 

Jim Myers 
And if you think about mushrooms, there’s a great documentary on Netflix about mushrooms. These mushrooms, or fungus have this massive network, global network that communicates actually around the world. It’s pretty fascinating. And so we kind of thought about it as like, well this SDK, this API, is sort of like powering all of these apps. It’s like a building block. That’s enabling all these apps to grow. And then there’s a lot of fun things you could do brand wise on top of that, with various mushrooms and stuff. So it’s kind of where it started, but yeah, some fun lore. 

Matt Zahab 
No, it’s great. I love the analogy about mushrooms having such a wide sort of network of the world as well. That’s world class. And honestly, the mushroom emoji, it just sort of pops like it stands out too, even on Twitter. It’s a good one anyways. And all the stuff you put out, what I was getting to about talking about your Twitter, you have been vocal about open access to data being so important in the future of Blockchain. No more closed doors, open and free everything. You guys have spent five years on data engineering to make pipes and structure the data. Heck, you have a community of 32,000 analysts, which is absolutely absurd. Yeah, you guys just focus on that from day one. Why has that been such a focus? And why do you think that that is so paramount to success for the future of Blockchain? 

Jim Myers 
If you look at other industries, most data is pretty closed off or is controlled by some central authorities that allow you to access that. And Blockchain is unique in the sense that anyone can tap into a network. The unfortunate thing is Blockchains, or maybe fortunate, but Blockchains are optimized for peer to peer communication to get to ultimately consensus, and so they’re not optimized for human readable, legible data. And so while it is open, ironically, it’s not open to most people. And I believe that, again, going back to our mission, if we’re going to enable that next wave of users to really enter the space, is we have to open up this data to enable the builders to come in and build on top of it. And so that’s sort of a core tenet of like, we can actually move the needle on helping this space get to where it needs to go by providing that open data platform and providing not just good data, but good tooling on top of that platform to enable various use cases. I think it’s really critical. If we’re going to drive growth, then we should support it. Now in terms of, is all of that data free? And whatnot I think there should always be a high bar of what is free to enable tinkering, enable understanding, investigation. And then I think what we’ve started to see as companies approach us to say, hey, I get that, that’s free, but want to build, like, a serious, scaled up company on top of your stuff, like, can I pay you? Because I don’t feel comfortable not paying you, and I’m going to form the foundation of my company on top of it. So we’ve started to also move into that realm as well. Like, okay, how can we support some serious players that are entering these ecosystems on top of our data platform? 

Matt Zahab 
So interesting. I’ve had some great notes here. You guys tend to do a lot of things the right way. Another thing that you guys are very passionate on is DYOR, which is such a classic and cliche term in the space, which stands for do your own research. We’ve all FOMOed, and we’ve all Aped into some stupid shit. Well, I mean, I don’t know if you have. I definitely have. We all have. And pardon my French there. I mean, this isn’t a kid friendly show, so I guess you can drop a couple of curse words every once in a while. But DYOR, do your own research. Very common term in crypto investing and trading, which refers to literally analyzing on chain data and seeing which ecosystems are healthy, seeing which ones are unhealthy, which ones you should avoid or jump into, really, it’s quite simple. But again, I’ve been at this many times where I see people that I trust and they shill something, or perhaps not even shill, just give a good point in regards to why they think this could be something useful or this could have some utility. And then I just go, what’s a grand or two? Throw it in goes to shit, money goes away. Why are you in the team so into DYOR? And why is it such an empowering concept of personal agency when it comes to investing in crypto? 

Jim Myers 
I think it’s the first time anyone has real time transparency into what is actually occurring under the hood. Again, I said previously, most data, particularly financial data, is very centralized and controlled, certainly not always real time. Think about quarterly statements that come out from companies. And so this DYOR concept is anyone has the ability to investigate what is happening and tell the world about it. And we’ve seen that does a number of things, but I think one of the biggest things it does, if done the right way, it holds people accountable, which is something we certainly need in this space there’s plenty of scams that give this space a bad name despite all the progress and the innovation that’s happening here. There’s tons of examples on Twitter where people have done analysis on our platform, broken stories about various hacks, from small hacks to major things like Terra or to FTX or to even if there’s rumors from time to time on okay, this thing is happening with Binance or this is happening with this exchange, you’re squashing rumors that might not be true. And so it gives that agency to the individual to actually show what is real and what’s not real. And everything is verifiable and provable on chain, which is amazing. 

Matt Zahab 
It’s really the only industry in the world, to my knowledge, in which that’s the case. I think about public markets, traditional public markets. You don’t have access to shit until months after it happens. It’s crazy. So very interesting. Jim, another thing I’d love for you to get into, and we had a couple listeners and team members who are curious about this, how you guys differ from Dune. Now it seems like you and Dune both have a stranglehold on the market. I mean, my apologies to any other sort of companies who are also building beautiful data platforms for users and analysts, but these are the only two that I use and that I’m truly cognizant of. So I apologize in advance, but how do you guys differ from Dune on the consumer facing side of things, it looks like you guys both do very similar things. Give it to us straight up. How do you guys differ? 

Jim Myers 
Yeah, I think Dune I would first say I think Dune is building an amazing platform as well. I have a lot of respect for what they’re doing. I think there’s the macro, how we differ, which is I think we business wise, we have very different approaches to what we’re doing. As I’ve mentioned before, about kind of our whole relationship with the foundation to bring it down to the individual persona. I think where we do compete here, the individual analyst on the platform, or builder, perhaps the platforms have some similarities. I would say that one of the major differences why a lot of people come to us is for cross chain exposure to data. So we certainly have a lot of EVM data as those doing. But we also branch out to a lot of other ecosystems through our CA partnerships. So things like FLOW, Solana, Near, the whole IBC ecosystem, we’re doing a lot of work there. And so that enables some really interesting things when you start to think about identifying individuals on chain and how those individuals move across different chains as one entity. And so we’re doing a lot around what we call cross chain curation of data and then exposing those tables, which are a combination of work that comes out of from our analytics team and also our data science team. So there’s some data differences. The other thing is, I would say tooling. We’ve built a lot of really powerful infrastructure over the past five years. We expose a very small amount of that infrastructure today to the General Republic. We will be exposing more and more of that over the coming months and year. And the idea is, and I wrote a post recently about this, I think a lot of people are really good at coming up with good data, but most data is useless despite how good it is. Because if the data isn’t made accessible in a way that matches your use case, then you really can’t use it. And so we obsess over, Okay, like what are you trying to build? Are you trying to just do some are you trying to do a research report? Are you trying to build an entire product? Are you trying to build to even specific applications? Are you building AML software? Are you building tax applications? Are you building trading applications? Okay, if you’re building these things, that means you’re going to need this architectural solution with the data. These are the solutions we have that you can plug in all built off of our data layer, but there are different ways to access it. And so we have right now exposed our data studio where you can query the data, you can visualize it. We have an API and SDK. We have Data Shares or a partnership with Snowflake which enable you to use our entire ecosystem or entire platform as your foundation. But then we have some other interesting products coming out like Live Query, which enable you to query a Blockchain node in real time using SQL. So those enable a bunch of real time use cases essentially with zero latency because you’re talking directly to a Blockchain node. And so we have all of these sort of access points that we’re working on. And I’m sure Dune will come up with some great ones too. They’re smart, innovative people. And I think competition is good. It keeps each company improving and delivering for the customer. But yeah, I think we have a pretty amazing platform. And so if you haven’t checked it out, just check it out. 

Matt Zahab 
I appreciate the candor there. Jim, also come on, do your boy a favor. Break some of these releases and product launches on the Cryptonews Pod. You got anything good for us over the next couple of months? At least maybe a couple of hints, teasers. 

Jim Myers 
One of the big ones we have coming, well, two of them we’ll be announcing in the coming weeks, is our Data Shares partnership, which essentially enables you to have our entire data lake warehouse in your own environment. So you can build your own products on top of it, you can combine it with your own data. You don’t have to build any data pipelines, manage nodes and whatnot. And then the second piece is something we call Live Query, which I just mentioned. And Live Query is kind of born out of this idea of we kept getting these questions about, how do I get lower latency data for X application? Any sort of data will always have some latency involved. And we figured, well, the best way to get to zero latency would actually be going directly to a Blockchain node, getting the data immediately out of the database on the Blockchain or on the node. And so Live Query lets you query a node directly with SQL and provides zero latency access to that data. And so that’s really powerful. There’s no one else offering that’s taken a lot of work on our side to get to that point. Technically, under the hood, it’s been powering a lot of what we do, and so what we’ve been doing is productizing that now for the general public to use. 

Matt Zahab 
I love that. Jim, you’ve been on fire. I know we’re getting a little tight for time here. A couple more questions before we wrap up. You guys have continued to grow over the Crypto Winter, and this is something that’s not easy. It’s not easy to stay focused when everything continues to be red and going down. How did you and the team do it? Any tidbits of advice would be absolutely lovely, but at the end of the day, you guys just keep shipping and it’s not easy to do. What’s the secret sauce there? 

Jim Myers 
Yeah, I think any company that’s growing faces you face your typical operational scaling challenges. But I think in the crypto market in particular, like you called out with the Crypto Winter, it introduces what I call the casino dimension, which can be a huge distraction. Even during bull markets, even bear markets, everything goes down and it can be pretty solid and grim, but during bull markets, everything’s going up and it’s a real distraction for the team. So I look at it in both ways, from both sides, and I think what we always try to reiterate is for every product line we’re offering, what problems are you actually solving for the users in front of you? And are you reducing friction for the users? Trying to keep the team focused on clear goals and objectives during those times, trying to keep people not distracted by what’s going on in the market, which I think is both true of up markets and down markets.  

Matt Zahab 
Yeah. Well said. Jim, we have a segment on the show called the hot take factory. You and I jump in, put our big knee high boots on, let a couple of hot takes fly. Preferably not crypto or Blockchain related, but give me a couple of hot takes health, wealth, happiness, food, politics, sports, space, AI, ML, you name it. Give me a couple of Jim Myers hot takes let’s let them fly. 

Jim Myers 
I think we talked a little bit about AI in the beginning, but I cannot tell you how many times a day I’m scrolling on Twitter and I just get like, the future is AI and everything is AI. You need to stop what you’re doing and implement these ten things or do these things. I think AI is particularly overhyped right now and we’re going to see again, going back to what I said in the beginning, you need to figure out how you’re going to integrate AI to build better products for your customers, not adopt AI for the sake of AI. Yeah, that’s one of the big ones I would think of right now. 

Matt Zahab 
It is true. I do think it will take a lot of jobs, like, even just sort of as a bit of an agency owner, having different people do certain things that I can now replace in AI. One thing for me that I’ve never been able to do before is I don’t know how to code, but If I were to get a contract, when someone’s like, hey, do you have a developer? I can now take half of that developer’s rate and literally, by just doing some pretty efficient prompt engineering into GPT-4. I can get some pretty darn good code. And now this developer does not have to actually come up with the code. He or she can just sort of review it and make it more efficient and then fire away and implement it and ship it. So that’s like one area that I think is extremely interesting. And then there’s the one part. I think the quickest sort of industry that will get taken out is customer service. Although a lot of online customer service reps I feel like if you can actually categorize and implement your internal data in an efficient way, why would you need a customer support rep anymore? Like, everything that they could possibly have is there, plus a bit of common sense, which you can get from GPT-4 or 3.5 or heck, even 3. It’s done. That’s my one easy one that I see where it’s like all these e-commerce companies, software companies, whatever, and almost every company now, every public facing company, consumer facing company, does have like an intercom chat box on the bottom right or bottom left of it. And I just feel like all those are going to be gone so pretty darn quick.

Jim Myers 
Yeah, I agree. I mean, it has a specific spot and a place where it really thrives and I think there’s a lot of doom and gloom about it’s going to replace everything. I think it will have a pretty big impact. But I also think that there’s diminishing returns in certain areas. 

Matt Zahab 
Yeah, the hype is insane, though. My Twitter hasn’t been taken over like this literally since almost close to two years ago today, to be honest, with Web3.  

Jim Myers 
Yeah, it’s been pretty amazing to see, particularly in a short period of time that we’ve witnessed it.

Matt Zahab 
Bananas. Jim, what a treat man. I truly did learn a crazy amount this podcast. I have some great notes and I hope the listeners do as well, which I will definitely be going over and some just some phenomenal one liners. Really appreciate you and the team for setting this up. Appreciate you for coming on. Before you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you and Flipside Crypto online and on socials?  

Jim Myers 
Yeah, thanks for having me, Matt. Anyone listening can find me on @JimMyersTech on Twitter. And flipsidecrypto.xyz check out the tooling that we’re building. 

Matt Zahab 
As always, folks, I will include everything in the show notes too, so anything Flipside or Jim related will be in the show notes on all of your favorite podcast players. Jim, thanks again, man. Truly appreciate it. Can’t wait to have you on for round two. 

Jim Myers 
Yeah. Thanks, Matt. See ya. 

Matt Zahab 
Folks, what an episode with Jim Myers, CTO of Flipside Crypto, some crazy one liners and some crazy distillation of some complex topics. We’d love to see it. Huge shout out to Jim and the team for coming on and dropping Alpha bombs left, right and center. If you guys enjoyed this one, and I hope you did, please do subscribe, it would mean the world to my team, and I speaking of the team, love you guys. Thank you for everything. Justas my amazing sound editor appreciate you. And back to the listeners. Love you guys. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy, and happy. Bye for now and we’ll talk soon.