Layer 2 Stage | In Conversation With Amazon Web Services' Alex Matsuo

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   it is my absolute pleasure to introduce our head of Business Development Lei to talk about various different interesting topics um where Amazon web service is involved with Alex matsuo and therefore please welcome to stage lelay and Alex Muro all right well thanks everyone it's so great to see that the near con app is a huge hit so keep claiming your en con tokens uh thanks so much Phil for the

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   introduction um very excited today to have a fireside chat with Alex matsuo who comes from uh Amazon web services which is one of the Premier Cloud infra in the world um you know from Amazon which is a company that doesn't need any kind of introduction so let me pass it over to Alex to give us a few uh you know comments about you know how how he was brought into the web three world all right thanks uh thanks D so um the first question that I usually have is how come

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   one of the most centralized actor in the world player in the world Amazon is doing something in a decentralized world and I'm going to try to explain what we do and for who we try to do that um I've been in the space for five six years now so I'm neither an ogi nor an uie uh and the reason I used to be at okx so from the crypto exchange perspective and the reason why I join a more centralized player is because I believe that there

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   is a space for more decentralization more ownership more transparency but I'm not a maximalist I think there's a spectrum and we come from a very centralized world now we have this amazing decentralized capabilities let's try to find the middle ground so what AWS does in the web fre space there's two areas one products and services in blockchain and two business growth for the builders on the product side whether you are doing some running your nodes

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   caring data on uh uh on chain for any transactions if you are doing some staking some tokenization we are helping you and the projects to build and co-build together the solutions for for you so that's one thing on the business growth side we are really here I would say to support the growth of the whole ecosystem and any startups any projects early stage seeds preed run a that are trying to grow in

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   the web ecosystem we are helping them in three areas one to raise funds so if you're trying to raise funds we are facilitating some intros to VCS Angels corporate investors to go to market Business Development so if you are looking to find some Partners whether they commercial Partners strategic Partners we have a lot of programs for that as well and third more around visibility and marketing but maybe we

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   can touch more details later on yeah no that's great so it's a really great overview and intro um so maybe going back to kind of am uh Amazon web services is this um glue and um sitting in the cross-section between a lot of the web 2 Giants um but being a web 3 company there what are some of the uh most commonly you know asked questions that you see from the web 2 Enterprise side and what are the use cases that they want to see or how do they think about like how can I enter so not only

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   the web to but the traditional corporate the big Enterprise of this world there's not a single week where they don't come to us and say we want to get the most benefits of web three we have an in Innovation lab or innovation department but we don't know how to start we don't know who to talk to what are the some proof of concept what are the benefits sometimes for our users and this is where we try to put in connection and

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   some make some relationship between those big players and the players from this the the start s and the projects and the builders in this ecosystem so without giving too much nonpublic example but we have the Nike the Starbucks Adidas of this world uh whenever they try to launch some new line of product or Services web tree related whether it's loyalty programs to nft whether it's tokenization web tree gaming then we try to introduce them the

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    top five top 10 existing projects in the market Mar in web3 who are already doing something similar in that space and then facilitating some kind of collaboration between those two worlds web two and web 3 um I think one and 12 months 18 months ago a lot of the web tree players that didn't want to be associated with traditional players or Web Two Worlds things have changed uh obviously and now it's quite the opposite a lot of the web stre Builders

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    are asking to be Associated and collaborate and talk to the big corporate of this world for a proof of concept or to build something together yeah perfect um so yeah speaking of that um near is a vibrant ecosystem of many projects and Builders who are building specific use cases many of which are very very applicable to many of these big Enterprises like loyalty reward nfts uh fals um token gate um so I would love to hear more about the AWS emerging um

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    accelerator and how we could work more closely um so we also have a great program with Horizon which really focuses on incubating um many of these projects and and working on you know how do we help a lot of our web 3 developers with their goto Market strategy um with their product design but also like how can we you know facilitate finding them some of the clients that could be helpful for the products and PCs that they're building right so um indeed we have an emerging Tech accelerator which

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    comprises all the big buzzwords uh gen llms machine learning and web free blockchain crypto because all the big corporates and the ventures the investors are asking to combine those disruptive technology in one group so they can present it and almost have a one United Team behind this disruptive Technologies and why we love so much near Horizon is because this is really the beginning of

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    everything where everything starts what I mean by that is you are an incubator very early stage project you have cohorts we are happy to announce that we collaborate with you and this near Horizon and whoever is part of these cohorts can have access to a specific I would say access to W uh through your team and then suddenly you are part of our ecosystem not only from a credit perspective which is important because

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    when you early stage startup every cost count but also from a program perspective so suddenly if you are part of this near Horizon cohort you will leverage all our services and programs in terms of fundraising go to market Business Development um potentially co-build a proof of concept and a product together together and at one point when you get a little bit more match some kind of visibility and

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    marketing and PR that we would do together I mean some of the projects that are building on near we are doing things together from the very early stage like Pike to more mature like calimero or sweatcoin economy are some of the example that we are happy to collaborate with through the near uh ecosystem great to hear um so so uh AWS web3 team is you know hous within this huge um you know kind of AWS broader

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    cloud services and Amazon um how do you uh I guess how do you navigate that as somebody who works um also within a big uh company that's um pushing the web three angle I guess when you are when you work in a big corporation which The Core Business business is not web three uh there are always uh I shouldn't yeah challenges or back and forth uh web3 is not the main business of Nike of Amazon

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    of Starbucks um but definitely we need to push and at the end of the day is the same as what we always hear from all the corporates is what is the benefits and the real use case for the end users this is the number one team that we get now it's really all about how do you abstract all the complexity of web three I don't want to most of the big corporate or even the investors now when they have the first discussion with a web stre project they don't want to hear

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    about wallets transaction ID or those ZK rollups account abstra abstraction what they want to hear is what is the real value and the benefits that you can provide and how do you enhance the user experience uh how do you maximize the user interface Bas and how do you make it as easy as possible so we talk about web to authentification email recovery uh those kind of uh things that again 18 months ago maybe people didn't want to hear about it but at the end of the day

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    this is really where we going and at least where our big Corporation and including Amazon is trying to do is really make it as easy and simple as possible hide the wires abstract all the complexity and just make it easy for the end user one of the most successful nft initiative or Pro program whatever you want to call it is Reddit they un boarded tens of millions of users who minted an nft on wallet on Reddit without knowing they minted an nft on

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    the wallet because everything was abstracted and that was one of the most successful use case and we see more and more I would say Direction in uh in the abstraction of complexity great um you mentioned that you were at okx before and um you're obviously at Amazon web services I would love to hear more about kind of your experience working at a crypto native firm versus a crypto um group within a a larger firm um very very different uh

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    especially I mean okx is uh has been around for 10 years one of the first exchanges uh I would say the biggest difference it's when you are at okx you make the news you are the one who one of the people who make the news obviously not the only one but uh and things are very uh fast uh whenever you want to implement something uh a couple of calls and it happens obviously when you are part of a web stre team within a corporate like Amazon is very different

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    you consume the news you see what happens in the market sometimes with a little bit of delay or not and then you try to implement things with few layers of approvals mechanism processes uh but I mean that that's part of the the industry right uh you also have a whether you like it or not some kind of reputational uh risk when you navigate the space uh and uh that's why things are more conservative when you come from

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    a big Corporation absolutely um what about kind of the you know the crypto industry has been in um obviously the uh bull markets and we're kind of in a uh bare Market hopefully heading out soon uh what are some of the kind of different Trends you've seen from the places you've been uh especially at AWS one thing especially if you look forward right um one big differ difference that we see now compared to maybe the previous bare Market four years ago or three four years ago is

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    that now most of the big Corporation are having initiatives in the web stre space uh you even have the CEO of Black Rock one of the largest asset manager y he became the CMO of Bitcoin suddenly talking about tokenization Bitcoin and so this is real a lot of big signs that definitely the big players are are in the space which we see three big use cases where people are interested one more on the financial side so tokenization of re

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    World assets uh there are some reports saying that in few years 20% of all the assets will be tokenized on chain which represent one trillion uh sorry 10 trillion 20 trillion potential Market uh crossb payment is a big one whether you go with cbdc or you go with a stable coin that's another whole debate we see a lot of loyalty programs through nft that the big retail brands are working on when you think about the Loyalty program it hasn't changed for 30 40

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    years uh if you have a 5% of retention or or adoption you're happy now with the implementation of the web tree loyalty is the other way around your community wants more and wants more interaction and more drops and more things from the NF so that's the second thing and the third one is web gaming I know there's a lot of barriers and challenges still existing the the quality of the game and and how the blockchain can be uh um I would say uh

28. 14:40

    scalable in a lot of cases but the way the the gaming industry is 200 billion traditional gaming 200 billion Market it's more than music and movies combined right that's that that's the First Data the second data is how the business model of those G gaming industry works is that 7 up to 70% of the revenue are captured and kept by the middlemen Publishers game Publishers if you put those two data in the web Tree World suddenly the 70% are

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    not captured by a middl med but redistributed within the ecosystem within the players within the creators and so these 200 billion markets could explode even more because suddenly you don't need few big names uh and big games um Creator and I don't know 10 millions of players to be profitable because it's a healthier economy 10,000 players is enough to sustain and to be sustainable

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    within the game ecosystem uh and so we can see already a lot of initiatives with hundreds or thousands of new creators going into the space of web tree gaming um and even the tradition additional players like e Sports Ubisoft Square Enix are also implementing some um some web three projects in a way so that's uh three areas tokenization crossborder payment nft through loyalty through nft and web3 gaming where we see a lot of Demands at least from our

31. 16:16

    perspective that's a really great overview um I guess maybe we could go back to touching more on aws's web 3 Services um obviously your cores the cloud infra which near also is a huge um user of uh but would love to learn more about activate U Marketplace partnership program and and what that might mean for you know all the builders and Founders out there um Alla programs are dedicated first for the early stage Builders

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    projects and startups so whether you are looking to raise some funds even preed seeds if you are looking to start a business from ideation to proof of concept then the first commercial partner first tegic partners then you scale then you have investors or even make some kind of visibility and co-build something this is some somewhere where we really happy to talk to you to talk to the community and you

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    would be surprised because not everything is public but we are already co-building things with very early stage startups just because there are great talents out there one thing that I may say whether it's um a good talk or not I don't know but we we are talking with absolutely amazing Builders tech people fantastic brilliant sometimes there's a little bit lack of selling uh capabilities or business Acumen uh so when they try to raise money uh even if they have the best tech solution they

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    are lacking Sometimes some presentation skills or or maybe business wordings to raise money or to secure a commercial partner and this is also where we are happy to help them uh not only obviously from a pitch perspective from a presentation perspective but also introducing them together to investors to be cooporate uh to just other partners within the ecosystem sometimes uh from a business perspective I would say

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    to help them grow and help showcase how talented and how the amazing solution that are already out there uh just need to be sold sometimes in a different way yeah um so speaking of the builders and Founders we have a lot in our audience today um we love to hear kind of your words of wisdom or advice for them um in you know how like how to best navigate the waters right now or what are the some of the common mistakes akes that

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    you see on on top of what you mentioned which is that many you know might be great Tech Founders uh but may need to you know figure out a more detailed go to market strategy or how do I pitch it to you know my end uh customers or investors in yeah um be resilient uh don't give up after a first no what all all the investors at least from a VC perspective or even the angel they tell us we invest in the people who are some

37. 19:28

    times harassing us in a smart way it doesn't mean uh being rude or anything but if they see someone quitting after two no then maybe they don't have the resilience so be persistent sometimes being a a Founder is also being brave enough to be wrong at the beginning long enough to be right at some point uh Jeff Bezos to talk about Amazon when he first wanted to raise for Amazon he wanted to raise couple of millions he ended up with $80

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    uh commitment uh and at the end of the day he pushed he pushed and he was able to succeed and sometimes even if you don't push in one area you can pivot you mentioned I was at okx the founder star he started with doing Bento boxes uh which is very different and suddenly by uh I would say iterating the ideas and challenging himself having a lot of discussion he was able to create okx I

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    think even near he started as a AI company right Singularity is near this is how it came uh so uh there was an interesting pivot and a successful one um the second big advice is that 90% of the startups succeed year one survive year 1 80% survive year two even more than half survive year five but at the end of the day only 10% are able to have a successful exit or a successful long-term story and how why what does it mean you alone you can build very fast at the beginning but

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    this is together you can build far and you can go far and collaboration and being part of ecosystem like near Horizon and at one point hopefully AWS ecosystem as well this is where is going to bring you to the next level and to the long-term success you don't want to be the 90% that succeed year one you want to be the 10% that succeed in the long run and it's the the fruit that

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    you're going to harvest 5 10 years from now starts with collaboration and Partnerships today hopefully uh with us absolutely well thank you so much Alex thanks for being a great audience I think those were great words of wisdom to end the panel on thank you thank you