Annakate Ross
Hey everybody and welcome to the Half Geek Half Human podcast, where we explore the intersections between technology, business, and life. I’m Annakate Ross, a project manager here at Atiba. I’m joined by my co-host Joey Baggett, and he’s going to introduce our episode today. We have a really special one planned with some clients and friends of Atiba over at Hashed Health. Take it away, Joey.
Joey Baggott
We have a couple of people here – Mr. John Bass and Les Wilkinson. John is a graduate of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the Founder and CEO of Hashed Health, which is headquartered here in Nashville. He is an internationally recognized author and speaker, mostly on blockchain decentralized healthcare technology. He’s the co-author of ‘Blockchain and Healthcare Care Innovations that Empower Patients Connect Professionals and Improve Care’. He’s also a trail runner and runs some ultra-running with one of our c-suite people here at Atiba. The same goes for our other guest today, Les Wilkinson. He is the Chief Development Officer at Hashed Health and a graduate of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville – Go Vols! He has been in health tech since about 2012, did some law in Denver, and is also an ultrarunner and a venture capitalist. He’s invested in businesses and heard countless pitches throughout the years.
Today we’re going to talk about a really cool topic, which is Web3, blockchain, decentralized internet. All these terms and technology – what do they mean? We’re going to try to talk through all of that today and get confused together at some point. There are a lot of topics that go into this realm, but we’re going to go a little bit into the history of Web1 and Web2, which is where we are now. But we’re quickly stepping into the world of Web3, so don’t worry if, after this episode, you can’t quite grasp what Web3 is. It’s a complicated subject, but we’re hoping that Les and John can help shed some light on it here. So, welcome Les and John. We’re glad to have you on the show today.
Les Wilkinson Thanks Joey great to be here.
John Bass Thank you so much.
Joey Baggott
So, we’re going to get right into some questions. Annakate, do you want to lead it off and talk to these guys and try to help us learn a little bit?
Annakate Ross
We would start right at the top by defining what Web3 is, and maybe even higher than that, why is this so difficult for people to understand? When we were preparing for this, Joey and I were kind of laughing that this seems like a topic that needs to be explained to people over and over. So, give us a definition and the background for Web3.
John Bass Les you want to go first?
Les Wilkinson
Yeah, it’s interesting when you talk about blockchain and Web3, it’s like asking someone what the value of the internet is – it depends on who you ask and the context. So, what is Web3? I tend to simplify it. The core value of what we’re trying to achieve, when I think of Web3, are two things: the behavior change resulting from contributions made to the platform and the ability to own, control, participate, and have special rights emerging from those contributions. What does that mean? For example, with Twitter, all of us get on Twitter and supply content, and the value exchange we receive is the ability to communicate with others. However, Twitter built a profitable business on top of that by selling ads. We don’t directly benefit from that, other than continued use of the platform. So, one core value proposition of Web3 is having users who contribute to the platform also have an ownership stake, a voice, and control of governance on how the platform is developed and will continue. This is a critical difference and where a lot of value can be unlocked, but it’s also where things get complicated. How does governance really work? For example, on Twitter, what can users control or vote on, such as the CEO or the look and feel of the platform? Playbooks for these things are still being written.
Annakate Ross
Right, and the way you’re describing how Twitter is currently functioning and the way it works is that users submit content to the platform, and that’s how the whole ecosystem works. That’s Web2, right? That’s how we currently exist in Web2, and so in Web3, there’s decentralization, but then also instead of just the central players making any kind of receiving value from that, the individual contributors can also receive value, which is a big difference. Am I understanding that correctly?
Les Wilkinson
For receiving value, on this page that we reference, you got it. And so, the other piece that I consider to be a core value proposition is what Chris Dixon at Andreessen Horowitz always uses as he describes Blockchain in general as well as Web3, which is the ability for a protocol, software, or a platform to make commitments that you can count on. So, here’s the thing that happens all the time, so we’ll stick with Twitter. Okay, so Twitter can say, “Look, you know, you get on the platform, you contribute your content, and it’s just a communications platform. We’re never going to use your data for anything else.” Well, they can change their mind if they want to, and so provided they’re doing it above board, they can change their mind, and maybe I’ve built my business on top of that communication platform, and so I’ve made lots of investments, and so my options are to take a model that doesn’t work for me anymore or leave it. So, one of the core value propositions is having users own, control, and govern the platform. It’s not going to be changed unless a sufficient critical mass of those similarly situated users decide that’s the direction that the platform should take. So, the ability for the platform, and the software really, to make commitments that can be relied on.
Joey Baggott
I would be curious. You mentioned Twitter. I kind of want to stick with Twitter just because that’s where we are. Is there any way to translate the way Twitter is today in the Web2 to Web3? Like how Twitter could adapt into Web3? And I’ll take an infamous line from a great philosopher, Michael Scott, and say “Explain it to me like I’m five.”
Les Wilkinson
Well, I think you start with a tokenization strategy. So instead of the platform being owned by shareholders as it is now, it becomes owned by token holders, and tokens are issued to people who make positive contributions to the platform. The token can be designed in any way you want, but proper token design is meant to encourage network effects across the platform. What does that mean? I think the way to understand it is to imagine a community of people living together. What if people had direct equity in their community? How would it change their behavior? Would they vote more? Would they be more thoughtful about who they vote for? Would they support more civic organizations, public benefits, and public education because they have a direct economic incentive to do so? I think that’s one way of thinking about how this would work on Twitter. Contributors to Twitter would receive value in exchange for positive contributions to the platform. What could that mean? It could mean that they go out and find bots that are inappropriately using the platform and report them, which would be something I would find valuable on Twitter.
Joey Baggott Okay.
Annakate Ross Cool.
John Bass
Yeah, I think the key thing here is that Web3 is a new version of the internet that adds the property of ownership. That’s what’s new. You’ve never been able to own a digital asset before, whether it’s an image like an NFT or any type of digital asset that’s represented and tracked on a blockchain. So the blockchain and the principles of Web3 enable that type of digital ownership, and it opens up a whole new design space around how you organize a company or provide services to a community of individuals. It creates an embedded incentive for adoption that the world has never seen before. So I think it’s the ownership economy and creator economy that’s created through Web3 that’s created this whole new design space that people are just starting to explore.
Annakate Ross
Yeah, so this is all really helpful. So the one question I had is, are the creators and individuals who own the digital assets the ones who will benefit the most from Web3 or will it be the companies?
Les Wilkinson Almost.
Annakate Ross Or perhaps both.
John Bass
So I think ultimately it’ll benefit both, but at the heart of Web3 is the ability to reward the community for their contributions in a way that’s not happening in Web2. So, whether it’s Twitter or Uber, imagine relaunching Uber where all the drivers are owners of Uber, rather than a centralized company owning it or rebuilding Twitter, Google or any of the big Web2 companies where the users are rewarded for their contributions. So, instead of having these centralized organizations with an insatiable need to collect and extract data to satisfy Wall Street and others, you flip that upside down. The consumers, the participants in the network, the community, receive the value, and the extraction made by the platform is a lot smaller while the network effects are a lot greater. That’s the idea of Web3.
Les Wilkinson
So I can also add an aspect that’s relevant to our market, which is the development of these technologies. If you think back to all the open source projects upon which the internet lives today, there’s no ownership or incentive model beyond the vision to build something that can ultimately drive greater innovation. But with Web3, for the first time, there is a direct economic incentive for success in open source projects. If I were a major contributor to the http protocol in 1996, I would have received no direct economic benefit. And even today, despite the widespread use of the protocol, I still don’t receive any direct economic benefit. That’s a massive change because now, Web3 enables people to make a career out of open source development and get direct economic benefits from their contributions.
Annakate Ross
One could argue that there is some of this with Web2 and if we go back to Twitter, if you’re cultivating your following and creating a platform for yourself on Twitter, you are gaining value from it. However, that would still feed into a lot of centralized power. It’s not decentralized, and there’s not an opportunity for lots of people to benefit. Instead, it would only benefit a few power users, making up a small percentage. Is that the right thinking?”
Les Wilkinson
That is the right thinking. I’ve seen businesses across my career become platform-dependent and eventually fail not because the main platform wanted to kill them, but because they were collateral damage.
John Bass
So yeah, these platforms break the hearts of entrepreneurs all the time because they change the rules, right? In a lot of ways, with Web2 companies, we’re all the product, and all of our contributions and data are feeding these centralized business models that primarily sell advertising. Therefore, all Twitter users and Uber drivers are the product of Web2. You are the product of Google. However, in Web3, the platform works for you. You are the customer. So we flip it upside down, and it’s really…
Les Wilkinson Take nothing.
John Bass
That fundamental shift is really in line with where society is headed. It’s almost like with Web1, we started with SMTP and HTTP, which were incredibly neutral protocols designed to enable the sharing of information. With Web2…
Les Wilkinson Those were opposite.
John Bass
Everything centralized to a few companies that were hell-bent on aggregating and collecting all of your data, then selling advertising back to the community. We all currently work for these protocols in Web2. In Web3, we kind of reverse that and bring it back to the way it was originally supposed to be, where the contributors, curators, and creators are the ones who will be rewarded for their contributions to these platforms. That’s the way we look at it, and it opens up brand new business models, design patterns, and design spaces that allow entrepreneurs to think of new ways to solve old problems, whether it’s in music, healthcare, social media, or whatever.
Annakate Ross
We think we lost you for just a second there, John, but we got the essence of what you’re saying. Those are great overviews of where we’ve moved from Web1 to Web2 and now with Web3 on the horizon and here in many ways. I still feel like we could talk about this for quite a while, but let’s, at this point, talk a little bit about Hashed Health. What is Hashed Health? How are you tying into Web3 with your value proposition? I’m also very curious to learn more about venture studio.
Joey Baggott
Yeah, exactly. You did bring up Web3 in healthcare. I listened to what you guys said, and keep in mind, Joey, I’m a salesperson by trade, not a technical person, so I apologize for my lack of terminology. But I’m curious based on what I just heard to see how that mentality applies to healthcare and healthcare technology. I would love to see how Hashed Health is taking that and making it something.
John Bass
Yeah, Blockchain and Web3 are like an operating system for trust, transparency, and incentive alignment in healthcare. Blockchains enable us to think differently about how we manage the various value chains that are part of our care delivery system. My background is in supply chain, which is one type of value chain, and also in surgical subspecialties like orthopedics and spine. Traditionally, the way we deliver and pay for that care is not sustainable and comes with a lot of administrative burden, driving inefficiencies and making healthcare delivery consume 20% of GDP. We have not done much to fix this problem to date, and it only gets worse every year.
So, you know, because of the experiences that Les and I and others at Hashed have had over the years, we see real opportunities to rethink some of the infrastructure that sits underneath the care delivery systems. These new structures are optimized for transparency, trust, and rational exchange of services, leveraging blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, and what’s now being called Web3. We’re continuing to add these new primitives and tools that allow us to rebuild those underlying systems in ways that solve for trust, transparency, and alignment of incentives across the value chains.
Within healthcare, there are many use cases, and we are thinking every day about how to build new startups with innovative business models uniquely enabled by these community architectures. Rarely can fundamental challenges be solved one company at a time, and that’s what we’ve traditionally tried to do, but it hasn’t really worked. With Hashed, we can think about utility or community-focused business models, bringing together organizations, communities, and people to solve shared problems as an aligned, transparent, rational network of organizations trying to solve a shared problem. Our venture studio model is a product of the work we did consulting with large enterprises, insurance companies, health systems, banks, and other technology companies in the first couple of years of Hashed. We were able to experiment and find design patterns that indicated where the low-hanging fruit was. After all that experience, we said, “hey, we’ve got all these great ideas, and these ideas really need a vehicle for commercialization.” Les is the architect of our venture studio model, which brings a robust, thoughtful, and intentional discovery and delivery system to the innovation process. He created a hack of the innovation process that allowed us to create a repeatable way of de-risking startups and running through a product management process resulting in a viable spinout. Hashed is a venture studio that uses a process of discovering delivery activities to validate, de-risk, and launch new companies. We’re focused purely on these community architectures for healthcare and life sciences.
Les Wilkinson That’s 4
Annakate Ross
That is so interesting, and Les, I want to hear from you also. So essentially, companies come to you, and you help them look for delivery opportunities and other optimizations, and if they would like, they may also join in with Venture Studio, where there’s a collaborative effort among other companies that you work with to help solve some joint problems. Is that how it works there? Or is Venture Studio an elective component of Hashed Health?
Les Wilkinson
Yes, so currently, the way our studio works is that most of the things we’re pushing through our studio are internally generated ideas. Sometimes we’ll get together with an external entrepreneur and get in front of a whiteboard to come up with a new idea together. Sometimes we’ll have organizations that are already doing things that come to us and ask for our opinions and help, which we’re grateful for, and we try to find a way to support those as well. But that latter category tends to be outside the studio because typically, they’re on their own path by then because really, our studio starts with a hypothesis of a problem and a really big idea. Then, our job, which we spend about a month on, is to take that big idea and try to achieve what we call the minimum viable problem. What is the smallest problem we could solve that unlocks our journey towards solving a much larger problem in the market? It gives us the ability to focus our development efforts, and we do that. You’re going to hear this term a lot collaboratively.
So, we do that by going into the market with people whom we’ve developed relationships with over the years across all of healthcare and really sort of putting these hypotheses to them and saying, “Well, we think this is a problem. Help us understand if it actually is. Is it truly a burning need, or is it kind of a nice-to-have, or are we just way off? Or is there some…?” Usually, what we’ve discovered is that problems exist for really good reasons. And sometimes those reasons can be solved, and sometimes they can’t. So we really try to, without spending a lot of capital and without spending a lot of time, see if something actually has legs or not in terms of whether we’re dealing with a real problem.
Les Wilkinson
And once we’ve done that, then we move into the solution discovery phase where we’ve come up with this minimum viable problem, and we try to come up with the minimum viable solution by throwing as much spaghetti against the wall as we possibly can. By engaging with our collaborative network and winnowing that down into what we believe is the minimum viable solution, we take that and we tend to use the sprint week format. We emerge from the sprint week with a prototype that is in users’ hands, and the goal of that would be to have an MVP at the end of that process. It doesn’t always work out that way, sometimes you get the wrong answer, which is the right answer. But all of this that I just described, I like to call startup Darwinism, and that’s really what I feel like is the secret sauce in the studio model. When you’re not wed to any single thing and you’ve gone out and raised money from your friends and family, and you feel like you are beholden to focus on this one idea, and pivoting is bad, and that sort of thing. Being able to free yourself from all of that and say, ‘Look, I want to know as early as I possibly can whether or not this is something I should spend my time and money on, and the moment I decide I don’t really have conviction in that, I can put that aside and take something else off the pile and go start working on that.’ So, Joey, you have your hand up.
Joey Baggott
I’m curious if there’s a problem that you guys identified and then used Hashed Health to get that problem solved and out into the marketplace. You don’t have to give names or company names or anything like that.
Les Wilkinson
Yeah, so the best example of that would be our spinoff company called Professional Credentials Exchange. When we first started with this idea, we had gotten a lot of feedback in the market that there were a lot of workflows related to healthcare practitioner identity, such as credentialing, enrollment, maintaining provider directories, and privileging, all of which related to a practitioner’s credentials. Currently, all these workflows are happening in silos, causing redundancy in work and data. So, the idea was to create a solution that enabled organizations to share data in a trusted, secure way, and for the recipient of that data to see the provenance of the data and how it was created. From there, we did a lot of prototyping and ultimately decided that credentialing was going to be our minimum viable problem. We found a co-founder, Anthony Piganda, who has been in the credentialing space for a long time and started collaborating with him to build a solution using blockchain technology. We tested the solution in the market, built a prototype, a business plan, and a network of enterprise organizations, and then raised a separate round of capital to spin it out into a separate company. That’s an overview of our process at a high level.
Joey Baggott And what was the timeframe from start to finish on that?
Les Wilkinson
Now, yeah, so that was our first one, so it took longer. But, um, what we modeled was about fifteen months from zero to SP. Wow.
Joey Baggott Just wow.
Les Wilkinson
Yes, I try to be conservative in my modeling, so I feel like we can do that much faster, but we want to get more and more reps so that we can hone it, perfect it, and make it more efficient. And that’s the process that we’re in right now.
Joey Baggott You are speaking right up in Annakate’s alley.
John Bass
Yeah, there are other studios out there that have a higher cadence. And you know, every studio is a little different in terms of how they operate, but for us, we’re working in healthcare. And we’re not building dog-walking apps. We’re building pretty sophisticated data exchanges and marketplaces and things that aren’t simple from a go-to-market perspective. Even if it was Web 2, and you throw the Web3 thing in there, it adds some new elements. And ultimately, these are technical and business architectures that the world has never seen before. So, I think over time, as we get better and better and we’re now hiring someone to help us make that process really tight and efficient, I think you’ll see us start to shrink that timeframe down. But for us, it does take a while, especially to do that kind of very thorough discovery and delivery process.
Annakate Ross John, what did you want to be when you grow up?
John Bass
Oh my gosh, I don’t know. Probably a rock climber. Ah um, I’m still trying to figure that out, actually.
Annakate Ross
I mean, I hear you talk about this incredible company you’ve built and the products you’re creating for your clients. It’s really fascinating and awesome, and I just wonder if your younger self ever imagined that you would go down this route.
John Bass
No, it wouldn’t, and you know, honestly, I don’t think I realized what we were going to be doing when we started Hashed, and I don’t know if I know today what we’ll be doing in a year or two. This is a new space that’s evolving so rapidly, and we are innovating at every angle. I honestly don’t know where all that comes from, but the venture studio model is an innovative approach to creating startups. The Web3 and blockchain technologies we use are really innovative technical models for solving problems that allow us to build really innovative new business models that the world has never seen before.
What we all want to do is fix healthcare problems, and we’ve built and exited successful companies, but I don’t know if we’ve really solved a lot, and I think that’s true for the industry. There’s an opportunity coming out of COVID; the world seems to be aligning around its thirst and interest in doing things differently and more collaboratively, with a real eye towards true patient agency, nurse agency, doctor agency, giving people agency over their data, careers, education, and lives. Using these Web3 concepts of community ownership, transparency, trust, and alignment, this is how healthcare needs to work, and if there’s any industry that needs Web3, it’s healthcare. It has the potential to help a lot of people, and Les and I are fortunate to wake up and think about it every day. It’s just an amazing opportunity.
Les Wilkinson
When I was a kid, I wanted to be Jacques Cousteau and I wanted to be an oceanographer. I’m not really sure why, to be honest. Maybe it was the hat, or maybe the idea of being on a boat all the time and going out with your friends to scuba dive sounded really cool. Then, I decided I wanted to be a writer, but that wore off, and I decided to be a lawyer. A lot of that had to do with growing up in a small town where lawyers were some of the most respected people in town. They were the people you went to when you needed help, and I think a lot of those people were my mentors. That set the course for my career.
That’s sort of set the course for my career. But what happened was, I started practicing law and I loved practicing law. There are a lot of people that don’t. They get into law firms and they just don’t like it. I mean, it’s not perfect, but I was in a great firm, worked with great people, had great clients, did sophisticated work, and I was part of firm governance. But after a while, you kind of get bored, and so I had an opportunity to get an adventure with one of my clients. So, I did that. I just jumped out of the boat into another boat and started doing that, and I had a great time doing that. It was wonderful being part of company creation and supporting other entrepreneurs and all that, and then that kind of started getting a little bored, and then John came along. And I jumped into the Hashed Health boat, and I think a couple of lessons from that one is I’m so grateful that what John has built and I’ve contributed to is this environment where I don’t think I’m ever, ever going to get bored again because we can get up and do entrepreneurial things.
We can change what we’re doing to meet what we feel is the best thing that we should be doing with our time and our investors’ resources. And so that’s a blast. The other thing is, paths in life are not linear, and so whatever you set for yourself, you know, it probably would have been really cool if I could have become Jacques Cousteau, but that’s just not the way life works. And so you have to give yourself a tremendous amount of flexibility. And I’m also a huge proponent of the growth mindset, so understanding that no matter where you are in your career path or your life situation, that’s not where you have to be. You can always create a new situation for yourself.
Joey Baggott
I think that’s really well put. Simply because, when I remember being back in high school (I’m not gonna go into years), I was doing HTML projects where you had to build a webpage based on very simple HTML commands that would have been considered web one, where your only contribution to the internet was maybe you would put out a static web page and throw out like a guest book on there where people could just leave a comment. But then you get to this web 2, which seemed like such a huge jump, where there are all these content contributors out there that are putting out really good stuff, they’re getting paid, and now we’ve taken this other huge leap into this Web3 era.
I’m thinking about the HTML project I did in high school. It’s like I never would have dreamed that we would have gotten to this conversation today where there are individual contributions to the build of the internet and how it works, and how it’s decentralized, and then they receive ownership over what they’ve done in that way. I heard John say a word that stuck out – incentives – so you have this incentive to do good for the future of the internet, and I think that’s really cool. Just seeing that back from, you know, the 90s early 2000s to where we are now, in just two decades, it’s pretty impressive and pretty cool. So yeah, I like hearing about Jacques Cousteau. That would have been interesting to see. But thank you guys for sharing that. And as far as the human side, because you know this is a non-human podcast, we have to talk more on the human side. You’re both ultra-runners. We mentioned that earlier. I might ask a very pointed question: Who is faster?
Les Wilkinson That’s easy. John’s way faster than I am.
John Bass
We’re both really slow. No, no, Les got me into this low heart rate thing and it’s really changed my life. It’s allowed me to run ultras when I thought I was going to have to hang it up because I kept getting hurt. There’s this way of training where you keep your heart rate super low, which is scientifically proven to reduce injury. So all of a sudden, I’m doing ultras again when I didn’t think I’d be able to. I think we’re both intentionally slow ultrarunners.
Les Wilkinson
It’s like somebody told me a long time ago about fishing, like, you know, the measure of a fisherman is how is the smallest fish you can catch while still being thrilled about catching it. And so, like, to me, that’s sort of like running. You know, how slowest can you go and still feel like you’re on an adventure because the adventure is the most important part about it. It’s not to speak, not in our world.
John Bass
It’s a value for our company – endurance and evolution are core values of Hashed and there’s a lot of strong ties between. our endurance running and kind of the work we do at Hashed.
Joey Baggott
That’s cool. Is there a specific ultra that you, as I was looking on UltraSignUp, just looking a little bit at your past results and stuff, have as a favorite? Like, what would be your top favorite ultra you’ve run?
John Bass
So I just did one a few weeks ago. It’s my favorite and I think the last one you did oftentimes will probably be your favorite just because, but this Laurel Highlands Run was really amazing for me. It was just, ah, it was really hard, and that’s probably one reason I loved it so much, but it was a beautiful, challenging, long day where you had a chance to go deep, push yourself, and learn about yourself. You know, a lot of these races, you’re on these trails, you’re kind of by yourself out there between aid stations, and people get all spread out, and it’s got real highs and real lows that are just fantastic to work through.
Joey Baggott
I’m seeing some parallels on trail running in the way they run their business. That’s really interesting – really cool.
Annakate Ross
Truly, I totally agree. Well, we’re just about out of time, but we are so glad to have you both on the podcast, and thank you so much for spending some time with us talking about Web3 and blockchain and your company and also yourselves. It was a really fun time, so thanks to you both.
Joey Baggott
Yeah, this was great. We’re excited to publish this one. We’re excited to have Les and John here, and who knows, we might have you guys back in the future for Web 4, so you guys just be ready for that here in a few years.
John Bass I enjoyed it. Thank y’all appreciate it.
Joey Baggott
We’ll keep the train going. But thank you guys again. Thanks everybody for listening in, hanging out with us, and just stay tuned until next time.
Annakate Ross Thank you and take care.