The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast 231 Sylo App, Ben Jordan & Dorian Johannink Founders

Episode Date: October 24, 2018

Sylo App, Ben Jordan & Dorian Johannink Founders

Hi, this is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming here with another podcast. Of course, we have the most excellent guests. Be sure to hit that subscribe button. Tell your friends and neighbors, relatives to subscribe to the show as well, your business friends in the office. They can go to Google Play, iTunes, now on Spotify as well. They can go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss and hit that bell notification button

so they get all the notifications of all the shows that come on the podcasts. And of course, all the reviews we do of the AT&T phones, the Siberian Huskies, and everything that is on the channel. Anyway, we've got another wonderful show with you here today. We have two co-founders or founders of the company called Silo, Ben and Dorian. Welcome to the show, guys. How are you today? Greg, good to have us. Yeah, thanks, Chris. Good to meet you. It's a pleasure to meet you too. So you guys have founded this company and started it. Tell us about Silo what it is how it works and why it works

all right you and me jump in so yeah so um so our product silo um is a confidential communication product um so we started out in confidential communication for professionals um and in more recent times we've transitioned to creating what's called a fully decentralized means of communication. So now through the silo network, when you communicate, you're not actually communicating through a company or a single entity, you're communicating what's called peer-to-peer, so directly from one person to another. So now it's about privacy, it's about confidentiality, and it's about retaining ownership of your information, which is a big problem that we noticed when we were, you know, dealing with our friends and businesses online. And it's something that we really were passionate about

solving. So everything's private. I believe, if I recall recall the messages are stored on your phone they're encrypted um so it's a way for to make sure that if you're having business conversations with uh or conversations with people that you want to stay uh private you don't want to share it on like the apple cloud if you um then you can have that luxury and confidentiality. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, and it's not just about dealing with your friends. It's also about dealing with businesses. So one of the things that has happened is, you know, in the last 20 years we've developed all of these amazing features

and we're also connected now. But what's happened is that all of that information has been collected by the service provider that you're using so we think the next step is about facilitating the same kind of interactions with with businesses and yourself without without needing all that information stored in one place so we can move away from the advertising model we can use a move away from extracting data from users and we can move away from the advertising model, we can move away from extracting data from users, and we can move into kind of a new era where businesses can provide the value that you think they are providing instead of giving you a free service and then, you know, extracting data out of you, which we think is quite a big shift.

Well, there's a lot of different examples of breaches of data uh not only from hacking but like you know the iCloud uh even there was a lot of celebrities had their pictures stolen off their off their messaging service on the Apple iCloud um and so would you say you guys are kind of like uh what services would you or apps would you guys say you guys are in competition with you guys compete with um yeah so we are in competition i guess with with some of the big boys um so we are the product that you can download from the app store is a as a messenger um so you think you can think facebook you can think um well wechat is the chinese equivalent. You can also think things like WhatsApp. But it's also a toolkit for businesses. So if you're a developer or if you're a business owner and you want to build communications into your product, you can actually pick up our tools, use them in your product very easily.

And what you're doing is you're providing to your users the ability for them to retain ownership of the information that they are, you know, sending you. So you can think of that in terms of, well, it's an example. So let's say you're a call center provider and you want to provide support for a product that you're selling. You can now provide support for that product in a way that doesn't mean that you have to gather up all that information from your users. And we're seeing that as being a really, really cool kind of way for businesses to show that they're on the user's side.

Yeah, as a bit of a value add for them. So is it, are you guys the retail end of the messenger or is there an API that I can use like you're talking about where I can use, so I can do some sort of build to say I'm an accountant and I want to have a private client confidential things or an attorney. How does that work? Yeah, so there's two key elements to it.

There's the user-facing app, which is, you know, you can jump in, grab the messenger and use it for communication needs. But there's also the protocol layer, which is the other area we're focusing, which Ben just alluded to, which enables other developers to build communication into their products. Whatever type of product application it is, it enables them to plug in their API communication functionality in a decentralized way.

So we've got the two elements. So we're very much going to be pushing the front-facing application into market to really enhance the user's experience. But we've also got the focus on developers and businesses to enhance whatever it is they're looking to offer. And that's the bigger play for us. So the real core is my messages are stored on my phone. They're encrypted, so it's really hard for anybody to get access to that.

And they're probably stored, I guess, I don't know, would the term be end-to-end where it's stored on their phone, my phone? You know, if I'm an attorney with a, I want attorney-client privileges and I don't want, you know, maybe communications of stuff going up onto the internet, this is a great way where I can have communications that are stored very securely with my client and know that I'm honoring my agreements or my fiduciary duty with them, I guess, in a way. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you've hit the nail on the head with respect to the professional use case. So we've actually, the product's been in market for over two years now. And that was our focus on the professional use case.

So we found a big, big kind of gap in the market where one-to-one communications, it was actually quite difficult to guarantee that what you were saying was confidential for a professional use case without kind of going and setting up your own servers and building your own IT team to deploy that kind of infrastructure.

So yeah, the application that's in MarketSilo is you download it from the app store and then instantly your business is set up for confidential communication if you need it for one-to-one communications with your clients. So yeah, there's a legal use case. We also found a lot of traction with respect to kind of mental health use cases and, you know, that side of things. But, yeah, now the business is taking that technology and we're more positioning it for consumers. And what that's given us the ability to do is to roll the product out a lot more broadly.

And we've brought in some really cool functionality in the blockchain space and cryptocurrency so that the product can evolve from a one-to-one confidential messenger to much more of a platform play where businesses can build different features and functionalities and bundle them into a messaging application, much like Facebook Messenger or WeChat with their connected apps. So now our users don't have to be professionals who need that for their professional communication needs. They can be, you know, you and I, and we just want to be able to use a platform that respects our privacy. And we want to benefit from being able to interact with a whole range of different businesses

that we know also respect our privacy. So yeah, it's been quite a shift for us. But yeah, it's going really well. And we're really excited about the progress we're making. Awesome. Is it built on the blockchain technologies? Yeah, it is. Absolutely. A core piece

of the whole product now is we're utilizing the blockchain to ensure that there isn't a single controlling party. When you use Silo, it's not like you're giving everything that you own to Silo. You're just contributing to the network.

And that's what the blockchain allows us to do. So, yeah, that's quite a shift. And it played really nicely with what we'd already developed. So we developed this confidential communication, you know, a means of communicating. But, yeah, the blockchain as a technology actually allows us to take that a whole step further. And now it's not just about protecting what you say.

It's about actually creating a network that allows a whole range of different computers to cooperate so that everybody can communicate confidentially without relying on a Facebook. So what are the industries that you're finding are using utilizing your product most so far? So the largest adoption we've had for the existing product, it is being mentioned as professional segments. So mental health practitioners, lawyers, financial advisors, accountants, insurance agents, the, the parties that really practiced confidentiality offline, but then were jumping

online and using a centralized service that was holding a record of their communications in a third-party location, which was technically a breach of confidentiality. So we had a lot of uptake from those segments. But now we're very much moving into the consumer space as well, branching out that functionality so that in addition to communication, we bring in other elements that really are going to add value to people's lives, things they're akin to using in these mainstream platforms now. But it's just based on an architecture that's not about capturing as much data as possible and finding a way to exploit that. It's about providing those same features, those same functionalities um and having the

the knowledge that that information is not being used for an ulterior motive you know it's direct it's point to point and it's value provision um not value exploitation i imagine the blockchain is a real key element of that being able to create that sort of confidentiality i think that's brilliant what you guys are doing and brilliant use of blockchain and ensuring that people can, you know, be confidential. There's a lot of stuff that goes on today with like corporate spying, corporate communications,

board of directors. I know that are, have to be worried about, you know, stuff being leaked out to the press or financial issues or whether announcing financials or talking between each other. I'm managing, there's a lot of that going on. There's probably a lot of that in government where people are, you know,

having to be ultra private in what they're talking about, what they're doing and everything else. So, you know, it's more and more when I talk to people, people are becoming, even in the, you know, the, the consumer side of things, they're becoming aware that they're being tracked. You know, I mean, anytime I look up something,

search something, uh, suddenly I'll start seeing ads in it. Uh, messenger, uh, it was from Facebook. Uh,

I mean, clearly he's listening to me. Gmail is listening to me. Uh, I'll, you know, uh, conversation on either two of those platforms and suddenly start seeing ads pop up.

And I'm like, ah, you are spying on me. And people are becoming very aware of it and concerned about it and starting to opt out. You know, and I've got some friends that they're just, I'm not sure paranoid is the right word, but they're definitely concerned about, you know's the right word but uh uh they're definitely concerned about you know hey i i don't really want to be watched i don't want to be tracked and it's not they don't have it it's just that they don't they don't want some database with

all the records of everything they do uh as well as you know you used to use the word paranoid but the reality is you're not really being paranoid because it is happening in the background. And from our perspective as well, some of these platforms provide amazing services and features. But we think as a user, you should have the choice. You should be able to conduct particular communications or actions on a platform where you know how it's working and you can use another platform

where it does respect your confidentiality and the mandate isn't to extract absolutely everything um and i guess the issue at the moment is you know 99 of the platforms out there that you're using are based on this model and the centralized architecture so what we're trying to introduce is you know a similar um feature set or functionality line that users are used to um that doesn't use that same model it's from what you know we see it as a just a better way of doing things it's you know it's the next evolution it's realizing hey people want all these features they want to enhance their day-to-day life with digital communications um but it's also a human behind those screens you know the default shouldn't be treating them as a product. We should be able to provide these services without, you know, logging and flogging everything we possibly can.

And it's, you know, I think it's just a logical progression. You know, with all these, the general public is becoming more and more aware with all these scandals and all these hacks and all these information leaks. And people are starting to look for those alternatives. And there's a real lack of them at the moment and we're kind of trying to usher in that new wave and we're approaching it from a very collaborative point of view as well so we're already working with about a dozen different projects so that when we push this into market it's not just going to be a one-shot pony and we're going to have quite an extensive functionality set so it'll be one of

the more comprehensive, decentralized applications you'll see in market coming out in 2019. Cool. I think it's awesome. You guys are using the blockchain and making this happen. I think more and more people as they become aware of how much they are the product of a lot of these companies like Facebook, that their information is being sold, the hacking and I think hacking is just going to keep getting worse.

I mean, it seems way too often now I get my pound email. I think that's how you pronounce it, where it's from the pound service that lets me know that, hey, your password's from the Walmart hack or, you know, whichever one of these popular hacks that have happened, that have happened to a lot of people, hey, your password's on the thing. And what's interesting is every time someone posts that on the dark web, the lists of the hacked emails and stuff from whatever company

let these things through, my accounts get hit with people trying to test the passwords to see if I changed the passwords. Uh, and it's really a pain in the butt. Cause I'll get these emails that say, you know, you, you've had multiple attempts to your, to your account. And it's like, oh, great. Someone's testing the thing.

Cause they got posted, you know, it's, it's getting, it's getting old with this stuff. So I love the fact that it's kept local and in my control and in my stuff so that if anybody does ever get access to, I don't know, my passwords or something like that, at least I know that it's encrypted on my phone and I have some control over it. My data is just not floating out in space somewhere that people can run with.

Yeah, I guess the other key piece on that as well is by the sheer nature of distributed or decentralized technologies gives you a layer of protection there. I mean, think of centralized like you've got one big gold mine of a whole bunch of user data. It's a very, very appealing target. You know, if an attacker gets in, they've got a pot of gold there with a big trove.

And in scenarios where you're using decentralized technologies, you have to be a lot more specifically targeted. there with a big trove and in scenarios where you're using decentralized technologies it's yeah you have to be a lot more specifically targeted so they'd have to be going after chris specifically um as opposed to going after a server with a million users and then they just get your data by default so it provides these other elements to it but just that basic architecture um provides an extra layer of confidentiality or a barrier to being vulnerable. Yeah, I definitely would want a messenger service so far as walking around DEF CON. Yeah.

Something to check around that place. Of course, they say when you go to DEF CON, the conference for DEF CON, you want to not only take your phone, you want to turn your phone off, but you want to remove the SIM card in the back. It's getting crazy, isn't it? If you go to DEF CON, you

start realizing how crazy it is out there, and the access some of these guys can have in being able to hack your stuff but um i think it's awesome you guys have this breakdown uh what what type of encryption is it whether it saves it as it uh i'll just let you guys tell me what it's using yeah so um so what you want to look for when you're using a communication service is you want to make sure that your communications are end-to-end encrypted. So what that means is that they are literally encrypted from one end to another as opposed to going somewhere, being unencrypted and sitting there so that they can be kind of looked at and then being re-encrypted when they're sent. Yeah, so end-to-end encryption is the answer.

There are some users that it's kind of encrypting your end. When you send it, it's flying through the air unencrypted. Is that correct? Yeah. I mean, more often it's encrypted while it's on its way, but it's not going directly. So, you know, when you're using, say, Google services, the reason that they can scan all that information and give you recommendations about, you know,

what products you might want to buy or, you know, a whole range of things is because your messages sit on their servers unencrypted. So that gives them the ability to look through it all and then for them to say, hey, Chris, you like this. How about you buy it? So yeah, once you start using services that are end-to-end encrypted, the ability for the company to kind of have a look through all that stuff and figure out what it is that you might want to purchase next,

it becomes a lot harder. And then the second part of that is there's a big movement now, especially with software development, to go more to an open source model. So what that means is that all the code can be looked at and all the code can be reviewed. So people that are in the know can actually see exactly what happens with everything as opposed to using using a you know like a proprietary product you know that code stays behind the scenes and you really don't

know what's happening at all so with your guys's service the coders can get in they can see the API they can see the back end and using your toolkit they can take and it. And so they know what's going on. They know that suddenly they're not going to get surprised by like, oh, wow, somebody blah, blah, blah has their data. And they can control it with that toolkit and they can take and use it like maybe an internal, say it was a corporate board of directors. And I'm like, we've got to have control of our own sort of private communication network. This would be a great way to take and do something like that. Yeah, exactly. So they

could pick up our software, change it if they needed to to suit their use case exactly. And then they can make sure that their communications use the silo network so that ensures the confidentiality of it and makes sure it works because there's a lot of there's many parties who are contributing to the silo network um so they get the benefit of being able to plug into that but also they know exactly what's going on because they can have a look through all the code awesome awesome sauce all right guys we'll go ahead and tell us where we can find Silo on the Internet and the links we can go to.

Cool. So we're the existing product and market, as we alluded to, the confidential communication application primarily adopted by professionals that's available in your mainstream app stores. So you can just go ahead and search Silo Confidential. You'll find that pretty easily in any major app store. In terms of the fully decentralized application, we released the closed alpha about eight weeks ago, and we'll be releasing the public beta of the fully decentralized, which we're calling the DAP, before Christmas, which people will be able to get their hands on. We're currently going through a token event, and we'll be releasing it as soon as that completes, which will let people jump in at that point. Yeah, so you can find out all the information on everything at silo.io,

so S-Y-L-O.io. Sounds good, guys. Well, thanks to Ben and Dorian for coming by today. We certainly appreciate you guys. Be sure to check out their apps on the website or on your... It's on the Apple iPhone. Is it also on Google right now? It is, yeah.

Cool. And be sure to check them out. And also, we appreciate you guys as an audience tuning in today. Be sure to give us a like, subscribe to us on YouTube, hit that bell notification button. Also, take in GoToGooglePlay, iTunes, if you haven't subscribed there, and Spotify. You can do that, and of course, with any great podcast

app. Thanks to my audience and everyone for tuning in. We'll see you guys next time. Thanks, Chris. Cheers. Thanks a lot.