— Was it challenging to raise funds for your first mobile app?

Of course. It is always a tough task, if you are not Facebook. But I want to address those who criticize ICO approach: raising funds with an ICO today is at least 10x harder than using a “regular” way. The transparency of your project increases and you are being scrutinized by your peers and by everyone investing in your project. You have to be extra reactive and responsive to every request and feedback you get.

— How did you shift towards blockchain technology?

We made a shift towards blockchain when we realized that this technology could solve all the problems regarding transparency,traceability and immutability of the data provided. After, there was a lot of iterations to find the best way of doing it and we’ve been helped a lot by tech teams and our advisors.

— How have you gained commitment that allowed to quickly sign several partnerships after the first model testing?

It was quite easy in fact. Once we studied the market, it became obvious we could collect the physical data needed by the data companies, in a more efficient and scalable way than any of them alone. We met with Google, Microsoft, Foursquare, Tomtom, Here, Acxiom, Yellow Pages,etc….and went to build an MVP to collect all sort of information needed after their feedbacks. From there, we just had to knock on some doors to license our database. It all happened in less than 2 months, which is a very short timing to close a deal with a large corporation.

— What’s difficult about building a cohesive team? How many team members are working on Dataeum today?

I do believe that the company’s message and culture are more important than how much the members are being paid by far. At least it is how you can make a difference to attract and keep great talents. Today a lot of the team members are following us because they believe that what we are doing can make an impact and believe in the project so deeply, that they have large incentives in tokens.

So not only we have gathered an outstanded team but also attracted truly great advisors that happen to be great people as well. We have Simon Cocking as an advisor, who is the N°1 on ICO Bench, Anders Larsson, our mentor, and he is the VP at Ericsson. Some more high-valued experts are coming up. They are all in the Datateum team because they believe in what we do every day.

There are 12 people working full time on Dataeum now. Some of them, like Max, our UX/UI Designer, have been with us since the very beginning of the project, which is more than 3 years. Other team members, like Michael, started much later but got so into the project that they basically put their full time and effort in it working more than 100h/week, just as I do.

To read the first part of the interview please click https://medium.com/dataeum/interview-with-coo-cfo-billy-pham-history-behind-dataeum-part-1-458d9b2b7d85