Will Murphy, VP of Blockchain at Talla

Will Murphy has recently become the VP of Blockchain at Talla. In this interview, he discusses blockchain technology and Talla’s BotChain network.

Q: Let’s start with your background. What were you doing before Talla? What led you here?

A: Before Talla, I was working as a Corporate Entrepreneur at FedEx Innovation. We worked on a wide breadth of technology and what we called opportunity spaces (areas of technological and societal change that will create big business opportunities). A lot of my past focus in terms of tech has been in things like Big Data, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and Internet of Things (IoT). A small group of us pitched a IoT platform for tracking packages that was eventually approved to for funding, which was exciting. A larger founding team was put together within the Innovation Group to launch the IoT platform called SenseAware, which tracks packages and uses the cell phone network to upload information like location, temperature, humidity, and more every few minutes. I also had some blockchain related ideas many years ago related to the supply chain that never took off. It was probably too early. My background story involves an evolution of roles over the years. Though I had been coding since I was 12, many years ago, I decided to focus more on leading others (as opposed to coding), pursuing my next idea, and helping people think through combining emerging technologies and new business models to launch something new.

As to how I ended up at Talla, I actually met Rob (May, CEO and Co-Founder of Talla) by commenting on his blog over 10 years ago. We both had blogs in the early days of blogging and then we both went on to sell them and move on to launching new things. We went back and forth for years, sharing ideas and what we were doing on our side projects here and there. I built and sold several small projects on the side while I was at FedEx. One of Rob’s projects was Backupify, which grew to be a really successful company and was acquired by Datto in 2014. After that, Rob was ready to start a new company and we discussed a lot of different ideas. I knew I was ready to move on from FedEx to pursue innovation from the perspective of launching a new startup as well. Artificial intelligence was a huge opportunity space in my mind, and I already had a background in technology at different sized companies that would help us think about designing a technical product for businesses. Also, my breadth of research into a lot of different areas led me to think that AI would be a major technical wave that will underpin a lot of new, interesting businesses. That’s what led me to help launch Talla as the VP of Product.

Q: Tell me about Talla and what lead the team to create BotChain.

A: Talla is a venture-backed AI startup, focused on building an intelligent information management. Essentially, businesses need a better way to share knowledge from team to team, and the Talla platform can create, manage, and deliver information in a more efficient way than a typical knowledge base. But we started out as an intelligent agent or bot company, and that got us talking about the future of intelligent agents.

Talla was started with the goal of building digital workers, but the future of communication between bots was on our mind. We believe that in the not so distant future, most bot conversations will be bot-to-bot, not involving humans, so that’s where the discussion started. We talked about a platform for bot-to-bot communications and ultimately decided a blockchain between bot companies would be a great way to support this use case and probably many others. There’s potential for a platform for lots of bot-related services, especially as bots get more advanced and complex.

So once we dove deeper, we could think about future bots as complex systems and also think about some simple metaphors to get started on a model for a bunch of things a platform might need to support. Bots will form complex systems. I’m fascinated by complex systems, how to design them and how to manage them. And, I think that AI and complex systems could form the foundation for a lot of new product design thinking in the future.

I use the management of humans as a metaphor to simplify the conversation. In the future, bots will become more like humans in a lot of ways. Humans are autonomous, independent actors working with each other to create a complex system of communication and work. Humans are unpredictable both on an individual level and a group level. Complex systems can be unpredictable and exhibit emergent behavior that surprises us. Bots will be the same. They will be independent actors making decisions and also working in groups. So, the metaphor we can start with is “how do we manage bots like people?” It’s not a perfect metaphor, but it’s a good place to start. So, how do we manage people?

The first thing we thought about was identity. For instance, on your first day at a new company, you’re given an ID badge so everyone knows who you are and why you’re there. Identification is fundamental to trust. That’s why the first feature on BotChain is giving a bot an identity. We also thought about the annual review process and and how people are assessed on their successes and failures. That’s the audit piece of the BotChain; we need to know what bots are doing and where that authorization came from. Or, if a bot’s decision was based on the result of a machine learning model, what model was used and did the decision work out the way we wanted? We also saw the need for the privacy and discretion of bots. Imagine an HR employee who has discretion as to what information she can share with whom. If you have an HR bot, it needs to have the same discretion, so that’s something that should be audited in the future.

Lastly, companies always want their people to improve their skills and knowledge. The BotChain marketplace is the way bots will gain skills and knowledge. I think there will be many more parts of a “bot brain” that are downloadable, but skills and knowledge are the first, fundamental ones. Developers will build on the platform and provide new skills for bots to perform. And, there will be partners that provide various knowledge that will be downloadable into the bot’s brains.

Q: Who does this product apply to? How big is the market for a solution like this?

A: The core of the ecosystem initially will be companies that are business bot developers. Bot companies that sell bots to businesses will use our platform to enhance their bots’ capabilities. Also, they (and other partners) will deploy skills or other capabilities for bots that will be available in the marketplace. Enterprises will benefit as well. If they choose a BotChain enabled bot, they’ll have all the advantages of identity, auditing, compliance, and security that the BotChain network is committed to providing. Essentially, the size of the market will be all the bots that work for businesses.

Q: So, why blockchain? Did you consider alternative platforms before settling on blockchain?

A: Yeah, we went back and forth on this idea for a long time before settling on the blockchain. I see several reasons the blockchain makes a lot of sense for this product. First of all, I think that valuable blockchain companies will be based on creating a commons for a group of companies who come together with common interests to a place with shared services. The blockchain can supply a common, trusted network on which to build this foundation of common services. The digital commons structure is a good place to build around. I think that’s the way to build blockchain businesses in the future: think about independent companies that need to share information and processing together. And I think identity is a great common service to provide.

The second reason to use the blockchain is immutability. The audit capability we’re designing is an example of a feature where we can have an immutable record. You don’t have to trust us or even your own IT department. Those audit trail snapshots will be partially stored on the blockchain where you can verify they weren’t tampered with. So, beyond identity, a solid foundation for auditing is a great use for the blockchain.

And lastly, this is a community effort. Companies that create bots will have a place to help maintain and meet common needs. Our goal is to create an innovative, early community of leading bot companies who will help us shape the vision of BotChain. I don’t think we have all the answers. We want the best bot companies contributing ideas and also building great things on top of this platform.

Q: There are a ton of blockchain products popping up each week. What are some of the challenges of building a network that are often overlooked?

A: I think the thing that’s missing in the conversation is the partnership aspect. The whole concept of building partners is at least as important as the technology. Where a lot of blockchain companies are going to fall down is focusing too heavily on building technology and not enough on the business side. At least half of the success of most blockchain companies will be the ability of the team to develop partners and customers.

Q: What are the limitations of the blockchain technology today? We know that blockchain has certain valid criticisms, like network speed. How do you think about solving those challenges?

A: We’re in really early stages of blockchain and I think this will mature and will look perhaps very different in the future. One of the limitations that’s brought up right now is the speed of processing, that’s probably the number one thing to address. The second thing that could be improved is finding more advanced ways to build consensus. I think there is a ton of opportunity here.

I think in the short term, the way to solve transaction speed will be artful use of on-chain versus off-chain technology. We’ll use the blockchain for what it’s best at and we’ll use off-chain technology for what it’s best at. As technology matures, we’ll take advantage of new capabilities and adapt. It’s a different for each blockchain company and each will have to make decisions based on their own platform and what they need. If you think about more enterprise use cases, advancements in privacy and other enterprise controls will be a major factor. Some of those capabilities will look different depending on if the product is for private enterprise or useful on a public blockchain.

These are all problems that will get solved and there will be a ton of use cases for blockchains because of that.

Q: What other objections have you run into about the BotChain platform and how do you answer them?

A: We often get asked “why are you using blockchain?” We chose blockchain for a few reasons. In the short term, the immutable ledger is perfect for identity validation and audit capabilities. In the long term, I think some people are looking at blockchain right now and making a judgment about it. They correctly observe the present. But we’re looking ahead. The current state of blockchain is enough to get started right now, and future developments will make it really powerful over time.

Thanks to Will Murphy for his time. You can read the whitepaper and learn more about BotChain and our utility token sale here.

Will Murphy is the VP of Blockchain and Co-Founder at Talla, where he was the founding VP of Product. Previously, he was a Principal and corporate entrepreneur within FedEx Innovation. Will has a B.S. in Economics from Christian Brothers University and a M.S. in Information Systems from the University of Memphis.