Entrepreneurship in Heavy-Duty Technology: Digital Asset CEO Yuval Rooz (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about how you got the company off the ground. What were the first few steps? What was the concept, genesis, and the concept of validation? 

Yuval Rooz: Not only was this a very nascent technology, but it was also associated with cryptocurrency and Blockchain. There was also some negativity in the early days associated with the technology. The early days were hard in the sense that having conversations with potential clients was a challenge.

I had met my technical co-founder on one of my trips to Israel. We convinced him to move to the US. The product person who started the company with me was a co-worker I had at DRW. So, we started developing the core technology of a distributed ledger technology to bring efficiency into financial services. That was relatively easy.

The main challenge was to start talking to clients. To bridge the challenge, we brought in a Board member – a lady who was well-known in the industry. We also brought in other investors who had pretty good connections with the banks at Wall Street. In the early days, in parallel to working with the product, we were trying to work on the business model for how we would be able to sell the product.  

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get the first version out? 

Yuval Rooz: Most of the solutions that we work on are pretty significant in terms of what it would require to deploy them. We were doing R&D for the first three to four years of the company’s existence.

Most of the systems that we were looking to replace with our technology are what I would call mission-critical systems that don’t get replaced easily. One example is our biggest client in Australia.

We were replacing something that had been in place for 30 years. Most of the development of our product took three to four years to get to a point where we could start releasing to clients. 

Sramana Mitra: What was in it? Can you summarize for me the Version 1 product that you went to market with? 

Yuval Rooz: The idea behind the distributed ledger technology is that the world is becoming more interconnected, and it means data is shared with many individuals and organizations. One of the issues with this is reconciling that data or making sure that we both act on the same source of data. It is not an easy problem to solve because not all companies have the same database. The problem is that we all have our private information, and we are not in just one database. We want to share part of the information to verify.

How do you build a technology that allows you to share information that is needed across an organization or across people? This is at the core of distributed ledger technology. To build applications on top of this technology is very hard because there are a lot of moving components.

To give you an idea of what our product is, we developed a language that allows developers and clients to build these connected applications easily. First of all, we had to create our own development language.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Entrepreneurship in Heavy-Duty Technology: Digital Asset CEO Yuval Rooz
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