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Episode #22: With Jonathan Hooker

13 June, 2019 | 35 mins 33 secs

On this episode Jonathan Hooker Chief Executive Officer at Autonomous. Jonathan and I talk about his involvement in blockchain projects, his move to Newcastle and his career plans for the future.,

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      Welcome to NewyTechPeople today with Jonathan Hooker CEO of autonomous welcome thank you very much James thank you for inviting me autonomous let’s talk about autonomous what is autonomous people I don’t think many people in new cars would know of autonomous thank you for quick overview yes or a consultancy investment firm based at Sydney we’ve invested in a few blockchain projects in 2018 this year we haven’t done anything but yeah we just kind of look for any project that’s empowering web 3 whether that’s IOT AI blockchain yeah so we just Scout out deals see what’s around and yeah go to the next step with them that’s madness has we how big’s wait well there’s about five of us so we have a couple of VCS we’ve got some tech people we’ve got some ops people as well just to really when I stuck the company together I went out and looked for the most intelligent great humans that I could find which were top of the top of their game that’s so where we’ve got some really smart people and weren’t going to who they are but they are so we got some really really lovely people come and you’ve invested in five companies today yeah four we’ve invested in four one’s kind of on the teetering on the edge at the moment but one of the best companies that we’ve invested in is company called M&A there are a music blockchain company based as Sydney where do I start with these guys they pulled me into a pub they said let’s have a beer I would write a starling yeah we sat there for about an hour and a half talking about music and talk about the revolution which is kind of this web 3 revolution that’s happening and they were just yeah super switched on they’ve got great team they had a great vision one of the nice things after invested in them is they really knew that they needed to because they’ve got two sided marketplace they needed to get one for before the other so they did a great partnership with a company called air vamper in the States which has 500,000 artists so if they’ve already got the artists now it’s just the users nice the nice thing about that tech which is launching next month is they paid artists the producers and the stem creators each the percentage of the amount of money that they should get for the track yeah but also they pay them every six seconds and that’s revolutionary can you imagine being paid by Spotify you don’t know how much your musics been played you might get paid six months or a year later so this real-time payments is revolutionary for the music industry so yeah I’m super passionate about that project I definitely think they’ll be the them if you think about it in the most contracts executed on the blockchain and the most amount of value movement I can definitely see them being one of the top in Australia by the end of the year well but yeah that’s nice great yeah very nice my very nice and you’ve investor around people that’s obviously it’s my way about going better yeah if you if you go if they’re really nice guys they’re all based at Sydney so they’re really approachable I think they’re on the M&A discord Channel so even just go in there just chat to them you can just find out they are just super lovely humans we’ve got a great ethos in our company we invest we work with and we want to invest in good humans because what’s the point of yeah I lost a shot to put up with her yeah yeah non-quality in our 20s we just like we go around a wheel right we just try and get further and further and I think as you get into middle 30s late 30s you just you want to your life needs to be enriching and nurturing and you know you want to learn right and that only comes around being around great people yeah man I completely agree I think like learnings a big part of what I enjoy yeah probably one of the most enjoyable parts of my job is having conversations with people do alone the other part is just mayn’t being around people you actually enjoy spending time with like life is literally – sure yeah just be spending either job all and family or whatever type scenario that made people that you don’t enjoy being around like it’s yeah especially what he’s given so much try not work to be in an environment where you don’t enjoy it yeah well this is why I love web 3 so much because nobody knows anything yeah because realistically where everybody’s learning is they’re going the cop is so complex blockchain AI IOT ad that game theory monetary policy economics it all comes to play when we’re talking about the new decentralized world that we’re going into so I love it because all like I’m learning everyday and it’s okay to be stupid in this world because nobody knows everything right that completely great so alright can based on what you’ve said right now mmm climb in a position that most people would be like how how the hell do you get into a position like that maybe most people would be quite happy to be sitting in a in a group of a group of people I enjoy being able to invest in companies that I think it going great yeah yeah how did it how do you get the position I like that give us a bit of background on who you are where you’ve come from okay so this is a this is this is a funny story right so I started I was living in Australia and my dad said you needed to grow up and get a real job and stop flouncing around Australia when I was 22 so I go back to London and I knew I would wanted to work in tech cuz I see technology is it’s more than itself right if you create technology to teach kids to read you can expand it and suddenly you’ve got millions of kids using it right it’s greater than itself so I got the eh-2-zed in London all the digital media agencies I caught up caught up all the A’s and I said can I come work for you they all said no right so that took me day one next they’re called all the B’s and say can I have a job and they said no and that took me two days anyway I got to the sea I got to the first one and the guy said yep cool you can come work for me but you have to work for free and I was anyway I went to my dad I said this company said I can but they’re not gonna pay me so what do I do he said we’ll go work for them I’ll help you out anywhere starts work for them and it went from there and a year later I was actually working for Robbie bark a Mitch coke in Seattle in for Microsoft and I was helping them build their powerpoints for global sales presentations so I literally sat with them in a room creating their presentation and listening how they talked about the Microsoft business I did that for six months three months for two years and that understanding of business execution strategy how their mindset talks and flows around the business was for a 23 year old kid now was I was loved it it was amazing you know and that’s kind of when it all started I completely agree this is slight and agree of just such honor there then the advice you could give to young people obviously may if you can be around people that are intelligent people the top of their game what you can learn from those people when you go to work free obviously legal now in Australia but there’s a lot of value there’s a lot of value in taking pay an underpaid job but to work for a person that’s a highly intelligent yeah field that you want to be and somebody’s been there done that yeah yeah and the learning to get off then just for clarification he did start paying me about 60 days after because I complained and then he stayed paid me so I was being paid in America but yeah you know I just took took a chance yeah I turned up every day for that job an errand of half before everybody else to end up that’s how kina was and you know I just so I think I was oh 16 hours a day I was doing while I was working in London three hours of training side it’s nuts but uh I you know that it was a stepping stone to becoming I always loved business and technology but it really it showed me something the exponential growth that the world is going to have when I was you know in Seattle yeah it’s not hard to stand out as a young person to go you go a little bit over and above here all right Ferriss talks about now he’s early days in San Fran don’t know sort of thing low-paying role going over and above from the rock yeah ain’t you it’s not hard to stand out and you get noticed really quickly right absolutely especially when you’ve got English accent and you’ve got gout teeth like I have shouting down the walls of Microsoft I would you know I’d always be chatting to all the directors and the MDS because I because I was the outside kid it was okay that could be a bit more cheeky than the rest of the staffers so I had a great tip but great time I was actually based in the Xbox room with all the Xbox social gamers sucked yeah yeah so you know the original all things were the original of Halo and all lists and we used to go and we used to do that you know going for the day and they just give us like 10 games so everybody loved working there yes sounds horrible yeah yeah what I wasn’t a gamer so all my friends had it I was just eating the American food and getting bigger and bigger a way to go from there yeah that’s a win now set up the Hong Kong office from scratch that was in 2008 obviously we had GFC in 2009 September so it wasn’t the easiest task but what I realized this I’ve got a lot of grit so we never gave in and we are for about five six years we were working for every bank and most blue-chip clients in Hong Kong and China so we did big deals with Standard Chartered we did so the company did videos apps bespoke software games anything digital we created we’re a team of about 50 or 60 so yeah we we were for shadi Matheson which are one of the biggest conglomerates out there really great company yeah I mean look we just did everything in it anything for you know we did some car launches we did some we did lots of IPO presentations and that’s kind of where I I really refined my business knowledge again because we did lots of I traveled to every European and Asian city doing launching IPOs so a worker wanna work for Patricio Barrett le and he’s the head of Prada and we we created some new web app technology which meant instead of people giving out presentations for IPO paper with that if they all had it on an iPad and it was a real-time connected so it had a WebSocket so it updated instantly which is what you need when you’ve got very sensitive material so we did that all over the world for lots of big clients yeah it was kind of where I kind of learned my craft of digital technology I nothing fazes me and digital anymore because it’s just a bit of a geek in a bit of a mathematical you know I can be a bit binary if it sounds a bit weird I know I can be I can you know it is or it isn’t you know how do we build it what’s the solution all those kind of things so I love solving the problem there problems like that in technology I wasn’t calm yeah so then I did a couple of things after it I built one of the largest education companies phonics hero comm is probably the third most used in Australia for kids yeah number one in Hong Kong it’s quite well known in Thailand Philippines how to do teaches kids to read and spell with phonics yeah I’m not sure if I can say but a very famous boy in the UK uses it as well yeah his school as well right yes he’s throwing ball for that company yeah yes that’s how I am I’m not not as much these days yeah you kind of move on as technology moves yeah we built one of the largest gaming platforms for kids on earth so and one of my accolades I love it but at allit now it’s time to kind of move on to this decentralized world that’s kind of appearing yeah that’s nice and then that’s brought you back to me a new class era yes I was in Sydney for seven years yeah and I just needed a change and I wanted a place which was a better place for me to grow into the next step to that if that sounds okay yeah me Newcastle’s obviously presents opportunities and challenges for your perspective Sydney always been more going on probably more attack though yeah definitely just great population more talent to me I would say mm-hmm Newcastle obviously it’s a step back from it I guess the speed perspective yeah that white wine Newcastle over Sydney then where do you see the opportunities here or yeah look I think there’s look we’re at this moment in time in technology where we’re going to go into an exponential curve right if you look at Amazon go in the state’s they’re gonna have 4,000 stores with no stuff right and now it’s gonna come to Australia in the next couple of years there’s gonna be and you look up you look ahold of Australia I mean I think I don’t know what the statistic is that but about a year ago is half the Australian businesses don’t have a website right so there’s going to be a massive thirst and need for companies to one understand and to how do they compete with this next you know the next step up in technology so I think when I first arrived here I thought you know I feel maybe I felt hampered a little bit because you know there’s not as much as sitting sydney going on and that’s nothing to do with newcastle not having great minds it’s just population size yeah but now I kind of see is an opportunity to to help people understand about this you know this decentralized world that’s going to come in very quickly so yeah I’m kind of looking at the looking at as an opportunity and I’m excited about it yeah nothing Helen you’re been your cousin I have only been here four and a half months yeah yeah not that long enjoying the lifestyle yeah I am everybody is absolutely lovely that’s why I don’t want to go back to Sydney there’s a definite definite difference you know regarded as I guess the attitudes and people and pace of doing things and yeah and more community yeah definitely definitely more of a community Newcastle young which is one of its greatest strengths something yeah it’s definitely hey obviously the opportunities that come around and also present some challenges challenges for you can regard – new cars’ opportunities and things like that and what have you faced so far what are you what are you thinking about you know the challenges that Newcastle going to present for you I think as I just touched on there I think it’s about personally I want to grow and learn and for me you know I just want to be around people that want to do that as well especially the kind of understand this the technology as well so here for me is just find those people connect with them and you know feed off them for this you know for more knowledge nice nice mate here obviously you sort of a self-professed no nerd but have you had guys that loves technology yeah where did I come from where’d that technology drive come from back in the days where did that technology wow you know what I never really thought about it but I think it’s cuz my dad’s a geek as well yeah you know he’s definitely on the spectrum and he yeah he used to sell like Wi-Fi global satellite web systems for people was a son engineer and I was always asking him how does it work blah blah blah so yeah I think probably probably all of him is mostly but one of the nice thing is my mum’s a nurse so I have a great combination of it can be really binary mathematical software tech autistic but combine it with soft skills think about it you know that kind of real empathy okay so I noticed I as up I crossed him over or I flick between the two depending on what needs to happen yeah it’s I’ve made I think the ability to have empathy as a technology professor was nicely right as a human yet I think as a human 100% as a technology professional yeah is that your real understanding of ain’t no technology for technology’s sake for what are we actually trying to do here how’s the ease of any users how are we helping somebody and that’s often overlooked I think I’ve never I’ve never been on a technology project that has not achieved the goals without everybody loving everybody feeling loved if sounds yeah they always fail because somebody in the team is not being cared for I don’t want to be kind of fluffy about it but you really do have to make sure that you know you understand whether they’re what they’re doing how they have that how best they can achieve those goals and you know for every everybody if everybody can see that happening you can crush any goals oh my completely great by obviously made my day today jobs recruitment and yeah a lot of my recruitment is around tryna align motivators China alone hey are you gonna be the right fit to this roller what are you actually looking to achieve what do you want out of a job and making sure what do you want out of the company you know the company you want to work for and align those motivators with the right company because together as motivators align and somebody really keen on what they’re actually doing who they’re working for or come who are they building a product boy is that all Alliance that the rest of it you know the skills can be learned and other things can be you know achieved and there’s other things that can be overcome if you’ve got the right motivators in place I think that’s such a key to you know building a strong team I always love when I’m in a team and there’s five people in it because those five people can always compete within a team that has five hundred in it because if they are motivated in the right way they think of quicker faster solutions with quicker faster technology to get to the end goal and we always happens we build their technology that took a company previously that work for about two years to build we had a little team three people they built it in about sixty days there are and that just goes to show that when people are passionate about what they’re doing they’re rapid and and rapid is success in technology there’s big markets massive yeah that’s not so Chad I guess that’s where you come from and so that’s probably true through growing up around technology having that influence from your father yeah having gone through that to go through education so finish school education what’s that look like yeah wasn’t really good yeah and too much too much to say at school so that was good obviously a date right past maths and science without even trying because I just loved it it was a breeze so you know I did all this that was pretty good and then I went to university and it was good I could have tried harder I know buddy doing University III did a base media production it had a bit technology it had a bit of media it was a bit of a cop-out if I think about it yeah but I’m not sure that style of learning is for me so it was always gonna be a cop-out yeah because I feed off super smart people that are next to me going through you know plowing through it that books there were a thousand pages long is tedious to say the least for me yeah you’re not lying there no it sounds like the maybe production though it sounds like that that creative although the ability to create yeah it’s sort of been consistent with you guys you know you’ve built businesses after I even like back when you’re creating powerpoints and things like that yeah you know that getting building something it seems like there’s a consistent themes for our you’ve done I think I just I like to try and solve problems as quickly as possible with a great team and I’m kind of like I’m in between the tech guy the business guy and the ideas guy I’m not on those and those three that sits across which I really enjoy it because that’s that’s what you know a business is all about rights solving coming up great ideas and building them and make it more revenue for the business yeah it’s all other problems right you have to do that you need multiple people around you it’s very very difficult to do that by yourself the area the talent units are you gonna drive people around you better sense like you’ve uh you’ve done that a couple of times you know and at the moment with your current sort of investments having the right people around you it allows you to sort of have the right inputs into who we’re going to invest in what sort of companies you know and then being able to provide those companies advice as well I imagine yeah we do a lot of advice with M&A in the early days we help build their you know their lean canvases business plans help them understand how to execute good partnerships all that kind of stuff it doesn’t matter what company you’re in whether it’s a blockchain company whether it’s you know a real real estate companies are just about humans and are they happy and how to achieve the next step right and once you kind of get down to those basics anything no anything’s really possible right yeah yeah sure and I think there’s not too many people I’ve definitely had on the podcast or spoke to around Newcastle that yeah I genuinely playing in the blockchain space adrenalin playing and sort of those more advanced technologies and you put it as a third wave I had talked to me about you know your opinion there your experiences what’s going forward yeah so look decentralized technology is not gonna be it’s not gonna be easy we’re not gonna go from what we have today to decentralize technology that what the world loves and just works right there’s gonna be a step one there’s gonna be 2.5 and then a web 3 right there’s going to be a bit in between and then we’ll go for just decentralized technology I’m big on economics and monetary policy at the moment and I’ll tell you why because as we go into a world where we have more quantitative easing and interest rates get cut people look for more reward in their in their assets that they own right and when you only get 2% P ratio and some of the shares that you own you look to Bitcoin now what that then does is people look that they go down the rabbit hole of okay what is a decentralized currency and what is a decentralized token and then we go down the rabbit hole a bit more about these global socio-economic communities in the cloud I always have to stall when I say that cuz I muck it out but yeah but that’s what we’re going into you know Facebook has shown us that they corporates can’t be trusted with data and they’ve also modified our behavior patterns with adverse they’ve looked our data Nathan they run algorithms to show to give us something to allow us to have different thought patterns so that’s pretty dangerous right significant yeah so the way the way I think about it is this problem it has is now everybody knows about this problem like yeah my mum and dad know about oh your Facebook steals your data you know it’s just normal right okay so what what are the options for what what’s the next step well the next step is us owning our data and we allowing technology companies to access that when we choose and we can only do that with crypto cryptographically secure tokens which could be our money or our identity yeah and we need a decentralized protocols for those things to move around the world so I think of it like now when I look up I don’t I you know I just see lots of value and things moving around our identity being released our money being released we’re going into a world where we’re gonna have sovereign money we’re gonna own our own money we control it we’re gonna own our own identity our data so we control it so we’re becoming we’re taking back our control which is great think about that all these technology companies doing are little pieces to each of the puzzle through a complete technology stack so if you think about it at the bottom we’re having we have to identify secure and validate data we then have to move that data to somewhere then we can have marketplaces of data which is secure and then we can have on top of that we can have AI smart contracts and a thing called autonomous economic agents which are smart things so the problem with the world today is what we need is we need to solve lots of simple problems but on a massive scale right how many buses do we send to on one day well if we just connected to how many doors shut that day and how many people on that street that would make it a lot smarter right you can execute insurance contracts in real time only get only pay insurance when your door opens right so so lots of these things can only happen with blockchain encryption and a cryptographically secure token how did you come to this I get it let’s call it education or how’d you become educated in in this I guess newer technologies let’s say yeah I’d say you probably one of the more knowledgeable people out there you know around this Hey where are you getting your learnings at the moment where is that is it reading books is it is it attending a formal education is that having discussions with smart people whereas this come from for you yeah well is you know when people say you go down the rabbit hole yeah it’s down the rabbit hole yeah so what happens is usually you start with a friend and they ask you some questions and you don’t know those answers and then you upskill yourself and then suddenly you leave it for a while I actually did this with a friend that owns a big VC firm in Europe so we sat in a pub in England and we talked about the big coin paper this was years ago and he asked me some questions about blockchain and I was a techie and I didn’t know and he annoyed me so I went away learned some stuff went back to him and then I was probably a year later I started to ask more and more questions yeah and the key thing is there is nobody I read a lot I say that actually podcast what I do is I take them and I go from long walks along the beach and let the speakers speak it to me because it’s complex like blockchain IOT AI a decentralized companies are really complex because it’s game theory economics technology all into one so I have to read it quite a few times to really piece together all the parts of what’s happening so yeah anything there’s a few but I really listen to a lot of economics and monetary podcasts because there probably the weakest because I never had that education but with tech Oh any white paper out live ventures in Europe’s really good just read all their research yeah anything that I can any papers basically so if you could point people in two or three directions for for education where would you what would you start for Ellison as if we could link them up in I would read every word outlier ventures has got on research and every company that they’ve invested in that would take you six months so just do that and then you’ll be you’ll be ready to rock ya know I turn it’s a good starting point I guess there’ll be a lot of people that you know would want to upskill or further education around this so you’ve ever been involved with quite a bit yeah sounds like you’re in Newcastle now been here four months yeah what’s next when he came to get involved with I am looking for a company and organization which I can help move them to the next step and be some passed something great yeah something a company that wants to innovate has lots of problems in their organization it just needs somebody that’s come in and get stuff done yeah and also help them connect globally with some of the technology that they’re gonna need to help you know scale the business enough oh I don’t think I you should struggle with that I think I you know there’s a lot of companies done and really look at newer technologies and how they can transform their businesses especially some I guess more traditional companies that are starting gay okay yeah what are we gonna look like in the future yeah how’s technology gonna help influencer yeah I forgot I can selfie five until you’ve built some companies from the ground up how do you manage it out what’s worth of productivity tools two years yeah had a heavy operate year your time there well I’ve used the productivity tools since they started and then I use this then I use this and then I wanted to use this I basically just use Trello yeah and I keep it simple because that’s what life should be and I organize my life actually organize my personal life poncherello as well that’s how geeky I am yeah just because I forget things sometimes it’s nice to have things ordered and there’s that I think um when I was younger I would focus on all about work but you also have to focus about your own health and mindset as well so I’ve got a few other things in there as well no I completely agree I think if if the health and like mental health as well sleep everything like that men don’t talk about it enough yeah that mental health is very important for all humans completely agree and it’s starting to come at least more oh yeah definitely more acceptable to talk about yeah oh yeah a few whether it be mental health or just physical health finish it all that’s not you know in order it’s pretty hard to succeeding in any form of business world graph absolutely yeah now you mentioned color podcast before yeah the probably more down a monetary or financial perspective at the moment but from more of a tech perspective is there any that any that you enjoy in particular on tech yeah no any from a financial perspective so the Wi-Fi with tech is there better when they’re research yeah with podcast it’s more of a conversation and when you’ve got a certain amount of time in the day and I don’t want to listen to everybody’s conversation about something yeah if you want that you should go on Twitter right yeah so with with research with tech it’s always research with podcast it’s more kind of financial podcasts there’s a couple of one called macro macro voices and market huddle those are great because at the moment where it was real economic cycle of what’s gonna happen are we gonna go into a big recession that’ll de and it all plays into the hands of Bitcoin they have you invested I have a little bit of Bitcoin you hop down rather all the curse stuff okay so this everybody will assist that right only so volatile okay so this unpacked that we’ve had 5000 years of a commodity based money right gold silver goats cows right and then we’ve gone into 200 years of government money where they print money which devalues money but you just run around we run around a little wheel and we use it right yeah so over the lifecycle of your work over that your working life cycle you pay taxes but also they devalue currency so you’re losing twice right so it’s not great for humans as a whole but I believe that we’re gonna go into a mass base monetary policy which will be a Bitcoin over the next hundred years everybody should buy some yeah I told my dad he should buy some the other day and he said don’t be stupid if you had a wheel at all back advice for a younger Jonathan mmm what’s that look like when I was a kid I want it to be I had these goals right and the goals were very binary they were X Y X Y and they were very much just in my business life right how do I achieve that position how do I achieve that wealth you know that kind of thing right and what I’ve learned over the last couple of years is life should be separated out into a few things kindness compassion you know spirituality and work life right they should all be treated the same and there should be no binary yes and those on any of those did I progress in them and if yes that’s great pound pay self in the back right so that that’s the ultimate goal and if you kind of live life like that and you’re always progressing you’re always winning but you’ve got to cover all your bases as a human otherwise everything falls down because if you don’t address one the others just go back and back and back and ultimately will cause you pain at a later date I think there’s more of that holistic perspective right I’ve been in enough technology companies when people like or they’re not going to hit deadlines and the world’s falling apart the world’s not falling apart the world’s colorful and beautiful you just have to be calm collected pragmatic and that only comes from being a calm and collected person great okay if people want to get in touch with you what’s the easiest way probably just find me on LinkedIn yeah I am there Jonathan hook up yeah ping me a message add me connect with me go from there yeah cough not all right thank you very much feet are perfect thank you.

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