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Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a motivational speaker who can cover blockchain and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) at your next business event. Contact us to check availability. The full transcript of the above video is included below.
 

 

Full Video Transcript:

 
Hi and welcome to another edition of Strategic Business Insights. Today we’re going to talk about blockchain and “does blockchain have the potential to destroy the corporate paradigm as we know it today?”

And the answer to that question is definitely yes. There are a number of startups in the blockchain space which are building unbelievable platforms and infrastructure that’s going to revolutionize our world in the years ahead. A few examples include Slock.it, which focuses on the sharing economy. You could think of it as the intersection of IoT and blockchain but, effectively, they’re building a platform – imagine an Uber without the company Uber or an Airbnb without the company Airbnb. So in other words, right now the Airbnb headquarters, they take a piece of the action. They get a percentage of all the money that trades hands. Same thing is true on Uber. The corporation gets a piece. Well, what if there was a network where there is no central governing authority, which means it’s completely efficient and all the money goes directly from the user to the provider? Well, that type of a platform, once it’s created and it gets some initial traction, would beat the existing one very, very quickly and all of a sudden the existing company like Uber or Airbnb or countless other examples would immediately be at a huge competitive disadvantage and the new blockchain equivalent platform would take over.

Other startups include Backfeed. Backfeed is a essentially creating an operating system for decentralized organizations. They call it decentralized autonomous organizations. Same thing. We’re talking about a company, effectively, or the equivalent of a company that has no central governing authority. It’s run by the people who contribute to it.

And these platforms, you earn reputation. Your reputation within the network is earned and it’s earned by your contributions and your evaluations. If your evaluations agree with the overall group, then you earn more reputation and so on. So you can develop your own reputation by contributing to it. So in other words, people can pick their own causes, their own companies, their own services that they want to contribute to, and the more they contribute the more reputation they earn within that space. This is a way of self-governing, for an organization to manifest and create itself by the voluntary contributions of people all over the world. This is a direct threat to the current corporate paradigm that we all live with today.

One more startup you should be aware of is Ethereum. Ethereum is an unbelievable startup which is growing quickly today and is building almost the next-generation Internet. Where the original Internet focuses and specializes on communication, the Ethereum focuses on computation. So in other words, it’s a network which is built on the blockchain or blockchain technology where you can upload code and programs and decentralized apps, and once that code, once that functionality is on the network, it’s unstoppable. It’s unhackable. You can’t censor it. It’s something that can live as long as it’s providing value to its users. This as well is a direct threat to the current corporate paradigm.

So this is all similar in a sense to the open source movement. In fact, it’s almost like a next generation of the open source movement. And this is what I believe, it’s going to take a few years, five, 10, 15 years, maybe 20 years, but we have a revolution coming where the existing structures that we live within, we work within, we function within, we’re aware of in our world, they’re our organizing principles in our cities, in our countries, in the companies that we work for, that could all change in the years ahead. This is an unbelievably exciting time to be alive because we’re going to witness the birth of a new business model and it’s going to happen in the next 10 to 20 years.

So keep an eye out and keep an eye out on the blockchain startups. Keep an eye out on what people are doing and where’s the early traction. Because once the traction starts, this whole thing could accelerate very, very quickly and the vast majority of people will be caught off-guard when all of a sudden the companies they work for or the organizations they’re affiliated with are threatened by new organizations or new equivalents that they might never even have heard of at that point. It’s all going to happen very quickly. It’s an exciting time to be alive.

Thank you so much for watching this video. My name is Patrick, reminding you as always to think bigger about your business, think bigger about your life.
 


 
Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a keynote speaker who has spoken at business conferences in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.