Thanks for joining me! Before we get into questions about the Build On Bitcoin Space and Bitcoin in Thailand, can we hear a bit about your background?<\/strong><\/p>\nI was born in Thailand but I spent most of my life in Southern California. My career started with a job in industrial manufacturing after completing my undergraduate degree in biochemistry from UCLA. I didn\u2019t want to go to medical school, after hearing from my friends that their lives were rather miserable. So I ended up selling electronic connectors for wire poles in Vietnam.<\/p>\n
Out of pure chance, I took the GMAT, because I was told that getting an MBA was good for career changes. Good for people who want to be in business but don\u2019t quite know what profession was right for them. The fiat world is all about testing, and I got a good enough score so I ended up at Northwestern\u2019s Kellogg MBA program. My internship at Morgan Stanley during my MBA kickstarted my finance and fintech career. I got a full-time offer and joined Morgan Stanley in New York doing investment banking and corporate finance, involving mostly mergers, acquisitions, capital restructurings, IPOs, etc. After three years with Morgan Stanley, I got laid off along with 75% of my associate class due to the dot-com bubble and the first real estate bubble. <\/p>\n
I was in Hong Kong at the time, and decided to start a boutique advisory firm with some ex-colleagues and friends, doing investment banking work and undercutting the bigger firms by localizing our services in Southeast Asia. After almost a decade and a half of doing that, I retired \u2014 but I was unable to sleep. There was a whisper in my head that I needed to do this fintech thing. I wanted to cut out the middleman and build a platform that matches business owners and borrowers with individual investors. <\/p>\n
But I had to get regulatory approval in Thailand to do that, so I ended up spending two-and-a-half years pushing through a new law called the Crowdfunding Act. If I knew that I had to grovel at the feet of regulators for like two-and-a-half years just to get permission to help my customers, I wouldn\u2019t have done it! But now we\u2019re here, and that company is called PeerPower. The core business is a crowdfunding platform, but once I discovered Bitcoin, that started to evolve. <\/p>\n
We raised our last funding round in 2021, and our lead investor agreed with our strategy to allocate some of the funding to Bitcoin mining with the purpose of finding bridges between the Bitcoin standard world and the current dying fiat world over time.<\/p>\n
Tell me more about the Build On Bitcoin (BOB) Space. Where did it start, and where are you at now?<\/strong><\/p>\nBOB Space<\/a> came out of the diversification effort with PeerPower. Part of it is mining, and another part is financial infrastructure around Bitcoin. There need to be real builders on this monetary network. So BOB is a forum to connect with other builders, where we can help them out in certain ways, say, with connections to UI and UX pros. <\/p>\n\n All images in this article courtesy of the BOB Space team.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nPart of it was also to have a regular place where Bitcoin-only folks can hangout regularly. We have a weekly meetup every Wednesday night, and hold monthly technical workshops. Those workshops are aimed at people who may want to build, but don\u2019t know where to start, and they aren\u2019t quite at the level that they can contribute alongside the more experienced builders that come around. That\u2019s a bridge we want to build. <\/p>\n
I want to go beyond NGU and all that shit. It\u2019s got to be about what the heck are you building, and why should people care about it? Why should Bitcoiners care about it?<\/p>\n
And why did you get a physical space immediately, rather than trying to do this as a meetup?<\/strong><\/p>\nWell, this space came about because the PeerPower business needed something like a mining lab. In our mining business, I do basic maintenance, repairs and testing. And after COVID, the PeerPower employees can all work from home, so we have a lot more space to host events and coworking. It already feels like a co-working space with PeerPower people coming in and out. <\/p>\n
So we decided to keep PeerPower on the second floor and the first floor is all dedicated to BOB projects and developers who want to come, build, hang out and spread knowledge.<\/p>\n
What does the event calendar look like right now?<\/strong><\/p>\nComing up is mining month at BOB in April. We\u2019ll go from the 10,000-foot view of mining down to like, three inches. I will open up some of our used miners and let people see what\u2019s inside, mess around with the actual components.<\/p>\n\n A workshop at BOB Space<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nOne week will be an insights week, where we go through different dashboards and what miners glean from them. Then we might have some special guests; some of the fairly big miners here or the energy projects that serve up electricity to miners.<\/p>\n
SovereignSk8<\/a>, who helps run programming here, is coming up with the May and June agendas. I believe those will be open source and node running months. We want to keep running with these monthly themes \u2014 so far, we\u2019re only about three months in but we are gaining momentum.<\/p>\nWhat ideas are you thinking about for the future of BOB? <\/strong><\/p>\nWell, something we\u2019re very excited about is launching the BOB Residency Program.<\/p>\n
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