Interview with Prof. Justin Cappos: Creating A Better Ecosystem!
Hello everyone. Hope you guys are safe reading this blog.
A few weeks ago, we got a chance to speak with Prof. Justin Cappos who has been helping us as an advisor from the very beginning and will tell us about his experience at BlockDeliver.
He is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at New York University. He was named to Popular Science’s Brilliant 10 list and his projects have made a mark everywhere. His research philosophy focuses on improving real-world systems, often by addressing issues that arise in practical deployments.
Let us have a look at our conversation
Q. Hello Justin, could you please tell us the story behind the technology?
Maybe five or six years ago people started to talk a lot about blockchain and I looked at a lot of the systems and thought there were things they were definitely not doing.
I kind of thought to myself, would it make sense to have a resource backed cryptocurrency, a cryptocurrency where you use it to exchange some type of resource? When I thought about that, well, that resource would have to be something that naturally wanted to be decentralized, because if it was a centralized resource, you would very naturally have people do the kinds of things they’re doing in Bitcoin, where they build big data centers to mine, Bitcoin and stuff like that, but sort of defeats the purpose because you have administrative control over minors then like you have centralized administrative control, or you would. So I tried to think of resources where that would make sense and CDN was really the number one resource, if that made any sense at all.
And, so I spent a bunch of time trying to design the system that I thought might work to see if it was feasible to make something that had reasonable security and performance properties. And, the culmination of that work is the technology that BlockedDeliver is helping to work to commercialize.
Q. So how did you meet Kumar Aniket, founder of BlockDeliver? And how was that experience?
He applied to be an intern in my group. He came over and spent some time with me in New York. I mean, he’s obviously a very motivated, driven fellow.
He’s also quite charismatic and, I think, naturally quite a good leader. Another thing very much to his credit is that I think, sometimes when I work with somebody and they have strengths and weaknesses, they are not very good at addressing their weaknesses. They’re very static. They don’t sort of grow, but Kumar has really also grown and improved in a lot of areas. Since I’ve known him, he was already strong, but he’s made a point of focusing and getting better, which I think is a very positive thing. Because you ideally, you want someone who you want to work with for the next five years.
Not just someone who can take something like this along for six months, but when it starts to grow, then their limitations become apparent. I think Kumar can very much grow into any role as needed.
Q. You being our advisor, what is your role at BlockDeliver?
I mean, realistically, I’m a technology advisor. And really what I am is really in many ways wearing that hat, the Cachecash Foundation, because this is the technology that BlockDeliver is implementing.
And what I’m doing is the same thing I would do for any startup that wanted to implement CacheCash technology. Which is that I’m giving them all of the technical advice I can and doing everything I can to try to help them to get to a point where their use of the CacheCash technology is a commercial success for them.
Because the more that happens, the better the ecosystem as a whole, the more everything grows, to everyone’s advantage in the ecosystem to have others to be strong.
Q. Right. So you have been with the BlockDeliver for a year, more or less. What do you think of the team?
I think there has been a really nice job of getting a bunch of people that work well together. That’s I think one of the most important things for a startup is to have a team that is all pulling in the same direction. And, I can see people are doing that.
I can see people are having fun. Gargi asked good questions. Fortunately for me, she hasn’t asked any questions so good that I haven’t felt really bad that I didn’t know an important answer. We did also have like five or six years of multiple people with PhDs designing CacheCash.
But yeah, overall I’ve just been impressed. And I think that as things accelerate and move, especially as the engineering talent ramps up with BlockDeliver, I’m really excited to see how it competes.
Q. Think of a BlockDeliver at this moment in comparison to BlockDeliver in the first month. How do you think it has progressed?
That question is an interesting one because in the first month it was basically just Kumar had at some point, registered a name or thought about registering a company or had discussed it with me and just asking questions about that. So, it went from him working on something and saying he had a startup, which is really just kind of the thing in nature only to actually being a viable group where there’s a bunch of people working on it, and one of the most impressive things to me has been the fact that he’s been able to go and get actually quite a good talent.
So, without having raised millions of dollars first, I’m very impressed with how good he’s been at motivating and growing the team and just really everything; How he’s taken it from an idea of something he wanted to pursue. After we had kind of loosely talked about that and made it into reality.
Q. That leads me to the last question. What is the best thing about BlockDeliver and how do you picture BlockDeliver in five years?
Yes. Well, one of the best things about it, I would definitely say is the working group. And you know, he’s managed to build a team and do things in a very good way. And so I think that is just the way you all work together. And the things you’re able to accomplish together is really the best part of what I’ve seen.
And I think that technology has quite a good chance. It really isn’t that far from the point to which you can go and deploy the full software stack and, we can really see things start to accelerate. We just need a little more engineering muscle.
Hopefully, we’ll get to this point in three to six months to have a massive flurry of excitement around it and then BlockDeliver can be seen as the leading company in this emerging ecosystem.
Thank you for taking the time with us today. It was very insightful and knowledgeable. We are honored to have you onboard from day one. I hope to see BlockDeliver grow to be a leading player in the CDN industry in no time.
