Today we’ve got here with us Andreas who’s got a long history of starting up incredible companies as well as a truly modern philosophy of how he believes in the future of remote work.
So Andreas one thing that you know is bad things going wrong things going right but I mean very often when we look at the history of disruptive industries we see similar things happening in the past so who do you think you can compare the metaphase industry to an industry such as the telecoms industry that was you know starting up in the 80s and 90s.
It’s the same as what you call the telecom industry so the moments when we were enabled to actually communicate over distances so tell complications it’s very much the same like the metaverse which for me is maybe something like cyberspace always nothing else and transferring the analog experience to the digital experience and having it from 2d to 3d so all your terminologies like metabolism cyberspace I think it’s all and because people do not understand it and that’s one of the biggest issues if you try to Google what is metaverse the answers you get I wouldn’t be able to remember half of it after an hour.
so this is too complicated what do you guys create here with web 3.0 10.0 or 2.0 all of these people will laugh about it they will not even think about it in five to ten years so yes it has to be 3d because we are sitting in 3d and it works really well it would be nice to have two more people sitting here who do not have to be physically here but who could be in a digital manner and some people call that cyberspace some people call it metaverse you can call it telecommunication because they communicate them over distances if you want to use that terminology but tell me what’s the difference it’s not analog anymore but otherwise it’s telecommunication if you want to use that term its communication.
If we enhance communication then we can share knowledge in a way that wasn’t possible before.
So I realized that it’s powerful if I can call people and if I cannot if they cannot reach me as a number which they call if I have a feature or setup which includes a voicemail system which is maybe remotely accessible so I have a higher connected either higher option of connectivity or higher potential or wider reach whatever you want to call it so as an example right now if we use the metaverse example it would be great to have two more people sitting here who maybe wouldn’t be able to come here today in a physical manner but we can project someone they’re sitting here in a 3d form where you can be part of the dialogue that is super powerful so I’ve seen if we enhance communication then we can share knowledge in a way which wasn’t possible before and that is super powerful if you are if you’re sitting in a small place called island like Malta and you only have analog phone lines with value work it’s difficult now we have ample fiber optics which kind of not unlimited but which is unlimited from today’s imagination perspective capacity
So this allows you to bring all the know-how instantly to multiple is it a complicated surgery that can get experts from all over the world participating in the same surgery remotely and so this is all super powerful it brings it makes mother earth smaller it makes the brain capacity by far more connected and it creates something which i would call instant integrity because you can check things people who want to be transparent can be transparent people who love to share their knowledge and share their knowledge and that’s powerful beyond belief
How could you know or not know when is the right time to launch a company that’s going to build mobile applications?
You never know you can only find out by doing it so as an example i was always a strong believer that the future is mobile and twins and human beings are intrinsically mobile if they cannot walk they get a wheelchair they do not get a fixture this is how we operate as human beings so I always believe that mobiles are actually the core and not computers on desks so this is mobiles carried around by human beings involved we have more mobiles than human beings so people have more than one phone and people will not carry their laptops so they will not even carry their desktops around so that degree will never happen so and that were discussions I had in the late 90s early 2000s.
We started this mobile application-focused incubator actually in Malta because the main issue from my perspective was to prove quickly that they work and Walter is an ideal place for this which is only 17 by nine miles or a tiny place but it’s a multicultural and I always thought it has united nations feature here because of the cosmopolitan dynamics so we can test things at light speed so this was underlying the concept we did this based on text messages for SMS so you can bet so mobile gaming if you want to use it by saying yes or no and you can use this on text messages with SMS you don’t need a mobile app so that was always already functioning at that time.
So this did not come up out of the blue because people of the multi-tourism authority were thinking of what could we do alternatively so there were some people behind it not it was not only a pure coincidence that things moved to that time from putting the fiber optics into place having legislation for online gaming because we saw there as a demand we did some testing with it and it’s the pickup rate was huge and we did it as an example uh what is this 300 characters so you combine two SMS messages and have instant messaging between artists and people so today we call things like this twitter but this was in 2002 2003. This was a little bit early but it worked yeah but we saw how the pickup is and how the demand is for things like that.
What is your process for taking a product to market and then giving you testing what does that normally look like?
I worked in Asia before and what they do in many markets over there they just create a candy bar put a wrapping around and put it into a shop and see people take it or not yes I met a guy called bill gross who has kindly got ideal app in 1997 in New York and he did similar things so he took products puts him online and then yes when people ordered he went to a let’s say car dealer got the kind actually brought it to them all right so this is how the first things happen when the internet was used as a front but also everything else was done analog behind it but you see what the pickup rate is and how people respond to it and if you see that out of we have a fifty percent thirty percent eighty percent bigger rate of people who actually pick the offer then you know you are up to something which could work on the larger scale and what I said before Malta has the upside being 17 by nine miles you can organize things pretty quickly yeah so it’s not the logistically accurate the storage effort and all the things as the complexities are low from what I had done before in Germany or in places like Indonesia you have huge countries with huge logistical complexities you don’t have altar
Crypto
Many of your customers if you talk about highly scalable businesses will not relate to something I think even the word crypto nothing should be cryptic when it comes to money it should be transparent and simple in a sense I’m not competent enough to judge that all I’m saying is I will keep it simple and I would rather instead of an American LLC with an American bank account and collect the money through that so that’s what I would do so you can use Malta for what it’s good at and you have a front-end solution which could be an American LLC with an American bank account and if you do it that way and then your money will all right and you don’t have a problem you can run all of this remotely and you only you build you put a taxation model underneath which is transparent as well which accommodates that so I would not at this stage wait until banking in water gets resolved.
Future of Remote Work
Let me go back to success I believe this very much looked at from my perspective is how many people influence you in your lifetime you will not be remembered for your account statements but you will be remembered for what you impacted and for the glowing and growing you contributed to or which you may be inspired number one number two people are intrinsically mobile so they get wheelchairs under fixed chips.
So remote work is just one of the natural features we only introduced offices as a stationary working setup early in the last century so we the idea people think in office is during the golden hours of the day is an industrialization feature we didn’t have that before so people should be able and they did during the roman times they didn’t have offices they worked everywhere so people should be able to work in any way which is conducive for them so what I believe will be experience right now the words remote work the words digital nominees will all disappear what you have is the biggest shift in humanity where we have been for the last 150 years work centric our life was work centric yeah you go to kindergarten you go to primary school secondary school whatever you study a little bit if you want to then you go and have a career so it was all work centering around work now it’s life-centric people realize that actually the focus is having a great life and if you need to work great do it but do something which really is conducive but you organize your life in a life-centric manner you can do it from many places these days why because fiber optics work.
So communication allows you to do that and so you can now pick the best place for as many times your children maybe where the geo arbitrage is amazing because everything only costs one-third of what you as an example spent in other places or the education of the world’s schooling model or whatever you find is conducive fantastic as long as the time zone works and you can get a little bit of work done when you want to its great so you can organize your life around life, not around work and that’s a big shift you have and the remote work definition which came out of this corona corvette dynamic now all the terminology digital armor this whole temporary stuff which will expire humans have always been mobile the experience.
Views about Metaverse
I don’t think it has anything to do with metaverse this is just enlightened human beings who realize that ultimately they are part of the same mother earth connection and if you look at you what we would what we had when things like Gmail were activated or Skype people did not have to dial any more country code so when I was a teenager I learned about country codes and so you had to have plus four ninety Germany or plus three or plus whatever so you have to learn all this stuff to make sure you actually can call people in the right places yeah and so this is something which is slowly but surely which has expired in the last 25 years.
So places or Gmail was one Skype was another one Facebook is another one Instagram is another one they don’t ask you for the country code anymore they don’t ask you for nationality it’s irrelevant yeah you as a human being as a core empowered human beings what I call the humans yeah so that is the core and this has been there having been gradual shift yeah look at telecommunications what we created over there in the 1980s so we created a situation where you have a kind of a device whatever it is like a phone like we have here you can activate it in different places and it turns on wow and they trust you they trust that your Sim card is legitimate they trust that you actually pay at the end of the month and you have maybe never been in that country so this kind of that kind of features are new.
So try to make phone calls 30 years ago when you travel somewhere and from a calling card from the hotel it was all really complex all of this stuff has shifted and disappeared to a high degree and so yes we are on that path and so I’m sure that for the glowing and growing people who can see the bigger picture and who feel comfortably connected with mother earth as a place where the other is lifetime yeah those people have probably had a higher affinity to what you call metaphors yeah which I would call probably 3d communication is easier yeah then metaverse and aerospace and all these kind of terminologies which people can barely sell and counting reps 3.0 5.0 can make it simple.
Advice for New Startups
I think figuring out who you are or what you what your values are this lifetime yeah and then figuring out people who you can align with who know more than you do this is probably the that feels like the best piece of advice i can give my personal my intuition and i think following people’s intuition is core because they have it for a reason and it’s a skill they were given as this lifetime and using it and living it and embracing it is cool and then and finding people who know more than they do in areas which are relevant for the past they want to take you smart don’t forget the old days if you travel with free gps you would ask people for directions right because they are from that neighborhood smart right so this is mentoring managing directions in the neighborhood not too difficult right so and if you want to go somewhere find people who know more about that direction that is probably the simplest piece of advice to consider you find tons of people who i always found and still find people who are much smarter than I would ever be and connecting with them and having sessions like this in analog all digital format is powerful.