Bayo Okusanya Podcast Transcript
Bayo Okusanya joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Bayo Okusanya. Bayo Okusanya is the founder and CEO of NPC Labs, a tech company building a one stop platform to create, monetize, and scale tech enabled goods through its global fulfillment network.
MPC aims to empower creative entrepreneurs and enterprises to build global franchises, eliminate counterfeit goods by tracking and tracing real world assets throughout the supply chain, and protect intellectual property using secure blockchain integrations. Bayo is also a partner and co-founder of AVATIST.
An AI company using interactive AI generated content and avatars to teach and empower the world.
Well, good afternoon, Bayo. Welcome to the show.
Bayo Okusanya: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for taking the time, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, but I appreciate it. And especially this time of night. I know you’re on the East Coast, New York, New Jersey area there by New York City, and I’m in Kansas City.
So, it’s not as late. But again, you making time means the world to me. It really does because you care about getting your story out, sharing with me and sharing with the world. So, thank you first question here. You’ve written a book, life lessons, volume one through 47 tips to transcend your education.
What motivated you to share these lessons and what are some of the key takeaways you hope readers gain from your experiences in entrepreneurship and digital content creation?
Bayo Okusanya: Yeah, thank you. So, around the time I was writing this book, I wrote it during my undergrad years at Princeton University, which I attended from 2016 and 2020.
I had a, you know, incredible and probably an orthodox undergrad experience because I was part of, for instance, emerging tech ecosystem and entrepreneurship space. Really at the time when the university decided to put many resources into that environment to catch our peer institutions like Harvard and Stanford.
And I was lucky enough to be part of an emerging fund called check ventures, working with a mentor and emerging manager. And that allowed me to be a fly on the wall for many different entrepreneurs. As they were building their companies, many of the lessons I learned during that time find their way into this book.
I ended up graduating with a philosophy degree as well, and a minor in entrepreneurship. So, I always took an interest in sharing my ideas, thinking originally from first principles. And I find myself doing that throughout the lessons I gained. And the final thing I’ll mention too. So, one of my favorite investors is Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater associates, and Ray at the time was releasing his book principles, which I very much enjoyed, and he advised young people to do what you would He did, which was write down the principles or lessons that you learned along the way, so you don’t repeat those mistakes.
So that’s what I did. I took my notes out and I kind of recorded what I was learning. I had always been a note taker, a high school student and young person. So, this was an extension of that and I kind of wrote the book in real time and then, you know, upon graduating, I decided to release it as an eBook, you know, some of the key takeaways.
But my experiences in entrepreneurship and digital content is to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. A lot of the activities I found myself participating in as an undergrad were very much outside of my comfort zone. You know, I considered myself introverted. I started. My undergrad career is a full-time engineer in the computer science department at Princeton.
So, I was very much not trying to be in everyone’s face or, you know, be like a master networker, but I found myself engaging in those activities out of exposure and being in the right position. And that started my freshman year when I was the financial coordinator and CFO of Princeton and vision.
Which was putting together these conferences on emerging technology, talking about AI safety in 2017, but it put me in a role where I had to adapt quickly and kind of practice being an entrepreneur. You know, not everything goes right on your 1st go and then later as a, as a VC as a junior VC you have to constantly be.
Building relationships. With tech entrepreneurs, investors, LPs. And that was not what I was used to at the time. So, you know, that’s, that’s one major takeaway from all of those experiences.
Brian Thomas: Thank you, Bayo. I appreciate that. And it’s kind of like having a journal there. I know you learned a lot there in your undergrad, but, you know, releasing a book with your experiences afterwards is certainly helpful.
And it’s, it’s your way of kind of paying it forward. So, I appreciate the story really do. And Bayo MPC labs is tackling multiple challenges from counterfeit goods to intellectual property protection using blockchain, which we love here. What inspired you to create a platform that addresses these complex issues and how do you envision MPC labs reshaping the future of global commerce?
Bayo Okusanya: Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that question. It strikes at the heart of a lot of the interests I’ve taken these past few years post my V. C. career, which never really ends. By the way, there’s a lot of things that block chain does well. And one of those things is providing a permanent record and database that is cryptographically secure.
And one of the things I’ve been interested in recently is how we can leverage blockchain technology to protect people’s data and their intellectual property. How do we attribute ownership and attribute credit to folks in a way that can’t be tampered with and that exists for posterity, future generations.
Blockchain, you know, is a database that solves a lot of those issues, particularly in like an AI driven world where everything can be counterfeited, replicated, copied blockchain, a test who actually created what, where that data came from, and that can’t be easily tampered with. So, I mean, what inspired me to get involved in this back as a VC, my first year in VC actually.
My partners were older than me and they didn’t understand blockchain and crypto. I had no real understanding of it myself, but they encouraged me to do a deep dive for our fund, and I ended up reading the Bitcoin white paper where a lot of people start in space and creating a presentation for our team on the blockchain industry.
That’s when things clicked to me about what it would mean to have an open market with no middlemen, where people can trust in the security of the protocol, right, and kind of agree on the rules and not need to have, uh, Referees controlling the transactions in the and the trade of information, which can often, you know, as people do get corrupted.
So, I realized that was a powerful thing, and I started investing on my own time in different projects that are coming out of the space. And then in 2019, when Web3 became the word of the VC world, our deal flow started picking up on that side of things. So, they had me at our fund to do due diligence and to kind of lead opportunities in that space.
One of those opportunities that I did. A lot of I put together like our executive summary on was a company called mirror imaging, which was incubated at Sotheby’s to find art house. And Mira was taking the biometric fingerprints of these fine art pieces, these physical artifacts, putting it in an NFT essentially, though I don’t think the word was coined yet and having that signify ownership.
So, if you could produce this NFT that has biometric fingerprint. Of that item, then you could prove your ownership. It costs a lot less than hiring expensive appraisers to go across the world. And that’s when I realized that blockchain can be used to track and trace physical items. So, when the NFT market started taking off in 2021, I started collecting on my free time to learn more.
And I was very impressed by the community engagement in these spaces and how it aligns people along the same sort of economics as long as you’re all part holders in this massive project, right? You could all be like a decentralized, like, hive mind all swimming in the same direction. You know, at the same time, a lot of those projects were having trouble, you know, good intellectual property, you know, not great businesspeople, right?
Mostly artists and creators and, you know, I could relate as, like, a part time content creator at that point, you know, trying to build my social and personal brand. That’s like your intellectual property. I realized that, you know, in order to build on that promise, a lot of projects for making it being these global brands, you needed access to the same infrastructure.
And that’s when, you know, NPC labs was born. So, we’re like a network of suppliers. Manufacturers to create, like, the physical infrastructure for fulfillment and product distribution, but all of these products are tokenized on-chain in order to track and trace, you know, their origins and their ownership, right?
As they enter into the market and trade hands, so you can’t actually counterfeit these goods. We track all of that on chain. So, you know, that solves like a massive billion-dollar issue within the e commerce space where you go on these public platforms, everyone’s copying the hottest product. And essentially replicating it, stealing the IP and reselling it on the platform coming from a community of artists and content creators.
You know, my brother being an artist, my uncle being a painter, but also a university professor. Like I could understand. And I realized that whoever could solve this problem and kind of bring, you know, these physical assets on-chain would be doing the world a big service.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I appreciate you starting back and, you know, you mentioned reading the white paper, the one on one for Bitcoin, right?
How that started. I think that’s impressive. And obviously that paved the way for you to look at other use cases for blockchain, which is amazing. And our platform is actually built on Web3 as well. We, we just love this work. So, switching gears Bayo, if you could briefly just share one of MPC labs, key offerings is the ability to track and trace real world assets through the supply chain, which you briefly talked about.
Could you maybe explain how the system works and what impact you believe it will have on reducing counterfeit goods and securing supply chains?
Bayo Okusanya: Yeah, thank you for the question. So, at the inception, I’ll start here, right? Our clients are often influencers, artists, creators, but you know, also enterprises that are built on top of massive creative IPs, you know, think like Disney or think like Pixar.
These companies take their IPs and turn them into massive franchises. And, you know, a big part of that, their revenue that they produce is based off of their merchandising. So, they also write struggle, let’s say with counterfeits. People that see value in the IP can make a quick buck off of it and then, you know, confuse consumers right by selling an exact replica of a good kind of trespassing over trademarks and copyrights.
In order to make money off of other people’s original concepts and ideas, the goal for us, right, was to make that an impossibility within the global supply chain. And the way we do that is from the inception of a product, and it could be, you know, any good. Right. It doesn’t necessarily have to be consumer goods.
This also applies to tracking and tracing commodities, tracking and tracing all sorts of assets, collectibles, memorabilia, luxury goods, and so on. And so forth. But what we particularly do is we take. RFID tags, NFC chips. We embed it into the item in a secure way. We co-create with the manufacturers and what we do there is essentially have a chip that lives with the item from its inception.
Throughout the supply chain and then into the consumer market or the public market and that ship has within its metadata a token where you can claim it and that token signifies your ownership in the piece. So, even if it is discovered across the world and the wrong person finds it. Right. The authorities will know who actually owns it based off of that ownership of the token that came with it.
But it also has within the metadata, the manufacturing specs of the product where the manufacturer actually came from. Right. It also has the journey through the supply chain. So we could track for instance, as it’s the filled. Right, it stopped at this facility, that facility, these checkpoints until it got to the, so the journey through the supply chain, we’re tracking as well.
We could add, you know, and we’re working on doing like, live GPS tracking of certain assets as it relates to certain federal contracts where they need to know where this asset is at all times or in commodities, like, they might need to track Jade or gold. As it moves across the supply chain and goes from Africa to Europe, right?
For example, so there’s many applications to technology. Watching is really good at creating the permanent record that people can trust, and they know that is secure and hasn’t been tampered with. Whereas certain other databases can be breached, let’s say, and can be copied, right? This is very difficult to do with blockchain platforms that we leverage.
So that’s how we’re going about executing, tracking, and tracing these assets.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And you’re absolutely right about that. What I like about blockchain technology is the immutable record and everything’s decentralized. So, there’s a, a really a digital ledger that is kind of proof in the pudding for everybody and that’s how things are better protected and better tracked.
So, I appreciate you breaking that down as far as real world assets. My last question of the day, if you could briefly share IP right intellectual properties crucial in today’s creator economy, how do blockchain integrations ensure that creators IP is protected?
Bayo Okusanya: Thank you. So, there’s 2 major trends that I’ve been focused on and that’s AI.
And blockchain kind of hit at least the tech consciousness earlier, though AI has been a science fiction up until recently. But what I noticed with AI is the first group of people that felt threatened were the artists and the creators, the designers, the musicians. And that’s because many people were using AI to essentially copy those talents, right?
You could easily create a song, easily create a photo, a design. People want to go ahead and get Nearer and nearer to what their favorite artists can produce. And that’s when you start getting into difficult territory. Cause you might be stepping over people’s copyrights and trademarks. Moreover, you know, these AI companies were caught taking data from artists, photographers, all sorts of people, you know, even social media users.
Right. Taking their information to train these massive AI models. And I realized that, you know, a good counter to that issue is blockchain databases and blockchain backends, right? Because we can attribute whose data came from who we can have people opt in. Right. Or opt out to their data being used. And we could, even if we get there properly not just credit, but incentivize people right through leveraging their own data, leveraging their intellectual property in the marketplace to get paid for their contributions to these massive AI models.
You know, last year I wrote an article. On mirror called a decentralized AI. And the whole premise was leveraging the power of AI in the front end and the power of blockchain in the back end in order to maximize the potential of AI, but without stepping over the people. Who’s contributing their data to train these models to do amazing things, right?
How can we also reward them? So, within our blockchain integrations, we’re integrated with platforms like men tangible, which is 1 of our partners meant tangible actually lets us put. The licensing agreements we have with the IP, the artist licensing and agreements, their copyrights within the metadata of the actual token.
So oftentimes when people release like an NFT. Right, or release digital art and people collect it. You can’t actually tell what your actual rights are to that piece. People think that they have complete ownership, but you’ve had situations where the artist or the brand or the community leader will change the rules of your ownership because they can, or they want to.
And like, you know, a simple example is like going from having complete commercial rights for something that you purchased in the form of a token or NFT to having, you know, no commercial rights because they’ve given the IP to the creative commons and like, you know, that’s what you have to now accept.
But with the way we’re leveraging blockchain from the time you mint something. Right, you can actually see the commercial rights. You can click within the metadata, and you can go see the licensing agreement. You can see, like, what writes the artist, the brand. The creator of the actual piece or digital asset is giving you and we don’t allow them to change that.
They have to make that decision 1 time, right? At the inception of the digital asset. And you know, that’s what the collector gets. Once they claim it, that’s at the heart of what we do. It both protects the creator because now their IP is on chain and it’s, you know, it’s hard to replicate. Right, and it’s hard to copy because any consumer can go and actually check the metadata and check the chain to see for themselves where that thing came from and, like, see if it was actually sanctioned by the original creator or not.
And whether it’s tied to them or not, that’s a hugely important thing. I believe in the future of Intellectual property protections, because it’s, it’s going to get very difficult to distinguish whether something’s AI created or original.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I think that’s so important. This IP is, is something so many people we’ve had a lot of examples here on the podcast of, of people’s IP being stolen and someone else taking off with it and, and.
You know, leveraging that in some sort of way or making a profit out of it. So I’m glad that you’re focused on that. I think it’s so important. It’s not just about digital goods or real-world goods, you know, hard assets, but intellectual properties is right at the forefront as well. So, I appreciate that Bayo.
It was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Bayo Okusanya: Thank you, Brian. It was a pleasure being here and I, and I am thankful for the questions.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Bayo Okusanya Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
