Dan Keene Podcast Transcript
Dan Keene joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:12] Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Dan Keene. Dan Keene is the Chief Business Officer and founding team member at Portal Foundation with a career grounded in traditional finance. He has 10 plus years at the forefront of consumer tech. Dan has spent the majority of his time founding, scaling, and selling companies across multiple sectors.
Highlights include scaling one company to unicorn status and raising 650 million in investment for another. Investors include the likes of Goldman Sachs and SoftBank. Dan has been full time in Web3 for the last three years and is bullish on the disruptive force that blockchain and digital assets can bring to all industries, particularly gaming.
Well, good afternoon, Dan. Welcome to the show.
[00:00:57] Dan Keene: Thanks so much for having me, Brian.
[00:00:58] Brian Thomas: Absolutely welcome. And I appreciate you making the time, hailing out of the UK and I love traversing the globe doing these podcasts. So, Dan, jumping right into your questions here. You’ve got an amazing career in investment banking, mergers, and acquisitions, you were an entrepreneur, senior executive. Now you’re the Chief Business Officer at Portal Foundation. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
[00:01:22] Dan Keene: Yeah, really great question. I think for me, it’s always been about asking for feedback. Feedback is a very important tool and being able to freely and openly ask for it.
I think it can really help you grow. In terms of what inspires me I’ve always been very much inspired by new technological applications, especially anything that can empower people. So I’ve worked in various areas, whether that be Empowering people when it comes to gig economy work in terms of flexibility and now kind of building out into web three, what was really inspiring me here is the true ownership of assets of digital goods and the way in which people can interact with those assets and digital goods to have kind of more utility and more fun in their lives.
[00:02:07] Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. And again, this podcast is all about the people that are passionate about what they do in trying to help the world be a better place. And that’s what you’re doing in your space and Web Three. And I appreciate that. And Dan switching gears, let’s talk about some really exciting news coming up with Portal’s launch here.
I understand this is one token that will allow any user to have a first of a kind cross chain gaming experience. Could you tell me a little bit about the utility token, the platform launch, and wallet and offering that people are calling a super app?
[00:02:39] Dan Keene: Yeah, I’ve been an avid gamer my whole life. That’s really my true passion when you ask me, but I tried to keep it a little bit more commercial than your first question.
And really the power of Web3 for gaming is an amazing power. It really truly enables true ownership. It allows communities to grow together. It allows gamers to have a say on the direction in which games go. And really that’s what we’re trying to enable with Portal. There’s been a lot of growth, as many of your listeners have probably seen in, in Web3 over the years.
As a result, there’s also been fragmentation. There’s so many blockchains out there now that you have gamers and games somewhat siloed across these different chains. And what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to unify them all together by a single token called Portal. And that will then enable a gamer to be able to play any game on any chain seamlessly.
So that’s really our vision to make. Gaming Web 3 gaming, especially more accessible to everybody. And blockchain is a wonderful piece of technology. We think it’s a piece of infrastructure that should be behind the scenes. And the user experience people have still felt very similar to what they’re used to playing games of today.
Yeah, portal is the unifying token itself, which is it’s the glue that, that brings that the entire platform together. And then on the front end, we’ve built a variety of different application layers and services there. that enables users to easily log into games with their email rather than a seed phrase; allows users to discover various games and then ultimately via our cross chain marketplace buy and sell in game items.
[00:04:14] Brian Thomas: Really love that. Thank you, Dan. Been in blockchain myself here for the past several years as well. The platform here, the publication side, we’ve got the Web3 side of it. So, we duplicate that content out on Web3. And gaming is something that I’m passionate about as well. And we should talk about that sometime.
My son was a professional gamer as well. Switching gears, Dan, there’s so much opportunity in the web three space and opportunities to solve so many problems. Tell me about why the Portal Team is uniquely positioned to solve for interoperability. I understand you’ve got a Web two gaming network, like any other team that has ever attempted to work on the pain points in Web3 gaming. Let’s talk about this.
[00:04:53] Dan Keene: Yeah, really good question. I think anybody that goes out to try and build what effectively for us is a two-sided marketplace. You really need to understand how to build both sides of that marketplace. One of one side is the supply and that’s the supply of high-quality games.
And then the other side is the demand. How would you actually get users playing those games? And how do you get that flywheel spinning for that viral growth? Why are we positioned to do that better than others? I think there’s a couple of reasons. I think first off, our team, myself included, we’ve all in a web two context, Have built significant businesses two sided marketplace businesses, many of which have reached unicorn status and have been listed or acquired.
So we bring a lot of experience there. We’ve also been very particular in our partnership approach. We’ve forged a very close strategic partnership with Layer Zero Labs. For those of your listeners that don’t know Layer Zero they’re an amazing team based out of Canada. They raised a significant round recently of around, I think, 300 million, and really, they’ve been building out their interoperability protocol effectively a protocol which enables the infrastructure side for us to have a full cross chain experience for the users.
Yeah. To summarize, our team has a lot of experience in building two-sided marketplaces. We’ve really picked to work with the world’s best from a partnership perspective on the technology side. And then finally, we’re also building what we think is the world’s best advisory board, with some really heavy hitters from some of the biggest publishers in the world from a web two gaming context.
[00:06:23] Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And I love the diversity of the team there. Obviously, they both playing to each other, but I really, really appreciate that. I’ve done a ton of these podcasts on the Web3 space and maybe offline, Dan and Jon, we can all talk about some great projects that are happening around the globe.
So Dan, we asked this of everybody, you’re obviously leveraging some of that new and emerging technologies in your tech stack. Is there anything you might be able to share with us today? And it’s okay if we want to dig into Layer Zero or anything that comes to your mind.
[00:06:55] Dan Keene: Yeah, I just think there’s a really exciting. Next kind of 6 to 12 months that will be occurring in the gaming space with web free mechanics. There’s been a lot of games during this bear market where teams have really had their heads down building some really high-quality IP and titles. And what we’re really excited about is helping those games come to market over the next six months.
So, I think if anybody’s interested in gaming and if anybody’s interested in kind of truly owning their items and being part of very close communities, I think there’s a lot to watch there.
[00:07:28] Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Dan, and last question, really if you could share with us some of the ways we can get in contact with Portal Foundation, everything that they’re doing and they’re launching right now offline, online, whatever, that’d be great.
[00:07:40] Dan Keene: Absolutely, yeah, so to keep up to date with all the top titles that we’re bringing to market you can check us out on Portal Gaming.com. And if you really want to keep up to date with all the latest updates that we’re dropping on a daily basis, now best place to see that is on Twitter our handle is @PortalCoin. And if you want to go one step further and be rewarded for your engagement around those posts, you can go to CrystalDash.Co.
[00:08:05] Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Thank you again. This has been an amazing and exciting podcast today. Can’t wait to get the episode out. Dan, I just want to let you know, it was such a pleasure having you on and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:08:17] Dan Keene: Thanks so much, Brian. It’s been a pleasure.
[00:08:19] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Dan Keene Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
