Sandy Carter Podcast Transcript
Sandy Carter 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 Sandy Carter. Sandy Carter is Chief Operating Officer and Head of Business Development at Unstoppable Domains, a platform for user owned digital identity. As COO, she is responsible for driving growth and developing business strategies in pursuit of the company’s mission to provide user-owned identity for the world.
She also drives partnerships and integrations for web three and the metaverse prior to unstoppable. Sandy was the vice president at AWS, where she created and grew businesses in emerging tech, leveraging AI blockchain and AR and VR. Before that, she was a general manager at IBM and a Silicon Valley startup founder.
Well, good afternoon, Sandy. Welcome to the show!
Sandy Carter: Thank you for having me, Brian. I’m so excited!
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I am to get to dive into a little bit about your career and what you’re doing today. So, I’m going to jump to the first question at unstoppable domains. You’re the forefront of providing user owned digital identity.
What are the key challenges and opportunities you see in the widespread adoption of digital identities? And how do you envision them reshaping online interactions?
Sandy Carter: Awesome question. Well, I think let’s talk about the opportunities 1st because I’m a very optimistic person, Brian. I think that there are so many powerful use cases by having a digital identity and all a digital identity is.
It’s about keeping information about you online on chain, actually. And when I say on chain, I mean, block chain that provides transparency, but also security to protect your data. And some of the opportunities I see in this area are, for example, health care, keeping your health care records on chain and available for you.
I recent not recently, but I guess a little while ago, I broke my leg, my femur, everything on my left side of my body in Brazil. I ended up waiting 72 hours for surgery because the medical records were coming in to do the complete surgery. Took three days. And it was quite fascinating when I would call doctors and hospitals to get the required information, they would say, oh, I can’t send this information to you.
I need to send it to a doctor or hospital, which shocked me, Brian, because it’s information about me. It’s all my personal information. So, I think that could be 1, you know, if we could figure out a way to comply with HIPAA. To where you could get that information across all your doctors, eliminate that silo have that in your digital identity protected hidden just for you and whoever you want to share it with.
I think that could be extremely powerful today. I was talking about professional identity. Where you might be able to have your diploma stored. LinkedIn tells us that 36 percent of people who put a school on LinkedIn, they never went to that school. So, this would be a trusted, verified source that you actually went there.
It’d be soul bound, meaning you couldn’t transfer it to anyone else. What a powerful thing for companies. We’re looking maybe for people from certain schools. Or even for you to prove that you did graduate with a diploma, you can think of certifications. And even your work experience. Imagine having your work experience tokenized and sitting inside of that digital identity.
And I’ll do 1 more example. You know, if you’re a citizen, and you want to have your driver’s license and your birth certificate, and you maybe your membership in a chamber of commerce. Having all that digitize being available. And a citizen profile could also be very powerful. So, there are so many opportunities, so many great use cases.
So, what’s standing in the way some of the key challenges that we see today are. You know, making it easy Web3 is still behind Web2. In ease of use and getting people educated too much focus on the tack, not enough focus on the UI. And I think that if we could overcome that, and then the second one is really, you know, the business model, because everything is on chain.
That means it’s decentralized and so who pays a lot of the costs there is that the individual is it maybe a hospital or a news agency who pays the cost? I think those are probably the biggest opportunities and the biggest challenges that will completely. Reshape our online interactions.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that.
You’ve shared some positives and some of the deltas, right? That we need to really overcome some of its technological and some of its UI, as you mentioned. But adoption is key, obviously. So that’s great. And one thing we could also put to use for blockchain is also, you know, that voting to make it easy for everybody, but at the same time, verifiable.
Sandy Carter: I love that one too. That’s a great one. Brian.
Brian Thomas: Yep. We’ve got to verify. So, Sandy moving into the next question, transitioning from being a Silicon Valley startup founder to leading roles at tech giants like IBM, AWS, how have your entrepreneurial experiences influenced your leadership style and approach to business strategy?
Sandy Carter: Well, I have to say I have learned so much from every company that I’ve worked at and it’s quite interesting because I was at a startup and then I went to IBM after I graduated with my MBA, then I went to another startup and then I went to AWS and now I’m at another startup. So, it’s really a great quilt of big enterprise and startup.
To your question, I think my startup journey really gave me a deep appreciation for agility, being able to pivot when you need to pivot quickly, innovation, and be very resilient to make decisions quick with sometimes a lot of limited information. And, you know, if I think back to, let’s take AWS, one of the things that I learned from AWS was.
A customer obsession and AWS taught me so much about that, how to make sure that I’m not too enamored with the tech because I’m a tech geek girl, and I love the tech, but to really obsess on the customer’s problem and solving the problem in the easiest and simplest way for them. And so, I think that in each.
You know, lesson, whether I was a founder at a startup as an entrepreneur, or at a big company, I think there are lessons that I took from each that really made me a stronger leader. And I would say both IBM and a W. S. Are just class a organizations that taught me what to do and then my startups have really enabled me to prioritize the need for a pivot to be able to iterate on real world feedback to look at emerging trends.
And I think embracing that startup ethos within that larger corporate structure. You know, really was a very powerful value, add a superpower, you might say to the other companies that I joined.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And I think what resonates with me probably a lot in our audience is the fact that you had so much exposure.
To some really large companies that have maybe their process down and have some, some capital there to support initiatives, but also a lot of startup experience, which really excites me because we have a lot of founders and startups entrepreneurs on this podcast. So, you’ve shared some great examples there, and we certainly appreciate it.
And Sandy, you’re recognized as a top influencer in AI and blockchain. Where do you see these technologies heading in the next five years? And what ethical considerations should companies prioritize as they integrate these tools?
Sandy Carter: So, I really firmly believe, Brian, in convergence that’s coming. I think in the next 5 years, blockchain will be more and more intertwined together as they advance forward.
So, you know, I’ll just give you a couple of examples of fraud. Unfortunately, the blockchain space has been. The victim of a lot of fraud and AI could really assist in that. In fact, I was just speaking with Pog, you know, Pog, digital little, the little chips that you collected in the nineties are now digital.
The CEO and founder was telling me how he is using AI to protect against fraud of his collectibles, and also to identify, you know, great gameplay. But using AI in that fraud, you know, in that fraud area or user interface, we just talked about the power of UI earlier as being an inhibitor and we see folks like brave, one of my partners using AI to make it easier for advertisers on their browser while still maintaining privacy from blockchain and so I think that these two technologies.
Will converge be intertwined and because of that, we’ll see wider adoption across the board, greater transparency, greater security and supply chains and healthcare and public sector. Now, on ethics, I also see some really interesting things happening with the convergence. So, we talked earlier about the elections.
49 percent of the world’s population will actually go through an election this year. And 1 of the biggest things people are concerned about is, how do I know that was my candidate speaking, or in that video, or in that picture, or in that quote? And here again, you know, I think blockchain can help with deep fakes.
There is a way to do trust verification using either a digital identity like we have with unstoppable or, you know, the blockchain to identify, you know, what is true, what is transparent while not compromising individual rights. So, I think this is going to become really, really important and it’s interesting that this whole area of responsibility or ethical has come to the forefront.
And because I’ve spoken out about it from a blockchain perspective into I, I was just named 1 of the top 10 responsible speakers because of the importance here. So, both AI and blockchain, I think, will significantly impact this area, and it is an area that I believe every company should have a framework for and work towards.
Brian Thomas: I love it. And I appreciate you sharing some of those examples. At the end of the day, we’re seeing a lot of great use cases for the technologies. We just need to come together and make sure that they converge appropriately, and we have strong ethics to the process. So, I appreciate that. And Sandy, last question of the day.
With numerous awards and recognitions to your name, you’ve certainly established a legacy in tech. Looking forward, are there any new challenges or fields within technology you’re eager to explore?
Sandy Carter: Yeah, I, well, there’s a couple and I always love the emerging tech, you know, again, I have that fascination with tech, but 1 of the areas that I am going to actually dedicate personally to dive deep into is with what we’re seeing from blockchain and AI, some of the business and governance challenges.
You know, we often talk a lot about tech, but we forget about the culture of a company or the way that you have to implement it or empathy needed or change management needed. And I think we talk too much about what we are going to do about the tech and not how are we going to ensure that this is done in the right fashion?
I’ll give you an example. There is a company I was working with in Asia, and they have these what they, what they’re called kind of mood jackets. And you put the jacket on. I don’t know if you remember the old mood rings, right? They used to tell your mood. Well, these jackets actually have sensors in them, and they sense when you’re too hot when you’re stressed.
Maybe when you need a rest and the manufacturing company that has these on the manufacturing floor wants to use them with AI storing data on blockchain. So, your data is private. But the management team can tell when you need a break, when the facility is too hot when you’re stressed out, they might need to play music or do something different.
So, the motivation is good and positive. But if you think about it from the person who’s going to be wearing the jacket, a lot of empathy is needed, right? Like, how do you how do you explain to someone that? I’m not going to share your data with others. I’m not going to penalize you with it. How do you do that change management?
And I think that we are today. So enamored with all these new techs that we’re forgetting that. So that would be 1 area that I think could be really interesting. And then the second one is quantum computing. I was recently at the world economic forum, and I got to see a couple of demos of quantum with AI and how it could speed up at really unprecedented speeds, speed up the training of machine learning models.
But at the same time, threats about, well, if it can go that fast, is it going to also break all of our cryptography that exists out there to protect us? So that is 1 of the other tech areas that I’d really like to investigate again, with the convergence of blockchain and AI together. What can we do to accept that new technology will also involve a new way of programming to not with just with zeros or ones?
So those would probably be the big 2 that I think I would take a peek at.
Brian Thomas: Awesome. Thanks for highlighting those. And I would agree with you. Love tech. Want to embrace it again. I know I’ve had several guests, probably a few dozen that are experts in the quantum and cryptography space on this podcast, and they did have some concerns for sure.
They like the tech, but they feel that the, the ethics aren’t quite there. And some of the prevention measures that we probably need in place at this point. But you’re absolutely right. I think there are a lot of benefits with the technology. If we look at it the right way. So Sandy, I appreciate all that.
And it was certainly a pleasure having you on today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Sandy Carter: Great. Thank you, Brian. And magnificent questions. You were a great host. Thank you so much. And thanks to all the listeners out there.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Sandy Carter Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
