Tahir Mahmood Podcast Transcript
Tahir Mahmood 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 Tahir Mahmood. Tahir Mahmood is a pioneering technologist and co-founder and CTO of KRNL Labs building the future of Web3 infrastructure with over 40 years of experience, Tahir’s career spans, operating systems, distributed computing and ai, beginning at Lower Borough University and Microsoft.
He’s a sole inventor of over 40 patents across Web3, iot, AI, and telecommunications, including push email, the foundation for Blackberry. His expertise encompasses multi-platform environments, financial systems, ai, cybersecurity, blockchain, and cloud architecture.
Well, good afternoon Tahir. Welcome to the show.
Tahir Mahmood: Lovely to be with you.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. And I love doing these international podcasts. I appreciate you making the time. You’re actually in Bogota, Columbia right now doing a podcast with me in the middle of the United States in Kansas City. I just so appreciate you making the time and, and traversing time zones, et cetera.
So I. Tahir. I’m gonna jump into your first question. You began your career at Microsoft in 1989 focusing on operating systems and programming languages. How did your experiences during that era influence your approach to technology development and innovation?
Tahir Mahmood: I. No, uh, very interesting question. I mean, if you can remember at that time it was pre, even Windows One.
So we had Microsoft Dos, ms Dos at the time, and when I joined Microsoft, obviously we were preparing to bring out Windows One with the Windows SDK, to allow people to be able to build those, what you see, what you get, WIC applications. And of course for more of a sort of a, a commercial institutional level, there was OS two, which was, uh, a joint venture between IBM.
Microsoft, which was this sort of more bigger preemptive operating system. And then later on, obviously when the relationship fell apart with IBM, Microsoft went on to create the NT operating system after that. So you can imagine it was a very early stage in terms of going from, you know, when literally you’re using Microsoft DOS terminal base.
Nothing but a mouse really to be able to take what was PCs and make them take that leap to something which was, as I said, windows based and using a mouse and having chopped down menus, you know, feature parity. So you had Word and Excel where they all operated, and the user experience was if you learned one, you could learn the other.
So I think what I learned from my days at Microsoft was one was very much about. What is it that you would need to do to take a product to market? Because you know, we can all build technology and you can build amazing technology at the end of the day, but it all comes down ultimately to selling it. And that is what I think I learned in my early days about technology from being at Microsoft was, Microsoft was really a, what I call a marketing company that was bringing tech out, not just a tech company because just a tech company would most likely have failed.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that perspective. Look at going back early in your career, obviously starting out there at Microsoft, which it would’ve been awesome. I’ve used Dos and Windows nt, but that gradual evolution from DOS to Windows One must have been amazing back then. I liked the fact that you learned how to take a product to market, and I think that’s important.
You highlighted that as Microsoft was more of a marketing company than a tech company, so thank you so much. And to hear as a sole inventor of over 40 patents, including the foundational push email technology for Blackberry after decades in traditional tech sectors. What motivated your transition into the Web3 space and the vision to founding KNRL Labs?
Tahir Mahmood: I. Yeah, filing patents obviously is something I learned along the way, and it became much more important because it was in 1993 that I came up with the intention and this idea of push email, which was, you know, having to open up your laptop, put, plug it into the, uh, a socket on the floor, dial up, see if you even have the email, nevermind, you know, waiting all that time.
So the intention of when we moved from analog to digital phones was, you know what? I saw this SMS message appear on the phone and it was like, wow. What if I could make it that my email, if anything came in, I could send the core critical stuff to the phone as a message, and that way it would avoid me, one, having to carry my laptop around everywhere, you know, if I need it, but literally be able to see what email is arriving.
So that was a early, early stage, and obviously I gave that invention to, uh, what was Research in Motion in 19 93, 94, and they went on to develop it from 1999 to create the Blackberry device itself. What I learned from that episode was that when I gave that invention to them, they went and patented as their own idea and as it’s in the public domain.
I spent eight years in court with, uh, research in motion to finally have the appeals court in Washington DC confirm that I’m the inventor of push email. All the evidence was there, all the, uh, emails from myself to them showing that I’d given them all of that sort of intellectual property. But the one thing I was very naive doing in the early days was.
Taking my inventions and actually filing patents for them. I just assumed everyone is a good guy in the world and everybody will respect your intellectual property. And you know, that was a hard lesson for me. So I decided after that, that if I ever create anything novel and unique, I would do it and take the effort to file a patent.
So, hence you see a, a lot of patents being filed for myself, because at least from one regard, I just want people to know that, you know, it’s not about being a trolled to try to. Make money out of it. It’s just having the ability to say, you know, I am the actual inventor, but that’s what it was all about.
Now, Web3, the reason why I went into Web3 and KRNL Labs was created is Web3 is one of those places where there’s such a divide between what we call web two and Web3. And I say the divide is we even have given them numbers. You know, it literally is that strange. And that wall, that Adrian’s wall that we have between the two.
Is something which, you know, I felt, uh, is wrong. I’ve literally felt that we have this very close community in Web3 and we have this massive web two community that has grown from, with the internet to great user experience in many ways, but still poor in others. But Web3 really lacking it. And for me, that was the thing.
And Web3 is made up of a very fragmented network of, you know, uh, blockchains they call layer ones and then layer twos to speed them up. You know, you have little community going from one chain to another, blah, blah, blah. I can just say it’s just absolutely fragmented deserts, isolated, uh, TBL in one place, total value lock, meaning to meaning in one chain to another, and you’re not, there is no harmony in it.
So KRNL Labs, to me was a cra. Just like when I was, and I, you know, it’s funny, at Microsoft I started in operating systems, but I ended up in the world of, uh, email where I helped develop gateways between different email systems. And if you think of it this way, it was only the fact have gateways in different EAMS that we have, you know, the one killer wrap on the whole planet email.
And for me, I wanted to take the same concept to Web3 and say, okay, you guys go ahead. You know, every blockchain has its own premise. It’s, you know, optimized for a certain thing, but one blockchain is not gonna serve the planet. We need this, all this cool technology, whether approved, whether it’s private networks, whatever it may be.
But we need to join them and interoperate between them. And that was the goal. And that is basically what KRNL Labs is all about.
Brian Thomas: Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Highlighting a couple things. I think it’s really cool is that push to email technology and of course, you know, I like to say as we’re young, we’re maybe naive, but it, the world can be a cruel place and obviously you and I both have learned our lessons in our careers about trust in the world.
But what’s cool is your transition to Web3, which I totally agree with you right now. It’s the wave of the future for sure. Our platform’s built on that, but there’s a lot of more work to be done. And more adoption to be done in order for Web3 to be more successful. And you’re doing the right thing by bringing these chains together.
So it’s a lot easier for the everyday user to jump on. So I appreciate that. To hear KRNL Labs has developed a cryptographically secured cross chain bridge in collaboration with CI Network. How does this infrastructure enhance interoperability between blockchain networks?
Tahir Mahmood: If, if you think of it this way, we accept that there’s different chains and we need to move value tokens from one place to another.
And in the world of blockchain, um, over the last couple of years, if there’s ever been any hacks where, you know, money and value has been lost, it’s generally been through these bridges that literally take value from one chain to another. And the problem has been that although we have these very clever things called smart contracts, you have one side where you’re minting, one side where you’re burning, and it, it is the greatest attack vector surface is these smart contracts and they have vulnerabilities inside them.
So as long as you’re dealing with smart contracts, you’re always going to have some kind of problem. So when we met up with, uh, David from CI Network, and by the way, he’s like the, the team out of near protocol. The cryptographic team came out and they would, you know, wanted to go on to do their own project.
I heard about what they were doing with these wallet, these particular type, uh, yeah, all wallets. And it came to me that, that we were in Bangkok at, uh, DevConnect and David was talking to me about what they’re to build. And that moment of, you know, oh my God, I, I, I’ve worked out a way how we actually build a cryptographic bridge, which does not have smart contracts on either side.
And if you don’t have smart contracts from either side. One, it means there’s less cost in terms of gas. Faster. The attack surface is minus to almost zero. There is some exposure, but now you’ve created an ability to be able to move value from one chain to another in such a way that it should be transparent, quick, fast, less costly.
Most importantly, you can be more confident that you can move your value from one chain to another.
Brian Thomas: Thanks for breaking that down. Truly. I totally agree, and that’s why I think people are slow to adopt because they see all these different accounts or hacks going on in the Web3 world. But I like how you are basically encrypting this bridge between the different chains, which obviously if there’s no smart contract that’s smaller or less attack surface or vector for people to manipulate or compromise account.
So appreciate you breaking that down for our audience. So here, last question of the day. Given your extensive background in distributed computing and ai, how do you foresee the evolution of decentralized computing? And what role do you anticipate KRNL Labs playing in this future?
Tahir Mahmood: I. So if you think of distributed computing, I mean the whole idea of distributed computing has been around since really to be in the sixties.
It’s not like it’s unique to this moment in time. So from a temporal point of view, you know, we’ve been doing this for a very, very long time. Distributed computing is about the fact that you can break up the load of work that you have into small components. So those components can be executing in parallel or sequential, but on different machines at the same time.
So you’re making more use of resource. You’re able to get, you know, more power. You know, that’s what distributed computing is and there’s a lot of sort of messaging and communication, blockchain, and I think this is where there’s a misnomer with people thinking blockchain is distributed when you actually activate in terms of call a smart contract, but you want to run it or execute it.
That smart contract, the same piece of code runs on every node. So it’s not like the nodes are communicating with each other and sort of saying, I’m doing a percentage of the code of the smart contract on this node and I’m doing another. Percentage of the code of on another one or whatever. It’s not, they’re just the same thing running across the whole network.
Now, you know, as a layman, you might turn around and say, well, isn’t that a bit ridiculous in terms of you’re just consuming a lot of power, a lot of resource just to run the same thing again. And ultimately each node makes a decision about something that it’s gonna commit to the chain. And a consensus has to decide is what is true.
Ultimately that’s what consensus is about. So that’s what I’m saying. I think people think of blockchain and I think they’re confused the way Decentralized with distributed. Okay. That’s very different now. Where KRNL Labs comes in is KRNL Labs is making it actually distributed. That is what we’re doing.
So when a transaction arrives on a blockchain node, now what we are doing is making it from that node you can execute. From say one chain, any smart contract, we call it function, or in marketing terms, a kernel on any other on chain smart contract to help you deliver your solution or go off chain into the Web two world.
And ultimately when it comes to, uh, ai, be able to call these AI agents and in instrumental orchestrate all of this together to be able to build that more real world sort of enhanced application rather than a simple, smart contract. So that’s really what this is all about, what we’re doing at KRNL. We are bringing true distributed computing onto the blockchain.
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. I appreciate that. Bringing distributed computing to blockchain, it’s like we’ve had so many guests that are in the Web3 blockchain space, probably 90 guests now to date on this podcast, and to see everybody jumping in and helping, helping each other, really helping the world, advancing the blockchain technology, and I like your concept.
It’s more than a concept now of your distributed computing, which allows. To execute a smart contract on any other chain. So I, I really do appreciate that. It’s helpful for me and, and my audience. And Tahir, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Tahir Mahmood: Absolutely. I look forward to a chat at another time.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Tahir Mahmood Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
