The Challenge: From a Startup Concept to MVP (Part 1)

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so names such as Daml and Canton can be misheard.

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   thank you very much for being here we are going to be talking about how to go from a concept to a Minimum Viable Product or at least a demo able product to your stakeholders very quickly in a matter of days and I want you to introduce Eric Shalini Aki he's the co-founder of digital asset so he's going to be talking about the the problem that you know startup owners and aspiring entrepreneurs people who have an idea running from pillar to post trying to get the MVP running looking

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   for a technical co-founder trying to get funding you know get stakeholder Buy and validate their idea all of those kind of common challenges that any entrepreneur and any startup owner has any any founder has so he's going to be talking about that particular challenge and what could be a potential solution so with that I'll quickly hand it over to Eric who can take us through the

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   concept in in a few minutes thanks finish hello everybody thank you very much for attending hopefully this is a little bit of an alternative from your normal Netflix evening so this should be nowhere near as riveting but at least keep you from going all the way through your playlist in one night so as Manish mentioned we are focused heavily on making sure that people are significantly more productive and get to an outcome for themselves and their stakeholders as soon as possible a

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   little bit about digital asset and why that's what we're doing we started about six years ago and we've spent the majority of that time focused on how to build applications for very modern technologies and what we've built is something that we called Amal da ml which is a new programming language and application framework that allows a developer or two to build very complex multi-party applications extremely quickly now those are a lot of terms that maybe don't mean something to

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   everybody but the idea is that any application were a few different users or legal entities or businesses would be interacting with each other and some shared common workflow that type of application describes you know something like a bank risk system but it also describes things like eBay or Airbnb so you're generally in that category of type of application where demo gives you language and a whole set of tools that just makes it significantly easier for

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   you to build that application and maintain it over time one of the really key properties of the framework that we've built as we are trying to make it possible for you to run your application on a variety of different types of infrastructures for every given application not only does a different infrastructure make sense than another but that can change over time so for example on the very first day you might choose to pick a very traditional standard database style infrastructure

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   because you're just trying to figure out does my application have meaning do people care about it can I get some users and then later you might do something like put it on a distributed ledger because you're looking for new types of network effects and developer opportunities and in the future you might even run that application against something like I've got a secure Enclave or a very you know specialized type of infrastructure that is starting to

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   become popular across the cloud environments so the idea is that if you build your application in demo we at digitalize have worked very very hard to make sure that that application is portable and works as you expected to you across a variety of different infrastructures one of the things that we're going to demo to you today is a specialized cloud environment that we call project devil the APO and that's a cloud environment that's been designed

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   entirely with demo in mind so that means that we take full advantage of every feature that we know in demo and are coming up soon in Dan'l as we anticipate them to really just make your lives significantly easier so put very simply demo allows you to build an application very quickly dabble allows you to deploy that application instantaneously and really reap all the benefits of the demo

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    framework so let's get into a little bit of the inspiration for project devil at DEA we've spent a lot of time working large enterprises so something that not all of you may be aware of is the Australian Securities Exchange is going to replace their entire equities clearing and settlement system using demo and a distributed ledger and that's gonna go live within the next year or so and into production which means every single equity that trades in the

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    Australian market will clear and settle on a demo application that's no small undertaking we've been working very hard at that for a long time and we have a few other customers and announcements along that size and scale so this is a framework used for very large applications but something that I wanted to make really possible is that same power to be brought to the startup community and anyone who's interested in prototyping something very quickly and to be able to demonstrate to their

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    stakeholders so generally speaking in engaging with the enterprises what I've witnessed is that it's prohibitively expensive to experiment and this is true for startups as well anyone that has a good idea you never want to spend a lot of time setting up a bunch of infrastructure that doesn't really show to your user but that often is a tax that gets put on you and you know just as a data here there was a good Microsoft Azure Post where they talk

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    about just simple POCs and simple blockchain PLC's could take you know 8 to 12 weeks or as much as $300,000 and I think actually anecdotally that that might be a conservative estimate I've seen things that are often two or three times that and just a testing a single idea and the reason that that happens is pretty straightforward just if you're trying to build a complete application

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    and bring it to market the breadth of things that you need to be aware of competent in had the skills for and the stuff that you have to setup from scratch is actually still quite large while all the cloud platforms have done a tremendous job and some of the past platforms have done a really great job there's still a lot of work to be done here for a single engineer often too much for a single engineer which means you'll start going and hiring people of

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    different skill sets so when you have all this underlying infor structure and scaffolding that just makes it possible for your application to run well your user doesn't see it but you make a large investment in it that pushes you into broader skills and I just touched on that and it's just easy to to have an issue in going through that if you have someone that's maybe learning how to use one of these new frameworks for the first time and they've never used it before some of

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    them can be quite unforgiving or difficult there's a lot of trial and error that goes into some of these things and again you're not delivering features to your users you're building the underlying scaffolding and supporting infrastructure for what you need to do and that really messes with your complete timeline so whether you're a start-up and you're trying to get your MVP live as soon as humanly possible or you're an enterprise and you're trying to experiment the longer it takes you to

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    get to understand your idea and how do my users engage with my idea and the longer it takes you to get to production and also you you know they're there's a there's a lot that goes into being said about the agile methodology but one of the things that I think is really positive about it is just the ability to experiment quickly test get some feedback right so the longer your feedback loops are the longer your iteration cycles are then just the less likely you are to have picked the right

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    idea to begin with and you know oftentimes people will say something like oh you know hey let's do a quick little POC but they'll only show it to their stakeholders at the very end because that's only when everything came together and they could finally show something that somebody and we really wanted to see could you do this within a couple days could you get your first working prototype and and not just you

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    know like slide where in code but a true application fully authenticated everything through and through and something that people could truly use could you get to that in a few days and for us as we examined some of the really cool properties of Danville we realized that with the right environment that would be possible so we set out with kind of a goal in mind when we wanted to

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    create tabble one was really to just enable rapid innovation so here's an example of an application that we wrote a blog post about this is a is a Trello clone one engineer completed a Trello clone in about a week we rely upon it for our roadmap for project Apple you can go look at it it's public right now but we had a pretty decent idea we you know beg borrow pleaded and stole some open-source code here and there and put it together and put it together on top of some the stuff we were doing so it's not like every single thing came from

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    scratch but that doesn't matter right what matters is getting something done getting something in front of people starting to use it and starting to expose what you overlooked or what you do we need to do so sam'l + dabble meant that we could build a complete Trello clone and use it in production in a week which i think is not to be overstated now not only is it up and running but

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    other people can interact with it so all of you could go to what we're now calling open work board and you could play with you could play with this example of the Trello clone that we have so what that what that concretely means is it is a real app the idea was you know if you sit down and you learning that new language and framework there are often here build a build a workflow tool you know in a couple days or here's a couple example apps that you could

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    build in a day or two and they're really great tutorials to help you learn how to do something but I don't think anybody would be in a position to deploy that expose it to the public and let anybody use it and so when we talk about these applications being up and running you know they're they're fully exposed to the open world and people can use these things right now so it's more than just the tutorial and learning it's at the end of that tutorial learning you have a

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    fully functioning MVP it's not just a learning tool or a tutorial the other thing is if you're going through a few different ideas and you're just using demo and dabble all of your thinking is in a single constrained sort of problem space you're not context switching between how do i make kubernetes work and how do i get my application to work and where do I do caching and how-to exposes feature all you're ever thinking about is features you're just saying what is the business logic of my application how does it behave how do people interact with it

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    and that focus allows you to just get a lot deeper about those features and it's and what it means to you and your users and it's also economical we've touched on this in a lot of different ways but I'll be explicit about it if you are not hiring extra engineers you're not spending a lot of your time learning new skill sets you are not overpaying for a bunch of infrastructure that you may not know if you need then you find that you

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    have an extremely economical approach both from time and cost so it's really kind of a - two factor benefit and you can go live right and and you know I mentioned this before but I want I want to bring it up one more time there's really nothing quite like pushing the go-live button and starting to interact with some of your first users you'll instantly get exposed to all of your own assumptions that were way way off or

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    spot-on it's exhilarating and the longer you postpone that the longer you kind of walk potentially in the wrong direction so you want to you want to engage it's gonna seem like possible and if you're making them happy you're happy it's a very virtuous positive feedback so just just maybe to reiterate or call out some of the things that I discussed demo is a language that allows you to express your

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    application purely in business logic and this is a slide that we I like to show this is the AWS CTO who's saying you know in the future all you ever write is business logic well I've got news for him because the future is here the future is damn oh damn oh allows you to do exactly this and you'll see some demo code in a minute but this is I think often conflated with LowE code or no

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    code which is not what we are talking about we are still talking about a developer sitting down and writing code but we are also talking about that developer interacting with the business part of their their team or their co-founder in a way that you haven't seen before like being able to actually talk about code reason about code understand code even if you don't have an engineering background and that's

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    exactly what Tim was doing that's its whole purpose something worth pointing out is that demo is completely open-source top to bottom everything you need to build a complete application yourself Daniel comm download the SDK it's all there once we go to deploy that we have a number of commercially supported vendors for different types of infrastructure and also project data so you can build an application you could launch it in project tab right away if you're not

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    comfortable using the cloud or you'd have a specific infrastructure requirement that application is completely portable against a growing number of commercially supported infrastructure is outside of digital last night I did see one question are they asking what is the licensing of demo demos Apache 2 Apache 2.0 completely free and clear for you to use and incorporate in any way that you'd

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    like and another question that came up was is when I deploy my application on project travel is it free to start with yes so if one of my really big goals for the whole project is that people can download kids start and get all the way into something and see did this work for them long before I forced them to make an economic decision because that often goes hand in hand with your idea maybe

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    you think you have a really great idea but you find that people are willing to use it but you're not sure how you're gonna monetize it yet well you don't want to get stuck in a situation where you're prematurely raising money in order to continue your idea or having to make a lot of purchase decisions too early so download the SDK build your application deployed in dabble and our goal for dabble we haven't found exactly that usage threshold where we would ask people to become paying customers yet

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    but the idea is that we want that to coincide with as you are starting to gain momentum in production and you know you're gonna stay there so for anyone that's experimenting anybody that's early in their lifecycle everyone that's kicking the tires I want to make sure that people can do that without having any economic decision making yeah another question Erik is a can can we use project at all and m/l is a in our

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    Innovation Lab or in some pilots as an enterprise yeah absolutely so we have several different ways that you can engage in project Apple one is you can use it just as is and you can log in and you can go use it right now so if you are an enterprise and you're an innovation lab you're welcome to do that as an individual if you would like to provide project animal to your constituents in

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    an innovation lab we also talked to people about how we can present data in a white label way so that it is your product and you're presenting it to your constituents but it's for everybody it's for startups that like production it's for enterprises that are in a stepping stone to a bigger production decision it could be for innovation labs to run tons and tons of projects and test cases to figure out what's the right thing to do and kind of everything into okay perfect

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    and one last question I'm looking at is this is from da babe we were trying to unmute him he says he has a business background and what kind of developer skill set or expertise would he need to work with ml and when he when he actually gets to the point where he has to be wearable I think that the people who take to demo very quickly already have a functional background in in programming so we've found that learning Tamil tends to be quite straightforward and fairly quick for people I'd say in

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    the first couple weeks there's a pretty steep learning curve because the mental model is different not because the language is difficult but just thinking about how the application is structured and the architecture is a little bit different so there are some like very early sort of learning points but if you blaze through a week or two of putting together a POC by your second one I would say that you're gonna be extremely skilled someone who is comfortable with using more than one language in a given

39. 17:09

    stack and someone that has kind of deployed something historically then it should be it should be easy for that engineer to learn damn all and become productive quite quickly we also we also do regular training and and sort of outreach to the community we have we have a slack channel for people to ask questions we've been told that the documentation is fantastic so in terms of the developer type I don't think you need to to have a narrow search you just need to find someone bad that

40. 17:40

    when they play with it for a day they see the point of it and they enjoy it you'll find that with demo you're able to sort of pick up and read the developer code the code that has been developed by by the person that you hire so myself I often find it that I can give my demo code to a BA or somebody who is a subject matter expert and they'll be able to sort of find some of the find some of the the bugs in there

41. 18:13

    having to do with with rights and obligations so it's it's intended to be read by non-technical people as well exactly yeah Thank You Lenny and I just wanted to add to that so a developer who understands the business and understand understands your vision as to what you want to do would be ideal so it makes it completely seamless for you to go from an idea to a quick demo level prototype

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    that you can start sharing with your stakeholders and get feedback and keep you finding it and and hopefully get your get your correct market fit pretty quickly all right then thank you so much Eric any last comments so just thank you very much I know that there's a lot going on right now people could have given their attention to something else perhaps more piscine so I take the time and the join

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    us and please feel free to reach out to us in any way and let us know how we can help you be more successful yeah yeah and stay safe everyone and yeah compute soon bye