Jan. 20, 2023

205: Memory Lane | Sam Williams and Arweave

Sam Williams is co-founder and CEO of Arweave, a blockchain protocol allowing us to remember and preserve valuable information, apps, and history indefinitely. In this episode, Sam shares the inspirational story of how Arweave got started, their life-changing experience with Techstars Berlin in 2018, and how their long-term vision, hope, and resilience have been the foundation of their successes to date.

Show Notes
Guest Profile

Pete Townsend interviewed Sam last month on the Techstars GiveFirst podcast, so thanks to David Cohen and Techstars for letting us share the interview for this episode of MoneyNeverSleeps.

HIGHLIGHTS:

Sam Williams on solving problems:

“There are all these global problems, and you are never going to solve them if you just go, 'okay, I'm going to solve the whole thing'. That's not going to happen for any human on earth right now. But what might happen is if you look at the problem and you say, 'okay, well that's a small chunk that, actually, I happen to be skilled to solve. Well, maybe I could do that'. And so I did.”

Sam Williams on his inspiration for Arweave:

“I was walking up this mountain and came up with this idea of, okay, well one of the problems with authoritarian regimes is that they always try to bend the perception of the past. George Orwell had a good explanation for this. He said, ‘the person that controls the present controls the past, and the person that controls the past controls the future.’

"What he really means is by controlling the way that people think about the world around them - and that a lot of it comes from the context that we think about the world that is the past - we can control the way that they act in the future.

“I said ‘ha!’, well, I see a nugget of a solution to that. What if we take blockchains, which are essentially hyper-resilient, decentralized databases of information, and we fill them with records of the past. So you replicate the records of the past in so many countries across the world that they just can't possibly be lost.”

Sam Williams on the foundation of Arweave’s successes to date:

“The message I try and give new founders if they're thinking about going through this is, well, just be resilient. Just keep doing your thing. No matter whether it's raining or shining outside, it really shouldn't matter to you. To be honest, the market is gonna have crazy, crazy things happen. It's not a sane thing to be around, in my experience, particularly in crypto, it's so, so volatile, and my hope is that over time it becomes less volatile.

“But for what it is right now, you've got to be realistic. The market's going to be overly excited sometimes, and super under-excited other times. And so the best kind of wisdom I've picked up along the way is 'just be robustly resilient'. Just focus on the things that you actually think will matter in five years, not the things that people are shouting about, like pumping the token price or whatever.

“Just focus on the long term, and it does pay off. At the beginning of 2020, we must have been pushing about 500 to a thousand transactions to Arweave each day. By the end of 2021, that was up to about 5 million. And our approach has not changed one iota from day one.”

LINKS:

Learn more about Sam Williams and follow Sam on Twitter

Learn more about Arweave and follow Arweave on Twitter

Episode title inspired by ‘Memory Lane (Sittin’ in da Park)’ by Nas

Episode artwork courtesy of DALL-E 2

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