Transcript: SEED Group’s Interview with CEO Phil Zamani and CEO Won-Beom Kim
CEOs of AERGO and BLOCKO, Phil Zamani and Won-Beom Kim, explain the relationship of their companies and what the partnership with SEED Group means to them.
Phil: I am Phil Zamani, I am the CEO and Chairman of Aergo. So let’s talk about Blocko first. Blocko is a company based in Korea that has identified early the opportunity for Blockchain to help governments and businesses rebuild supply chains and new services. So Blocko is a company that helps governments or organizations to use distributed ledger technology to build new products, new services and new supply chains. So, Blocko is it’s five years with clients in Korea such as Samsung, Hyundai, LG, Shinhan Bank, the local government, the local registry and they’ve understood where blockchain works. And what we’ve done with Blocko is we’ve taken the technology and expanded this now to build a new platform called Aergo.
Why is working with Aergo giving you an advantage in the enterprise market?
Won: Our blockchain is perceived as true innovator in space. It brings a lot of new qualities that previous technology bare to do so. In many ways, it opens up a lot of room for creating new types of architecture and system and in turn these new applications and our business models as well. So, we really believe that blockchain will be there for enterprise architecture and help millions about customers and companies build exciting new stuff.
Can you share a little story about how you got your first investors/customers?
Phil: Luckily, South Korea is very progressive with new technology. So we are lucky to be in the right country and luckily our second client was Samsung, they are very impressed on what we delivered and they asked their investment arm to take an interesting role. So, Samsung Ventures became our first investor. And put money into the company to allow us scale. So since then, it’s been very very successful for us to grow because of the brand association with Samsung in Korea, but we’ve now found many many clients.
Won: When I started the company it was just two-man job to do everything and now we have around 80 people. I think it’s that continuous process since a team is defined by the members, finding the right member and securing the right people at the right moment is the quintessence to create the functional team and I think we are very lucky in that regard.
What made you decide to penetrate the market, specifically Dubai?
Phil: As fast as UAE was established over 50 years, you also need to take a step forward to move faster with technology, and for that we need partnerships. We believe we have some skills and capabilities that will allow the region to move faster. So, we want to be part of this journey to take advantage of all this technology and the long-term objectives to improve the way the technology improve your life, your quality standards to be part of that. So we like to do work not just for business sake, we like to have an impact on humans and individuals and this is why we are so excited to be part of the journey here.
Could you share a little about your target customers in the UAE?
Traditionally, we have been working with business, customers, and sometimes are manufacturers or government agency or financial institutes but other times we work with partners who are system integrators and are builders about rather solution. So, in many ways, we look to connect with their customers but at the same time find the right partners who could actually help us put together working systems.
How do you see the enterprise customers in the UAE benefiting from your blockchain technology product, Aergo?
Phil: We see our technology has been a hybrid platform that allows companies, customers and governments to combine the best of what they have today with the new, together is an integration platform. This is how we see this envisioning, working and we are looking for projects where clients are trying to build new services to ecosystems is a very big part of what we do.
So moving forward to the partnership with SEED Group, how did this come about? How quickly after the first encounter did you know you were going to do this?
Won: We are very excited about the partnership because we definitely identify Dubai and UAE as an objective market. Getting into new market, especially when you are from a different culture is a huge challenge, it requires someone to nurture us and teach us about their new customs as well as to educate [us] about the market. And I think, this would be a huge opportunity for us to truly scale out and reach out to customers and we hope to contribute to the goals as well.
Can you share with us, in brief, the goals and objectives of the partnership?
Phil: If I’ve asked his excellency what he taught was be the main objective of this relation and was very clear we have the same view: large scale projects with impacts. We want projects that create an impact for not only UAE vision 2021 but impact for business, for government, for local government to move things forward faster using this digital technology. So we are really looking for references, large-scale projects that we are successful together with.
How confident are you that you’re going to meet that goal?
Won: I’m confident that we’ll be doing it but not because that we are arrogant or we know for sure but because it’s something that we just got to do.
What can you say about the potential for Blockchain to become a solid, long-term disruptive innovation in some sectors?
Phil: The prediction is that within 5 to 7 years, 10% of worldwide GDP will run on disruptive ledger technology platforms. That is a lot of business, a lot of projects, a lot of governments that many many projects we hope to be a major player there. This is as transformative as the internet. In fact, the combination of blockchain, IoT, 5G, smart mesh, smart grid, identities is going to be bigger potentially than internet itself. So the next 20 years, blockchain is one element of a very very large transformation. So we believe this is absolutely an amazing time to be part of this journey.
Transcript was taken from interview that you can watch here:
