Interview with Mysten Labs Product Director Why is Sui’s technology particularly suitable for enterprise services?

Interview with Mysten Labs Product Director on Sui's technology for enterprise services

Recently, we interviewed Lola Oyelayo-Pearson, the Director of Business Products at Mysten Labs, to explore how blockchain technology can provide business services for enterprises and why Sui is particularly suitable for these use cases.

Below is the interview content:

Q1 Please introduce yourself briefly, your role, and how you got involved in the Web3 field?

Currently, I lead the business product team at Mysten Labs. Generally speaking, business covers everything and can involve various business domains such as gaming, retail, loyalty, travel, and ticketing.

This is my sixth year exploring the blockchain field. I started getting involved in this field as early as 2017. I took about 14 months off to take care of my child and then prepared to return to work. I wanted to work on interesting, complex, and challenging technology stacks. Previously, I had worked in a leadership team at an organization for a long time, so I was very satisfied with that part of my career. I wanted to solve unsolved problems and didn’t want to rely on selling “let us build a company website for you” or “let us create another retail checkout page.” I felt that many problems had already been solved online, and I wanted to solve those unsolved ones. Through mutual friends, I was guided into the blockchain field, and during this time, I went through an amazing process that gradually helped me understand blockchain. Many things also left me puzzled.

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My past work experience was at the user experience level. Therefore, I paid great attention to optimizing the “minimum common denominator,” which means finding the simplest way to understand the problem. I found that, just like now, the information about blockchain at that time was almost chaotic. Most of the information was confusing, and much of it was related to finance. In the end, I started to believe that blockchain is a solution looking for problems. But actually, I think it can solve a very specific problem, which is asset ownership and digital agency. In traditional Web2, we didn’t have this. My data doesn’t belong to me, and my online behavior doesn’t belong to me either. They belong to the companies that interact with me.

Blockchain disrupts all of this. My transactions are mine, my assets are mine, and my outcomes are mine. Additionally, I am very interested in the privacy implications of some blockchain technologies. I have always had a strong interest in zero-knowledge and how to achieve things done online in a way that is easier to protect privacy rather than giving up privacy. Zero-knowledge is like a very interesting proposal to me. Therefore, I fell in love with blockchain in 2017, but because the funding of the startup company I was in was withdrawn at that time, I went on to do other things but still maintained a connection with the blockchain world. This year, I finally had the opportunity to return to the blockchain field in my current role.

I like blockchain, not as a separate thing, but as an infrastructure that can improve the internet as a whole. Sui actually has this potential, as it is an infrastructure that is applicable to the internet. I think many other blockchains are excellent, but often they are slow and expensive, not very suitable for enterprise use. However, I believe Sui has more potential to easily address all these challenges. I’m really looking forward to Sui validating my personal assumptions about the impact of blockchain on the internet as a whole.

Q2 How do you guide companies that have already developed well in the Web2 field to think creatively about the problems in their business and how blockchain can be a solution?

Let’s approach this problem from a business perspective. In business, we often talk about the sales funnel. At any given moment, if I attract 100 people into the top of my sales funnel, some of them will drop out, some will engage more deeply, and this part of people will also drop out. The people at the bottom of the funnel will be those who eventually convert, that is, the people who actually make a purchase or take the action I need them to take. This funnel game is a fundamental principle of any business, whether you’re a cinema or a shoe retailer, you’re trying to attract as many people as possible at the top of the funnel so that through natural attrition, as many people as possible eventually reach the bottom of the funnel and convert.

For example, the top of the funnel is a very complicated place, basically where advertising is. You’re trying to attract as many people as possible to learn about your business, understand your product, and interact with your brand. My previous work was at Shopify, which can be considered an advocate for small businesses. Their mission is to empower more and more people to become entrepreneurs, giving them the ability to define their own businesses and destinies. The biggest challenge faced by every entrepreneur on Shopify is getting customers. This involves how to tell my story? How to find people who want to buy the products I sell? How to adjust my sales approach to accommodate those who may be slightly interested in my product? How to sustain sales so that even if I have a great performance this week, I can continue to build on it next week. These are long-term challenges that small businesses face. But for various reasons, these challenges have become very difficult in the current internet environment.

First and foremost, privacy is the most important issue.Web2 and the internet have been moving along the path of “I need to collect as much data about you as possible to show you ads”. I remember when I first encountered the internet, there was a lot of super personalized content that made you feel like you had a very special experience when interacting with the website. The problem is, the only way to do this is to collect and hold a large amount of very personal and intimate information. Therefore, a trade began to sell this kind of information, and the advertising world became obsessed with buying private data. This is why we have rules like GDPR and California’s CCLianGuai, which are designed to protect individuals from being shared or even collected without consent. Unfortunately, this also means that the data quality required to build customer channels has declined. So, previously I could obtain information such as your gender, name, and home address from a dealer with high confidence, but now I actually can’t buy this information. So now I need to guess or try to infer this data. This happens to give companies like Google and Facebook a monopoly in the advertising market, as they have applications that give them the right to collect this data. They have become the only places where you can look for new customers.

For example, at Shopify, Apple changed their privacy rules, so we observed a significant drop in sales for Shopify merchants on iOS devices, such as iPhones, because many of these merchants rely on collecting Facebook advertising data through mobile phones. Although unintentional, Apple essentially killed the marketing channel at the top of the funnel for thousands of small businesses, as they don’t have million-dollar budgets like big brands. We’re talking about your part-time or corner store that wants to find target customers in their community.

So the question is how can blockchain contribute to this data ecosystem and how can we use zero-knowledge technology to feed information about people’s behavior into the internet without sharing private information. Zero-knowledge allows people to verify facts more intelligently. And Sui’s speed and scalability make it the perfect place to provide services for real-time internet queries using zero-knowledge.

How do I tell my story? How do I find people who want to buy the products I’m selling? How do I adjust how I sell? How do I maintain continuity? These are the challenges small businesses face in the long term.

However, not all problems have been solved, but what we can be sure of is that just as the entire online advertising world was built with the advent of online behavior in the early 2000s, we now see that blockchain can be used to lower customer acquisition costs.

You might think that many blockchains offer zero-knowledge proofs. I think what sets Sui apart is that Sui can provide this service at internet speed and predictable cost.

Here’s another example: loyalty. Every time a company asks for my email address, I wonder, what have you done for me to make me satisfied? Why should I be loyal? With digital asset ownership, you can give me something that will always belong to me, something that can be updated, changed, and evolved. Sui has the ability to provide dynamic, composable NFTs (at internet speed and low cost), so suddenly loyalty programs might mean more to customers, offering not just more emails and discount codes.

Q3 Is this about adding Sui to your tech stack to achieve what you’re trying to do in a broader business model?

This is actually something I strongly believe, that Sui is a type of blockchain that is essential in your tech stack. The era of cloud computing basically introduced us to this idea of being able to scale quickly. Now, if you’re a business starting tomorrow or you’re investing in your infrastructure, you would absolutely include cloud computing because it would be foolish not to. I think Sui represents a blockchain era that you can think about in a similar way. There are some things that can only be achieved through blockchains like Sui, or only by using blockchains like Sui can security be guaranteed, so it would be absurd to try to accomplish these things in any other way. Sui is still new in this field, and it needs partners who are willing to build and embark on this journey with us.

Q4In many ways, what you are describing is the opposite of what is typically considered in blockchain, which is building Web3 businesses.

Interestingly, the difference between Web2 and Web3 is only useful when helping to describe the difference between blockchain technology and standard internet technology. There will come a time when this difference becomes irrelevant, because we are not trying to create an internet to access, we are simply trying to make the internet you already use better for everyone. The win-win should be for everyone, including end users, and right now saying Web2, Web3 is a way to help describe this difference. But at some point in the future, we are just talking about the internet and general internet behaviors and activities, and what becomes normal.

We are not trying to create an internet you need to go to, we are simply trying to make the internet you already use friendlier for all participants.

Q5What role do end users play in understanding the value of decentralized technology and blockchain, as it relates to their own privacy? Do you expect them to demand more from companies once they are ready to offer benefits?

All of the above, let’s start with the decentralized technology stack. The incredible thing about having a decentralized blockchain with this capability is that many people need to be involved to make it a reality. Many people have invested a lot, not just the companies that created it, not just investors, but all participants. This collective investment has been the foundation of successful open source technologies for years. But there has always been this idea that if something is open source, you can’t make money from it. What blockchain tells you is that you can make money within this open source culture, because the decentralized technology stack allows you to do both, especially blockchain technology. Some people will dive deep into all aspects of the blockchain network that require active operation and good performance, such as validating nodes, stake delegation, and node operation, to stabilize global availability. Another group of users will be very concerned with what it means for their activities.

I think there is another group of people, frankly, who don’t care about blockchain or anything else. They just want a very good loyalty program, they want to enjoy a secure experience online. They want the companies they trust not to use their information for malicious purposes, and they want to feel that they have access to experiences and value propositions that suit them. So, they want to buy a hat and want the concept of ownership to be reflected in a way that makes sense to them. They want to be part of a loyalty program that truly changes with the changes in their location, so it doesn’t just exist in this little box, or if they scratch that specific coupon, and so on. If blockchain realizes its potential, then the entire range of users will be interested in this.

This is the Internet today. Some people are very technical and go into detail, but on the other hand, some people’s grandparents only need a smartphone with large fonts. They are excited to be able to do things on their phones that they used to have to go to the bank or travel agency to do. Sui serves every user like this.

Furthermore, I also believe that in the end, even many people who try not to participate in technology will feel more secure and expect it to be the default option to provide privacy for me. Any applications that do not provide this must be suspicious. Why wouldn’t you provide this for me? We will turn to places where individuals have more choices. I think this is fundamentally beneficial.

Q6 What are you most excited about for the future of Sui?

What I am most excited about for the future of Sui is zkLogin. zkLogin is very exciting to me. Sui will provide a primitive that allows you to use login patterns that most people consider reasonable. You can access the blockchain by logging in with my email or other existing accounts, but Sui eliminates the need to remember keys or forget the private keys for this transaction. Those really high-risk requirements disappear.

This is a big step forward, and it can be said that Sui can bring a billion users into the blockchain. It is exciting to see this become a reality and provide a convenient way for non-blockchain businesses to leverage this capability. As more and more people adopt this technology, we will see more use cases emerge.

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