Who is Chris?
Christopher Lemuel is our new CFO that joined the TAP Team after 5.5 years in the Financial Services industry. He worked as a VP with Goldman Sachs for the last 2 and a half years. Prior to his career in Finance, Chris spent nearly 9 years in the active-duty Army after his Commissioning from West Point.
Chris brings his unique perspective and experience from Goldman Sachs to help make TAP a force in the reward redemptions and advertising industry. With Chris in his new position, TAP will be uniquely positioned to deliver both consumers and advertisers cutting edge features and initiatives that competitors, without the benefit of Chris’s experience, cannot deliver. Chris envisions a platform that is best in class when it comes to cutting inefficiencies - meaning customers should see advertisements they want and care about, and advertisers should be getting their ads delivered to the appropriate targets. When this happens, both parties win!
The set of questions were picked from our Telegram community. We could not take every question, but we want to thank everyone for participating and congratulations to the members whose questions were picked. Chris has answered them below.
QUESTIONS:
What got you interested in cryptocurrency? Are cryptocurrency projects something that can fundamentally change the world?
I had a number of colleagues and friends who were actively trading - mostly BTC/ETH and conversations with them and why they were trading sparked my initial interest. One friend, in particular, had a background in distributed computing and we chatted at length about the potential benefits and drawbacks of crypto/DLT/etc.
The latter half of the question is difficult to answer. Given the number of enterprise projects around "Blockchain", you can argue that there is potential to alter the way many fundamental processes are managed on a day to day basis- whether that is supply chain management across the logistics spectrum or trade settlement in Finance, I think it is safe to say that there are serious efforts underway to fundamentally re-engineer some of the more complex process management protocols regularly used across almost every industry today. Whether or not that constitutes fundamentally changing the world I'll leave up to the reader.
What is the view of some of your colleagues at Goldman regarding cryptocurrency? Did they see the potential right away or did they take a wait and see approach?
I can't speak for my former GS colleagues but I think based on recent hires and public statements made by the Firm's leadership, they definitely see potential around the technology and I would argue they were fairly early as well. From a practical perspective, the implementation of any new technology is a non-trivial event for any large enterprise. People underestimate the scale and scope of what Banks manage on a day to day basis and the precision with which they manage these complex operations.
Simply ripping something out that works well, and manages millions of transactions representing billions in risk on a daily basis -- without absolute certainty that the new system works -- is simply not an option. Additionally, many of the processes Banks manage involve customers and partner organizations for validation and settlement, so Banks and similar enterprises will only be able to evolve as quickly as their customer/partner base is able to evolve and adopt new tech.
Why Hooch, there are 1000s of projects out there, why is this the one that caused you to think, "I need to be involved?"
After sitting with the Team at Hooch /TAP Network and looking a bit deeper into what they were doing I found that the product and what it was evolving toward was something I both understood and could see enterprise partners adopting. What was particularly appealing was that for many/most of Hooch / TAP's customers, our product will be the first time they have implemented a digital Rewards/Loyalty program - we are not fighting to displace existing tech, which is a much easier value proposition for clients.
Can traditional financial networks and cryptocurrency coexist, or will there always be friction between cryptocurrency and more well known financial products?
I think the bigger question is can non-central bank-issued currencies co-exist with central bank currencies. Based on what we are currently seeing- I would say the answer is yes. Whether that is the case for the long run remains to be seen. From a practical perspective, I do not see regulated entities- Banks, Insurers, Pension Funds, etc dealing with cryptocurrencies - their barriers to doing so are too high and the risks associated with getting engagement with Cryptos wrong are much higher than the rewards are for getting it right.
What is the end game of Hooch/TapCoin, is it just going to be a reward coin/advertising and if so, what sets it apart from other companies that aren't using blockchain?
The end game is interoperability of "rewards/loyalty" points within the merchant ecosystem. I think you are starting to see more and more traditional loyalty program operators opening up their ecosystems to this idea. Nominally, most people who have major airline, hotel, or credit card are seeing a form of this as the threshold for redemption continues to go down and the array of brand partners available to redeem with continues to climb. Ultimately, we can see our product/ecosystem potentially working with a stablecoin that has gained widespread adoption from merchants/consumers and providing cash-like transaction value to the consumer across nearly all participating merchants. We use DLT technology to mask our users’ personally identifying information while allowing them to share their transaction data with merchants/brands that they are interested in receiving offers from. The "Opt-In" component of this is non-trivial from a consumer experience perspective-it assigns control of the data to the consumer. The end goal is for our partners to get their message out and for the customers to actually see ads and content that is relevant and engaging to them.
Any updates or opinions on the Brave Partnership, and how do you feel about the partnership, was it a factor in you joining up?
I am a big fan of what the team at Brave are building and am a user of both their desktop and mobile browser. I don't think you have to be a crypto evangelist or privacy maximalist to appreciate the product they have built- to me, they've built a better browsing experience for the user. We have some exciting developments underway with the Brave Team and I look forward to sharing them as soon as we are able to.
What skills that you have acquired over your career do you think is most valuable for your foray into cryptocurrency?
It isn't a skillset but I've had the good fortune of being able to see the impact that technology has had on large organizations/enterprises from both my time in the military and in finance and at a level where I've had to deal with the implementational complexities of integrating these technologies into everyday operations. From these vantage points I've learned that if you want to implement change you have to learn every detail of any system you are looking to remove/update/overhaul to include any linked/contingent processes that touch that system. Any gaps in your knowledge will quickly be filled by angry phone calls from people who were relying on what you just turned off- you'll be lucky if you only end up with angry phone calls too. The other bit I've learned is that any change worth implementing is going to be a difficult and long process.
When did you first become interested in crypto, and what is the impression now of crypto among your peers and friends in the financial industry?
I probably started paying serious attention in late 2014. I had a few colleagues that were exploring the space- I considered them pretty forward-thinking so I followed suit. From there, my interest and engagement in the space grew and evolved and as my understanding grew, my thoughts on the space evolved into what I consider a fairly mainstream opinion- DLT/Blockchain/etc has potential and if you can provide a reasonable value proposition for the user, you have the potential to actually do something interesting. I think opinions among people in financial services vary broadly, but if I were to generalize, I first would delineate between cryptocurrencies and the related technologies versus rolling them up into one catch-all. You'll find more skepticism around currencies and more optimism around DLT/Blockchain.
There are still a lot of scams and problems in crypto. Do you think we will need to move in the direction blockchain along with big corporations administering any coins (e.g. facebook libra) or is the dream of decentralization still possible?
My belief is that you are likely to see more centralization than decentralization in crypto terms but I think you will see more decentralization in finance via "consensus" or "distributed compute" processes in the future. It's probably an unsatisfactory explanation for the decentralization maximalists but I'd argue it's still decentralization.
Any crazy or interesting stories about crypto or from where you used to work that you can tell us?
Honestly, there wasn't anything really too wild or crazy from my time in finance. Maybe I just didn't get invited to the right parties.
How did you meet Lin, and what do you think sets him apart from other CEOS of startups?
I was introduced to Lin through a mutual friend. What separated him from the start was the mix of success he had as both an entrepreneur and as an executive inside of established Media companies- he understood the challenges facing him from the start and it made him a compelling partner to work with on this project.
What does the future look like, mostly blockchain, or the products we use today remain the trend for the major economies?
I believe you'll see more blockchain-like technologies adopted in the future for a variety of different purposes but they'll probably exist in the background powering processes that are unnoticed by the end-user.
What do you think about citizens in turbulent economies (central and south America) using crypto like bitcoin and ether to get what they need instead of more traditional means such as cash and credit? Do you see that as a good thing generally in a bad situation?
It is an interesting development and clearly a good thing in a bad situation- people accessing goods and services that they need but were previously cut off from due to local currency challenges. I think it will be interesting to see if the short term necessity results in longer term and more widespread adoption of ETH/BTC/etc as a medium of exchange in these impacted economies.
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