Lukas Seel: 0:00

Welcome everybody. This is Helios Horizons, episode 13. I'm very excited to invite my personal friend, tom, today. He has gone through quite a journey from, you know, just being a young guy dabbling with Web3 technology to becoming a founder of a very exciting company that is seeking to disrupt the NGO and philanthropy space. It is called Philathrify and I'm pleased to welcome Tom to the stage. How are you, tom?

Tomos Rees: 0:38

Very good. Thank you, it's nice to hear that you can say it right. A lot of people struggle with that.

Lukas Seel: 0:44

We had this conversation. I told you I'm not sure about the name, because you want your brand to be pronounceable to non-native speakers. And here you are, ignoring my advice once again. Talk about that.

Tomos Rees: 0:58

But, Lukas, think of all the branding XOXNO is getting right now because no one can say its name. Everyone keeps on saying it ten times over, trying to pronounce it right.

Lukas Seel: 1:09

That is true. So let's start at the beginning, or even before the beginning. You know you're pretty young I actually don't know how old exactly you are, but like mid-20s or something and obviously you've been in this space for quite some time, considering your age. But take us back from before discovering Web3 and blockchain and then tell us the story of how you did end up discovering Web3 and blockchain.

Tomos Rees: 1:42

Yeah, yeah, sure, so I am 25. You nailed that. You nailed that. Uh, guess there. So, um, yes, I. I studied economics in university. I then went on to international business.

Tomos Rees: 1:55

Um, throughout all my life, I've also been involved in the charity industry. I basically grew up in the charity industry. My family um do a lot of projects out in Uganda for a charity called Spotlight on Africa, so I've kind of delved into it a lot, into different areas, whether it's fundraising, marketing, events, operations and more recently last year, I spent three months out in Uganda, out in the slums actually, where I was helping to build and operationalize an IT center for people who have never touched a computer before, never touched a keyboard even, and most of them don'tFi via connecting to satellites. So that's a great service. We've been asking for discounts from Starlink for that. They basically said no, there are no discounts for nonprofits, which is sad, but you know it's been a great journey. Profits, which is sad, um, but you know it's it's been a great journey.

Tomos Rees: 3:07

And in terms of web free side of things, um, I basically first found blockchain in 2017, when I was in university. I found bitcoin first. Obviously, like everyone else did, I actually thought it was a scam at first. So, but I also knew that, uh, it was going up quite a lot, so I put a bit of money in, uh, kind of expecting to lose that money. I did the same for Ethereum as well. I bought Ethereum at about $100 a coin, which is quite good, bitcoin at 5K 6K around that point and I just left it.

Tomos Rees: 3:40

Left it for three years, came back to it in 2020 when the bull market and stock market started to go off and everything saw that my money had like gone up 15 or 20x or something like that, and I was just like, oh, maybe there's something here. So I kind of read some white papers, I went into it, a lot more research. I really fell in love with the um, the combination of computer science, economics and game theory and everything like this that blockchain really develops and the fact that it could actually find a decentralized way of having a financial system. So I really went into it then and I did skip over one thing. But I did also buy EGLD or Elrond coin at that time, ERD back at the 2018 ICO with Binance. But I put a very small amount of money in, so I didn't become rich from these things and, yeah, I fell in love with EGLDs philosophy, their white paper. I really loved it. I thought it was the most technically advanced one. Obviously, at that point they had to prove that they could actually shard properly.

Tomos Rees: 4:48

But back in the end of 2020, 2021, I went back into MultiversX again. Really, when NFTs started, I saw that they'd proved it very well and, yeah, I just started to delve more in. You know, lucas, um, I really started to do a bit of research papers. Uh, threads, technical threads especially, so not the kind of ones that most people really want to read, but I was just, you know, I loved the technology side of things, so I'd love to go deep in detail and, you know, read 100 paper, math papers and then try and condense it down for everyone else to understand as well. And actually, we met at the first x day, me and lucas and I've been going to every x day since and, yeah, just becoming more involved in the community. We I started x spaces last year, about 15, no, probably 16 months ago now, I think. Uh, we've been interviewing a lot of projects. We've probably interviewed over 60 projects now, I think Some founders of blockchains, charles Hoskinson being the most notable one more recently and, yeah, we've had a great time two spaces a week. I'm sure many people here already know about that.

Tomos Rees: 6:01

And then I started Philanthrifyy, which and then I started Philanthropy which. Actually, one thing I did miss out was my time in Dubai, which was in 2022. I was out in Dubai for about four months. I was giving advice. I was basically a consultant for a Forex trading company on them building a centralized exchange. They wanted it to be the big one, biggest one in the middle east, and they had basically the most regulated forex trading platform in the world at that time. So I was helping them with that. And then they offered me a job and I was just thinking back to what I always said to myself, which is I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to make something that mattered in the world, something that made a difference and really helped people, and I didn't really feel like I was doing that at that Forex trading company. So I moved back from Dubai to London and I started really pushing with this vision. I had this vision of helping the charity industry as much as I could. I felt blockchain was a big part of that, especially given the lacking of trust in probably the last decade or so in the charity industry and I really felt like we could build some amazing products there with that.

Tomos Rees: 7:19

It took a little bit of time to convince some people, or inspire is how I say it to investors, because you never want to sound like it was a little bit of time to convince some people. Or inspire it's like it's how I say it to investors, because you never want to sound like it was a little weak or anything. But inspire some people to join me. It's quite a difficult job, especially when you can't offer them a salary. Not many people jump at that opportunity to join a risky startup with no salary and just a promise that their equity might actually one day be good. So I convinced three people and we started building that actually just after last X Day so it was about November last year and we worked really hard. I was also applying for grants at the time and we won a big grant actually. So was uh, the big news. Over the last few months, we won a big grant from innovate uk, which is the uh, if you wanted to jump in lucas yeah, we'll talk about that, uh, in a bit.

Lukas Seel: 8:15

For sure that's. That's on the agenda, I think it's. So I I want to take you back just a step right, because I think this, um, you already described a bunch of the journey after discovering bitcoin, or maybe understanding that it wasn't a scam, and perhaps it was just the, the money that convinced you. There it's like oh well, if it, if I 30x my money, it can't be a scam, um, or I can't, I don't know, but you know, um, talk about, like, once you start reading these white papers and the technical papers, what did you see? That really kind of solidified this interest in the technology and, you know, eventually ending up building on it.

Tomos Rees: 8:57

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I skipped over a lot of that. It wasn't actually the money that made me realize it wasn't a scam of that. It wasn't actually the money that made me realize it wasn't a scam. I think what happened was I saw the money go up a lot and then I was thinking, oh, I thought that this thing was a scam, so I'll look into it a little bit more, because I didn't take it too seriously originally. And then I started to read the white papers and so on, and then I realized that I was an idiot for not believing in it a little bit more back in 2017.

Tomos Rees: 9:25

And the reason that I really believed in it very strongly when I first came into it which is a great question actually is because it had a beautiful architecture behind it. When you look into cryptography and you look into the way way that things are secured, the way that you can create a decentralized system which actually has the right incentives to keep itself truthful, I felt that that was something that I'd never seen before um, and I hadn't gone too much into computer science before this, but it just seemed like a beautiful mix to me and with trust in general in the in the world going down so much, you know. You know one, no one really trusts their politicians anymore, no one really trusts all of these other things and the fact that, uh, you know, the federal reserve, you know, and all of these central banks around the world just print money like crazy, just because it makes sense for them to do it. Because the way I really see the world is split up into incentives, people tend to do in. In the general scheme of things, people tend to go towards what the incentives are.

Tomos Rees: 10:40

If the incentive for a central banker is to create a good economy and they've got all of these tools like, for example, printing money, then their incentive is to use these tools to make sure that the economy is good. So if you have a big banker that's printing all of this money because they're only in term for three or four years so the rest of the world doesn't really see the effect until they're out of term To them, they feel like that's a great decision because they look amazing. They then go on to the next opportunity. They go on to maybe a hedge fund or an investment bank. That's thought they did a great job and maybe they can do a great job in their thing. They then start to make millions and millions because of this, and it's the same kind of thing for politicians as well.

Tomos Rees: 11:28

The incentive is to spend the public's money so that the economy can look better, so that this constituency can have a better transport link or anything like this, without any real regard for the long term, whereas the blockchain, embedded in a codified way which could not be changed unless via a major majority which would be very difficult given how decentralized it was to actually make sure that these things wouldn't happen and it incentivized the long-term growth. So I felt like it was partially the beautiful mix of technologies all put together in a very holistic and well-thought-out way, and then also partially the fact that the incentives actually made sense for a long-term perspective. So I guess that's what I would say.

Lukas Seel: 12:23

No, I mean mean it's so interesting, right, this incentive alignment and and it's something we'll speak about I think this is a very, very cool topic to touch on later. Um, but I want to also go back to your background and your, let's say, personal commitment to um doing charity work and doing, you know, work in places of the world that not a lot of people from the UK or you know see ever and really see on the ground how it looks like. And you mentioned your family, you know being very involved with this. So give us a little bit of background on this part of your life as well, please.

Tomos Rees: 12:58

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, as you mentioned, my family definitely very involved. So, as you mentioned, my family definitely very involved, ever since my granddad pretty much, you know a big. He was a minister for the church and he was very big on giving back to people. So he would constantly drag out his children all the time to do all of these things without any monetary reward and I think that really embedded a sense of giving in my family from an early stage.

Tomos Rees: 13:27

My dad actually went out when he was 18 to Kenya and he lived in a slum for six months, which is a very difficult thing to do as an 18-year-old, especially someone who hadn't traveled much like my dad. So it really instilled in him this perspective of the world where, you know, we we are very lucky to in some degrees I mean, there's a lot of things you can talk about but in some degrees we're very lucky to have clean water, to have electricity, to have food, which sometimes might be more expensive than we can afford, but at the time we actually have that infrastructure there to be able to get the food if we wanted to. And, you know, I think that really embedded in his life, which he then pushed on to me and my brother as we were growing up and I'm very thankful he did, because it's quite an amazing feeling, I think, to work for something more than just money or even prestige or anything like this. I mean, I've never really talked too much about these things previously. Now it just makes sense because obviously we're building this company. Um, but I think from there, you know, as as I was like six or something, I was helping with a bucket in my hand, like on the side of the street, just asking people for money for the charity, trying to explain as much as I could, maybe learning a little bit of sales whilst doing it, who knows? And then Christmas market stalls, summer stalls, everything like that, a little bit of fundraising, and then I really started to go into actually helping organize events and quiz nights, everything like that, as I was still like 10 or 12, all the way up until actually building projects.

Tomos Rees: 15:18

So I started going out to Uganda, which is where the main operations of this charity are Uganda's east central-ish Africa and I started just helping with some boreholes, you know, clean water for people that didn't have a connection to these things previously. I also started with helping with tiny little construction projects like maybe like a playground or for some kids, or just dividing up a medical center between different divisions that it needed to be in, because there's not enough to actually build new buildings. A lot of the time. You have to divide up the ones that they have and then make sure that the purposes are done differently, like, for example, women giving birth safely, which is a massive problem in Uganda, and then the other side might be vaccinations and stuff like this. And then from there I just really became a lot more involved, started heading up a lot of the technology aspects, as I was also going into technology myself, and eventually I actually became pretty much there's not really titles in our charity, but pretty much like the head of innovation or technology for the charity itself, helping with all of those problems. And then when a big donor wanted to give money for building an IT center out in a slum in Uganda, I was kind of the obvious person to go and sort that out. So I went out there. I helped a little bit with the building.

Tomos Rees: 16:57

Not too much construction isn't necessarily my area. My dad actually prefers a lot of that. So he did some of that side of things and I took over really from the operations aspect, supply chain, hiring people. Firstly, finding them as well, which is quite difficult out there with lack of skills. In fact, a lot of universities out there don't even have computers. So you know, you've got people who are learning computer science with no computers. They're just literally writing on a whiteboard what you're supposed to do in certain circumstances learning theory and then they're basically at the end of the course. They get told go out to a business and pay them some money to then teach you how to practically use these skills, which is, I mean, it just seems like a scam to me personally. But a lot of people lack funding. So including the business says businesses. So yeah, it's difficult for skills and everything out there.

Tomos Rees: 18:02

So I really uh, spent a lot of time last year. I've probably been out to Uganda about 15 times. Last year I was out there for about three months. So throughout my life I've probably spent about a year out there, uh, and also I've been to a few other countries like Rwanda, um, a little bit of Kenya and stuff like that. So, uh, it's been quite a journey, um, and it's been really eye-opening working with other charities, working with other people in charity, and it's almost a privilege to be able to do these things, because I've got so many amazing stories from doing these things as well, and I would always encourage people to spend a little bit of time, if they can, helping others, because that can go a long way. Even if it doesn't go a long way for you, it can go a long way for them.

Lukas Seel: 18:51

So yeah, yeah, it's really a life-changing experience and I think it's so interesting to think about these two distinct elements. Right, you have blockchain and Web3 technology that perhaps ingrained in it also has this element of giving an economic stake to people that usually have a hard time participating in economies, and also this idea of bringing trust, transparency you mentioned a things um already uh, to the world that you were working in. So I I wonder, in this idea now let's kind of pivot to or or seg into talking about this idea of philanthropy um, was this something in your mind that you always wanted to do, this sort of taking the charity work to the next level, and then added to this um, was it immediately obvious to you that these two things kind of belong together and just a matter of you know, making, making that happen and fusing them in a in a way that meant made sense?

Tomos Rees: 20:02

it's. It's a good question. I, you know it's funny. Um, I would say, definitely that was never my plan to begin with. Um, I had more of a corporate side of uh, thinking of you know me going to be a bit more like a hedge fund manager or investment manager or something like that. Um, but I just, you know, I didn't enjoy that side of things. I much preferred building products and having innovative ideas or visions.

Tomos Rees: 20:30

And then, in terms of charity and blockchain, I'd say it really came to me just before I went out to Dubai, I was asked a few questions like I was basically, you know, always talking about wanting to build something cool, a product, uh, always wanting to be an entrepreneur someday, but not necessarily at this age. And a few people would constantly go well, you know, why don't you try and solve one of the biggest problems, kind of thing? And one of my uncles, actually, he he said a lot of the time he used to say why don't you? Because he was a consultant in the uh, social investing world. Is social investing, yeah, impact investing, sorry, not social, um, and he kept on saying to me why don't you try and solve impact investing for people? Because no one's solved it yet.

Tomos Rees: 21:22

So I was just, you know, thinking about it every now and then and, uh, we know, whilst it was in dubai, I was also thinking about it quite a bit and I just started to think well, actually, I think blockchain would be a great um connection with this and instead of thinking about just impact investing.

Tomos Rees: 21:42

You know, the charity industry needs a lot of help technology wise, um, not just for proving where money goes or showing impact of money, but also just for running operations, uh, for all of these other things.

Tomos Rees: 21:57

So, um, I really thought a little bit more on how I could use blockchain in, uh, in this aspect of the charity industry and, you know, I really came to the conclusion rather than the conclusion that most people think where, when I just create a token, and then that token will be used for people just wanting to donate money, and then also, the token would pump in price. So, instead of you donating one dollar, you're donating tender all of these things which pretty much everyone in the blockchain industry, uh, who tried to create something like this, was really trying to do. I thought, why don't I try and solve a real world problem, uh, using technology, not necessarily completely with blockchain, but with blockchain evolved, and then the blockchain itself can show the embedded transparency and the codified language that is proof of history for a charity, to show exactly how well their impact has been, and so on. Yeah, I don't know if I answered the question super well there, but I think that's kind of how it came to be in my mind.

Lukas Seel: 23:11

Yeah, and then you spoke about something that I thought was interesting. Right, this is you know, you're very if you've ever worked in the non-profit industry, you're kind of used to working for free, but it's hard to convince people to really work for free on something for a sustained amount of time. Find co-founders to then really, you know, carry this vision with you, for you know a long time and you know, with a long time horizon where you probably won't see any returns and you already spoke about this you know finding accomplices, in a sense, where you really need to. What did you say? Inspire them to do this with you? And, yeah, talk about that process. You said that that came together not too long ago. Who are these people? How did you inspire them? And then, what is the vision?

Tomos Rees: 24:05

Yeah, yeah, and I think you know it's worth saying. Well, this was also kind of why I did a post quite recently saying maybe I should try and uh, you know, document my journey a little bit better, because I've learned so much in this journey and I think, um, a lot of people might be quite interested in it if they want to, you know, follow along in that journey as well and do their own journey. One of the things I wanted to the reason why I added that in is when you are really looking to start a business or an idea and you have no idea, like you don't really have family that have done these things before. You don't have too many super close friends that have done these things before, so it's quite hard to find the best advice, and whatever advice you're getting, it's always different, no matter who you talk to. I mean, I must've talked to at least 20 people who were friends or family and so on. Every single person gave different piece of advice. I'd go to one person. They'd say oh, you just need to take a coding course and spend three years there and then you can start your business. Spoke to another person. He said you just need to sell, you need to go on calls with people, start selling the product before you even built it. Like another person would say, you just need investment first and then you can pay for people's salaries. And there's no like one one fits all solution and no one really has the proper answer when you're in a position like that. So what I was doing a lot of the time and the reason why it took so long from having the idea to actually getting a team together was I was kind of scrambling around all of this advice, seeing what was the best thing to do, how I could best do this with no money and everything like that, finding it very difficult, of course, but all the meantime, you know, working with the charity. So it's not like I was just sitting in my room doing nothing, because a lot of the time that can demotivate you and make it even worse when you're in those situations.

Tomos Rees: 26:20

And I really came to the conclusion in the end just before XDay, really with the hackathon of XDay. I came to the conclusion this hackathon could be a great accelerant to get a team together and to start what could be the next big project or whatever. So I convinced a few people to join me with that, and actually I had a good team, probably about three of us together. The problem there was it ended up, you know, people were doing their master's still and all this kind of stuff, so people end up not having enough time to actually work on the project, so it was ended up just being me on the hackathon, uh, which did not go to a best standard.

Tomos Rees: 27:00

I'm a pretty amateur coder so, um, I couldn't build everything I wanted to build and anyway, the hackathon happened. X day happened, um met some amazing people again, of course, and after X Day, actually, I reached back out to a couple of those people that were supposed to be on the team with me because they had just finished their master's properly at that point, and I said you know, why don't you just come on and join me for experience whilst you're waiting to get a job? You know, you can have some practical experience, you can show your future employers that you've done this, you've done that, it's a really cool idea, and you can show a product.

Lukas Seel: 27:41

That's true.

Tomos Rees: 27:42

Wow, exactly so. And then they joined me. So I actually got one of them through that. And then he brought on someone that he knew who was doing the same masters as him and all of a sudden there was three of us and then I reached out.

Tomos Rees: 27:58

Also, whilst all of this was going on, I was reaching out to a number of platforms like Y Combinator, co-founder matching.

Tomos Rees: 28:06

It's actually a pretty good platform to find co-founders for businesses and everyone there you, you know obviously wants to start a business, so it's it's a pretty good match there and I found one other guy, so it ended up being four of us by the end of november and we started working together as a team um, you know, obviously finding out what everyone was best at optimizing a little bit, pushing out as much as possible so that we could have a fully formed MVP that was running live globally by January.

Tomos Rees: 28:39

So I went out to Uganda again in January, end of January, and I was there with the plan to also use the product. So I started using the MVP towards the end of the time because, as always, when you say a deadline is going to happen with tech, it's always going to run overlined. So I ended up only having two days to actually test the product out there, but it was a good experience and we did a lot of changes since then, iterations and yeah, that's kind of how we all got started. Then I started getting advice from a lot of people lucas, you were one of them, as you know a lot of great advice there. I was also talking to sever, who's also a great resource for anyone that wants um to start something in this ecosystem, and I was talking to different charities, seeing what people wanted, and it's quite a diverse range.

Lukas Seel: 29:33

So trying to optimize the things that were most important at this time and since then we just carried on going, yeah, and I think it's probably a good time to start talking about the product and what solutions you offer to the charity industry. So take us through well, maybe address some of the pain points that you saw. Perhaps also you know working on the ground with charities and with how charities work, and then you know, bring us into this process of how you kind of figured out what you wanted the product to be and what you wanted the project to do for charities.

Tomos Rees: 30:17

Yeah, yeah. So with the pain points, it's different for like every check. I think the problem almost with the charity industry we're trying to solve problems is it's so diverse. You know, you have charities that do online events, you have charities that do construction projects and then you have charities that work in countries which maybe don't have credit cards or cards like, for example, uganda. So you know, when I was really thinking about it originally, I was thinking that we could track everything with blockchain and crypto and you know we could use, for example, xcard or something like that At that time it hadn't come out, but something like that, I was thinking and you'd actually be able to give it to the charities and they would be able to use their money that's been donated to them and then you could track it that way perfectly on chain.

Tomos Rees: 31:10

The world doesn't really work like that. I definitely learned that, luckily, before I built the product. And also it brings a lot of problems in the sense that you may have hundreds and hundreds of people in the charity and you may only have like five cards or something that are linked to this bank account, and so there's governance problems in that as well. So in terms of the pain points I would say. I mean there are many different pain points. One of the big ones is definitely being able to connect their donors with the impact that the donor's money is having. That's kind of the big one that we're really trying to solve first, and I thought that that was probably the best to start with, especially given trust, in the UK at least and I imagine globally has dramatically fallen. I mean, it's from 2014,. It was 75% of people trusting charity and end of 2022, it fell to only 48% of people trusting charity. So more people distrust than trust these days, and you know a lot of the reason. That is the big scandals that we see in the newspapers. You see the Red Cross mishandling funds that was meant for Haiti. You see Black Lives Matter co-founder buying a $6 million mansion in Hollywood and then using it for her own personal uses, and you know, the list kind of goes on. I think everyone's kind of seen one of these examples and maybe even know some of them personally.

Tomos Rees: 32:50

If it's uh, if it's uh, not great enough, um and so just, and yeah, I think, before I go into the actual solution that we're thinking, the other problems are obviously as well the inefficiency in the market. Uh, if you just look grant writing alone, grant writing is a big thing for how people, how charities get money, and you know the UK alone is probably I think it's about 2.1 billion pounds a year is spent on actually finding and making grants, and two thirds or more of these applications end up failing or end up being worthless, and you know it's. It's a lot of money that people are donating to a charity which is going straight to something which isn't actually having any any actual change, and so I feel like that's a big problem as well. Um, and yeah, there's, there's quite a few problems, but if I go into some of the solution real quick, we really felt that to be able to connect the donors to where their money's going, the impact it's having, it would not only solve this problem of people not feeling like they know where their money is and like there's distrust there, but also it would solve the problem of inefficiency to some extent as well, because if you can get people showing that they're spending their money well and then actually rewarding them for spending the money well and for being transparent, then you'll get more and more people doing that and hopefully, if people see that this platform, for example, is showing transparency and connecting them to what they want to do and see in their impact, then that should engage more and more donors, which should bring more and more money to the platform, which should make more and more charities want to be more transparent and efficient with their money, and that's kind of the bigger cycle that kind of leads to the growth of this, the actual product itself.

Tomos Rees: 34:59

What we're looking at right now is creating quite a simple operations management tool and I say quite simple because it's essentially a little form where they can fill out in like five to ten seconds and it would be for each expense. Or maybe they're doing an update like a full class in an IT center. The donors paid for the full class and they want to show a picture of the full class and what happens then, and maybe they share an invoice for where they spent the money and everything like this. And what happens there is that the thing goes through a governance system. One of the reasons for this is charities also have some things which they don't necessarily, even though they're spending the money very well. They might be a little bit concerned about, for example, a toilet seat showing up in the transactions log. People would like to see transparency of them spending money, but they don't necessarily want to know that their 10 pounds went to buying a toilet seat. So we added a governance system which also helps with the operations management.

Tomos Rees: 36:08

So if someone actually does a transaction out in Uganda with an IT center let's say they bought a new computer because they want to fill the space more that transaction will then be submitted by the person who bought it in the charity and it will go through the governance system where the manager of that person will then see the transaction and they can approve or reject it. Maybe they reject it because they've inputted it twice and you don't want to double spend, or anything like that. Maybe they rejected it because they've actually stopped the payment and they didn't want that payment to be made. There are many reasons why these things can happen. But then they can also put it into a review process. If they don't think that they filled it out properly or if they want to add some details to it, then they can put it into review.

Tomos Rees: 36:57

And the whole point of it is, once it goes up the chain, you know basically once, and then the fundraisers can show that money going there, the money will be shown, no matter what, it's just whether the name of the transaction would be shown. And that's currently the way we're trying to solve that a whole, uh, interconnected link between the donor wanting to see full transparency and the charity wanting to show, um, the best use of what they're spending. And then, yeah, and then I was just going to add one more thing. Sorry, I know I'm spending a long time on this, but once that happens, in the back end, we're also going to be using some of our AI features where, if you spent 100 quid on a school in Uganda, you would get a personalized report basically explaining in detail where your hundred pounds has gone, the impact it's had, and, you know, maybe give you a little bit of a reward with some gamification and stuff.

Lukas Seel: 38:04

How many toilet seats you bought with the hundred quid. It's something I think that's so interesting. Right is this incentive alignment, and you spoke about it a little bit before. It's like, how do we reward economically and perhaps just with reputation, good behavior? Right, and blockchain technology and this transparency really unlocks these things that are quite hard to do in Web2. They're possible Impact tracing is certainly possible, but it's baked into the technology that is Web3 and blockchain, right, and so it's very interesting to see this use case and you and I actually spoke about this, I don't know over a year ago, I think, in some other space where it's like, you know, this is such a natural use case, yet it's not being built somehow.

Lukas Seel: 38:55

So really it's an interesting, interesting thing. And this not being built. I want to. You mentioned the grant and that you won with this, and it's quite a substantial government grant that you got, and it's not a grant that goes out to like web three things. It's not like a vc raise or something that you would typically see in this space. It's something quite unique and maybe you know, speak to this approach of like using this technology in a sensible way that makes sense, trying to explain that to the, the government body that you spoke to there, and, um, how you kind of conceptualize this so they could also understand the value of it. And, yeah, how you, how that process of applying for a grant yourself. Now you know when and how you connected the technology with the use case.

Tomos Rees: 39:57

It was a difficult process. In short, no, it's a very competitive grant. Just a little bit of information on it. As Lucas said, it's not for not for web free companies, it's just for companies generically. Uh, it can be from any industry, it can be any level and, um, you know, very competitive. I mean the round that I was applying in. They do it four times a year. I will apply for more, which, having won one, I hopefully will be able to win a couple more, if not one more, at least, and, uh, so that's a a little bit of I don't know if it's alpha or just intuition there um, but it's, uh, it's a great process. They actually run it very well. I think it's one of the best things that the uk government does. To be frank, um, they run it four times a year.

Tomos Rees: 40:52

As I said, the batch that I was applying in and it's also worth noting I did apply twice. I failed the first time. The second time I reapplied and I got it, the one I actually won it in. There was 2,300 companies applying and a lot of these companies pay professionals to write these grants for them, and I was one of 60 to actually get the grant and we applied for a massive grant. As Lucas said, in dollar terms, the project itself over the next 12 months costs $500,000. So it's a pretty major grant and it's kind of on the upper end of what you're allowed to ask for. So we were kind of one of the biggest projects in that 60 that won it In terms of, like, actually selling blockchain to them.

Tomos Rees: 41:41

It was very difficult and the reason I say that is you know these grants are very complex. You have to go into so many details I must have had like 15 really long forms that I had to submit and, you know, really go through with a fine tooth comb, very difficult word limits and everything like that, and you can never please everyone at the same time to also do the blockchain aspect along with trying to convince them that the business was viable, that the team was viable, that the problem was big enough, that it would bring more jobs to the uk economy because that's obviously something that they want to see as a uk government and that we would also, at the same time as taking jobs from other people, we would actually retrain these people, and you know there's so many things that you have to think about with these things. But in terms of the blockchain side of things, the first time we actually failed, one of the reasons was we had one assessor, so there's three assessors for every application. One assessor was really anti-blockchain and you know we may have failed anyways, but you know his comments were very against us. He also didn't like the fact that we were planning on charging charities for these services, which I'm not quite sure why he didn't like that, just because, you know, most of the industry third-party consultants and so on charge tens of thousands a month, let alone only 3,000 a year or something that we plan on charging. So we're actually saving about 66 plus percent on fees, which actually was part of our whole grant process.

Tomos Rees: 43:33

And, um, yeah, the blockchain side. The guy said um, you know, blockchains are very inefficient. It uses so much energy, why would you want to? Firstly, he also said why would you want to build your own blockchain? So he didn't even read our application properly, because we were not saying we were building a blockchain. We were saying we were building on a blockchain. Um, and then he also started talking about proof of work and everything like this, which had no relevance whatsoever to , MultiversX is. So, you know, we really realized that we had to hit those two points home, and the fact that we're saving charities money and the fact that we're actually using a much more advanced blockchain than these people originally think. So I just say here there's.

Lukas Seel: 44:21

I want to like this entrepreneurship lesson that we're having here like kind of baked into this conversation. It's so important to fail. It's so important to fail and then learn from this and read the assessor's note, address that kind of thing in the next application and really double down on what the strengths are. So just wanted to mention that in there and I'll let you continue.

Tomos Rees: 44:48

Yeah, no, I think that's a great point. I mean, a lot of people have said so. A lot of people have said that I've met recently, including most of the investors I've talked with. I've never met anyone that's won this grant before. It's very important to, firstly, be very motivated, passionate and also a little bit persistent, because no one's going to give you a free lunch for nothing, but at the same time, also to know the battles that you really want to be fighting. You know there is some optimization you need to run and you also need to realize that not everything you're doing is worth spending that much time on and so on.

Tomos Rees: 45:35

It's kind of a little bit of a dilemma with entrepreneurs.

Tomos Rees: 45:38

I see a lot of people say, oh, but they went all in, they spent all of their money, they dropped out of college, they went into debt and look at them now they're billionaires, they've made an amazing company.

Tomos Rees: 45:53

Yeah, I mean, they wouldn't have done it without dropping out of college and going into debt and putting everything into it. That is, that is right, because they put themselves in a position where they had to fight and claw themselves into success, and you know that's a big part of being a founder that I've really noticed, and but at the same time, you have to also know that if they were working on an idea which actually didn't make sense, you know that can go very bad. The same way, uh, you know they may not end up being successful just because of how, uh, perseverant they were, and so on, and it's always about you know monitoring your decisions in the best way that they are made. I just wanted to say, because I just brought up now the name of the title of the application I wrote for the grant was an innovative blockchain platform for charities that could increase donations up to 50% and reduce costs by 66%, and that was the actual title that I gave for the application.

Lukas Seel: 47:00

It's very daring to put blockchain in there. I would say, Was that a deliberate choice?

Tomos Rees: 47:07

Yes, yeah, so it is. I agree with you completely. It's very daring to put that in there, um, but the deliberate choice with that is for these grants they they're innovation grants, obviously, so you need to show a core, innovative idea technologically speaking, and so the idea that I had at this point was all about integrating blockchain to make transparency more trustworthy and to make the charity industry connect with the donors better as well. So that's why I really included that in there. But you know that can also rub people the wrong way, definitely. I mean, just today. We actually technically started the grant two days ago, so that's big news there.

Tomos Rees: 47:54

And I had a call with my monitoring officer because they give you monitoring officers today he, when I explained the idea to him, you know, he's not the person that assesses it, he's just the one that monitors me as I do it and he instantly just went like yeah, but you know it's very energy inefficient, you know why would you use blockchain kind of thing? And then he went but, taking off my brainstorming hat, I'll put on my monitoring officer hat again. And then it was like and then I just went well, well, don't, don't take your hat off just yet. We'll have this conversation first, and I was explaining, uh, proof of stake in the simplest way I could and everything like this. So I mean, when you're using the word blockchain, it's very, very difficult and if I didn't have to, I wouldn't have used it. The only reason I used it was because it's a technology grant kind of thing, um, but yeah, I mean, selling blockchain is quite a difficult thing to do, um but yeah, I mean, selling blockchain is quite a difficult thing to do.

Lukas Seel: 48:57

The people, would you say what did convince them in the end there? So so was it. Did you actually manage to sell them on the technology or was it the business model, or obviously? I mean obviously the answer to this it was a mix of everything, but you know how. How did that process then go, especially after the first assessor's assessment? Did you get the same person? But then you actually were able to concretely address these hesitations and then overcome them, and how did you end up being able to sell it?

Tomos Rees: 49:26

let's say, yeah, it's a difficult question to answer because, as you kind of alluded to, we didn't have the same assessors, so each time you apply, reapply, you have different assessors. I think the way I really sold it on the second time round was being very, very clear on exactly what the blockchain is being used in the product, what the blockchain is being used in the product, rather than maybe you know a lot of the time, as we're so used to talking about blockchain all the time, we can kind of forget that most people don't necessarily understand the little details that come with every 10 words that we say when we're talking about blockchain, and I think I've really delved into that a lot more. I also explained a lot more that MultiversX was a proof of stake super efficient blockchain, uh. Also the fact that it only had fees of like 0.001 uh per transaction, and that was actually something that I forgot to mention in the first time around. They were like well, you know, it's not if it's not a viable business, because every single transaction is going to cost you like 20 quid. And you know again, that just goes to their naivety, to learning ethereum, because I think one important point to make here is these assessors are supposed to be experts in the field that you're applying in. So if I say blockchain in the title, they're supposed to be blockchain experts.

Tomos Rees: 51:02

And yet the first time I applied, you know their knowledge clearly did not pass Ethereum. I mean, you know it was very clear that they did not pass Ethereum in the way that they were using their language. The second time round, they didn't really mention too much about the blockchain and their feedback and so on. So I think they just accepted that. I answered it much better this time and actually one of the comments from Assessor Free funny enough, assessor Free on the first time was the one that ruined the application. Assessor Free this time was the one that loved the product the most. I think the idea he said, and I quote, a potentially groundbreaking idea which could have a global impact, and that's a pretty cool thing to hear from your Assessor.

Lukas Seel: 51:49

I think I saw that somewhere in one of the descriptions of the product I want. I saw that somewhere in one of the descriptions of the product. I want to say we have about five minutes left. If somebody has a question on entrepreneurship, trust, transparency, charities, please feel free to request the mic or write your question in the comments. I'll bring us back in the meantime, tom, to this idea of like okay, we have a technology that is actually working and it fits with the product you're trying to build. Is there something you know like? Where do you, how do you want to really start this company? You have the grant. You're rolling things out. What are the first things? You're addressing? The grant? You're rolling things out. What are the first things you're addressing and how do you also see this technology being not just something you're using, but something you're really using to its fullest potential, in this way that you're pushing the space forward on both ends on the blockchain side and the charity transparency side?

Tomos Rees: 52:54

Yeah, I think it's a good question. I think the way I see it running currently. Obviously we've already been building for quite a while. So actually funny enough, when I applied for this grant, you know you have to say like month by month what you're going to be building, how you're going to be building and all these kind of things, timelines and so on. We're actually technically three months ahead of schedule on this grant already, which is funny to start it off with um. So actually that gives us room to build a lot more than we had originally intended in this 12 month period.

Tomos Rees: 53:27

So um, you what was originally going to be a nice platform which had quite basic features with the impact reporting and the operations management and the transparency aspect, with a mobile application as well. That's a little bit of alpha and so on. Not the best alpha We'll have better alpha as we go but you know it allows us to also add in a lot of the AI aspects that we really want to do too. So I'm not going to give too much away with a lot of that stuff, but we're in a really good position. We're very excited and you know we started the grant technically two days ago, which means we can actually start spending the money as we intended and we're onboarding more people. So we are four full-time right now, but we're actually looking to extend that out to six people. So I'm also in the process of hiring some people currently for those jobs, jobs and yeah, I, you know, I I will be trying to document as much as I can without, uh, spreading myself too thin. I I'm going to try and do a lot more um information as we go along, maybe a couple of videos, if I can as well. Well, I'll get my tech guy to do some building on MultiversX videos, uh, for other people to watch as well. And yeah, I mean we're in terms of like integrating blockchain which was your second question that lucas um, we will be doing it all in the back end.

Tomos Rees: 55:07

So the whole point is most people will not know that they're using blockchain technology, and the reason for this is 95% of the world does not own crypto and probably 98% of the world either doesn't understand how to use it or they just don't use it on a daily basis or weekly whatever.

Tomos Rees: 55:30

So we will be having wallets in the background, we will be having smart contracts in the background, we'll be having nft rewards, but we're not going to call them nfts because, again, that just does not sound good to most people.

Tomos Rees: 55:45

And yeah, we'll be adding in a potential DAO structure into the application as well, along with a voting token which will be held on everyone's profile so they can vote For one thing.

Tomos Rees: 56:02

One thing I did like the idea of was potentially having, every month, a certain percentage of the business's income let's say it's like five or 10% or something like that that can go into a pool which everyone who's been using the platform and donating on the platform they then receive tokens for voting in the background, so they wouldn't even know that they have them technically. And well, they would be able to see some of it because it'd be gamified and they would be able to vote where they want that pool of money to go every single month. So you know, if 10% of people vote for one charity, 30% of people vote for another and maybe 1% vote for another, that direct percentage would be given out of the pool to those charities that were voted for. And that's just one of the many ways that we plan on gamifying and, you know, really trying to engage people whilst having some superior technology behind the whole thing.

Lukas Seel: 57:03

Man, I wish I had asked this question earlier. There's like we could literally have a space on each of these points. Yeah, really really cool and very interesting. Cosmin, you're up here. You have a question for Tom.

Cosmin: 57:16

No, I don't have any question, don't kick me down. I just want to be on the record again. It's not the first time, but I do want to take this opportunity to say congrats again to Tom for achieving this. It's amazing and uh, the thing that you said earlier by having the one that rejected you the first time being like the biggest supporter. I mean, I can only imagine how good that felt. And, yeah, congrats, and I cannot wait for this to become bigger than the Red Cross. Let's fucking go.

Tomos Rees: 57:54

Let's go Love it, thank you.

Lukas Seel: 57:58

Yes, thank you so much. I will leave you with one question before we wrap it up, and this is the special element. Another thing that you haven't quite mentioned, but it's somewhere in there this idea of connecting communities that is quite unique in the Web3 space and has very different mechanisms. You mentioned some of the gamification aspects of this, but is there a plan to kind of specifically leverage that part as well for the business and, if so, what is it?

Tomos Rees: 58:31

You mean like leveraging the community feel within the business. Is that what you mean?

Lukas Seel: 58:37

Yeah, and bringing together, like using blockchain to really have these unique mechanisms that tie people together. You mentioned tokens, you mentioned gamifications, you mentioned so many mechanisms that are part of the architecture and infrastructure and like they are in web 2, um, and just perhaps give us some insights in in these ideas that you have to to leverage the technology there.

Tomos Rees: 59:02

Yeah, yeah, definitely, um, so, uh, in that kind of sense, I I think there are a lot of ways you can go with this, which is one reason I think blockchain as the foundation for this platform is so crucial, because it gives you so many incredible benefits that you could leverage. Like you were just saying. There, lucas platform is, you can actually bring together certain people that maybe have common goals, they have common ideas, maybe have some communities on there themselves and those communities could share, maybe like a monthly pool or something, and then they can distribute it how they like and people can suggest I like this project, I like this charity, maybe I can put it there and you. You know it's worth noting when I'm talking about all these things. At the moment they are just ideas, um, and they will not be coming in the next three months. They will be more like 12 months kind of time. So definitely don't expect that like very soon, um. But then you can also add in the aspect of um volunteers.

Tomos Rees: 1:00:12

I think it's a very important aspect of the charity industry and one you mentioned earlier, lucas. It can be very difficult to have volunteers feel incentivized to work for charities them. They are very skilled in certain areas, but they don't necessarily know people or charities which they trust to be able to join, and a lot of the time I think this is really neglected in the industry. I mean, we've already seen if you look at some statistics of the uk, for example, I think there's roughly the in terms of like amount of time people volunteer there's apparently 2 million full-time jobs in the UK that could be serviced with the amount of work, volunteered hours that people use a very efficient way, or also in a way where more people can get involved in this then I think you can have a very important use case there and you can maybe even incentivize them by offering potential bounties and stuff like this. So, for example, one thing I was thinking when I mentioned that sharing some of the revenue from the business one other aspect we could share is a pool for bounties.

Tomos Rees: 1:01:35

So if charities are very trustworthy, transparent, if they are efficient with their money and they're essentially earning what we're going to call trust points on the platform, now, these trust points they can then spend technically, although not necessarily the case they can spend on access to bounties.

Tomos Rees: 1:01:56

So if they wanted to do a video to show off this new product, but they don't know anyone in the video space. They could win a bounty, and the bounty might be worth $200 or something like that, and then they could put on that bounty. We want a video editor and all this kind of stuff and then it gets shown out to the volunteer marketplace that we could have on the platform and every single video editor that's there can just go. Oh wait, this is amazing. They're already being very transparent, they look quite trustworthy and I'm going to get paid a little bit of money from it. So it's just kind of one of those ideas that we have to connect communities and it's one where blockchain just helps so much, and a little bit of alpha, I guess, as well. But again, that's not coming in the next two months, so don't expect that yet.

Lukas Seel: 1:02:51

Yeah, I mean, I think that's such a cool mechanism and it's even a mechanism where a lot of people, like you were saying, like are looking to volunteer their time to worthy causes. They don't even want to get paid. You know, like, if they get paid in reputation, if they get paid and you know something that isn't necessarily money, they'd be happy to do it because that's what they're in there for. And then, of course, if we can monetize it in some way, and perhaps onboard talent that you couldn't have access to without an incentive, a monetary incentive that's very interesting. Wow, so many interesting ideas. Would love to talk more, but we try to keep these to an hour and, yeah, so I'll just leave it on this note that I'm very excited that you're building this and really the potential, I think, is quite clear, and the potential of using this technology in this particular use case is very clear and very well outlined. So, yeah, so many thanks, tom, for building this, many thanks for coming on and yeah, thank you for your time.

Tomos Rees: 1:04:01

Thank you, lucas, and thank you for inviting me up. You know we are in the process of building. I hope to have a lot more updates as we go and try and document some of the journey as well, and I appreciate everyone's time coming here as well. And yeah, let's bring MultiverseX technology to the whole charity industry.

Lukas Seel: 1:04:29

Maybe make the truth machine that Benny's been talking about a lot of the time. Exactly, there's so much more too, that we can talk about in that and um, so we'll. We'll leave it here, but maybe on the note that we'll continue this conversation sometime in the not so distant future. Thank you so much, um tom. Thank you, cosme for coming on. Thank you everybody for tuning in. This was helios horizons, episode 13, with the co-founder of Philanthropy, a blockchain-built charity all-in-one solution. Thank you everybody for tuning in. Thank you for being here. We'll talk to you very soon and have a good day. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.