Episode 147: Steve Beauregard on Developing Blockchain Businesses Kelley Weaver: Welcome to Crypto Token Talk, a crypto one-on-one podcast, exploring how blockchain applications like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other crypto assets could change the world. Learn from blockchain experts, thought leaders, and founders of some of the most innovative companies and world changing ideas our time. I'm your host, Kelley Weaver, CEO of Melrose PR, a leading blockchain communications agency. Thanks for Joining us today. Today I'm here with Steve Beauregard, who is the Founder and Chairman at GoCoin, and is the Chief Revenue Officer at Bloq. Welcome Steve. Steve Beauregard: Thank you Kelley. Kelley Weaver: Really great to have you here today. I know you have a long history in technology. Tell us a little bit more about who you are and your background. Steve Beauregard: Oh Wow. If I go back to the early parts of my career, I was originally a software developer. In the mid 90's, I started a software firm that focused on mainly enterprise solutions. Through that period, we got into everything from building websites to eventually mobile apps, and mobile games and then, later on, into building things like big e-commerce websites. Kelley Weaver: Fantastic. How did you first discover crypto and blockchain? Steve Beauregard: Ironically, it was a project I was doing for my wife's startup. She had a kid-facing website called Pure Spring, and they wanted to incorporate Bitcoin as a way of incentivizing people to either comment, or sign friends up, that sort of thing. I assigned one of my engineers to go off and research it, and he stayed up all night and came to work the next day and said, "I think we should stop every project we're doing and Just do this." Kelley Weaver: How did your wife's team discover Bitcoin in the first place as something that they wanted to implement? Steve Beauregard: She's actually a heavy researcher, so she had found it Just through some of her research, and this was back in 2011. The first thing I did was call the only person I knew in the virtual currency space, which was Brock Pierce. I had known Brock Cryptotokentalk.io #askCryptoKelley @cryptotokentalk Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode! for probably half a dozen years at that point, Just in the LA tech scene. And Brock said, " You know, we've been experimenting with it in the early days, but there's really not anything very interesting right now. It's kind of a cult following. It's sort of a lot of libertarians and crazy people, and just talking about the early days of crypto." So, he sort of dissuaded me in 2011 against doing this for her website, which, you know, at that point it certainly was too early. Kelley Weaver: Interesting. How did Gocoin come to be, and what is that? Steve Beauregard: Actually, it was a little bit later, after the initial look at Bitcoin. It's probably a year later. Once again, we found, at least my wife, she found Bitcoin, and she found BitPay in particular that was now allowing payments. Rather than using a credit card at checkout, you're getting paid for things with Bitcoin. So she said, "Well, maybe I will Just implement that as a starting point, but I really like this technology. There is a lot of interesting aspects to it." Ironically, I'm going back to that email that he said she sent in 2012, and read it, and she had a really, really good view of exactly what it was, and what the strengths were back at that point. So, we researched it a little bit, looked at the BitPay interface. Kevin, my engineer, and I sort of sat down and said, "Well, okay. If we were to build something in this space, would it be a wallet? Would it be an exchange. Would we build a payments processor that would compete with BitPay?" At the end of the day, that's what we ended up doing, was building a competitor, but our vision really was not Just to take Bitcoin. We saw the trend coming of [inaudible 00:03:35] and other cryptocurrencies. So, we really designed the ground up to be another payment processor that could accept not Just Bitcoin but you know, Litecoin and others as they matured. Kelley Weaver: That's awesome. Your wife sounds amazing. I'd love to interview her. Steve Beauregard: She is. She is. Kelley Weaver: Very cool. Where is GoCoin in the ecosystem today? Steve Beauregard: GoCoin is still a going concern, and still profitable. It's probably one of the only companies in the space of its kind that has been turning a profit for three years. We took a very lean approach. Rather than building out a huge team, we sort of grew organically along with the customer base, and kept the team lean, and so that's where we've been profitable. I'm still sitting on the board as Chairman, Cryptotokentalk.io #askCryptoKelley @cryptotokentalk Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode! and still very interested in their success going forward. But, I have stepped out of the day to day as of March of 2017. Kelley Weaver: Is it something where businesses can just plug it into their, similar to BitPay, they can Just plug it into either an e-commerce site or if you're a business like ours, you can accept payments through that portal, and Just kind of plug and play? Steve Beauregard: That's right. Kelley Weaver: And then it accepts all different altcoins? Steve Beauregard: Yeah. It plugs right into the shopping cart, but we still are pretty selective. We don't Just allow any coin to be used, Just because operationally, it's not all that easy to add all of the different cryptocurrencies. So, we take the popular ones. Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dash. I think there's a handful of others pretty close to turning on in theory in payments as well. That will also open up the world to a number of select ERC-20 tokens. Kelley Weaver: I think I've used it for event tickets. There was a couple plugins where I've used GoCoin. How does it work on the back end for the businesses? Do they receive fiat funds, US dollars, or do they receive the coins themselves? Steve Beauregard: It's entirely up to them. They can do either. They can have coins. They can have fiat into their bank account or any combination thereof. They could take a 50/50 split. For example, if they wanted to get [inaudible 00:05:36] coins and have some exposure to the potential upside. Obviously that comes with potential downsides. Or, if they Just want fiat currency, we usually give 99 cents on the dollar, which is much cheaper than credit cards. Kelley Weaver: That's awesome. I think for businesses, one thing that's challenging is because the price of these tokens and coins is so volatile, it's hard to charge in real time. So, you kind of take the guessing game out of that, by ... Steve Beauregard: That's right. Kelley Weaver: Yeah. Steve Beauregard: We're reducing that risk. Cryptotokentalk.io #askCryptoKelley @cryptotokentalk Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Kelley Weaver: Yeah, that's great. Really helpful for businesses. Really cool. So, I know you started at Bloq around that same time frame, I think March, 2017, right? Steve Beauregard: That's right. Kelley Weaver: You've been there about a year and a half. Steve Beauregard: That's right. Kelley Weaver: Tell us about that. How that came to be, and what you're doing there. Steve Beauregard: Matt Roszak was one of my investors at GoCoin, and always was very supportive every time I would send out an investor update for GoCoin. One of the few people that would respond every single time, encouraging, always, "What can I do to help?" Just a great person to have in the space, especially as an investor. He and Jeff Garza got together in, I think, early 2016 to form Bloq, and that was really them looking at the development in the crypto space, and sort of saying, "I think large enterprises are going to have a lot of benefit from blockchain technologies." Jeff, who had been 15 years with Red Hat, also was an enterprise software guy. Also, Jeff was one of the original contributors to the Bitcoin project with Satoshi directly back as early as 2010. So, Jeff had a really long history. He and I had met each other at a couple conferences, speaking and so forth. I always had a lot of respect for the two of them. When I expressed to Matt at one of the conferences that I was starting to look around after four years at the helm of GoCoin, he's said, "Why don't you join Bloq?" He flew me out to Washington, DC to meet the team, where they were having a sort of an all hand team meet up. At that point I decided that I could be more effective in the blockchain industry inside of Bloq than I could in sort of the niche payment processing aspect of GoCoin. So, I Joined the team and it's been an incredible life. Kelley Weaver: That's awesome. Isn't Bloq mostly a distributed team, like everybody is remote for the most part? Steve Beauregard: Yeah, very much so.