One of the most highly anticipated speakers at SmartCon 2022 was former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who became a strategic advisor to Chainlink Labs last December. Schmidt, who helped steer Google from startup to tech giant over ten years, called Chainlink “a secret ingredient to unlocking the potential of smart contract platforms and revolutionizing business and society.”
Schmidt joined Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov for a fireside chat at SmartCon 2022 to discuss the promise and challenges of building web3 from the perspective of his storied career. In a particularly inspiring moment, Schmidt shared an important lesson from web2 that he believes will similarly impact the development of web3.
“At the end of the day, the companies that won in web2 were better technology; they put more capital to work and they moved faster and they scaled faster,” he said. “And these are network businesses, so once you get a little bit ahead, it’s very hard to catch up to the person ahead of you.”
Referencing Chainlink’s position as the web3 industry’s leading oracle network, he continued, “So I think that in web3, you’re going to see the same dynamic of new things entering. And the winners – and I think this is absolutely true of Chainlink – they have better technology and it scales better.”
He underscored the fundamental value of secure, reliable infrastructure. “You’ve got to get the architecture right so you can go from 10 users to 10 million users.”
Over the course of his career, Schmidt said he’s seen most systems fail because they’re not built to scale. “It’s just harder – you can’t do it in six months. It takes real computer science, real planning, real platforms.”
He said Chainlink’s track record of providing secure and reliable trust-minimized compute services will likely contribute to the network becoming “a key component” of the web3 infrastructure stack.
“Ideally, if the protocol is built with real computer science, as you put it, which is how we try to do it, then it’ll be built in a way that can meet all of those requirements and provide cost and scalability,” Nazarov agreed.
Schmidt distilled the philosophy behind Google’s success. “Our goal was: ‘We want a little piece of Google in everyone’s computation.’”
“Having a piece of every computation is a good idea,” Nazarov agreed. “I’m on board with that plan.”
“We want everyone here to have a piece of Chainlink in everything that you do,” replied Schmidt to applause.
“As long as we provide the security you need and the systems that you need, we should win on that basis,” said Nazarov. “And if we provide the most secure, best system for you to build your application, then we should absolutely have the ability to provide that compute to web3.”
Watch Eric Schmidt and Sergey Nazarov’s fireside chat at SmartCon 2022.