WIRe Series – John Martin – Measure Protocol

Welcome to the WIRe Series. Recorded live in Austin, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from the WIRe MRx Meet & Mingle event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews John Martin, Founder and CTO of Measure Protocol. Contact John Online: LinkedIn Measure Protocol [00:02] John Martin, Chief Technology Officer, Measure Protocol.  Thanks for being on the Happy Market Research Podcast. [00:08]     My pleasure, my pleasure. [00:08] So, we’re at the WIRe event, part of...  connected to the IIeX Austin events. What are your thoughts so far regarding IIeX?   [00:16] I mean it’s fantastic.  To be honest, I haven’t been there yet today.  I flew in. [00:20] You just got in. [00:22]    But I was just checking my Bizzabo app trying to pick out all of the... [00:26] Connections? [00:28]       Yeah, and all of the sessions tomorrow that I’m going to go to.  Looks like there’s a bunch of System 1 stuff, which is super interesting; a bunch of Big Data stuff, which is interesting.  So, yeah, it’s a really good lineup this year. [00:38] CTO of Measure Protocol.  Tell me a little bit about Measure Protocol.  What do you guys do? [00:41] So, we’re doing sampling on the blockchain.  So, we started life about 18 months ago right, I guess, at the height, of blockchain madness, of ICO madness, and started working on this idea that we just couldn’t run away from.  You know two out of three of us founders had a background in market research, had worked at Comscore and Kantar, and had another startup, which was a market research startup that we’d exited awhile ago.  And the deeper we got into blockchain, the more we just could not run away from how perfect a fit we thought that it was for this one particular use case that we knew so much about, given our history. And so, we’ve been sort of digging away at it for the past 18 months. [01:26] Your executive team, Ben?  Is that right? [01:28] Owen and Paul. [01:30] Owen and Paul.  Sorry about that.  And you guys have had a successful exit, which is really unique, especially in the context of blockchain since the very early stages of that whole technology.  What are you seeing as the central role or, even more specifically, the practical role of blockchain in market research? What is the problem that it’s solving?     [01:54] Right.  I think it’s going to end up coming on in two different phases.  When I think about what we’re doing, which is just quite literally putting sampling on the blockchain.  So, instead of a sample provider being in the middle of a researcher and a population of respondents, there’s software on a blockchain, which is not to say that we’re disintermediating all the sample companies, right?  It’s just to say that, from a technical perspective, this stuff is possible to be done in software alone. But,