← The Digital Executive
The Digital Executive
Building the Future of Web3 and Distributed Computing with CTO Tahir Mahmood | Ep 1043
00:13:31
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Tahir Mahmood. Tahir Mahmoud is a pioneering technologist and CO founder and CTO of Kernel Labs, building the future of Web3 infrastructure. With over 40 years of experience, Tahir's career spans operating systems, distributed computing and AI. Beginning at Lower Borough University and Microsoft. He is the sole inventor of over 40 patents across Web3 IoT AI and telecommunications, including push email, the foundation for BlackBerry. His expertise encompasses multi platform environments, financial systems, AI, cybersecurity, blockchain and cloud architecture. Well, good afternoon Tahir. Welcome to the show.
- [00:57]
B
Lovely to be with you.
- [00:58]
A
Absolutely. And I love doing these international podcasts. I appreciate you making the time. You're actually in Bogota, Colombia right now doing a podcast with me in the middle of the United States in Kansas City. I just so appreciate you making the time and traversing time zones, et cetera. So Tahir, I'm going to jump into your first question. You began your career at Microsoft in 1989 focusing on operating systems and programming languages. How did your experiences during that era influence your approach to technology development and innovation?
- [01:29]
B
No, very interesting question. I mean if you can remember at that time it was pre, even Windows 1. So we had Microsoft DOS, Ms. DOS at the time. And when I joined Microsoft, obviously we were preparing to bring out Windows 1 with the Windows SDK to allow people to be able to build those. What you see, what you get, WYSIWYG application. And of course for more of a sort of commercial institutional level, there was OS 2 more which was a joint venture between IBM and Microsoft which was this sort of more bigger preemptive operating system. And then later on obviously when the relationship fell apart with IBM, Microsoft went on to create the NT operating system after that. So you can imagine it was a very early stage in terms of going from, you know, when literally you're using Microsoft dos, your terminal based, nothing but the mouse really to be able to take what was PCs and make them take that leap to something which was as I said, Windows based and using a MOUs and having drop down menus, you know, feature parity. So you had Word and Excel where they all operated and the user experience was if you learned one, you could learn the other. So I think what I learned from my days at Microsoft was one was very much about what is it that you would need to do to take a product to market. Because you know, we can all build technology and you can build amazing technology at the end of the day. But it all comes down ultimately to selling it. And that is what I think I learned in my early days about technology from being at Microsoft was Microsoft was really, really what I call a marketing company that was bringing tech out. Not just a tech company, because just a tech company would most likely have failed.
- [03:06]
A
Thank you. I appreciate that perspective. Look at going back early in your career, obviously starting out there at Microsoft, which would have been awesome. I used DOS and Windows NT, but that gradual evolution from DOS to Windows 1 must have been amazing back then. I liked the fact that you learned how to take a product to market and I think that's important you highlighted that as Microsoft was more of a marketing company than a tech company. So thank you so much. And to hear, as a sole inventor of over 40 patents, including the foundational push email technology for BlackBerry, after decades in traditional tech sectors, what motivated your transition into the Web3 space and the vision to founding Kernel Labs?
- [03:45]
B
Yeah, filing patents obviously is something I learned along the way. And it became much more important because it was in 1993 that I came up with the intention and this idea of push email, which was, you know, having to open up your laptop, plug it into the socket on the floor, dial up, see if you even have an email, never mind, you know, waiting all that time. So the intention of when we moved from analog to digital phones was, you know what, I saw this SMS message appear on the phone and it was like, wow, what if I could make it that my email, if anything came in, I could send the call critical stuff to the phone as a message and that way it would avoid me one, having to carry my laptop around everywhere if I need it, but literally be able to see what email is arriving. So that was a very early stage and obviously I gave that invention to what was Research in Motion in 1995, 394. And they went on to develop it from 1999 to create the BlackBerry device itself. What I learned from that episode was that when I gave that invention to them, they went and patented as their own idea and as it's in the public domain. I spent eight years in court with Research in Motion to finally have the appeals court in Washington D.C. confirm that I'm the inventor of push email. All the evidence was there, all the emails from myself to them showing that I'd given them all of that sort of intellectual property. But the one thing I was very naive doing in the early days was taking my inventions and actually filing patents for them. I just assumed everyone is a good guy in the world and everybody will respect your intellectual property. And, you know, that was a hard lesson for me. So I decided after that that if I ever create anything noble and unique, I would do it and take the effort to file a patent. So hence you see a lot of patents being filed for myself because at least from one regard, I just want people to know that, you know, it's not about being a troll to try to make money out of it. It's just having the ability to say, you know, I am the actual inventor. That's what it was all about. Now, Web3, the reason why I went into Web3 and Kernel Labs was created is Web3 is one of those places where there's such a divide between what we call Web two and Web three. And I say the divide is we even have given them numbers. You know, it literally is that strange. And that wall, that Hadrian's wall that we have between the two is something which, you know, I felt is wrong. I've literally felt that we have this very close community in web 3 and we have a massive web 2 community that has grown from, with the Internet to great user experience in many ways, but still poor in others. But web3 is really lacking it. And for me, that was the thing. And Web3 is made up of a very fragmented network of, you know, blockchains. They're called layer ones and then layer twos to speed them up. You know, you have little community going from one chain to another, blah, blah, blah. I can just say it's just absolutely fragmented, desert, isolated TVL in one place, total value lock, meaning in one chain to another. And you're not. There is no harmony in it. So Kernel Labs to me was a creative, just like when I was. And I, you know, it's funny, at Microsoft I started in operating systems, but I ended up in the world of email where I helped develop gateways between different email systems. And if you think of it this way, it was only the fact have gateways in different systems that we have, you know, the one killer app on the whole planet, email. And for me, I wanted to take the same concept to Web3 and say, okay, you guys go ahead. You know, every blockchain has its own premise. It's, you know, optimized for a certain thing. But one blockchain is not going to serve the planet. But we need all this cool technology, whether it's ZK proof, whether it's private networks, whatever it may be, but we need to join them and interoperate between them. And that was the Goal. And that is basically what Kernel Labs is all about.
- [07:24]
A
Thank you so much, I appreciate that. Highlighting a couple things I think it's really cool is that push to email technology. And of course, you know, I like to say as we're young, we're maybe naive, but the world can be a cruel place. And obviously you and I both have learned our lessons in our careers about trust in the world. But what's cool is your transition to Web3, which I totally agree with you right now. It's the wave of the future for sure. Our platform's built on that. But there's a lot of more work to be done and more adoption to be done in order for Web3 to be more successful. And you're doing the right thing by bringing these chains together, so it's a lot easier for the everyday user to jump on. So I appreciate that. Tahir. Kernel Labs has developed a cryptographically secured cross chain bridge in collaboration with SIG Network. How does this infrastructure enhance interoperability between blockchain networks?
- [08:13]
B
If you think of it this way, we accept that there's different chains and we need to move value tokens from one place to another. At in the world of blockchain over the last couple of years, if there's ever been any hacks where, you know, money and value has been lost, it's generally been through these bridges that literally take value from one chain to another. And problem has been that although we have these very clever things called smart contracts, you have one side where you're minting, one side where you're burning. And it is the greatest attack vector surfaces these smart contracts and they have vulnerabilities inside them. So as long as you're dealing with smart contracts, you're always going to have some kind of problem. So when we met up with David from signetwork and by the way, he's like the, the team out of Near Protocol, the cryptographic team came out and they, you know, wanted to go on to do their own project. I heard about what they were doing with these. Wallet. This particular type. Yeah, wallet. And it came to me that we were able to devconnect and David was talking to me about what they're looking to build and that moment of, you know, oh my God, I've worked out a way in my. How we actually build a cryptographic bridge which does not have smart contracts on either side. And if you have smart contracts from either side one, it means there's less cost in terms of gas faster. The attack surface is minimized to Almost zero. There is a sub exposure. But now you've created an ability to be able to move value from one chain to another in such a way that it should be transparent, quick, fast, less costly. Most importantly, you can be more confident that you can move your value from one chain to another.
- [09:44]
A
Thanks for breaking that down. Truly. I totally agree. And that's why I think people are slow to adopt, because they see all these different accounts or hacks going on in the web3world. But I like how you are basically encrypting this bridge between the different chains, which obviously if there's no smart contract that's smaller or less attack surface or vector for people to manipulate or compromise accounts. So appreciate you breaking that down for our audience to hear. Last question of the day. Given your extensive background in distributed computing and AI, how do you foresee the evolution of decentralized computing? And what role do you anticipate Kernel Labs playing in this future?
- [10:26]
B
So if you think of distributed computing, I mean, the whole idea of distributed computing has been around since really to begin the 60s. It's not like it's unique to this moment in time. So from a temporal point of view, you know, we've been doing this for a very, very long time. Distributed computing is about the fact that you can break up the load of work that you have into small components. So those components could be executing in parallel or sequential, but on different machines at the same time. So you're making more use of resources, you're able to, you know, more power. You know, that's what distributed computing is. And there's a lot of sort of messaging and communication blockchain. And I think this is where there's a misnomer when people thinking blockchain is distributed, when you actually activate in terms of call a smart contract, but you want to run it or execute it. That smart contract, the same piece of code runs on every node. So it's not like the nodes are communicating with each other. And so to say I'm doing a percentage of the code of the smart contract on this node and I'm doing another percentage of the code of on another one or whatever. It's not. They're just the same thing running across the whole network. Now, you know, as a man, you might turn around and go, well, isn't that a bit ridiculous in terms of you're just consuming a lot of power, a lot of resource just to run the same thing. And, and ultimately each node makes a decision about something that it's going to commit to the chain and A consensus has to decide is what is true. Ultimately, that's what consensus is about. So that's what I'm saying. I think people think of blockchain and I think the computer will decentralize with distributed. Okay, it's very different. Now where Kernel Labs comes in is Kernel Labs is making it actually distributed. That is what we're doing. So when a transaction arrives on a blockchain node, now what we are doing is making it from that node you can execute from say one chain, any smart contract, we call it function, or in marketing terms, a kernel on any other on chain smart contract to help you deliver your solution or go off chain into the Web2world. And ultimately when it comes to AI, be able to call these AI agents and instrument to orchestrate all of this together to be able to build that more real world sort of enhanced application rather than a simple smart contract. So that's really what this is all about, what we're doing at Kernel, we're bringing true distributed computing onto the blockchain.
- [12:43]
A
That's amazing. I appreciate that, bringing distributed computing to blockchain. It's like we've had so many guests that are in the web3 blockchain space, probably 90 guests now to date on this podcast and to see everybody jumping in and helping, helping each other, really helping the world, advancing the blockchain technology. And I like your concept, what's more than a concept now, of your distributed computing, which allows you to execute a smart contract on any other chain. So I really do appreciate that. It's helpful for me and my audience and Tahir, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
- [13:19]
B
Absolutely. I look forward to a chat another time.
- [13:22]
A
Bye for now.