Juan Benet
Founder & CEO, Protocol Labs. On 2 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutivescientistengineerinvestor@juanbenet ↗juan.benet.ai ↗
Juan Benet is the founder and CEO of Protocol Labs, which he established in 2014 to build decentralized web infrastructure. He is the creator of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Filecoin, and co-created CoinList.
2shows
3appearances
58statements
11resolved
10supported
1contradicted
91%fully supported
Everything Juan Benet said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Benet: Academic research proved doubling Bitcoin block size has minimal impact
“The debates that have been raging for the last two years are about relatively minor things, so increasing the block size became this huge holy war, and when you step back and look at what they're talking about, it's just increasing one factor, either by, you k…”
Benet: 2013-2014 blockchain thought in New York and Europe far surpassed Silicon Valley
“I think in 2013 and 14, a lot of the blockchain tech was being built in New York and Europe and far ahead of Silicon Valley. And I remember having a lot of conversations with people here in New York and Europe and just the level of thought outside of Silicon V…”
Benet: Silicon Valley dismissed Bitcoin by missing its core value of verifiability
“And so it's partly for that reason, I think, that Silicon Valley effectively dismissed a lot of the potential of Bitcoin. It just looks like such the wrong thing. If you could, you know, beat the throughput of Bitcoin with a SQLite database in your phone, why …”
Benet: High-throughput blockchain scaling implementations will be live within two years
“So expect that to happen over the next year or two. Already there's a bunch of academic results that show this is not only possible, but it's provably so. So now people are building those Implementations, and we'll see them live in the next two years or so.”
Benet: 2017 ICO hype cycle peak will lead to greater investment rigor
“We're seeing probably, like, hopefully this is the peak of the hype cycle. Hopefully this will not get worse next year. So hopefully we have now peaked this and it's gonna go back down. And then suddenly we'll get a lot more rigor in investing.”
Benet: Democratic voting in open-source software often drives projects into the ground
“People did try to come up with voting systems for a lot of open source, and it ended up going worse. So there's some open source projects that were running to the ground effectively by just communities of people effectively using democracy to kind of drive the…”
Benet: Catalan government used IPFS to bypass Spanish censorship
“Yeah, so, Catalonia tried to declare independence and tried to vote for it. The Spanish government censored the website, and so then the Catalan government Put their website on IPFS and distributed it that way. So it was pretty cool to see the Catalan presiden…”
Protocol Labs bypassed Turkish censorship by hosting Wikipedia on IPFS
“So recently Turkey decided to block Wikipedia and it was very easy for them because all they had to do was intercept, you know, the connection between all Turkish users and the Wikipedia servers outside of Turkey. And so that was like very trivial blocking, bl…”
Benet: Twitter as a protocol token could have sustained third-party developers
“If you instead thought of Twitter as a protocol token, Twitter, the company, or like the group developing the protocol could totally continue to exist just fine with as many developers on top as you can think of.”
Benet: Scammers will exploit retail investors in crypto token sales
“I mean, the reality is that it's going to be super hard for a lot of people to do the diligence on these networks and understand which of them are actually valuable. And there will be bad actors that are going to take advantage of that system and try to scam p…”
Benet: Bitcoin solved protocol funding by enabling shared ecosystem upside
“Bitcoin came in and gave us the answer, which is you create cryptographic assets that allow everybody in this entire ecosystem to share in the upside of creating this value.”
Benet: Blockchain apps will reach mainstream consumers within two years
“So I think it's gonna take about a year or two before you start seeing these things get mainstream consumer use.”
Benet: VC cannot fund deep tech needing over two years of development
“VC is not built for long-term investment in things that are
Extremely high risk and building some deep foundational technology.
VC is tuned for 10 year returns, which means that in two, three years you have to, like, show very strong you know, sign of, like, m…”
Benet: Modern private funding would fail to build an open internet today
“My claim is you couldn't build something as free and open, and that works as well as the internet today because no group would fund it.
and what you would end up with is a massively stunted version of something that is highly centralized and controlled by a c…”
Benet: Tesla and SpaceX would have failed without Elon Musk's personal wealth
“If Elon hadn't been personally wealthy, both projects would have probably failed.”
Benet: Ethereum could reach Google or Apple valuations in 5-10 years
“So if Ethereum continues to be useful five, 10 years from now, you're going to have, and continues to accrue continues to grow, right? So if Ethereum becomes more and more successful, continues to solve a whole bunch of problems, then an ether is going to be w…”
Benet: Tokenized networks are emerging as alternatives to traditional companies
“The company is fading away, or not fading away, but rather a new thing has come in, which is the network or a market that, that is not a company, but it functions kind of like a company. And so you can think of Ethereum not as a company, but rather as a, as th…”
Benet: Crypto networks reward knowledge work better than salaried employment
“You can't measure knowledge work in hours. Somebody's investment over a decade can put them into the right perspective to make the right contribution at the right time, that creates something like Ethereum or Bitcoin or whatever. And, you know, how do you corr…”
Benet: Decentralized storage nodes will beat AWS on unit economics
“Our bet there is that yes, that there's a whole bunch of places and cases where Certain individuals or groups in the world have access to either really cheap storage or storage that's positioned well in the network that is kind of like, you know, somewhere bet…”
Benet: Protocol tokens act as internet-native equity for decentralized networks
“Think about it in terms of company equity. When you're thinking about building technology and so on, it can pay people salaries and dollars and so on. And you can give them equity, which gives them a share of the thing you're creating. And that's what protocol…”
Benet: IPFS would have died in academia's publish-or-perish model
“Really I think, like, the only option was either, ah, university or Google, and in the university case, it would have been killed in, in the, you know, publish or perish world where, like, hey, this is way too ambitious. Focus on this, like, one little thing, …”
Benet: Decentralized internet tech directly opposes Google's data control model
“I think this kind of tech is stuff that Google might be interested in funding from the perspective of Google funds a lot of protocols and funds a lot of research, but it also kind of runs counter to basic Google positions around, you know, data, control of dat…”
Benet: Computing overuses human-readable naming when cryptographic hashes are superior
“I think we have, like, this massive addiction to human readable naming where it shouldn't be used in a lot of places because it brings in a whole bunch of baggage around, hey, now you need a consensus system. Now you need, like, a network stack. Now you need, …”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Juan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Protocol Labs | 1 | 37 | 100% 3/3 | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |
 a16zLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Protocol Labs | 2 | 21 | 88% 7/8 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |