This is the first in a series of articles, videos and releases on the inner-workings of Bless, the world’s first shared computer. If you’re not sure what Bless is, where have you been hiding?
After moving to the US to study at the University of California, Butian worked in academic research, consulting and as a tech investor. As she became increasingly immersed in crypto and Web3, she began identifying a set of limitations that she says continue to hinder the space today: a lack of focus on user experience, and an unwillingness to learn from the successes of the previous generation of internet technology.
Bless’ mission is really bold — you’re aiming to transform computing, in a way. Have you always been interested in technology?
Not at all. The region where I grew up was really rural — it wasn’t remotely close to what kids have here in the US these days. We didn’t have regular cell phones — let alone smartphones — until I was in middle school. Technology was seen as something fancy.
When I first came to the US for college, that’s when I experienced how much disparity there is between different regions, different generations, and the different cultures and environments that people are in.
You studied Engineering at UC Berkeley as an undergrad, and then you got an MBA in Quant Finance at the Wharton School, UPenn. How did the West Coast and East Coast college experiences compare?
They definitely clashed in some ways. My undergrad was focused on tech. People in the Bay Area are very absorbed in their projects and focused on innovation — very driven to build their own solutions to things. The culture during my MBA program was more business-oriented or revenue-driven; there was a much larger emphasis on connecting the product to developing a business, and a keeping financial goals in mind.
The West Coast has the founder mindset, the East Coast is the boardroom?
Yeah, if we want to be reductive about it. On the West Coast, they’re physically surfing in the ocean or at home surfing on the computer. Now we’re taking that one step further with Bless and offering a shared surfing experience with the world’s shared computer.
Exactly — collective surfing. Would you say your experiences as a student were a major influence on your eventual founding of Bless?
Yes, in the sense that Bless definitely started with a culture massively focused on product. Michael and Derek developed the initial whitepaper, which was the theoretical basis of Bless and its engineering implementation. What we’re trying to do is merge the quantitative or systematic way that technology structures people’s lives with a very human emphasis on interaction and sharing resources.
We’re trying to create a kind of circular economy where people can contribute directly to this greater infrastructure that can support everyday activities. Businesses support their users, users support their preferred businesses.
It seems like you’re broadening a very specific field of computing that hasn’t really admitted consumer devices until now. Phones and laptops are perfectly capable of sharing power and interoperating, but you would need significant technological know-how to make it happen. You’re allowing people to do it in a very seamless and convenient way.
Yeah. We’ve designed a straightforward user experience that solves the access problem, and we’ve spent a lot of time figuring out the orchestration of the network’s resources.
You see this kind of thing in some industries, where businesses rely on supply chains that are really elegantly orchestrated. We’re simply doing the same for consumer-grade and professional-grade compute resources. Consumer devices are becoming more and more powerful, more performant. An iPhone chip can already do things like rendering, providing GPU-like functionality for running inferences and even training models.
You were previously an investor. You worked at Lightspeed and NGC Ventures, investing in AI, blockchain and Web 3 companies. How did it feel to go from being an investor to a founder seeking funding for your own company?
Being a builder is definitely more rewarding. Of course, being a VC is exciting — you’re allocating capital to startups you think will change the world one day with their innovations. But building something, working on it 24/7, driving it to the market and scaling it — it’s completely different. Being on both sides of table definitely provided me with a lot of perspective.
The Web 3 industry is immature, and for it to grow and solve meaningful problems it requires people from all different angles and with all sorts of different experiences and skillsets. And the builders and investors who work in this space are evolving so much — you can see it in the increasing sophistication of the investment theses that VCs come up with, and in the sorts of problems that founders are trying to address through their work.
I think Bless is an example of this desire to solve bigger and bigger problems. We’re taking decentralization to the full stack without it being bounded by the limits of blockchain.
Bless is sometimes described as a DePin network — are you comfortable with that characterization?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s kind of like Uber, in a way. Instead of a traditional taxi service servicing the entire city from one depot with their limited fleet, drivers just use their own cars, serving local customers. And in the future, once we’re at scale, I think we will see businesses leasing out their machines for people to use with Bless. You see ‘institutional node operators’ these days, a blend of completely centralized companies and a few individual participants. The key difference here is the ownership, the control, the power.
We’ve already had institutional interest in Bless, and I think that companies can become important contributors. But ultimately, we’re going to ensure a balance where centralized institutional operators, server rooms and so on can participate without the influence they’re used to.
What would the ideal mix of providers look like to you?
We would look at that from a market needs perspective. But we want the institutional provision to work as a supplement. The application users themselves will automatically contribute compute power, making the network self-sufficient, and the institutional providers can support that core framework.
That kind of functionality, I think, will be a big deal for the future generation of applications — web apps or products — that don’t want to rely on a third party and don’t want to worry about their services being disrupted.
What is the minimum level of provision Bless will need to function after the launch?
That’s a good question. Right now, we’ve got over a million nodes concurrently contributing to the network at any given moment. We’ve found that this is already more than sufficient to process a lot of the world’s shared computer’s functions without any kind of interruption — but we need to scale this further to cater for all institutional and consumer demands.
From a technical perspective, we’ve done a lot of work on the auto failover and fault tolerances of the system. The secure sandbox is the base layer; on the networking layer, there is off-chain verifiability, load balancing and auto failover to ensure that the network can run without any interruption to the service-level agreement — as efficiently as you might expect from centralized providers.
What has been the most challenging aspect of working on Bless? I’ve asked your cofounders this question too, and so far the answers have been different.
From my perspective, it has been juggling the various elements of the job. We’re a small team covering a lot of functional areas; we’re making sure the product is built out, letting the world know what we’re building, and we’re coordinating all of these efforts as we approach launch.
I’d say we have spent longer than the typical crypto project on development. We spent two years building out the product, instead of launching as soon as we could and then making changes. So we would develop something and then get market feedback on it, and we did that over and over again. It was a slow process, but it helped us understand which elements would solve major problems for large enough numbers of people. A lot of projects have launched without the actual ‘compute’ part — it’s a blockchain without the meat. We didn’t believe in doing things that way.
You mentioned how long the average crypto project takes to get to market. Without wanting to badmouth anyone, a lot of those projects will be focusing on launching a token as soon as possible, whereas your goal is a lot grander in scale.
It’s definitely important that a business hits those financial milestones. But you have to make sure that achieving your financial goals is also feeding back into the product and to your customer as part of a sustainable business model, right?
Some people have said, “Oh, you guys are still around after two years, and you’re still building?” That was a common response among crypto people. But if you look at how long it takes a traditional Web 2 business to figure out their minimum viable product, their product/market fit, scale and later reach IPO, two years is nothing.
In recent months a lot of those voices have switched sides. There will always be external voices, and there will always be a mainstream way of doing things. We’re just holding tight to what we set out to do, which is to make the world’s shared computer a reality.
Do you think that kind of approach, which may seem unusual to the crypto industry as a whole, is an advantage for Bless?
Yeah, definitely. It’s not a linear route to product launch or to scale. Sometimes you feel like you’re going around in circles, but you’re learning a lot that way. You try out different ideas and you keep the things that work. You see demand, and you think about how you can meaningfully meet that. You keep repeating this process and iterating.
How do you think Web 3 is going to look post-Bless? In say five or ten years, if everything goes as you want?
I hope we will have made the user experience better. While we are pursuing goals like decentralization, sovereignty and self-sustainability, we don’t have to lose the things that we’re already comfortable with that come from Web 2 or traditional technologies.
I think this is the only way for us to improve as an industry. Web 3 isn’t really in the spotlight these days, because people are like, “Well, what does this change in my life? Probably nothing.” A bad user experience can push people away, even if you’re offering something really interesting.
Early adopters are willing to sacrifice the user experience for the upside of being early to some kind of innovation that’s transformative. Our goal is to remove that sacrifice, so that users don’t have to make any compromises in the kind of experience they’re getting.
We want using Bless to be a fluid, automatic experience, because we believe that a fundamental transformation of the internet requires nothing less than that.
Bless is building the world’s first shared computer. You can contribute here and talk to the team here.
