Founder’s Friday with Newcastle Start-Up Week
When: Friday 30th November 2018
Where: Barclay’s Eagle Labs, Newcastle-upon-tyne
Who: Gordon Dodd - Chief Strategy Officer (CSO), Lewis Collins - Chief Commercial Officer (CCO)
Blocknorth were delighted to be invited to speak at the Founder’s Friday event in November, organised by Paul Lancaster of Plan Digital & Newcastle Start-Up Week.
Gordon spoke to an assembled crowd of 140 people from businesses around the North East, covering a timeline from our business formation up to the imminent launch of our learning platform, then onwards to our goals and milestones in the next 3-year period.
Key areas covered
- The formation of Blocknorth in March 2018 & introduction to the executive team
- The imminent live launch of our online learning platform
- Our intervention as CPD accredited blockchain learning courses designed specifically for businesses
- The infancy of the blockchain sector, the knowledge gap that exists & ultimately our plans to address this through blockchain learning for employees.
- Our future plans to create sector-specific approach to blockchain learning and research
- Exciting partnerships formed with groups operating within the blockchain sector – announced Syscoin as our first
- Explained basis of Syscoin partnership, including where and how Syscoin operates in the space as both an open-source blockchain platform & cryptocurrency in top-150 by total market capitalisation
Key quotes from Gordon Dodd
Gordon on our key Blocknorth intervention within the marketplace:
“Our purpose is to translate the relative nature of black box thinking behind blockchain, and to distribute knowledge and learning to our client base… To try to de-entangle some of the questions marks which are attached to blockchain, and to provide a linear growth of knowledge from beginners/ground-floor, through to intermediate and then developmental level.”
Gordon on the infancy of the blockchain sector as a whole:
“That’s because while some of you may have heard about blockchain, and perhaps some of you won’t, our job isn’t to proselytise, our job isn’t to preach about blockchain. People will be talking about blockchain in 10-15 years time as if it was the Web 20 years ago. We’re confident of that as our starting point.”
Gordon on business theory & how this particular device relates to Blocknorth:
“Simple, Speed, Confident
Simple. We think we have a simple proposition – the transfer of knowledge into the marketplace.
Speed. We’re nimble and lithe and we think we’re ahead of the market. Even in a professional audience like yourselves, there will be a good fraction who won’t actually be aware what blockchain is.
Confidence. We believe in what we are doing.”
Gordon on our belief in the quality of the North East:
“Having something like Blocknorth in the North East we think is a great thing. From our perspective, even in the technology sector, within the North East there is a modest level of imposter syndrome still going on. We have to have the confidence and the chutzpah to say actually we’ve got this, we can do this & we can provide this. That’s part of our approach to making this happen.”
Gordon on the Blocknorth commercial model:
“Our broad approach to our commercial model is a lot times a little. Which is to say, we want to get a lot of people through our training programmes, and the relative charge is modest. The reason we do that is because it is at right-angles to the broad focus of most of the training programs in the blockchain space, which typically cost in the thousands of dollars.”
We’d like to thank again Paul Lancaster and Plan Digital for organising an excellent event at Eagle Labs, we’re looking forward to the next instalment.
