Episode #18
Oran O’Flynn is the CEO and founder of Soul Search, having graduated from University College Cork with a degree in chemical engineering.
But even while he was still at school he was innovating, and was lucky to be one of 50 students from across the globe to spend two weeks at NASA in Houston, Texas planning a mission to Mars.
Soul Search is a start-up that aims to revolutionise the way businesses and individuals verify and maintain their relationships. Utilising blockchain technology, Oran and his team have created Digi-Proofs, a digital proof of relationship between two parties.
These Digi-Proofs serve as a secure, tamper-proof record of partnerships, collaborations, investments, and more.
With its Soul Bound Search Engine, users can easily find and verify relationships between companies using our unique Soul ID.
In this podcast we discuss where we are in the Web3 revolution and what opportunities exist for companies like Soul Search to provide assurance and verification of relationships before people transact with one another.
I also get Oran’s prediction on when we will send people to Mars and beyond.
SPEAKERS
Dom Burch:
Welcome back to the ubloquity podcast with me Dom Burch. This is the podcast where we get to speak to thought leaders from across the industry. And I’m delighted this week to welcome onto the podcast, Oran O’Flynn. Now Oran is the founder of a company called Soul Search and Soul Search is aiming to revolutionise the way that businesses and individuals verify and maintain their relationships, a fellow blockchain technologist, well, I use that term lightly in my case, Oran is creating Digi Proofs which are digital proof of a relationship between two parties, which sounds very, very interesting, Oran welcome to the ubloquity podcast.
Oran O’Flynn:
Thanks, Dom. Thanks for having me on. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Dom Burch:
So let’s just a reverse back a little bit. Before we get into Soul Search. Tell me a bit about you. Because when I was doing my research, and I’ll confess, when you told me last week, you’ve already been over and worked at NASA. So you know, you’re going from have we got a problem, Houston. To then coming home and designing your own blockchain company, reverse back for me.
Oran O’Flynn:
So I was fortunate to be in a very supportive Secondary School of different opportunities. And I’ve always had an interest in science, I took all the sciences when I was in secondary school. So physics was kind of the one that I landed on quite a bit. And an opportunity came around when I was about 17, to go to Texas to Houston, and participate in a thing called FISA at NASA. So it’s a space school essentially, where 50 students around the world come together and plan missions to Mars. So it was quite a an interesting experience, to say the least. But invaluable, all the same,
Dom Burch:
and just being in the room with 50 like-minded folks, but from all around the world when you’re when you’re 17. I mean, that and that alone must have been really, really inspiring.
Oran O’Flynn:
Yeah, it was absolutely. And it wasn’t even just the students alone, the people introduced to us, we got to meet Everett, the man who first found water evidence from Mars. So it was all kind of overwhelming to say the least but, undoubtedly one of the best experiences I could have had.
Dom Burch:
So then fast forward a little bit, and you know, you’ve gone to uni and you went to uni, and you did it. Did you do engineering at university?
Oran O’Flynn:
Yeah, I did processing chemical engineering for four years.
Dom Burch:
And then you come out of that. And then you go right, I want to be an entrepreneur. And actually, I’m going to get involved in technology. So I presume, did you have a sort of an early interest in things like, you know, decentralised, finance, cryptocurrency, all those kinds of things?
Oran O’Flynn:
Well I first got into it when I was about maybe 15, or 16. So about 2015 2016, I first started trading, it was called verge, currency verge token. And that was true Bitrex. One of the issues back then is you had Coinbase, but they were only allowing you to purchase Bitcoin and Etherium. So you had no on ramping system. So it was all kind of firsthand experience of how, how complicated it could be at the beginning. But it gave me a good grasp of how it works, really quickly.
Dom Burch:
You then go right, I know what I’m going to do now I’m going to I’m going to create this verification platform. So what was the start point? What was it that you noticed that the world was missing? And you thought hang on a minute, this this, there’s a there’s a gap here, there’s a requirement?
Oran O’Flynn:
I think a lot of it stemmed from a huge drummed up interest. So you started to get massive amounts of different things called meme coins, which were essentially coins that people just buy into purely for the namesake, then you had NFTs kind of pushing out in 2017, becoming massive in 2021. But what I noticed was the ability for rapid technology to be developed in this area. And what that led to was a lot of bad actors being introduced into the pool. So what I figured was after a few, I suppose experiences, you could say, in being rug pulled or liquidity pulled, I found that I wanted a way in which I could look at a company and see that they were connected to someone or they had some sort of relationship that I could verify so that I could back my investment or my purchase. So that was where the original kind of Soul Search started come up from just the ability so that I could verify something.
Dom Burch:
I guess it’s kind of what you know, old fogies, like me relied on social media to do maybe 10 years ago, it was like, wow, here’s an a digital way of connecting with a fellow human being, perhaps I’ve never met before, but we’ve got some shared interests or a passion or, and then it’s kind of all gone a bit south, hasn’t it over the last sort of five, six years, and there’s been, you know, plenty of scandals of Facebook being manipulated and fake fake accounts on Twitter, my gosh, I mean, is there anyone real on Twitter these days? So it’s kind of in that context, isn’t it that something like your product comes along and says, Well, actually, how do we actually verify it so that both parties can trust the fact that they really exist and the is a relationship between one another
Oran O’Flynn:
Exactly. And I think I came at it from a perspective of maybe that just like what you were saying, we’ve tried solutions as we went along. And who’s to say the blockchain shouldn’t work in this instance, we’re not guaranteeing that the success of all verifiability will be true blockchain. But it’s definitely worth a shot of utilising this technology that can actually have a verifiability behind it. Because, as you were saying, we’re so used to these walled gardens, these 5000 data points that they all collected on us with with Facebook. So I think it came to a point where let’s create something that’s open this distributed ledger technology is here. So let’s just see what it can do for us to make this world a bit more secure around it. And I think Twitter is facing a lot of things now with with bot accounts, I know Elon Musk is doing his bit to try and get rid of them. But there’s definitely a lot of issues with their, with their stocks and stuff around software at the moment. So I think testing this blockchain system is proving to be quite well around a lot of different areas. And people don’t even know what they’re interacting with it it really yet.
Dom Burch:
And I suppose it’s kind of bringing web3 if you like, to life, isn’t it because it feels like we’re going through this sort of next natural stage or evolution, you know, revolution, if you want of, of the kind of digital sort of revolution that we’re going through, right, so you sort of start off with very simple web, which was, I guess, kind of wallpaper, right, you know, the early websites were just a page held, and you can find them, then search engines come along, and really adapt, and then this sort of web 2 have actually been able to interact, create your own content and the proliferation, obviously, since of sites like TikTok that just explode in sort of, you know, super quick time, but allow us to be the content creators. And then web3 is kind of like it was put to me when I was at a conference in Toronto that if you’re not paying for it, then you are the content. And that sort of transactional nature of how the big tech firms have kind of traded, if you like, of our collective data, or our personas, our rights, our likes, and then web3 comes along and says, hang on a minute, we can arrest that sort of sense of ownership back again, to the individual, whether that’s a company or, or a person. I mean, it’s really exciting time, right? Do you feel like you’re kind of at the cusp of this new evolution to the digital world that we live in?
Oran O’Flynn:
Yes, absolutely. I think in that area, especially around, let’s say, going from, like you were saying blogs, kind of originally a non interactive sign in with Google. And now finally, web3, I think we’re really at a pinnacle moment right now, because we even have Apple and Facebook bickering. So when you go on to Apple now and you download a new app, and it says, allow an app to track, that was a huge dig to Facebook around getting user data and all those kinds of things. So it just shows how valuable of an industry it is because it’s destroyed Facebook marketing. So I think where we’re at at this position is people now especially I think our generation have an understanding of how valuable our data is. Now, given having said that, I think we’re at a point where my generation has given up a lot of data. But at the same time, we are aware now of how much it is worth. So I think web3 coming along, the ability to monetize your data, own your data and know who’s utilising your data is extremely important. So when you’re interacting with wallets, for instance, signing transactions of, of knowing what you’re actually interacting with is hugely important. So definitely, we’re in a really good area right now. But one of the big things is education around what you’re actually doing and how it works, because you’re now dealing with the back end, nearly, essentially.
Dom Burch:
And that’s it, isn’t it? I mean, you have to find a way to translate what is quite technical and kind of under the hood. And for a lot of business users, even for a lot of individuals they’re kind of like, I don’t really want to know how the television works. I just want to know that it’s going to be HD right. And so how do you address that? Because you have to kind of help people go through that educational process. But how do you go about translating what is quite a, it’s quite a technical area into something that makes sense for people?
Oran O’Flynn:
At the end of the day. And I think you will know this as well that UI/UX is absolutely everything for customers for that user experience. And to put one an example, I would talk about Sam Altman’s chatGBT. That’s a very, very complicated neural network of machine learning models. But what he’s done is he’s created a simple interface, a chatbot. It’s the most simple analogy of how you could interact with something. And I think what we can do is something very similar, in a sense of just getting people to understand all we’re doing is verifying that that relationship exists, and it’s true. So we really don’t need to get into the details of what it actually consists of. And I think Etherium the network itself is doing some good things. Only there in Denver the other day ERC 4337 was announced, which essentially is a leap forward in how people interact with wallets. It allows people to pay subscriptions through their their cryptocurrency wallet, it allows them to sign and reject transactions in one fell swoop. So I think everyone is, is best at being obsessed with the UI UX at the end of the day, because you can have the most complicated back end, but you can, you can narrow that all the way down to the front end and make it quite simple to a click of a button. So you don’t need to overcomplicate the system, you just need to create that simple UI UX.
Dom Burch:
So talk to me a little bit about Digi Proofs them, right. So you’re a blockchain enabled technology platform. So you’re creating this digital proof, which is I guess, helping verify then the relationship between two different parties. And over time, that could be two companies that are contracting with one another. Or I guess it could just be senior leaders in two separate organisations that are kind of trading off the kudos of being connected to the other one, right. And you’re able to then create this Digi Proof this kind of, well, this token, I suppose that says, you know, that’s true, this is correct, you can rely on the fact that relationship is real.
Oran O’Flynn:
Yeah, exactly. So we essentially, connect different data points around the relationship itself. So what we’re aiming to do is create an overview of the relationship to a degree. So we collect the relationship types, or is it a partnership, collaboration, we would then collect a description of what the relationship is, then we would collect the parties in the relationship. And then finally, an image to display it, so usually used for media purposes. And then what we do from that is we mint that relationship. And two tokens are sent to both company or entity wallets. And from there that symbolises the relationship. So what we have then, is what we call a Soul Search engine, similar to your your Google search engine, or your Bing search engine, that you would type in the company name or the person name and be able to see the relationships that they hold with people and companies. So what we’re really trying to do here is protect brands and protect users so that they can find out information, with a
Dom Burch:
And it’s a really interesting concept. And have simple search. you found that you’ve had to kind of, you know, hate the word pivot, right. But it’s true as you’re sort of developing out a business and you’re still in the early stages, having to sort of like be agile as you go. Or are you just still at that kind of dogmatic sort of like, I’ve got a vision, I’ve got a point in the, you know, in the future that I’m heading towards, and nobody’s going to knock me off course, how are you finding that? Because it’s, you know, it’s challenging running a technology company, when you’re cutting new ground?
Oran O’Flynn:
Absolutely, I think pivoting. You should never let your ego take over on anything around business, I believe, ensuring that at the end of the day, you’re selling to a customer. So interacting with the customer and actually getting an understanding of what they require, there might be certain features that I have in our roadmap that many people may not envisage being correct. But what we can do with those is, we can pivot off the back of those and create something that people will actually use. So pivoting is absolutely okay with me as we move forward. But I think the core back end will stay the same. It’s nearly more about how we tell the story or how we sell the product at the end of the day, it will switch. But that’s the only thing I believe that will change as we go along. But a huge part of my roadmap and building process is iterating off the back of these beta users that we’re now going to onboard and get an understanding of what they want as they will be the customer.
Dom Burch:
As you look around the corner, then what’s you know, and I don’t want you to give away all of your your USPs and secrets right, but you know, as you’re looking around the corner, what what is it that you’re imagining the future could look like in the in the coming years ahead? Or what, what’s really exciting you about about that sort of that world that we’re moving towards?
Oran O’Flynn:
I think an area in which I’ll base it off is a simple thing around Revolut, especially, I think to understand. So Revolut have have simplified the payment industry, especially for younger generations, but also older generations as well. And here in Ireland, it’s been a huge matter around them getting Irish IBANs. So recently they were they were chased off, because they they weren’t being given their IBANs, but now they’ve been brought back again. So it’s a huge combat now between Revolut and our banks or like Bank of Ireland and AIB. And I think it incentivizes a good idea around payment processing and how that can be simplified down and narrowed down. It’s never it’s never done so Stripe have figured stuff out but no Revolut are doing great things. So for us, we feel we can offer help around payment processing as well in the future. I think huge part for us is procurement. And that’s one thing that I’ve always been looking to drive towards. A huge example of that in most recent terms is around polygon. So polygon, put a 60 million euro bond on the or sorry, Siemens have put a 60 million euro bond on Polygon, and interact with three banks through that. And they’ve said that they’ve simplified loads of costs and paperwork. So what we hope to do is to emulate that and allow companies who aren’t, let’s say as big and can push out a team, like Siemens to settle something like that, we can provide value like that to customers moving forward in future.
Dom Burch:
The other thing I just wanted to ask you is like being on in Ireland, right, and part of not just, you know, the Republic of Ireland, but also the whole island of Ireland. It feels to me and I would say this wouldn’t I, because we’re based up the road in Banbridge. But it feels to me like, there’s a lot of amazing innovation taking place. And because you know, somebody wants to put it to me, from AWS actually said, you know, Northern Ireland particularly is a bit like Goldilocks, it’s not too big, and it’s not too small. It’s just about the right size. So the networking is great. Everybody kind of knows somebody or know somebody who knows somebody. But it’s also big enough that you can get things away and pilot and proof of concept to actually demonstrate the use case of something and then you can accelerate quite quickly. What’s your view as a young entrepreneur in Cork? As you look out, do you sense that that there’s a real sort of momentum building in terms of digital capability as a sector?
Oran O’Flynn:
Absolutely. And I think the benefit of what our generation and kind of age group has is the ability to reach out through the internet. So we no longer have barriers, essentially, of who we can speak to who could back us who could fund us who could be our advisors, it’s, it’s now as simple as a click of a button to interact with people. So taking an idea now, and speaking to someone about it, getting a bit of validation of it, and then being able to broadcast that outwards. I think our generation is so well capable now of going, let’s say viral, for instance, on TikTok, YouTube, all these different things. So not only in Ireland, are we very lucky about the different supports we have. But just globally now with the access that we have to the internet. If anyone has a solution that can help humanity in any way, or simplify systems in any way, they now have the easiest route to be able to get validation off the back of that.
Dom Burch:
Right last question. I got to ask you this haven’t been over in NASA, you know, what, when you were the tender age of 17 Oran, are we going to get to Mars in the in the foreseeable future? What’s your best guess? Is that something that’s within reach? Or is it one of those moonshots where actually the, it doesn’t matter so much as the trying to attain it will lead to the innovation that we’re after?
Oran O’Flynn:
So we were in charge of orbiting and landing in our team. So we were called the maroon team essentially. So a big thing around what we’re really trying to achieve with with Mars and everything is validate and prove that we can first of all travel such a long distance, but also build a tech that can take us further. So we have exoplanets that emulate Earth, quite similarly with water, and an atmosphere and everything like that. We’ve done some pretty horrific damage to Earth itself, I’m not too sure will we stop if we if we find other planets similar to us and be capable of travelling those light years away? But I do think that with 2030 being on the roadmap for Elon Musk and SpaceX I think, in the very near future, we’ll be seeing long distance travel and going beyond Mars with human life. So it’s definitely going to be quite interesting over the next 20/30 years,
Dom Burch:
Certainly is! Well, hopefully, I’ll be well into my retirement by then. And I’ve got the golf handicap down a little bit. Let’s hope but, no, it’s fascinating to imagine, isn’t it? You know, what I was thinking about chatGPT recently, and of course, you know, whenever anything new comes out, people then start to have that slight moral nervousness of where’s this leading to, but you know, imagining 30 years ago that you didn’t have a supercomputer in your pocket in your hand, able to answer any question through Google or whatever would have just been It’d have been hard to have conceptualise that being the truth, you know, and go back 30 years before that we didn’t have colour TV. So you know, who knows who knows where we’ll be? Well, listen, Oran, I’m pretty confident that wherever will be in the future, you’ll be making a success of it. Thank you so much for coming on to the ubloquity podcast. It’s been a pleasure. I look forward to keeping a close eye on how Soul Search develops in the months ahead. And if anyone’s interested in finding out more about Oran and what he’s up to at Soul Search, then just go to soulsearchprotocol.com And you can find out loads of information. Look him up on LinkedIn. He’s a young one, right? So you just need to type his name into the internet and it will come back and there he will be. Oran, in the meantime, thank you so much for coming on to ubloquity’s podcast.
Oran O’Flynn:
Thanks very much Dom. It’s been a pleasure.
