I met Amber Baldet in early 2017 which in crypto years means we go back four millennia. She was representing JPMorgan Chase & Co. on the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, a group of global corporations that included BP, Microsoft, IBM and others that were experimenting with how blockchain technology could improve business. She immediately struck me as fearless and bold in a room full of bankers and executives and as I’ve gotten to know her over the years it’s clear that her hacker mentality has helped guide and steady her in a often tough environment for a woman. She also possesses one of the clearest and most compelling visions for how decentralized systems are meant to reinstate and protect user privacy. Her firm Clovyr is building tools to give people the usability of centralized apps that they’re used to but in a decentralized system where privacy and security aren’t lost. You can follow Amber on twitter here and learn more about Clovyr here.

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Matt Leising: You grew up in Boca, Raton, Florida, correct? What was that like? What was your childhood like?

Amber Baldet: I'm trying to think what is actually interesting or of note? Florida is a place of a particular type of culture. I mean, it's Florida. I wanted to move to New York from the time I was probably 12 or so because [I had this] vision of a big city where things were happening and there were lots of different types of people and you know, artists rubbing shoulders with bankers and people of all different socioeconomic levels living on top of each other. It was just so different than where I lived and I could not wait to get out of the tropical hellscape of south Florida. And it took me a number of years to do that, but I eventually made it.

ML: As you've told me before you like to build stuff. As a kid you were making jewelry and helping your dad do stuff around the house.

AB: Yeah. I grew up when HGTV was not all contests yet. It was actually people fixing stuff. And more so than that even PBS, I grew up on PBS and This Old House and the New Yankee Workshop.

ML: Shout out to Norm Abram.

AB: Yeah, Norm. And because of that I learned a lot of stuff by watching and then similarly that was around the time when people were building their own computers because the aftermarket PC market was very small still. So it was kind of expected that if something broke, you would open up your machine and fix it. So I would do that with my dad. It was all kind of the same thing.

“The hacker mentality has always been screws, not glue”

AB: There wasn't really this idea yet that tech culture, that Silicon Valley culture, was white collar and elitist. It was more of a blue collar endeavor where you'd go to Radio Shack and the same places that you'd pick up resistors and transistors for your ham radio were the places you'd go pick up a PC fan or whatever you needed like new RAM.

ML: One thing I'm learning by doing these interviews is how many people literally built things with their hands as kids who are now prominent in this space. I find that really kind of fascinating that there is a strong builder mentality among a lot of people who are now doing great stuff in crypto.

AB: Yeah. It took me a long time to get on board with Apple products. The hacker mentality has always been screws, not glue. You know, iPhones and whatnot come glued shut, you can't replace your own battery. You can't really do your own maintenance. They're opening that up now, actually for the first time, you're going to be able to get Apple parts and do some of your own repairs, but the fight for the right to repair has been an important part of hacker culture for a long time, because if you can't fix it, you don't really own it.

AB: You know, whether that's fixing your own wiring or building your own computers or baking your own cake. I don't know where I've talked about this before, probably not on the record, but I can also sew dresses and everything else. And not just electronics wearables, although those are fun too, but I think it's a great skill to be able to make your own things, whether that's cooking, sewing, electronics.

Don’t sleep on this one

ML: All right, so when the zombie apocalypse comes, I want you on my team.

AB: My team is going to definitely have some good people on it, we're prepared and preparing.

ML: Growing up did you like school? Did you have any favorite subjects or how did you find that?

AB: My mom was a teacher. I was allowed to go out of district actually, because I was allowed to go with her. So because of that school was a little weird for me, because my mom was there all the time.

AB: Because of that, I think I always understood the school from a professional context as well, of like what the teachers were doing with rest of their time. So I always had a good relationship with school. I understood why I was there and I had a teacher all the time, you know, at home and at school.

AB: And similarly, my dad was an academic as well, though he was teaching fine arts and theater directing and whatnot. He was the chair of the theater department at Florida Atlantic University for a period of time. When my mom was studying for her masters, I would hang out with my dad while he was teaching his classes. And I saw him be a teacher and saw a lot of theater training and that's probably where I started being interested in performing arts.

ML: Was that a bright spot in the tropical hellscape of southern Florida for you?

“It was amazing to see the difference in how people would respond to me when people didn’t have presuppositions about who you were or the way that they talk to you. Nobody ever said, wait, actually you sound like a 13-year-old girl. That never happened.”

AB: It was. The drama program at my high school was wonderful. We won a lot of awards. I've performed in a number of state festival sorts of competitions. I also did cheerleading which was another story [laughs]. At a big sports school it was a big deal.

AB: I actually managed to figure out my freshman year that if I followed this exact path of courses that by my senior year I would be able to only have three classes. So I got out of school at 10:30 in the morning every day my senior year because I followed the path exactly and manipulated the system.

ML: Damn, you won. That’s great.

AB: I did win, but it meant that I was actually taking two college courses. So taking like six credits at the university and I was working 20 hours a week at Crate and Barrel. And I was in cheerleading and I guess I couldn't do the school play that year because of cheerleading, but I was also in a variety of other organizations so I was still incredibly swamped.

ML: In theater, were you acting or singing or what did you like to do?

AB: Oh gosh, yeah. You name it. I did it. I think dramatic monologues were my sweet spot, but, you know, musicals are the draw, so I did a lot of sing/dance/act. I did some tap dancing. I did some you know old school Guys and Dolls type musicals.

ML: And going online and being part of that community was something you started from a relatively early age, is that right?

AB: Yeah. I was really lucky at my middle school. They had a very one of the very first – I don't think it was called computer science – I did take computers, but computers was an elective everybody had to take and they taught you how to type and put a floppy disc in the drive and I could already type you know 80 words a minute or whatever. So that was not really a challenge for me, but we did have this amazing class that really did impact me where it was like an innovation, something, I forget what they called it, but it was all these different stations and one was a computer, but you could kind of like do whatever, they set it up with like flight simulators sometimes.

AB: And another station was robotics and you could do really early programming on some robots. And my favorite station was fiber optics. So I did my whole science fair project about how fiber optics work.

AB: So that was a really interesting fun class that probably did change my life in some way. It was a great little congregation area for the nerds. And that was the same teacher who ran the AV Club. That AV Club of course was where the nerds were. And that's where I met the folks who were running Linux and could talk to me about hacking stuff and share copies of 2600 Magazine.

ML: We've spoken about this before, where you found some freedom online where nobody knew you were a girl or maybe even, you know, a young girl and you could be taken seriously in ways that you couldn't in other parts of your life.

AB: Yeah, absolutely. You know they joke that there are no girls on the Internet but it was very true. You could pretend to be anybody who you wanted and I did, you know, pretend to be some other people —which are not stories to talk about — but it was amazing to see the difference in how people would respond to me when people didn't have presuppositions about who you were or the way that they talk to you. Nobody ever said, wait, actually you sound like a 13-year-old girl. That never happened.

AB: I felt much more comfortable in those spaces, which were mostly all college men, I mean, it was almost all guys at that point. Of course you need a thick skin.

AB: At the time, if you're trying not to get found out about being a 13-year-old girl, you're certainly not going to complain when someone makes an off-color joke.

ML: And so what was your plan? Like you said you wanted to get to New York from a very early age. What was your plan to get there?

“I always wanted to understand the power plays behind what you see on the news”

AB: I studied political science and economics and I wasn't exactly sure what that was going to mean. At some point in college I realized that if I wanted to understand how the world worked – my initial impetus was less about, you know, the political machinations you see on the news every night and more about understanding the markets at large, but also the other kinds of systems of power of the world.

AB: I had a focus in international relations as well which was important. So I spent more time digging into finance and the stock market.

AB: My thinking at that time was entirely around wanting to be an analyst and the type of skills that you needed to be an analyst. No one actually told me what those were. I was interested in understanding how stuff works. So being an analyst like that would be cool because I thought at least I would get to see what was happening behind the scenes. I always wanted to understand the power plays behind what you see on the news.

ML: And had Bitcoin come out yet?

AB: No, this would have been 2002, we're just after the dot com crash. I went into college as all of that blew up.

ML: You did some work in brokerages in Florida, right? Then did you finally come to a point where you're just like, I want to go to Wall Street and I want to work at a big bank.

AB: I managed to get a job at a place called Avalon Research that was in Boca Raton and they were located at the Florida Atlantic University research park. And it was very interestingly because they were an information arbitrage boutique, which is a fancy way of saying that they actually did their own research. They were an independent researcher.

AB: The thing is that at that time, all the research that people were using to make purchasing decisions was coming out of investment banks that actually own those positions. So it was complete trash. All the research was just selling their own book.

AB: So this place was born out of an idea that they thought that the Chinese wall between equities and research at the investment bank was going to be fundamental. And it turned out to not have as big an impact on the industry as they thought, which I think is unfortunate, but kind of goes to show you that nobody really cares about research in some of these senses.

Michael Burry

AB: It was mostly on biotech, tech, pharma and special situations. So for example, one of the special situations that they were working on when I was an intern was understanding Countrywide and the mortgage tranching that was happening [where lots of mortgages were put into a single security and then cut up into different levels of risk]. And just looking at this situation where like the emperor has no clothes and saying, there's no way that this seems right.

AB: There's a movie called The Big Short where they go down to Miami and they look at the empty houses, you know, and figure out that the emperor has no clothes. The guy in that movie who plays the main character, I forget the main character's name [it’s Michael Burry].

AB: That was basically my boss. He was exactly as crazy, exactly as convinced with exactly as much conviction. That was an amazing place to like learn that my entire entre to the markets was – I was watching CNBC and thinking, ‘wouldn't it be great to work in this industry?’ And then I went to go intern at this place and was like, ‘all of that is just full of shit.’ [laughs]

AB: That was definitely pivotal to my understanding of working in the industry later on. To always be paying attention to when people are talking their own book and to look at who is incentivized and follow the money, follow the power.

ML: When did you learn about Bitcoin?

AB: I don't remember when I first learned about it. It was kind of just a thing I knew about on the periphery probably shortly after the initial white paper. I remember reading the [Bitcoin] white paper in its entirety in 2011 at a cafe in Soho. I do remember it was a lovely day and it felt like one of those New York moments I wanted my whole life, right, that I was dreaming of in Florida, people are telling you have to read this innovative white paper and you get to sit there at a cafe outside in Soho, all the beautiful people walk by and you're reading [about] some technical future. That was exactly the life I wanted. It was amazing.

AB: I think my first tweet about Bitcoin was probably not long after because I looked it up a while ago. Back when Visa denied payments to Wikileaks. And, you know, the tweet’s like, ‘Hey, look, an actual use for Bitcoin.’ [laughs] So from the beginning it was about censorship resistant payments. And I realized more over time that it was, yeah sure, it was a reaction to the financial crisis and whatnot, but it was also a statement about the transfer of power – power being money – from the old guard to the extremely online [community]. And who the extremely online were in 2008 to 2010 are not the same people who consider themselves to be extremely online today.

ML: New York was very interesting at that point because Occupy Wall Street had been going on.

AB: I haven’t talked much about that previously because of reasons [like working for the largest U.S. investment bank], but yeah, I was around.

ML: When did you join JP Morgan?

AB: It would've been 2010. I started as a consultant and was then hired full time.

ML: It seems like there was a bit of a culture within JP Morgan where you could kind of take risks. They were kind of pushing the boundaries in different areas. Can you just tell me a little bit about your experience there?

An oldie but goodie

AB: Large organizations often have these innovation teams and labs that are given more leeway than the rest of the organization. And a lot of experimentation happens in those groups and they have incredible freedom to try things out, [they get] more budget than most people. And if you can get into one of those groups, do it because it's a great place to be.

AB: We were tasked with looking at a variety of new technologies – everything from machine learning to robotic process automation and AI – all of which were kind of bucketed together along a spectrum. The blockchain team was just a couple folks with laptops who were just, you know, running nodes and experimenting as well as more of a focus on strategic investments. The investment in Digital Asset Holdings came out of that early on. And Axoni, both of those started around the same time.

AB: And then as more was happening with talk about private ledgers then there was more talk about what could we contribute there or should we just be using them? And of course privacy, the question of lack of privacy, was at the forefront.

AB: Privacy on distributed systems is hard. And so there were a number of attempts and designs that people took a stab at. The thing that eventually became Quorum was one of those that was implemented, mostly designed and implemented by my co-founder [in Clovyr] Patrick Nielsen.

AB: And what was really cool about that and one of the things he and I enjoyed so much about it the first time around was that it was basically just an implementation of PGP [pretty good privacy, a standard encryption method] on top of Ethereum.

AB: But what the system really needed, you needed to bring in an OG cypherpunk who just looks at something and is like, ‘oh, you want privacy? Here’s some PGP.’ [laughs]

ML: Okay and we are now at the JPMorgan Center for Blockchain Excellence? [editor’s note: I just love that name so much]

AB: Yeah. We ended up pulling together a product team that was really stellar, a wonderful group of people from both inside the organization who were really excited about what was happening in crypto and blockchain, and also some new faces from outside who had a lot of experience in startups and helped us think in new ways. And we had incredible access to different teams throughout the bank at the highest levels. And we're able to both break down use cases and talk through business stories and value propositions and talk to clients and advise people all over the globe. It was an amazing time to kind of be in the middle of all those conversations and see how many people were thinking about it.

ML: I think the first time we met, or that I saw you, was the initial announcement day for the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance at the Microsoft headquarters in Midtown. And I remember you just like kicking ass and you didn't seem intimidated by anybody in the room. There were some technical difficulties and you just stood up there and just started talking. And I was just really impressed because I had not seen many people pull that off in a room full of bankers.

AB: I don't even remember. Well, the Enterprise Ethereum thing was at the JP Morgan offices, I think.

ML: It might've been at JP Morgan, the one in Brooklyn.

AB: Okay. Yeah.

ML: Do you remember, Vitalik [Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum] was supposed to be on video, but they couldn't get the video to run. And I think you just stood up there for about five minutes or 10 minutes and just kind of talked. It just impressed me. I've never forgotten that.

AB: Oh, well, thank you. I was just amazed that we managed to get to that point where this whole thing was happening, because it was you know, to get an organization like JP Morgan to commit to having an opinion on something or even to provide the space for the discussion about something. It's no small task. It was certainly a team effort.

“At Clovyr we’re trying to help people be able to use applications that treat them and their data better”

ML: As I wrote about in my book having Microsoft back Ethereum, you know, you've got these big names, but then when JP Morgan came into play, it was a signal, I think, on a whole new level that this is being taken seriously.

AB: It was. I don't regret anything that we did because I think that it was all very additive.

ML: As you've mentioned several times, privacy is very important to you. Can you talk a little bit about what you're hoping to do with Clovyr and the problem that you're hoping to help solve, or give people an alternative solution to?

AB: At Clovyr we're trying to help people be able to use applications that treat them and their data better. Sometimes that means Web3. Sometimes that means tokenized systems, sometimes that means cool peer-to-peer or privacy preserving technology. Sometimes that just means self hosting your own blog instead of putting your intellectual property on Medium and giving up control of it.

AB: What we're supposed to be doing is making business models that are alternatives to centralized, exploitative SaaS [software as a service] be viable. That doesn't mean that we need to reinvent the entire Internet in a fever dream of capitalism on top of these tokenized networks where absolutely everything only has value and meaning if it's paid for and every slice of time is monetized. I don't believe that is an appropriate alternative, but I do recognize that the open Internet – free as in free speech, not as in free beer Internet – has created a system where there's a vacuum where a business model should be.

AB: Ad tech has stepped in there and normal people lack a lot of power. So I can say that I support the creative commons and Wikipedia and the Internet archive and the decentralized web and the free flow of information and the democratizing effects there in as much as I want. But, you know, four companies own everything at this point.

AB: So now we're like, how do we redo this again? And there are people who are working on these problems by creating amazing applications who are breaking open walled gardens with different ways to look at the problems.

AB: And what we do at Clovyr is make those applications able to be actually run by people rather than just the developers who made them or a couple of companies in the world.

ML: It's great to have a decentralized app, but if it's on Amazon web services, that's the issue, right? It's kind of getting back to when Visa shut off payments to Wikileaks. You don't want to have that kind of situation.

AB: Exactly. So there is a push towards self hosting in Web3. And I think that's great. Self hosting has been too often conflated with having a personal server in your basement. I think that's a bygone era and a failed way to look at it. We have all these cloud resources and cloud compute. We should be using them, but we should be using them as our own little spaces, that are individual to us and private to us, rather than just using part of somebody else's infrastructure.

“This culture has emerged where everybody needs to always be hustling and you can’t have a hobby, unless it’s a side hustle and how are you monetizing this? And that is, I think, damaging to people who make things because it’s fun”

AB: A lot of people in open source in general, but Web3 especially, overestimate the general person's technical ability and more so than that, their desire to become a more technical person. And we also look down on people and tell everybody that they need to code.

AB: And, you know I've complained before about how cypherpunks thinking that everybody needs to learn how to use PGP is why PGP failed. Nobody likes it. And so the main thing that we're working on at Clovyr is reducing the friction to zero for distributing and running these sorts of applications.

ML: Is it too simple to say that you're working on a distributed cloud system rather than a centralized cloud system?

AB: [long pause] The only reason I don't like that term is that there are other people who are working on what they consider to be a decentralized cloud, and it's part of one main cloud, but it runs on different people's computers. That is not what we're doing.

AB: We help you literally deploy into your own cloud accounts. I don't care where that is. What's unique about the way Clovyr operates is we have a decentralized app store. People misunderstood that early on as meaning an app store for exclusively decentralized apps.

AB: That is not what I actually meant.

AB: But I understand, and I'm still working around this challenge. You can help me with messaging. I am not a marketing person. But the app store itself is decentralized, meaning that yes, you can come to clovyr.app and see any number of applications, which you can deploy, but anybody in the world can also make their application deployable via our framework. And somebody can point their Clovyr app that they're running locally at that application package at that config file and it will just deploy into their own cloud account. It has nothing to do with me. Clovyr never intermediates any data, we're not in the middle of that.

ML: Right, so there’s no deplatforming.

AB: So there is no deplatforming, there is no approvals process.

AB: What's really cool about the way that Clovyr works is there's nothing to install. It's totally web-based. And the actual control of your infrastructure happens between your browser and the infrastructure that the platform has deployed for you. So Clovyr does not intermediate any of your data.

AB: It is anonymous in that you can be running your own decentralized desktop on the web that is private to you.

ML: Cool. Looking back over all the years, where do you come down now on how things are moving in crypto? In general, in Web3. Would you say you're optimistic or is there anything that concerns you? What's your general kind of vibe like these days?

AB: I think that the pace of adoption is going along at about what I expected. I think that the externalities of what's happening in our society are what is concerning. And that is that fewer and fewer people are able to afford homes. And Gen Z is being pushed into a gig economy. You know pensions and insurance are like a thing of the past. But that means that we have a youth culture that is turning to these new technologies because they can independently make a buck, which is good, but it also means that you know, there are very few protections.

ML: Yeah. I was just going to say, it's very risky. There's no safety net, right?

AB: Yeah. It's very at risk. And it also means that this culture has emerged where everybody needs to always be hustling and you can't have a hobby, unless it's a side hustle and how are you monetizing this? And that is, I think, damaging to people who make things because it's fun. But it's damaging to artists. I'm interested in the conversation around how we can change some of the economics of selling digitally scarce things. I am terrified by the reduction of art to a marketplace. I mean, art to me is a participatory conversation with society that makes you feel something and very little of it can be owned.

ML: Is it too transactional?

AB: Yeah, well transactional, but also that the value of art is the monetary value. That is not true, at least not true to me. And also, you know, there are challenges with the existing gallery model but at least you can show your work in a gallery for free before you get a cut from the gallery owner, whereas even minting NFTs can cost money up front. So I've heard some artists have challenges with that, even ones who are successful in the fine art world.

AB: I think it's amazing that we are having conversations about what art is again and what it means to us as a community. And that it's like in our face that, you know, art has value as a profile picture. But it does feel like we're on this kind of hyper capitalization of every bit of society. And I'm not sure if that's a place I want to live.

ML: Yeah, I'm hoping it's a hype cycle, like the ICO stuff, and then it sort of pops or comes back down to earth. And then we can just keep getting on with the more interesting things about building because good things came out of the ICO era.

AB: If I was to hope for something, which is risky, what I hope for is that as people become more and more disillusioned with the walled garden platforms and the anger-based engagement cycle of social media platforms and decentralized options become more useful and more accessible to them that we see an emergence of this, I think I called it like cottages and cottage industries. Like cottage core, homespun communities, right? Where you meet with people whom you like and whom you probably know. And yes, you can invite more people into your community and your community can grow, but it's not just like standing out in the middle of the street and saying, I want to have a conversation with anybody and then needing to spend an hour fending off trolls.

“In communities that’s what we do. We share stuff. We don’t just sell stuff. We drop potluck when somebody’s has a bad day, you send them stickers because you love them. You donate to people who need it”

AB: It's more like a cocktail party where you meet some new people, but it's within a space where you set the rules of the road, about what kinds of conversations are allowed, what kind of speech is acceptable to you and your friends, regardless of what people are doing over there. You're not saying they can't have conversations outside your area. But here's what we're doing here. And we consent and agree to that. And that as people feel that sense of like actual social safety – which is what we're missing right now from this town square model. That they will necessarily share. In communities that's what we do. We share stuff. We don't just sell stuff. We drop potluck when somebody's has a bad day, you send them stickers because you love them. You donate to people who need it.

AB: You create collectivized insurance policies for your community because you would feel bad if the people around you suffered a negative event, and some day it might be you. So that's my hope is that even if these meta hyper capitalization things are happening, I don't know what you call it, that we still are able to retreat to somewhere that reminds us what it's like to be part of a community where we can have not just public goods, but a commons.

ML: Yeah. That's a great place to leave it. What a nice thought. Thank you so much, Amber. One thing I like to do at the end of these is ask the person who I should try to talk to you next to create a social chain. If there's somebody you respect or admire that you think I should try to reach out to, to see if they'd want to do an interview like this.

AB: A person would be interesting to talk to would be Dan Guido. He's the CEO of Trail of Bits, they're like the largest auditor of Ethereum contracts. But also they're like an actual computer security company that does very high level work, but he always has really good things to say from a bit of a different perspective.

ML: Thank you for the time. It's been really interesting, always fascinating. I love your backstory. It's just crazy.

AB: Thank you.