An entrepreneurial journey has to walk through various challenges, undulating moments and enlightening failures. Leaders who climb the business ladder accumulate many learning experiences. However, very few return the lessons they’ve learned to aspiring entrepreneurs. Two exceptional entrepreneurs who are passionate about helping others, however, are Eric Tippetts and Steven Chiang.
It takes passion, deep ingenuity, and sharpness to help other entrepreneurs build their own start-ups and to show them the way to take their businesses to the highest peaks. With massive experience of more than 25 years, Eric has built relationships with many top Fortune 500 companies like 3M, Proctor & Gamble, The Boeing Company, HP, and hundreds more as a serial entrepreneur. His skill sets involve understanding the challenges people are having and the obstacles that stand in their way, and creating technology solutions to bridge the challenges that get most people stumped. According to Eric, content creators, artists and influencers need to think like entrepreneurs. They must not only understand that mindset, but must put it into action consistently, each day, and create a road map leading to the results they are looking for in business and life. This dilemma led him into sales and marketing for many different companies and ultimately led him to China about eight years ago.
Consulting multiple companies in China led Eric to his partner, fellow serial entrepreneur Steven Chiang. The two became great friends and shared an authentic relationship built on trust. They view the world in the same way, and wanted to create a business ecosystem with more authenticity. As China is witnessing various frauds and scams, they came at their success in the process of trying to build tools and technology that would overcome a major issue they were having personally while building a previous company. That concern led to the inception of a new and fast growing Blockchain Internet Platform, NASGO.
Everything needs to have a Common Goal
NASGO is a Blockchain Internet Platform that integrates 4 technologies that include Decentralized Hosting, dAPP Store, Payment Gateway Utilizing Digital Currency, and Blockchain. The company is making Blockchain available to the mass market, globally. Eric and Steven created the NASGO platform to help connect the world in a more open, fair, and transparent way to allow people to communicate, collaborate, and innovate together with a common thread of trust.
When asked about the way to diversify NASGO’s solutions so as to make an impact on the lives of people, Eric believes that everything needs to have a common goal. He says, “I think that’s the issue. When you’re building technologies, too often there’s one that doesn’t talk to the other, or isn’t even in alignment with the other. That’s why when you get companies that try to merge or acquire a company where you may think, initially,”that has nothing to do with the other company.“That’s when you’ll discover that everything we’re building is diversified as far as what it’s doing, but that all of these parts lead up to the main goal of creating loyalty, creating a consistent brand and a favourable experience as well as a means of exchange. When you look at tokenizing a brand as a digital asset, it’s giving you the means to create a community from anywhere, even globally, that recognizes your brand. This is your brand token. This is an asset that people can use to interact with you, and they know that it’s you. It validates you.” He exemplifies the dilemma by giving an instance of VAPR, a blockchain decentralized application (dApp) on the NASGO platform. VAPR is a direct peer to peer experience sharing network that employs Augmented Reality (3D) transmissions that travel to mobile devices via satellite waves—there’s no internet connection required.
According to Eric, businesses need to be able to communicate and transact with people. They need to step up above the norm of what a benchmark currency or transaction would be and make it possible for an entire global ecosystem to transact with it. With that purpose, the NASGO team built AMICO, a merchant processing and transaction settlement app. It is a global, social eCommerce application built on the NASGO blockchain network that creates a revolutionary way to monetize traditional platforms like social media, communication, video channels and marketplaces to create incentivized consumerism through the use of digital currency and tokenization. Lastly, Eric adds, “A diversified portfolio would be about the fact that each business and participant has a different focus, but all have a common theme. We are focused on helping entrepreneurs have a better means of facilitating what they are ultimately trying to do: to connect with more people, communicate their brand messaging, and transact with their followers and audience.”
A Gamification Approach to the Blockchain
As per Eric’s opinion, blockchain is an arena where he thinks we’re still too tech-heavy as a culture, and it is a concept that continues to be over-hyped. Few participants are providing the world with actual case studies. He recalls a recent event he thoroughly enjoyed where participants said, “Hey, let’s show you how people are using it. Let’s show you how people are using apps. By the way, they are utilizing blockchain,” instead of “Let me tell you about blockchain. Let me tell you about the algorithms and consensus.” For real people, the technology advancements are all about the actual use case studies and about the gamification approach that can bring communities closer.
He believes that blockchain continues to be developercentric. Developers are typically behind a computer screen and are disconnected from others. They are not social. According to him, the next advancement of blockchain and technology itself is about how to bring people together in experiences that are fun. People love the gamification of apps, to compete with each other, win together, and get recognized on the leaderboard while playing together. One must create technology that actually incorporates those fun, gamified experiences, he says, but the activities need to have a purpose as well.
For example, Steve looks at social media as a waste of time because he’s not focused on social life. He doesn’t see the purpose of it. But, like Eric, he sees that what the two are building has a purpose for every entrepreneur, allowing them to communicate, collaborate, and transact with each other. Together they are providing entrepreneurs with gamified experiences in apps to help them collaborate while interacting in a Pokémon-style activity that has an end goal, which is transactional. People all get what they wanted. One person gets the experience they desired, and the other person gets the digital currency that pays them. According to Eric, Blockchain is playing an important role in shaping businesses by building trust. He explains the importance by giving an example of China, which has needed to address a plethora of fake businesses that have a story, but make it very hard to see what’s going on behind the scenes. When a business process is built on the blockchain, they are basically opening the door, inviting people to see behind the scenes. Building trust and transparency is a major priority for Eric and Steve as they progress in their business. Eric emphasizes the value of blockchain for the healthcare industry and notes that healthcare has a huge future thanks to the blockchain and people’s ability to build upon it. He also believes the blockchain is making a great impact on entrepreneurship, as it brings the ability to connect with others and to create and build higher levels of trust.
Striving to Evolve Constantly
Eric and Steven are focused on building the momentum of NASGO and its tipping point. They have spent their own time and resources to build the ecosystem, to build the tools, to build blockchain, to build Vapr and to build AMICO. These are extremely complex projects. Eric believes the team is at least a year ahead of anyone else. They have put their money where their mouths are. Now they are ready to launch on an even larger scale. The tipping point is about to happen as NASGO sees people accessing the momentum of its community, which is growing extremely fast. The NSG coin is gaining value rapidly and establishing a strong foundation. The company’s deals are bringing massive communities to its ecosystem. Eric strongly believes that people are going to find NASGO and the on-chain and off-chain ecosystem to be the fastest growing blockchain in the world. He says “I think if we were to say how many companies are coming onto a blockchain, that NASGO is potentially the fastest growing in the world right now. We have many companies coming on board, getting tokenized and excited about using our ecosystem.”
Eric believes the reason the company stays relevant to developers is that the team has a deep thirst for knowledge. The partners have come from big companies with big budgets that took long cycles to roll things out. In contrast, NASGO is in full throttle, moving 100-miles-an-hour, hitting the market, and creating a gap between what it is doing and what anybody else has been able to accomplish so far. As the company listens to the market and its concerns and challenges, it knows what the market’s needs are and is constantly innovating to enable that. The company is focused on and committed to constantly evolving to stay ahead of the pack.
Redefining the Attributes of Leadership
According to Eric, having a vision, being focused and having persistence and grit are some of the vital attributes every leader should strive to possess. “As a leader, especially in blockchain, we’re still way out ahead. Many would call it a leading edge. I will tell you, everyone wants to tell you why your idea is not going to work. Everyone wants to tell you why you’re going to fail. Everyone wants to be the hero who tells everyone else, ’I told you so. I told you it was going to fail. I told you.’ These are the same people coming back to you when you win and trying to claim, ’Hey, I was telling you about them before anybody.’ As a leader, you have to recognize that there will always be people who love you, hate you, write about you, good or bad, and you have to be able to compartmentalize those things and say, ’I have a mission. We have a vision and a mission we’re going after. We will drag everybody in the boat across the water over to the mission and the result that we envision,” he says.
Considering grit, Eric emphasizes on the stimulating statement by Tony Robbins, who says “People are rewarded in public for what they practice in private.“He further adds, “What you don’t see behind the scenes is the 99% of what it takes to succeed. I can’t tell you how many people say I’m lucky. Wow, it’s really amazing. The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
Illuminating Young Minds
Time is our most valuable asset, Eric believes. In order to enlighten emerging young entrepreneurs, he advises, “Any time that you’re young, you have time. You have time to be crazy, to go and try things. It’s when you get up into your 50s, 60s, 70s that you don’t have time like that. You can’t go and dabble and experiment and try things that maybe are not proven.” “Go out and have fun. Go experience life. Time is our most valuable asset. Go and experience things while you’re young, while you’re learning the knowledge that actually helps you get to where you’re wanting to go,” he adds.
Eric suggests aspiring minds to find a pace setter and spend their time with people who are doing crazy things and experimenting and doing things that are out of the norm because what one finds is one’s thermostat starts raising to be comfortable there. One starts to become comfortable at that pace. Those pace setters will start to shape one’s belief. “Also invest in yourself. Read every day. You have to sharpen your mind. You have to spend time inspiring your thoughts,” Eric adds.
Eric Tippetts and Steven Chiang | Co-founders | NASGO
