Jack An, Analyst (安良方 / 分析師)

Jack is an Analyst covering AppWorks Accelerator. Before joining the team, he was a co-founder and early team member at two InsurTech startups, where he developed a passion in user experience and product development. Previous to his startup journey he worked as a commercial property underwriter at Chubb Insurance in New Zealand. Jack graduated with a Bachelor of Music from Waikato University where he studied classical piano. He loves to cook, read and is a practicing stoic.

The world of digital ownership is being transformed by the emergence of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). These unique digital assets have opened up new possibilities for creators and collectors across a wide range of industries, but arguably none more so than the music business.

The music industry has a long history of conflict over asset ownership and the transfer of value produced by selling or playing the song. This should come as no surprise given the value chain’s fragmentation and opacity that was built over the years to distribute music worldwide. However, as the industry gradually consolidates and is consumed by its digital self, there is an opportunity to establish a transparent ownership and value distribution pipeline through the use of blockchain and NFTs. Ultimately, this makes it easier for artists and creatives to receive proper attribution and incentivization for their work.

That’s why we are excited to back Cardin Campbell, the founder and CEO of Trac, recognizing the potential of Trac to shape the future of the music industry and create new opportunities for musicians to monetize art and control their careers.

From musician to founder

Cardin experienced the hardships that musicians face personally as an aspiring musical talent in his youth. Music, as the major product and the center of the artistry, would generally only earn a tiny royalty distribution, making a sustainable career difficult. With no transparency into the royalties system, musicians must rely on touring and merchandise sales to fund their art, which for many is an additional responsibility that often prevents exceptional musicians from being able to make music full time.

Cardin was urged to follow a career in software engineering instead, owing to his secondary interests in programming and product development. Hebuilt his career in the valley and held multiple senior engineering roles across Intel, Nike, Expedia, and Peloton. Through all of this, Cardin never lost his love for music, and when his own son decided to pursue a career as a professional musician, he decided it was time to bring what he had learned in tech and roll up his sleeves to build Trac – a digital platform that takes care of everything else that is not related to creating music, so artists can focus more of their time on their craft.

“Sign yourself, be your own label”

Trac enables musicians to publish their music on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, and others, as well as sketch, order, and sell products, and analyze their streaming/listener data to better understand their fans. Labels or agents are traditionally hired to address these vexing duties. However, with Trac, musicians of all levels now can easily access such tools and execute time-consuming work effortlessly.

Cardin and his team are also constructing the pipelines required to assist artists in exploring NFTs. Due to the ease of which NFTs can be tracked and confirmed on blockchain networks, it can readily determine who owns a specific NFT and distribute royalties accordingly. This has the potential to establish a highly transparent and equitable royalty payment system, benefiting musicians who provide the core product but struggle to earn their fair share due to various intermediaries in the current system.

Giving power back to the musicians

Trac is still in its early stages, but the potential for what it can do for musicians around the world is enormously exciting. Trac has the potential to make a huge influence on the music business by assisting musicians in taking charge of their own careers and monetizing their talent. And as more musicians use NFTs and other digital ownership technologies, the possibilities for Trac are truly boundless. We are thrilled to be a part of this adventure and look forward to seeing where Trac leads the industry in the future.

At AppWorks, we look for great founders who are building on new technologies such as web3 to innovate and solve real world problems. We’re honored to have the privilege to partner with Cardin and his team at Trac as they continue to break new ground at the forefront of helping musicians across the globe take control of their career.

[If you are a founder working on a startup in SEA, or working with web3 and AI / IoT, apply to AppWorks Accelerator to join the largest founder community in Greater Southeast Asia.]

David Wu, Associate (吳戴文 / 投資經理)

David is an Associate mainly focused on investments. He previously lived in the US, but was drawn to the Greater Southeast Asia region by the growth opportunities and the wonderful people here. He spent the first five years of his career as a consultant at IBM, where he became intimately familiar with the enterprise software and services needs of Fortune 500 companies. Later, he focused on building predictive models and solving optimization problems for large companies, and gained an appreciation for the role of data and algorithms in our lives. He joined AppWorks in 2020 after receiving his MBA from Columbia Business School, and also has a B.S. in Mathematics from the Ohio State University. In his free time, he tries to stay active and is always looking for opportunities to hike or trek, often seeking the trail less traveled.

NFTs have finally burst into the mainstream consciousness in the last year after spending a few years simmering underneath the surface as critical infrastructure was built out. This followed a DeFi boom after a similar infrastructure-building phase.

Today, essential groundwork is being built to unlock tomorrow’s use cases and utilities in NFTs, gaming, and DeFi, which will bring about new classes of assets and activity. On-chain sentient NFTs, non-player characters (NPCs) in gaming, and automated financial transactions in DeFi are just some of the things that can be unlocked through “decentralized automation”. 

We are proud to announce our investment into Autonomy Network, a decentralized automation protocol that unlocks these brand new use cases in web3. Despite their name, smart contracts have limited intelligence, and Autonomy aims to bring them to life. The founder behind Autonomy is James Key, one of the most impressive young founders we have met.

A determined decentralist on a mission

When we first met James in the interview for our accelerator program last year, it didn’t take long to be impressed by this 25-year-old’s strong passion and devotion to his craft. We recognized this was a genuine life calling for him and he would stop at nothing to accomplish his dreams. 

Based in Berlin, James was a university student not long ago, completing the last year of his physics degree while working in a quantum computing lab on the cutting edge of physics. Though it was interesting work, the pace was slow compared to the other itch he had – crypto. James took leave to work on blockchain forensics, including for the FBI, and when the university asked him to either come back or drop out, he made the easy choice to do the latter and pursue his interests further, including stablecoins and cross-chain bridging. 

The draw of crypto would have been natural to James at a young age. As a child, when his parents installed child locks on his computer, James found a way to hack the locks  – despite having no previous interest in hacking. So, when he read about censorship-resistant currencies years later, it was a natural curiosity and easy sell. 

During the next few years working for other blockchain projects, there was another itch, growing every day – to start his own company and serve this glaring need he had recognized in the market, all without compromising on decentralization (something he had witnessed working on other projects and could not accept on principle).

After working on it on the side for some time, he emptied his vacation days and coded nonstop for two weeks. At the end of it, he faced the choice of either giving up on this idea or going all in – building a team and becoming a founder. Again, he made the easy choice, and Autonomy Network was born.

Fully enabling DeFi smart contracts

Due to the nature of smart contracts needing to be called by an outside party, critical use cases in DeFi have been missing, such as stop and limit orders, automatic liquidity provisioning, and automatic self-liquidations in a completely decentralized, non-custom, composable manner. 

This is especially essential in DeFi, as crypto markets are 24/7, fast-moving, and volatile. 

Autonomy Network has built a fully composable, decentralized network of bots that can perform any action when an arbitrary condition is met. Users register requests, bots monitor the network state, and a proof-of-stake algorithm determines which bot can execute the request and collect a reward. The team has already begun integrating with major DEXes with some more big names on the way.

Other features like recurring payments are also being developed, but perhaps the most exciting is autonomous NFTs.

Sentient NFTs, a new form of life

With autonomous NFTs, a non-human and non-human-controlled entity can execute their own transactions on a blockchain using Autonomy Network. They can vote, trade, send messages, play against you in a game, buy other NFTs, upgrade its own logic, and even have offspring by minting aNFTs of itself. 

The ultimate goal, as James puts it, is to create the first blockchain-based citizen in the UAE. But for now, the team is working on NPCs for major metaverse applications and its first blockchain game, MetaDungeon, in which users can fight NPCs and claim (or lose) real assets depending on the result. 

We’re excited to support James on this mission, through all of the twists and turns and ups and downs. At AppWorks, we make big, bold bets on potentially industry-changing founders and are honored to have the privilege of putting our faith in the drive, vision, and execution of James, his co-founder Diego Chui, and the entire Autonomy team.

[If you are a founder working on a startup in SEA, or working with web3 / DAO, and AI / IoT, apply to AppWorks Accelerator to join the leading founder community in Greater Southeast Asia.]