NEO has announced its strategic expansion into the United States with a new office established in Seattle, Washington. In an exclusive interview, Da Hongfei shares what distinguishes NEO from competitors like Ethereum and Bitcoin—and explains why he believes NEO could emerge as the premier blockchain platform by 2020.
Da Hongfei, the founder of NEO, revealed at the NEO DevCon on February 16th that NEO Global Development had established a base of operations in Seattle, Washington—with immediate plans to begin recruiting talent. The new offices will provide NEO with a "strategic foothold" in the US market, Hongfei stated.
The reasoning behind this strategic move: Seattle's robust software development ecosystem. As the headquarters of tech giants such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Expedia—and home to major corporate offices from Facebook, Google, and Twitter—the city represents an ideal location to recruit top-tier programming talent.
To gain deeper insight into NEO's motivations for this strategic expansion, CryptoSlate spoke with founder Da Hongfei on February 17th at DevCon.
To understand the significance of NEO's new US offices, it's important to explain how NEO is structured. According to Da Hongfei, there are two primary companies under the NEO Foundation: NEO Global Development (NGD) and NEO Global Capital (NGC).
NGD is responsible for implementing the strategies set by the NEO Foundation and for building out NEO's codebase. Meanwhile, NGC serves as the investment arm responsible for nurturing enterprises around NEO, with Hongfei going as far as to claim that NGC is performing "better than 95 percent of crypto funds worldwide."
"We are now in Seattle, the hometown of one of the largest software companies in the world—Microsoft," Hongfei announced to an audience of several hundred at DevCon. He went on to draw a parallel between NEO and the software giant:
"Nobody understands how to win a platform war better than Microsoft, especially for enterprise development frameworks and platforms."
And, broadly speaking, it appears that Hongfei wants to emulate Microsoft's success and win the blockchain "platform war."
For further insight into the reasons behind the move, during the interview with CryptoSlate he elaborated on why the organization chose Seattle over other high-tech North American cities:
"We evaluated various locations across the US and Seattle emerged as the optimal choice. New York is more suited for finance. San Francisco or Silicon Valley excels for startups if you're seeking funding, or for more consumer-facing internet companies. But, if you're focused on serious software development, I believe Seattle represents a superior option."
He went on to discuss NGD's expansion plans for Seattle. For context, there are approximately 45 people working at the NGD offices in Shanghai.
"In Seattle, we'll start small but gradually expand. We don't want all the engineers [for NEO] to relocate to Seattle and work in the office. NGD Seattle will coordinate all activities [related to the development initiative]."
NEO appointed two former Microsoft executives to lead the US expansion, John deVadoss and Peng Huang, both of whom possess over a decade of experience at Microsoft and were deeply involved with the development of .NET, a proprietary software development framework by Microsoft. It is also the primary development platform used by much of NEO's blockchain.
"We are transitioning from the industrial economy to the smart economy or digital economy. In the smart economy, many things happen on a global scale. There is diverse talent in different countries and different cities. The US certainly has an abundance of talent. We firmly believe we need a presence in the US and a presence in China. This way we can leverage the best of both worlds."
John deVadoss and Peng Huang are both co-founders of messaging app text11, a machine learning venture that they claim to have "successfully exited."
DeVadoss is a 15-year Microsoft veteran and software architect. During his tenure at the company, deVadoss was responsible for leading .NET in Microsoft's competition with Java. DeVadoss also was one of the executives responsible for building Microsoft Digital, the division of Microsoft responsible for technology advisory and consulting—he grew the business from $0 to $500 million in revenue.
DeVadoss was appointed as the head of NGD Seattle and development lead.
Meanwhile, Huang is an 11-year Microsoft executive and former strategy and marketing lead for .NET patterns and practices. Huang is now tasked with leading platform strategy for NEO.
During his presentation on NEO's vision at DevCon, Hongfei asked the audience:
"What makes NEO different from other blockchains? What's the distinction between NEO and Ethereum?"
To find the answer, Hongfei discusses what makes a blockchain successful. One of the best indicators, he claims, is a community's sense of "shared mission":
"If a team or community has very unified and shared values, a shared vision and mission, then it will likely lead to the success of that community and that blockchain. I believe Bitcoin has a very clear vision… Ethereum has a very clear vision, so does NEO."
Apparently, it's not the different technical architecture or consensus mechanism that separates NEO from Bitcoin and Ethereum. Instead, Hongfei claims that the key difference is "organizational philosophy":
"The shared value of the communities [in NEO] is practical idealism. Pure pragmatism can't envision a bold future, while pure idealism can't get anything accomplished. It's the perfect combination of both that drives innovation [for NEO]."
During the interview, he elaborated on what constitutes "practical idealism":
"We don't try to go directly at the goal. We identify what obstacles exist. Some obstacles we'll overcome, others we'll work around. So we're more pragmatic than other blockchains. We find the balance and sweet spot between efficiency and decentralization, between current success and future success."
Ultimately, Hongfei's discussion about organizational philosophy ties into NEO's ambitious mission, to become the "number one blockchain," and not by market capitalization or token price. According to Hongfei, the number one blockchain is the platform with the "best technology, a diverse ecosystem, and innovative solutions."
"We've set our mission to make NEO the number one blockchain by 2020. We only have a year, or two years, depending on how you define 2020… Time is precious."
