054. Trent Lapinski. Crypto Visionaries, Tech for Trump, and Why Apple Bites

What happens when Bitcoin startups are in the same space as big businesses creating enterprise Blockchain solutions? Trent Lapinski, host of the HackerNoon podcast, believes in the visionaries and the vision of those who are on the leading edge of this technology, but he’s worried about what might come of that vision as big businesses enter the space.


“These are some of the most forward thinking like visionary people in the world that are working on these things. The problem is, I’m afraid of what I’ve seen with every other technological innovation is the visionaries come in, they build and push forward into a new space and then the powers that be whatever you want to call them come in and figure out how to screw it all up and make it mainstream and take those good intentions and ruin it.” 

This Speaking of Crypto podcast interview with Trent Lapinski is also available as a YouTube video here –> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI6IgOfORHM

Trent is a former tech startup CEO and founder, based in San Francisco and we talk about tech in Silicon Valley, the cost of doing business and living in San Fran, and what it’s like to own and run a successful tech business when you’re bringing in 40-50 thousand dollars a month. It wasn’t friends who came to him for money, he says, it was governments.

We also talk about Trent’s take on how tech helped Donald Trump beat Hilary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. He explains that it wasn’t Russia, but AI and “our own social networking companies” that got him the win. He’s got really interesting ideas on what went down.

Also, Trent used to be a big fan of Apple computers in the Steve Jobs era, and we talk about what he would do if he were running Apple today. 

“They went from being one of the best software companies in the world to being one of the worst, and they’ve lowered the level of the quality of their hardware to the point where everything’s disposable. And I think that’s bad for the environment. I think it’s bad for products. I think it’s bad for consumers.”

“I would change their entire approach to hardware and software… We could put AT+T and Verizon out of business tomorrow, by enabling some software to allow every iPhone on the planet to communicate with each other. It would create a giant network that all these devices could communicate with each other.”

Best moments:

  • Apple without Steve Jobs 41:00
  • How tech helped Donald Trump win 19:50
  • Bootstrapping a tech startup in San Francisco 31:15
  • Why investors like investing in surveillance tech 34:30 
  • Cost of living even post 2008 crash 11:15

Speaking of Crypto podcast (Trent Lapinski interview) on YouTube

Hacker Noon podcast


Hacker Noon podcast (YouTube)