Welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the digital executive podcast. Do you work in emerging tech, working on something innovative, maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.coruscant.com forward slash brand. Welcome to the digital executive. Today's guest is Vladimir Panchenko. Vladimir Panchenko is a pattern recognizer who builds infrastructure for futures he sees before they arrive. At 16, growing up in Ukraine, he recognized that the world would take a decade to grasp. Digital assets would become as economically real as physical ones. So he started building. He founded SunTechsoft in 2008, which grew into one of the world's largest private distributors of digital games. In 2016, he launched Skin.Cache, a marketplace with over 20 million annual trades. In 2017, he founded DeMarket, a blockchain-based marketplace that raised 19 million in its first hour, grew to 3 million users, processed 6 million monthly in transactions, and was acquired by Mythical Games in 2023. Today, as CEO and co-founder of Portal.ai, Vlad is solving a different kind of future, how to make authentic human connections scalable. Portal.ai delivers personalized connection intelligence ahead of every meeting. This is partners, venture capitalists, or your friend. You'll get to the light speed and communication with Portal.ai. Welcome to the show. Hello, hello, Brian. Thank you so much for the invitation. Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. And I know you're coming generally out of San Francisco via Santa Monica tonight. I'm in Kansas City, so to our difference. But you're able with your travels and your calendars and time zones able to make the show tonight. So I really, really appreciate that. Vlad, jumping into your first question, you've spent more than a decade building products used by millions in gaming and digital trading. What lessons about user behavior, trust, and value creation are you applying as you build an AI engine centered on emotional intelligence? Thank you for the question. And it's an honor to be invited into commerce. Probably the first thing coming to my mind, very replicable. Every time an everything was built and I'm building right now with Portal AI. And it's all about trust. 99% of the success of everything I've built before and everything we do in Portal is connected to trust of the customers. As before, it was with the technology which allowed us to trade in-game items. It was new. It was not really anyway regulated. It wasn't described in any way. But there was a lot of liquidity, a lot of hype, and a lot of money. So in my case, building the legit application and creating value for customers, the first thing to solve was trust. Because 99% of everything else was, let's say, was legitimately scaring them all. That was the same in the technology was trading in-game items. So with the technology of trading crypto, NFTs, all the time new technology, lots of new people, lots of hype, and just statistically, we're all human beings. There were numbers of people bringing value, not for everyone. Let's put it this way. And as an example, what we did and then upgraded and then reused and we will use in Portal AI as well was the ticker. So the idea we took from the money exchanges or like live shows like CNM, the life ticker, but what we did put there were customer reviews. So every time the customer was buying something, selling something, exchanging something, using the service, after that, there was an option to leave a review. And automatically, it would appear on the life ticker on the website on the main page so that everyone else who is coming can see, can read. And one customer can share their experience and share their trust with other ones. One of the most important parts of it was 100% transparency because of course it was being tested from both sides. So even if there was a negative review, it would still appear. So even when we just started, it added double digits to the value creation rates. And I have a lot of know-how to build trust in the community and thus enable customers to create more and more value. Thank you. I really appreciate that. And trust is foundational to all human relationships and you knew that early on. But your success was a combination of having customers that trusted you, including sharing their experience with others online, trading valuable items online, obviously that's important to people. Trust has to be there. You were very passionate about what you did and what you built and you had a product or a need there that you were able to fulfill. So thank you. And Vlad, portal.ai isn't a social network. It's a context engine that helps people connect more meaningfully. What problem did you see in today's digital communication that inspired you to build a completely new category of product? Well, the biggest problem I have and by far is still like trust and trust defined by my communication. I'm 41 and throughout my life, business partners, friends, intimate relationships work like everywhere. What I do, what I learn or what I create is defined by the clarity of my communication and the communication in the team. As an example, it's usually I remember every time the first time when something happens, which has a lot of promotional data for me. And that was maybe 25, 28 years old. And me and my best friend for like a decade, we were friends, we were doing businesses together. But it came to the point where I got to the conclusion that he's actually a very bad man. And for two months, November and December, I was feeling very bad like when I woke up, when I went to bed, very bad. But thankfully, we had so many things interconnected from business to friendship that we at least had to sit down at the table to rightfully put an end to the relationship with such a bad person as we thought. But when we sit down at the table and my friend shared with me his life experience and what led him to the idea that because he also believed 20% that I'm a very bad person, I was shocked to hear it. But when he shared the chain of events and thoughts, I was like, oh, well, I understand why and how he could have come to this conclusion. And when I shared my chain of thoughts and happenings in the years of with different people, which led me to my conclusion, we both couldn't believe it was neither of us was right. We both were not bad person, but communication was the key. We're still friends, but the delta in between what I was 100% sure and what was the reality, it was unbelievable. So thankfully, right now, the technologies are at the point, the tipping point for this civilization, where we can leverage them. And if every human being, the opportunity to fix this miscommunication problem and build trust on the global level. Thank you. I really appreciate that. You talked about trust and trust being defined by the clarity of your communication. You went into the story with your friend and how you thought, gosh, there's something wrong here. I think he's bad and he didn't trust. And then once you sat down and talked all that out, you found out so much more and there's so many different facets or dimensions in life and relationships. But you're right. I think their technology is now at a point where we can build some of this, help build some trust and especially in online types of relationships. AI is going to play a big part in that. So thank you. And lad portal.ai promises smarter collaboration by helping people understand each other before the first conversation. What early use cases are emerging, whether it's in the enterprise, networking, hiring, dating that are showing the strongest promise right now? It's interesting, like a little self-reflection because I share this question right now. And you made me smile again. And probably I will smile again and again and again because what I do, she always believe why I'll share two cases. One is my personal because right now I'm sitting at the table in Salonka, where I was my previous company. I went at least, well, not at least two, three cycles of fundraising. And by the book, and it is what it is. Every time it was at least two months. More than like it's like they call it nine, nine, six early morning to late night. Phone conversations, at least a hundred as a first call. And yes, the book is right. Only one of those converted into the actual investment in a human being. And honestly, those two months were not happy months for me. Every time before in the middle and after the conversations, most of the time I didn't feel good. I was feeling I was feeling nervous. I was feeling bad. I was feeling not balance. I was feeling that I underters weren't. I was feeling like lots of uncertainty was put in this way. But what I am 100 percent sure is that every time on that call, there were two people who genuinely wanted the same thing. Which is at least I lacked the communication to make it happen. So what was the first case I put for myself, which worked so magically that after three times I forgot about the pain that did ever happen? Was the very, very simple on the surface, but very complicated under the hood. Margaret, which would look at me, which would look at the person I'm meeting with and find what we genuinely have in common, what would you normally have in common in our lifetime experiences so that we can start and begin the conversation from those things we have in common. And it also helps and helps provide the guidance what I should avoid in the conversation, not to trigger something which is not related to me, but the person will feel bad. And it's as one person said, who didn't do it first, I said, like, it's a hallucination. There is no way you could put this type of things together in a question to that person. And so I didn't go asking. But he said, but this is about me. I said, it is about him as well. Three out of three times in this fundraising cycle, I never felt any fear or discomfort because I know who is in front of me. I know how to communicate and I know how to communicate my answers. And I genuinely love conversations with people. There's always something interesting which we can exchange. Now it's happening. And also, like, two out of three already got the safe closed. But the most important thing, that pain I had, and I knew that I will have to go again and again and again through it. No, I don't. And the fact that we're now putting together today, tomorrow, probably the version of that application for YC Last Bet Show founders, just knowing that they will not have to go through the pain which I had to go through. But then I'm like, I will wake up at five a.m. or like four, whatever, I will. That's one example. And the other example would be Nick. Nick was one of the first who tried the flow of the founder and venture capitalist. You know, he's a friend. He's a founder of the Aviation startup, Na'vi. And after a couple of weeks, he is still texting us every other day. It is so emotional. It is so. He's like, I can't believe so. Like, I had never had those kind of deep and friendly conversations. And at the end of it, even with the founders and ventures or business partners, what do you want to have at the end? You want to build a friendship, the partnership, the trust. So if we can cut out 90% of mistakes and we can, that's amazing. And Nick already, this is how we developed the second flow, HR follow because of the customer feedback, because Nick used it for the fundraising. And then he said, I actually was hiring talents and I used it for that. And the advice is and there were ways to communicate. We're so deep, emotional and true that he was, as I said, like every other day, he is texting us emotional messages. So happy I am that we helped him as a founder and as a product. But I was emotions. Like, I know the pain and now knowing that there is no pain, but there is those emotions. I'm happy to build the product to scale this was not just as this was before. When the knowledge, the resources and success was available to like 1% and 1%. What I, sorry, but I probably I even can't build something different because I am who I am. I know where I was born and I know my life as I'm always building something to fix this and to democratize the technologies and help people. Like just to unlock the terms, build value and scale it to as many people as possible. That's amazing. Thank you for sharing that. Again, talks about that relationship and understanding people. I know you struggled with some anxiety and some things that you had some challenges about these conversations you had with people on the phone. But they may have triggered you or the other person. It's just amazing, just great, deep relationships that have come out of a lot of these. And I know you're trying to make that human to human connection and communication better. So I appreciate that. And Vlad, looking ahead, what role do you believe AI will play in shaping the quality of human relationships over the next decade? Is there any boundaries that shouldn't be crossed if you could just briefly share? I think that the space where this question is set is the same space where, for example, we will ask this question about electricity. So that's from my standpoint, it's all about how we humans are going to use it. We do not blame electricity for some good stuff or bad stuff. It is what it is. And then how we human beings are going to use it, what applications we're going to build, how we are going to leverage the technology that's up to us. I like that analogy, electricity. It's how we use it, right? Electricity could be bad, right? It could kill somebody because of the superpower that electricity has behind it, the voltage, the amps. Like you said, it's about how we leverage the technology. And I really appreciate that analogy. And Vlad, it was such a pleasure having you on today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon. Brian, thank you so much for the invitation. It was an honor, a pleasure, and I hope to speak to you soon again. Bye for now.
