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In this series, I feature the ideas and stories of the world’s most innovative entrepreneurs. Today, I caught up with Joseph Snyder and Christopher Brown from Lannister Holdings.
Here is what they shared with me.
Christian Vind: My first question…who are you? Tell me a few of your backstories.
Joseph Snyder: I’m Joseph Snyder. I’m the CEO of Lannister Holdings and Lannister Development. I am a serial entrepreneur, and I have built multiple companies spanning risk management, real estate, investment, e-commerce, marketing, strategic consulting and technology. So my passion and focus has been on the development and buildout of organizations and operations this time with a philosophy of remote work, openminded, hardworking, forward-thinking lifestyle by design that breeds a very special culture at Lannister. My goal at this stage of life is to strike balance between the demands as a father and a husband, and the demands as an executive and a leader for our company.
Christopher Brown: I’m Christopher Brown. I’m the CTO of Lannister Holdings, Inc. and Lannister Development. I’m also Joe’s brother and have been essentially his partner for the majority of the entrepreneurial journey that he’s talking about there. My main focus is building the technologies and technology platforms. As well as identifying interesting technologies or companies that we might partner with or acquire. I also ensure we have the teams and the operations needed to create, deploy and manage those technologies.
We have a forward-looking reason for existence I guess, of building the next generation and the next generations of disruptive and world-changing technologies. Keeping a push toward that edge while striving to maintain balance and perspective in life is my operating mindset for myself and the culture of our company.
Christian Vind: Why did you get into blockchain?
Christopher Brown: It is the bleeding edge of technology and there’s a such an incredible level of disruption and just overwhelming change that’s coming because of the way that technologies are shifting and because of the way that world is advancing. Being on the edge of these types of technologies really gives you an advantage in the marketplace for creating the type of business and the type of industry really that we want to create and be a part of.
Serial entrepreneurs.
We’ve run development companies and multiple development projects and everything else doing full stack development, whether internal or external or doing cloud infrastructure development and migrations but things like blockchain and IoT and 5G are where the really exciting things are happening in the tech world.
Because our Lannister Development teams are so deeply experienced in large-scale traditional systems and infrastructure development we bring a powerful value proposition to organizations who are trying to understand how these technologies can impact and disrupt their verticals or use cases and there’s a lot of development available there, the next generation of distributive ledger technologies and then the technologies that come after those are really what’s going to make a massive impact in shareholder value for a publicly traded company such as ourselves.
Christian Vind: Perfect lead into the next question. What inspired you to start a publicly traded company?
Joseph Snyder: I always had a dream of being the leader of a scaled, global company. I know that’s a kind of a random thing for a 10 or 12-year-old kid to have on his goals list but it was one of mine and has always been a driving force in my entrepreneurship journey so far. That, by the way, is a terrible reason to start a public company. So you have to follow that up and support that dream with a truly scalable operation, ideally in a big blue ocean space, where one’s offering is in high demand at the premium levels.
As Chris and I really evolved this ideology around Lannister Holdings and Lannister Development, as we identified the myriad of use cases that blockchain is going to be able to impact and disrupt in existing infrastructure and industry, it became very transparent to us from our background and our experience that this was probably the best business strategy, the most scalable, the most disruptive and the most impactful one that we knew of to build a strong foundation for a really scaled, fluid, diverse remote work company.
Publicly traded on the OTC Market.
That was the starting point for all the work we did in finding and purchasing a publicly traded company, executing the “reverse merger” and resulting in being a publicly traded company on the OTC Market.
We really felt that we were able to clearly see the path, challenges and all, that led to stakeholder growth. The long-term scalability of value and value creation for ourselves, for our families, for our team members and for our stakeholders across the board. That path was clearly better technologies, offered in a very public, social media-centric way from a USA based, publicly traded company. We have worked tirelessly since that day to build what is now Lannister Holdings, Inc. and Lannister Development.
Christian Vind: Tell me about your personal philosophy and how you implement that into your business.
Christopher Brown: I’d say the personal philosophy is something along the lines of work as smart as possible to find faster better ways. Stay insanely curious about things and always do the hard things with great detail. No matter what comes your way, if you’re trying to get somewhere, you’re trying to make your goals, you’re trying to build a company or you’re trying to do anything in life. If you basically follow that pattern, you’re going to get where you’re trying to go. You’re going to get there in a way that’s probably enjoyable.
It’s that gut-check moment when you have a hard decision to make of which is the impactful one, the one that gets results?
Joseph Snyder: Yeah, that’s it right there for us. I would just add too our entire team is really connected around these ideologies:
- Balanced, inclusive, diverse, openminded forward-thinking operations
- Decentralized operating structure
- Core focus on lifestyle by design.
Creating the life that we want for ourselves, creating and supporting the lifestyles that our team members and our employees and partners want to live yields incredible results for all of our stakeholders. That ideology allows us, we believe, to attract world-class talent and really have them deliver their very best results in a balanced and positive culture.
The types of people who sometimes literally don’t have to work for money anymore in their lives and are looking to attack unique challenges. They want to play with cutting-edge technologies.
Our culture is unique.
You know we literally don’t have an “office” full of people anywhere in the world. While organizationally we will face unique challenges with this structure, we are really strategically building this out to be an openminded, diverse company culture. We are lifestyle by design, decentralized organizational operation.
Everything that we do, all of the choices that we make, all of the execution and decisions that are made on behalf of the company are viewed with those things as a reminder or our “why.” As a constant awareness of really looking for better ways, lower costs and more fulfillment all around.
So, we think that that’s a better way to run a business. The incredible humans who are giving us their passion and their time and their energy, their insight, and their wisdom. tells us that maybe we’re on the right path.
Christian Vind: Now how would you define success?
Joseph Snyder: Success is the ability to create and love and empower in a positive and productive long-term scalable structure.
Christopher Brown: You can also go with the old unattributed quote of success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. The ability to go from failure to failure. There you go. Something like that. We’re very enthusiastic so that’s a start!
Christian Vind: Now a couple blockchain questions. What insights and/or recommendations do you have for other entrepreneurs in the blockchain space?
Joseph Snyder: I’ll take the entrepreneur side of that question first and then Chris can probably follow it up with some technical pieces. Initially, I would say if you’re looking at raising capital through tokens or crypto that you should probably pause and really drill into your use cases.
And your product deployment and your go to market strategies. Crypto is not a panacea for fixing all things because we get to throw money at it, do the damn work. And that regulation is coming. Everybody knows that it’s coming and there are right ways to do these things.
What is your use case?
If you’re an entrepreneur and you see an area where maybe blockchain can make things more transparent, more secure and less costly. If you have questions about whether smart contracts are able to remove layers of redundancy and risk inside of a system. Then what we would say to that is visit www.LannisterDevelopment.com and drop us a line.
Our teams at Lannister Development are available to help you identify disruption points inside your systems. We really do an amazing job of working to understand the ways that an organization needs things to work. And how these technologies can impact various systems.
They’re happy to help you review those use cases. We’re happy to work with you to map those use cases. We have a network of legal advisors who can help you identify how you can go deploy these things.
Redifining how funding structures work.
We have networks of financial advisors who can help you look at how those funding structures work. Lannister will show you how you go from zero to one on some of those issues.
If you’re looking at blockchain for a vertical that you know very well and you see a disruptive use case, we’d love to talk to you.
Christopher Brown: Well for entrepreneurs, it’s call us and let’s chat about what you’re thinking to do and we’ll give you a technical review from there.
Christian Vind: How in five years you think that blockchain will have changed the way that we do business?
Christopher Brown: I think it will vastly change the way we trade and securitize assets. That’s going to have an absolutely massive effect on the way economies work, the way everything works, the way money works.
Modifying how you trade assets.
Changing how the systems works to decide who owns a certain piece of anything. Changing what hands do these pieces go through.
How many intermediaries do you think there are in a stock, real estate or auction transaction? There’s multiple middlemen, actual settlement of many transactions takes days on existing, even fairly new systems. Things like that are already on their way out.
These are technologies that already exist. We are right at the cusp of the impact and disruption stage which is amazing. Like the royal mint has a blockchain gold reserve that you can buy into now.
I’m not sure if it’s open or not yet. But the securitization of assets on distributive ledgers and the current technologies are going to disrupt economies. And the way everything works between the nations of the world and the economy of the world. So it’s really hard to say like this is how it’s going to be in the future. But it’s very easy to say that it’s going to be much different than what it is now.
Joseph Snyder: Right. I support that statement and add just a little tweak. I think that one of the questions we get asked a lot is.
“Okay, so how are people going to see blockchain disrupt their lives over the next five years.”
That’s a little different than the question that you just asked.
Blockchain in government.
Joseph Snyder: The analogy I like to make is this; Look, we all have a cellphone in our pocket, right? We all know that if we touch on the Instagram app then Instagram opens and then we can see pictures. We can like them and we can do this stuff. Right? We all know that we can make a phone call and it’ll connect to the person that we want.
Very few people on the planet understand the technologies that are running inside of that smartphone. However, Blockchain is just like one of those technologies from an understanding point of view. Where it is going to be running inside of infrastructure.
Blockchain is going to be running inside of government. It is going to be running inside of finance. It is going to be running inside of contracts and trade, logistics, and shipping. As well as, data and contractual engagement pieces of our daily lives. But most people on the end user side will just know that maybe things got a little bit cheaper. Or a little bit faster or maybe something runs a little bit smoother.
Or there are not so many disparate parties that are being dealt with to do X, Y or Z. But they’re not necessarily going to know that there is a blockchain is doing it for me right now.
Final thought…
Christopher Brown: Then again from there you have an example like that of swarm robotics. And how the distributed census algorithm among those and a distributive ledger of current state can change everything. But this is again not a piece that your average consumer is going to understand.
Oh, blockchain disrupted this industry in a way that allowed the world to completely change. Right? So there’s a lot of different use cases along those lines. All those industries could have outsize effects without it being just random public knowledge oh, it’s because of blockchain. The perception may simply be “Oh, it’s awesome. Now XYZ works better this way.”
Find the Lannister team on Twitter at @LannisterDev and online at www.LannisterDevelopment.com.
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