Dinis Guarda interviews Michael Healy, Founder and CEO of Unit.Ventures, Building Decentralised Meaningful Marketplaces
Michael Healy is one of the founders and CEO of Unit.Ventures, focused on creating meaningful jobs and solving inequity. It connects providers and customers, as well as allows businesses and individuals to issue tokens for specific uses. He is focused on social impact and positive change through education, entrepreneurship and empowering individuals.
Michael Healy is a self-taught full-stack web developer and mobile engineer for iPhone and Android. He has digital design and video expertise which support in building useful products.
Michael Healy Interview focus
1. An introduction from you – background, overview, education…
2. Starting with background from Singapore to the world
3. Career highlights
4. Your company / companies, organisations and focus?
5. Building the android app for wikileaks
6. Crypto and lifestyle
7. Property
8. Singapore / Indonesia Southeast Asia
9. How do you see Society 5.0 – 4IR and all areas of digital transformation?
10. What are your views on our society, technology and digital transformations?
11. What are your goals and how do you see the future of work and the main trends in tech and society?
12. With Covid-19 what ways do you envision to redesign our society with technology and social impact?
13. What are your visions for the present and future?
Michael Healy Interview Quotes and Highlights
· Singapore has got a great reputation around the world and that is because they are doing a good job promoting a growing startup ecosystem, bringing talent to settle there and it is very attractive for investors too. In fact, Singapore is very strong and focused on academics and education. The standards there are really high and I could experience it myself growing there and helping me be the person I am right now.
· My parents were my inspiration to become an entrepreneur, especially in the area of technology. I always enjoyed building stuff and coding when I was younger and always knew I wanted to create my own company and become an entrepreneur. I am very interested in computer science but the way I learn is by experimenting and self-taught. That is why I have been building all my life, especially apps in the beginning.
· Social impact driven project. During my life I met a lot of people that were involved in social impact companies and projects, whether investors, entrepreneurs, experts, etc. I tried to learn from them as much as I could and follow their path. As I learnt, making money is important but having a social impact is even more important.
· With my company I want to help young people that want to become entrepreneurs. I want to give them the tools, opportunities and knowledge to do so.
· About Wikileaks. I really think it is important that governments and countries are open and transparent. They need to have accountability for their actions. And people have the right to see what governments do.
· I created an app for that. I started by researching ways to channel all the information coming out of wikileaks and created APIs that could structure and display the information to the users.
· I am also involved in this series of conferences to empower young people and entrepreneurs to kick off their ideas and business and show them what’s trendy in technology.
· The tokenomics behind Unit.Ventures. I loved the way Uber works and how it disrupted the taxi industry. So I wanted to do something similar in Unit.Ventures. I believe in a collective model where people are also part of the business and building community along the way. It is basically people empowering other people to create something bigger and tokenization actually allows that. In fact, blockchain and cryptocurrencies are really important for that too.
· In Bali, we are building this village with artists, entrepreneurs, technologists, etc where people can get invested in other people’s ideas and be benefited by each other’s endeavour.
· About the crypto space. I think that the missing point at the moment is to find very successful use cases. We need blockchain based companies that go mainstream and are successful to show people what good blockchain and cryptocurrencies can bring. There is potential there of course, especially in finance, as blockchain can promote decentralized finance and services that can help with financial inclusion and in developing countries.
· I am really excited about how blockchain will commoditize the way the internet works and is thought and the value found in the internet.
· The reason why Asia is dealing COVID-19 so well is because they had the experience in the past with the SARS. They did have to prepare protocols and pandemic scenarios and that definitely helped them now.
· The way Unit.Ventures is built is around jobs that we want to create and nurture in society. We give space to yoga classes to deal with stress and anxiety, electric cars and etc and different social impact and sustainable projects. Our platform is cooperative based.
· We have ambassadors in different cities and countries around the world to do some research on the ground to see how we can build these communities and empower the people living in them through our platform. We want to build a network linking 200 cities around the world. One of our first questions when we reach a new city is how can we build 1k new jobs in this new city? And we don’t stop until we find the way to do that.
· From my experience, the most important thing in a business, also in ours, is to provide the best customer experience possible. People that come to our platform can find what they went there looking for.
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Bio Michael Healy
Michael Healy is one of the founders and CEO of Unit.Ventures, focused on creating meaningful jobs and solving inequity. It connects providers and customers, as well as allows businesses and individuals to issue tokens for specific uses.
Michael Healy is focused on social impact and positive change through education, entrepreneurship and empowering individuals.
Michael Healy is a self-taught full-stack web developer and mobile engineer for iPhone and Android. He has digital design and video expertise which support in building useful products.
Michael Healy has built several successful businesses with exits ranging from Chatride, an encrypted peer-to-peer video conferencing technology, Ratemash, once one of the UK’s largest student social networks, the Wikileaks Android app and many niche mobile apps used by millions of users worldwide.
Alongside starting and growing businesses, Michael Healy has advised and supported startups, investors and corporates in Asia, Europe, Middle East and Latin America.
Michael Healy was a finalist of the Thiel Fellowship by Peter Thiel and also awarded the Silver medal in the Mathematics Olympiad.
Michael Healy has served as Entrepreneur-in-residence at top pan-European Venture Capital firm, Wellington partners(€800 million under management). He has done work for Google, KPMG, Founders Forum, Saatchi & Saatchi, L’Oreal, Imperial College, Unilever, London Business School and others.
Michael Healy is Singaporean, Irish and British, growing up in Singapore and moving to the UK when he was 16. He enjoys travelling and experiencing different cultures. He has lived in Singapore, London, New York City, Bali, Shanghai, Berlin and looks forward to living, traveling and working in more places in the future.
Michael Healy Projects highlights
Wikileaks Android Developer and Fundraiser
Used actively by over 150,000 users, featured in Guardian, Telegraph, New York Times and other top publications.
Founder & CEO Love Calculator
App that tells the love compatibility between two people.
You type in the names of two individuals and it lets you know how much in love they are along with advice or tips. Popular on the Android store, built in a day, used by 48,000+ active users.
Michael Healy Sources links
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhealyco/
https://www.instagram.com/michaelhealyco/?hl=en
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