Interview: Julie Maupin

Julie Maupin has traveled the world, attained extensive academic credentials including graduate degrees in law and economics from Yale, a PhD in international development studies, and is a leading expert on international economic law and global governance regimes. With a long held affinity for technology, she was able to shift her focus to a variety of topics within the realm of distributed ledgers while serving as a law professor at Duke University, and later as a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute. The IOTA Foundation is undoubtedly fortunate to count an expert of her quality among its ranks. Let’s get to know Dr. Maupin:

Tell us a little about your Background

Perhaps the first thing to clear up is: I’m not French (sorry, IOTA France!). Most people assume I am, because of the name, and because I live in Europe. But in fact I grew up in the US, in rural Colorado. It’s a place that tends to attract people who want to make their own path in life – free from external constraints, but also devoid of much in the way of government support – the classic “pioneer spirit”. I think this mentality has influenced my own life to a sizable extent. I’ve had a pretty non-traditional career path.

My first job after leaving school in the mid-90s was working for a non-profit relief and development agency in Bosnia. When I went there, I had only a vague idea of what to expect. The reality was even more sobering than the sporadic TV reports that had reached the outside world. In the city where I worked, Bihać, there were only women and children. All the men over 16 had been sent to the front lines. It was my first experience with the very real, and very harsh, connection between economic prosperity and basic human rights. Everyone who had the means to flee the war did. The rest got stuck – and endured 4 horrendous years. This realization was what birthed in me the desire to study both economics and law, to understand the interconnections between economic empowerment and social empowerment on a global scale.

I returned to the US with this goal in mind. I had to somehow figure out how to finance my studies first, though. It was the late 90s, so I did what everybody else was doing: I moved to Seattle and jumped on the tech bandwagon, landing at Monster.com. This too turned out to be a very formative experience. I got to ride the internet boom and bust cycle, to which the blockchain space now shows striking parallels. Then, as now, it was incredibly difficult to pick winners and losers. Internet-related technologies were developing at a dizzying pace, cash was easy to come by, and no one really had a clue where it would all lead. When the internet bubble burst in 2001, around a third of everyone I knew lost their jobs overnight. And it wasn’t necessarily the “coolest” companies that stuck around. The thing is, humans and the markets we create can be terribly irrational. The gap between hype and substance is sometimes very large indeed. All that glitters isn’t gold.

Another important lesson that came from that time was one I didn’t actually learn until several years later. While at Monster, I landed and developed a very successful client relationship with a mid-sized regional bank called Washington Mutual. Our team conceptualized and built an internet-based suite of human capital management tools to support the bank’s ambitious nation-wide expansion plans. Everything went swimmingly, and within a few years, WaMu had become one of the largest banks and home lenders in the United States. Unfortunately, it turned out this was largely due to its aggressive expansion into the sub-prime mortgage loan market. The company went completely bust in 2007 when the sub-prime loan crisis hit. I had left the Monster five years before to pursue my graduate studies at Yale. But looking back, I realized that the technology we built in the early 2000s had generated the pipeline of loan underwriters which in turn allowed WaMu to follow that path. We were a cog in the wheel. Without the help of internet-based recruiting tools, WaMu probably wouldn’t have been able to hire enough people fast enough to sustain such explosive growth rates.

The moral to the story? When you’re in the middle of it, you have very little idea of the longer-term systemic impacts of the technologies you’re working on. Technological innovation brings with it externalities – both positive and negative – which are all but impossible to forecast in advance. This was true of the internet, and it’s just as true of distributed ledgers, IoT technologies, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and every other cutting-edge field today. Innovators need be alive to this reality and approach their work with due humility and vigilance.

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