In this episode of Blocklayer Podcast, Kenzi Takahashi, Sachi Shiokava, and Diksha Desai sit down with Greg Osuri, Founder and CEO of Akash Network, to explore the ideas powering the decentralized web — liberty, sovereignty, and what “freedom” should mean in an AI-driven internet.

Greg shares his founder journey and the real challenges of building a Web3 product: staying grounded through volatility, making hard tradeoffs, and keeping a healthy work-life balance while running at startup speed. We also talk about why community isn’t just a nice-to-have in Web3 — it’s the distribution engine, the governance layer, and the resilience mechanism when everything else shifts.

On the tech side, we dig into open-source as a strategy, why decentralized cloud infrastructure matters for the future of AI, and how Greg thinks about governments and regulation in a world where AI compute is becoming the new choke point. If AI is going to be decentralized, he argues, the infrastructure and incentives have to be decentralized too.

Before Akash, Greg founded AngelHack — one of the largest hackathon communities in the world, spanning 100,000+ developers across 50 cities. He started his career at IBM and later designed Kaiser Permanente’s first cloud architecture — experience that shaped how he thinks about reliable infrastructure, not just narratives.

Expect a deep conversation on decentralized AI, open-source, the Web2-to-Web3 mindset shift, and what it takes to build a movement — not just a product.

This episode was supported by Diksha Desai and Sachi Shiokava.