How to Build in Crypto: Lessons from 8 Leading Founders | Jesse Pollack, Jeremy Allaire, Anatoly Yakovenko & More
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Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today on Bankless, we're exploring the frontier of being a startup founder. Are you startup curious? Do you think you have what it takes to become a founder? Have you always been curious about the challenges, difficulties, and skills that come with building a company? Today in the show, Bankless Nation, I have a goal. A goal for the marginal builder who's out there, who just needs a little push over the edge to start building something in crypto.

On the show today, we have some of crypto's most successful, most famous founders and builders, each with about 15 minutes of time, giving you the wisdom that they've gained from their time being a crypto builder. We've got Jesse Pollock from Base, Jeremy Allaire from Circle, Anatoly from Solana, Stani from Aave, Kane from Synthetix, Mike and Jason from Blockworks, Kevin Iwaki from Gitcoin, Lucas from Jito, and each one has their own perspective, their own scars. And

And hopefully by listening to this episode, you, listener, can learn from their lessons and acquire their wisdom and gain the confidence you need to venture out onto your own frontier and maybe one day on the Bankless podcast. Let's go ahead and get right into this episode. But first, I want me to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Stella.

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- Bankless Nation, I'm here with Jesse from Base. Jesse's time at Coinbase seems to have been marked by a destiny of figuring out how to get Coinbase on chain. And he finally did it with the arrival of Base last year. Since then, Base has grown to almost a million active addresses on Base with over 4.2 total transactions and over $6 billion in TVL. Jesse, welcome back to Bankless. - Thanks, David, glad to be here.

Jesse, were you always a builder? Were you born that way? Or did you learn to be a builder? I mean, I started at a pretty young age thinking about how to build things. It was different. I started with small businesses. I ran a snow shoveling business and a yard work business. Then I learned how to code when I was in my senior year of high school, my last year of high school. And that really opened up the world for me where I was like, oh, I can build apps and put them on the internet and

people can use them. And that's kind of like this open and crazy imagination space for me. So started building apps my first year of college. I started a company my second year of college, dropped out after that and built a company for five years, then joined Coinbase, built the consumer products for five years, and now I've been building base for the last couple of years. Okay. So I'm going to go with definitely was born with it. Yeah.

So you always saw yourself as somebody building something. What would you go back to if you could go back to your college self or when you're like first getting real serious about becoming like a real professional career builder? Any advice for that younger version of Jesse? What would you go back to him with first? I mean, I think the first piece of advice I would give is find something that you're excited about, like a domain that you're excited about, and then find the smallest possible thing to build and start with that. You know, like...

I think I spent a lot of time early on in my career, like trying to find the perfect idea or like the perfect product to work on. And I think what I've seen over the last few years is that the place that people like generally find the most impact is through kind of discovery process where you get started with something small. That's something that aligns to your interests, aligns to your area of expertise. And then over time that can grow into something bigger.

And so you don't have to have the perfect idea. You don't have to start with something that you think is going to reach billions of people. You can start small, build your skills, build your intuitions, and kind of gradually build to something bigger and bigger. I think entrepreneurs will probably be able to be listening to this episode and know whether or not they have the entrepreneurial spirit in them. But being an entrepreneur, being a builder comes with other skills that must be cultivated.

So I think maybe to parse that apart, there's like the natural skills of just like, you know, you're a coder, you like to build things, that's great. And then there's like the skills that kind of like the job requires. And whatever you build is going to both lean into your natural intrinsic strengths and then also require you to hone some like secondary skills that are just kind of required for the job. What natural skills did you lean into and how does that kind of like mark your time as a builder? Yeah, well, first thing I'll say is that anyone can be a builder.

Coders are builders, they can build apps, but you can build community. You can build your art. You can build your identity, especially on-chain. Really, everyone has the opportunity to be a builder and the tools are getting better and better. So you can build really cool things without any of the kind of technical know-how that would have historically been required.

So that's kind of the first thing. In terms of the skills that I think kind of like naturally lend themselves to building, one is just like a mindset, a mindset of optimism and determination. There's a lot of difficulty in building. You're going to run into roadblocks. Things are going to get really hard. People are going to tell you you're dumb because you're doing something that no one's done before. And having the resilience to just keep building

and keep putting one foot in front of the other. I think that's a really, really important skill and mindset for people to build. Another one that I've seen help people be successful is finding a way you like to communicate about what you're building. It doesn't have to be the same, right? Some people are going to like to be on Twitter all the time. Some people are going to like to write long blog posts. Some people are going to like to go to conference talks and give conference talks. But

Finding a way to tell your story, I think is really powerful because that's going to let other people come in and basically help them join your journey and help them want to support you. And then that will all help you be successful. So that's the second one. And then the third one I'd say is an ability to kind of like put things together that kind of transcends anyone's skillset, right? Like maybe if you're a developer, you're going to naturally spike in kind of the ability to build an app. But if you can only build an app,

That might not get you that far. And so being able to think about, okay, how can I use this, you know, kind of like strength as the center of my skill set, but then add on other skill sets like, oh, I'm going to figure out how to get the first bit of distribution. Oh, I'm going to figure out how to, you know, collaborate with someone else on it. Oh, I'm going to figure out how to build a little team. I find that the best builders are scrappy, kind of T-shaped individuals who have one area where they're really deep and have a lot of expertise, but then they're also, you

broad and they're able to think kind of holistically and put together the pieces, even if they're not an expert in anything, to get things done. What about the skills or activities that you just know you have to do because that's what is required of you, but you just really don't enjoy? So like any like solo founder is going to have to do like taxes and

at the end of the year or like accounting. And that's going to likely be very adjacent to the skills that they have that are making them a builder in the first place. Just like the burden of responsibility of being a founder can be very large. How have you navigated this? Yeah. I mean, I'd say first off, like to start, you have to just grit it out. There's no one weird trick, right? It's like you doing all that stuff by yourself and learning the skills enough

to be able to get them done in a scrappy way, I think is a super important part of one's journey. And that was something that I did for a long time. I mean, I filed all my crypto taxes for like 10 years and it was super complex, took hundreds of hours. And so I think that that's like one really important starting point. It's like, there's no easy way through. You just have to grid it out.

I think once you grid it out and you have done it for a while and you have an understanding of what it is and you have an understanding of how much it costs you, then as your business grows or your kind of lifestyle and how much your earning grows, I think you can start to reason about where does it make sense to take the things that you really don't like doing, but you know need to get done and you have a clear understanding of what good looks like and outsource them to other people.

And so some of that's going to be like, you could hire an accountant to do your taxes. You know, you could hire someone to help plan travel. Like there's a bunch of different pieces that you can put together that will let you exchange money for more time. But I think that if you jump to that too soon, you can get like kind of caught in a situation where you're paying a lot of money and you're not getting good results.

And that's because you don't actually know what good results are. In that early stage of like doing the hard work that's unglamorous, that's annoying, that you don't like, I think it's a really important stepping stone to build that understanding so you can successfully kind of progress to being able to say, okay, now I'm going to make a trade for more time with a little bit more money spending. Builders and entrepreneurs, one of the like critical make it or break it skills that they have is just being able to like manage their time most effectively. Like

especially in the early stages of a company, doing the most high leverage thing possible and identifying that high leverage thing is going to make or break your company. And I think perhaps that's where a lot of builders fail is that their instincts aren't tuned to identifying what the high leverage thing is. Maybe there's a very obvious low hanging fruit and they just can't see it. How have you navigated like identifying what is the right way to spend your time in like what opportunity zones?

Yeah, that's a good question. One forcing function that I've tried to have for me and my team is like, how do we just make sure that we're moving fast in whatever we're doing? Right? Like we shouldn't be measuring our progress, especially early on in months or quarters or years. We should be measuring our progress in days or hours and weeks, like max. And so even with the base team, the size it is today, like my push to everyone is like, what are you shipping this week?

Literally, what are you shipping this week that's going to have an impact on our business? And, you know, of course, there's always new projects that go out longer. But I think one of the things that Brian Armstrong, who's the CEO of Coinbase, has said a lot to me is this idea that action produces information. It doesn't have to be the right, perfect thing.

that you're working on. But it's the worst thing if you get stuck in indecision or you get stuck in doing something for a really long time that you're not gonna actually be able to learn from. The thing that's gonna accelerate you is having a really clear feedback loop where you can ship something quickly, you can learn from it, you can ship something quickly, you can learn from it, and you can use all of that to improve your kind of judgment and intuition. Because like you said at the beginning of the question, especially early on, you're not gonna have the best intuition and judgment because you've never done this before. But if you can get, you know, like,

50 or 60 reps in a year from shipping something every week, you're going to build that intuition so much faster than if you ship one thing in the first year because then you're only going to get one set of learnings. Yeah, so building with speed kind of enables like a meta skill to emerge around all of them. Yeah, and of course there's always like, you know, caveats and exceptions where maybe you really, you know, a certain type of product needs a certain different way of building. But I think for the most part as a general rule, like,

Figuring out how to ship quickly so that you can learn really quickly as well is super important for early stage folks. During your time just building, how have you spent your time unexpectedly in ways that you actually didn't see coming? That's a good question. I mean, one way that I think I've spent my time unexpectedly just in the last year and a half is I would say that I am spending an unexpectedly large amount of time on Twitter and Farcastrack.

in my role as like, you know, leader of base. You know, if you'd asked me like, what's going to be required in order to make base successful, maybe two years ago, I probably wouldn't have said like spending a lot of time on Twitter and Farcaster. But I think one thing that's really shifted for me is as we've built base, what we've realized is that we're building an economy and the most important part of any economy is the people.

And platforms like Twitter and Farcaster have a really powerful role, which is that it lets me reach the people at a massive scale. And so, for instance, like here's a little anecdote. You know, we launched base names a couple of days ago and there's already 200,000 of them minted. But I tweeted like, hey, share your base name if you got a base name. And people started sharing photos of their base names.

I went through not every single one, but probably like 400 of the photos that people shared of their base names and just said based and then whatever their name was. And that like, you know, if I put on like traditional, you know, CEO hat, you know, it's like, is Jesse spending hours like replying the same rote thing to 400 people, like the highest leverage thing? Maybe not. But what I realized over the last year and a half is in building an economy and building a community,

one-to-one direct recognition of people and taking the effort to see people and say, you are a part of this thing that we are building is super, super important. And so if instead of thinking about this, oh, this is like Jesse wasting his time on Twitter, it's like, oh no, these are actually like the most important

avid fans and supporters and builders on base. And they're all publicly proclaiming their pride in building on base. And the recognition from me of saying, I see you, you are based, you are part of that is going to have a massive impact on their feeling of

like being a part of it and their desire to build further. And so I think that that's like a good example of, you know, something that, you know, I think the traditional world might say that's a waste of time, but it's definitely something that doesn't scale. Like you can't scale that, like having Jesse reply to things, but it's a place that I've kind of identified, oh, this is actually high leverage because it creates this feedback loop that then has a bunch of like follow on ripple effects that go out through our community. Yeah.

Jesse, this has been great. Any just final words of wisdom, bits of advice that you have that comes to mind? Yeah, I mean, if you're building on base, we like to say keep building and stay based. And when we say stay based, we really mean a few things. We mean work hard, like there's no shortcut for hard work. We mean stay optimistic because the future is going to be great if we build it. We mean push boundaries with creativity because if we're not pushing boundaries through creativity, like we're not gonna create anything special.

And then finally, we mean put the team over the individual. We're not going to get that far if all of us are just looking out for ourselves. The way we get far, the way we build a new global on-chain economy that increases innovation, creativity, and freedom is by lifting up the community and the world over the individual or the single company or the single country. And so if you're listening to this and you're thinking about building on base, I would say keep building and stay based. Thanks, Jesse. Thanks, everyone.

Bankless Nation, I'm here with Jeremy Allaire, the co-founder and CEO of Circle. Circle, as I'm sure you all know, is the company behind USCC, the $33 billion stablecoin company.

Founded all the way back in October 2013 and is on a mission to revolutionize the form factor of the dollar using crypto rails. Jeremy, thanks so much for joining me today. Thank you, David. Awesome to be back. So Jeremy, jumping right into it, what do you wish you knew at the beginning of your entrepreneurship history? If you could go back in time before you had become an entrepreneur, what would you tell yourself? What did you wish you knew back then?

Well, it's a huge question in some ways. It's a simple question, but a huge question. You know, Circle, as you know, this is my third startup. And the first two companies, you know, I helped co-found and grew and eventually IPO'd. And hopefully we'll see that happen with Circle too. But I think, you know, what I wish I knew, you know, back when I was in my 20s and starting my first company, or even as I like worked on different projects, including Circle, like there's definitely like major things I've learned along the way. Yeah.

I think one major thing, and I talk to founders about this a lot, is I think there's a tendency to kind of feel like to win, you have to basically kind of overpower people or it's all about all the energy that you bring. And I feel like a huge lesson that I've learned is that at the end of the day, achieving success in a business or a product or whatever, it's about the people that

you have around you. It's not just the founder and your passion and your energy. And I think there's a risk of kind of being megalomaniacal or whatever as a founder. And I think the biggest lesson I've learned is just fundamentally, it's about having a group of people who are better than you, constantly finding people who are better than you,

in many domains and giving them space to create and giving them space to communicate. And so I think like from early on where I think I was like the kind of classic, like hard charging, a lot of strong attitude, et cetera, to kind of where I am now, I've definitely like had a huge amount of learning in terms of just how to work with people and, and

And, you know, I think that's like a general thing. I think another thing is the more I've worked on building things and, you know, as over my career, I don't know, I probably helped build, you know, 30, 40, 50 products, a lot of different products, a lot of them fail. So I think another major thing that, you know, I think early on, like there's a sense of like, you know, if this thing doesn't work, I'm a failure and you hold this kind of emotional baggage and stuff. And it's like failure is actually good.

you know, as long as you can quickly learn from that. So sort of planning for failure is also a really important, you know, lesson. And maybe the third thing, which I wish I had known is really about the importance of values and

And the importance of having values that our people are kind of held to. And again, like I think that the earlier stages of my career, I think the energy is like it's this all in energy and you're, you know, you're not thinking in a maybe a disciplined way about anything.

Like what it is you want from the people that you have around you, what kind of value system that you want to have. But I actually think like having a really strong value system and really making that a core part of like who your company becomes. Like I think of a company as an organism or, you know, whether it's a protocol project that's open source or an actual company company, like everything.

Like, you know, the kind of character of the people and the DNA that's expressed in these values actually has a huge impact on how your kind of corporate form or organism, you know, works and grows. Anyway, those are just like a few high-level things. And there's a very long list of things that I wish I had known, but I've come to appreciate. Yeah.

for sure. All three of those are great. Do you remember any like story or aha moment that goes along with any one of those three different priorities or learning lessons that you brought to the table? Yeah. You know, I mean, just like take one of the last ones, right? I think I have been burned many, many times by kind of, there's sort of a philosophy that is an alternative philosophy, which is sort of kind of, you know, skill trumps culture or culture trumps skill.

And there's sort of this philosophy of like, well, this person's really a dick and they're just an asshole, but God, they're really smart and they do stuff. I've been tricked by that philosophy and I've been burned by that many times because even though you might have someone who's like really, really brilliant, but they're just a complete ass.

And you're like, if you have people who are complete assholes, like, I'm sorry, it just takes you down. So I've dealt with that. And, you know, I think that that kind of thing, you know, sometimes it's hard to interview for that always. You might have an intuition like, I'm not so sure, but God, they're really smart. And then you kind of get into the actual working relationship and you just start, you know, having complaint after complaint or other things or you're dealing with that. And, you know, this is actually another lesson I've learned, which is hire slow, fire fast. Yeah.

So, you know, take your time and be deliberate about hiring because it's a major thing. But if you get it wrong and you figure that out, like, take care of that. Like, just take care of that. Because, again, in the organism metaphor, right, if you let that virus in, right, it will infect. Right. And it will have that impact and that impact.

The cost of that on morale, on effectiveness and other is really, really high. So that's something like that sort of fits within those lessons that's there. And then I think on the kind of fail fast philosophy, I mean, I cannot tell you how many times, you know, there are sacred cows in

And, you know, there's like maybe the founder's really passionate about this idea they have and we're going to do this. We're going to keep pushing on it. But the data just tells you something completely opposite. It's just not working. And there's like a kind of like blind faith that can happen. Like we'll eventually figure this out.

But then the rest of the organization knows like this is not working. Like this product is not working. And like there's competitors that are crushing us or like the amount of capital that's going to be needed is too much or we're just spread too thin and like we're just not focused enough. And like that kind of thing is really common, extremely common. And I think you just have to be willing to like cut your losses and

you know what, just realize like it's not the time for that. You might actually come back to something later. Like that's happened as well in my own careers, like building something and then being like, you know what, even though we've put millions of dollars into this or we've pushed on this really hard, it's not the right time. And so a lot of times,

The outside world will look at like you shut down a product or whatever you sold off a business or whatever that is. And they'll say, oh, look at that. That company's failing. Actually, they're wrong. I think Circle's been a huge demonstrator of this. Like we've tried a lot of things. We've built a lot of things. We've built things. We've bought things. We've sold things. We've shut things down. We've built things up. We've done a lot of things.

And actually, that's a sign of, I think, a healthy organization that you can actually just make those hard decisions and cut things off and realize that for the people who have a vested interest in it or really passionate about it or the actual employees that are working on it,

You know, like they'll be happier if they're moving on and working on something that is part of a winning team or like something that is getting the whole attention of an organization. And so you can actually improve morale by making those hard choices. Yeah, I'm getting a lot of priority from you about just like the health of the system that you're talking about the company as an organism. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I'm guessing Circle has a sufficiently large number of employees that you have no longer hired all of them.

I think you've probably delegated off that role to somebody else. Can you talk about when that choice was made to like, when you decided to not be in charge of hiring every single person and like bestowing that trust on somebody else or a few people? Like, how did you know the time was right? How did you know you needed to do that? And how did you actually feel like making that call to trust somebody else to do the hiring, which is like putting like different DNA into the company? Yeah, that's a great question. And so if I think about the kind of current growth cycle that circles in,

And about four years ago, we had 60 people. And now we have almost 1,000 people. And we went from like 60 to 120 to like 240 to like 400 to 800. And now we're almost 1,000, right? So there's been a lot of growth every year. And-

I think, you know, when we were 60 people, and that was actually after we had gone through like the last major rally and we had a number of other products, we had gotten as high as 400 or 450 in an earlier version of Circle. And then we like sold off businesses, restructured, spun out companies, and like got down to 60. So it was like, you know, quite a shift.

I think, you know, during that, like when we were 60 and we were hiring people, I met everyone. Like I met everyone that we were going to hire. Up to 60, wow. Well, when we were 60, when we had gone up to 400 and some, I had not been involved in hiring every person, right? There was a certain point where that dropped off. But if you take this current cycle that we're in, when we were 60 and we were hiring, I was meeting every person for sure. And actually it was at that time that, you know, my chief operating officer, Elizabeth and I, like we really doubled down hard on our values and

And we like really pushed, like, we have to know that the people we're hiring, like hold these values, right. And can do that. And so you had to be super, super close to it because you're, you want to make sure the DNA of the organism in that metaphor, right. Is in fact happening and thriving. And so like that very hands-on take was really key. Yeah.

And then I would say probably above 100 is when I started to delegate more. But I had a lot of awareness. I wanted to know, like, who's in the pipeline? Who are the top candidates? Why are you focused on this person, et cetera? And I would always basically offer to a hiring manager, like, I will be involved in any recruiting that you ever want me in. And it's still the case. If there's a single manager in Circle that wants my help talking with someone, I'm going

or wants my view, like I'll do it. I'll make it a priority. I'll make it a priority the same day if they want me to talk to that person the same day. That's really important. But I would say like during the scaling that we've done, the rapid scaling that we've done over the past few years,

You know, in that kind of hire slow, fire fast philosophy, I spent a huge amount of time hiring the executives into the roles that they're in, like my CTO, my chief product officer, my CFO, you know, lots of these roles. I spent a huge amount of time figuring out, like, who are these people and.

and really making sure that like the fit was deeply strong and that these were people who like I would trust to build teams. And in fact, I was hiring them to go from, you know, a small organization like our say our risk and compliance organization, you know, and scale it into, you know, hundreds of people and like know that they know how to do that and that they bring those values in. And so I think now like I'm at a point where I will definitely be involved in hiring people

of any leader in the company, like, you know, any leader in any major role, like I want to be involved, but like, I feel so much more confident now that like, we've got

a foundation that we can really scale with. And I think if you talk to people who work here, you'll hear pretty consistently about the values that the company has and how those show up for people and what it's like to kind of work within that. So Jeremy, most of the entrepreneurs that I'm going to have on this podcast, I will only be able to ask this question once to them, but I'm going to ask you this question twice because this is the question of what do you have for aspiring young entrepreneurs? But since you've built companies outside of crypto and inside of crypto,

So I'm hoping to get your perspective on building companies in both of those contexts. So generally, like what advice do you have for young entrepreneurs? And when you add crypto to that sentence, does anything change? Do you have any like advice specifically for the crypto context as well? Yeah, you know, they kind of build on each other. Like, I think generally as an entrepreneur, like one of the things that you have to be kind of eyes wide open on is that basically everyone's going to tell you that you're wrong. Everyone's going to tell you like you're nuts.

going to always be asking you skeptical questions like, I don't know, isn't that problem solved? Why would anyone need that? Being an entrepreneur is really lonely because you're doing something and there's...

for whatever reason in society or in business or in the media, there's like an inherent skepticism about anything new. There's also a fascination with the new. So it's multifaceted. I don't want to paint like a totally black and white picture, but new, it's weird. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But like one of the interesting things with like PR, actually, if you look at PR is that like early stage startups find it really not easy, but like there's,

You get a good VC round and you got a news story and it's amazing and someone's covering you. But then you go into this long period where no one actually really cares because you're not scaled, you're not at scale, you don't have huge product market fit. Then they ignore you. That's a very lonely time, is that period.

And so I think the advice is kind of like, you know, you better have like really deep personal conviction about what it is that you're doing because you're going to face skepticism every single day. You're going to find it, you know, in most cases, really, really hard to like raise the money that you need over and over again. Like that's hard because like generally people say no. And so you have to like accept a lot of rejection. You're going to have a lot of people who join and then they're going to quit and

And you're going to take it really personally. You're going to be like, oh my God, they don't like me. They don't like this. I'm a failure. Like there's like a lot of these personal narratives that go on that are hard. And so, you know, you have to just also realize, and this is, I think, an important lesson that I also think I've learned over the years, which is like,

That founder passion and that like vision and like driving that, that lasts. Like that's a very lasting thing that you can hang on to and build. There will be many, many people, including people who are really key people that you hire who sit right next to you who are going to quit.

And that doesn't matter. Like an institution as you build it and so on, like it outlasts anyone. And ultimately it outlasts the founders as well, depending on what you're building and how large it gets. But like, I think that's also a thing that I have learned is that like, you know, there's like a heavy heart when it comes to like people coming and going. And I think that's in some ways important.

It's valuable because you want to feel empathy and you want to have connection, but also you have to kind of be steely eyed about it and just be like, you know what, just going to keep going. And like the organization reconfigures and you keep going. And so that's also something that I've definitely felt. So I think like that's like a general comment is like you have to kind of hold on.

in that way as a founder and realize those things. And I think for crypto, it's even harder. I mean, basically, like you're asking for punishment, right? Because, you know, like literally, like if you think, you know, I'm starting a, you know, a social media startup that's going to do, I don't know, whatever, like some e-commerce sharing or whatever the hell it is, right? Like people would be like, yeah, okay. I kind of know what that is. But if you're doing something in crypto, like the skepticism just like comes on even harder. Yeah.

Right. And so I think as a crypto founder, like there's like all this explaining that you have to do and people don't get it. And like, you know, because as a technology, this is a technology, it's a very powerful technology. It's also a technology that is aggressively abused by criminals and bad actors and terrorists and like all this bad stuff. It is. It's like a new technology that's abused. Right.

Just like a lot of new technologies are abused. But I think, like, that has become such a go-to thing that, like, you know, you're sort of guilt by association. And so I think in crypto, as a crypto founder, you have to explain more and you have to educate more. I just think that, you know, again, that's hard, but I'm writing a series of posts on X and on Flycaster and Flycaster.

Like, they're sort of why I'm bullish about crypto right now. And there's, like, tons of reasons. And one of the reasons I was writing about was that the community of builders, that the people who are, like, working on all of this, like, they have such fire in their belly and, like, all really deeply believe that they're, like, change agents on a global scale and really going to be impactful. And this isn't just a business. This isn't just about making money. It's, like, really, really trying to upgrade people.

the economic infrastructure of the world. And people believe that and they feel it. And so there's like an energy there. And so what I would say also, you know, and this is not even advice to crypto founders. Just what I observe when I'm out there is that crypto founders are very unique relative to a lot of entrepreneurs because there is this level of conviction that it just runs very, very deep. And so I'm personally just super grateful to be able to be in this community of entrepreneurs as well. Jeremy, thank you so much. Thank you.

Bankless Nation, I'm here with Anatoly Yakovenko of Solana. Anatoly, you have been through quite a lot in the Solana arc. I've also just learned you've also been doing everything that you've been doing with Solana while also juggling three kids. How do you do it, my man? Um...

Well, the kids like help you focus, which is surprising. Like you have so little time that any moment that you spend on work or whatever, you're like, I have to be doing something really, really important or else why am I doing it? So that it's, I think actually like a net gain, surprisingly, if you have a family and like kids, um,

You're so busy that you have to be good at prioritizing. Do you recommend this life for everyone? No, it's painful, but existence is painful in general. If you subscribe to that philosophy, you can do it.

It's not so bad. What else are you going to be doing? When you started building Solana, did you know that it was going to turn into just like this multi-billion dollar ecosystem? And was that what you wanted in the first place?

No, like I think I just wanted it to survive. And this kind of like, you know, like you kind of feel like a wounded animal like the whole time as soon as you're a startup. If you're not, I think you've raised too much money and you lack focus, right? But a proper startup is always starving and is always just trying to survive, I think.

Paul Graham has written quite a bit about us, is that the companies that succeed are the ones that somehow survive, despite all odds. So I think it's in that moment as you're grinding, you're never really thinking about some magical success story where everything is like 100 times bigger. You're just thinking about what's going to kill us in the next six months and how do you avoid it. Yeah.

How long did that phase like last? Is it still like it to this day? Do you still think in that mentality? Because like, I don't think Solana is going to die in six months. But like, do you still think like that?

I would say up until like six months ago. I think I've made this joke before, but like, yeah, like you, I don't know. I think maybe part of the survivor bias too, maybe some of the founders that have that like anxiety, I'm like, how do I avoid it? Maybe that's a part of it and that never goes away. That's born here to the person. I don't know. Yeah.

So the Solana ecosystem, I would say, is now self-sustaining. It is now a point of critical mass where there is a community. The community is helping itself. It's not routing through the Solana Foundation. It's kind of got a mind of its own. What did it take to get there? What was that journey like? It was a shared trauma experience that got us there. Yeah.

There's two things I think that we got lucky with in building things differently than other ecosystems. One is that, when I, again, tell the story, like I just didn't raise enough money to build a fast EVM. And the logical thing to do when you're building an ecosystem is to kind of look where the vast majority of the devs and kind of target them. But...

Given the resources that we had, that was going to take too much work. And you kind of look at Monad and how long and how much they've invested into optimizing EVM. That's what I imagined it was going to take. So I was like, okay, let's not do that. Let's take something very small and niche, but that we know is going to be fast and ship that. And that gave us...

I guess if I'm giving advice to a builder, think of it as like an impressionist painting. Like there's one spot in the painting that's the focal point that is almost perfect and photorealistic and draws the eye and the artist really, really nailed it. And the rest is brush strokes kind of slopped on. But

gives you, that your brain fills out the rest. We were lucky enough to have built that very, very niche spot that was really, really good and, you know, like really inspired a whole bunch of devs to go jump over all the slop that was fast brushstrokes painted on to take advantage of that that was different and unique. So, yeah.

That was not strategy. It was simply limited resources. And I think startups that do have limited resources kind of almost tend to do better than those with unlimited ones, probably because of that focus is forced, you know, is a really good forcing function. So that was like lucky. The second part was that we had a lot of just shared trauma through the ups and downs of Solana, right? Like the FTX collapse and stuff like that. And, yeah,

The devs that kind of stuck around, it's almost like the purge. You get a purge and you have a core that is even harder and more hardcore and more resilient. And that builds... If it doesn't kill you, it is a good experience that will strengthen the bonds between all the builders. So that works out. But never would I have thought or wanted or wished this on anyone else. Yeah.

How do you balance between this idea of like a playbook? Like there are certainly playbooks out there. There's like the foundation playbook. There's like Twitter marketing, the playbook where it's just like kind of a formula. And then there's an idea of just like growth and development that like you just kind of figure out as you go. Like how do you balance between these two things? Because obviously you have to have a little bit of both, right? Like some things are just a science, but if you follow other people's science, then you'll never actually create anything new. How do you balance between these two things?

It's a lot of stuff that people kind of like repeat in a lot of founder books. You know, what is the vision that's kind of the guiding light that everyone's building towards? And it's something that is on the horizon and everyone's striving for. And there's a lot of kind of like intermediate steps that you have to take.

that are very practical and block and tackle and stuff like that so do you like repeat the vision as a mantra you know like consensus at the speed of light or whatever increase bandwidth reduce latency or like you know like the silly things that i say on twitter to get everyone to understand that like focus your energy onto this thing and then there's a lot of like

simple things where like if you're launching a product during a hackathon make sure you have a Twitter account and you do leaderboards and stuff like that and onboard people and try to talk to them and that kind of advice like you should

just kind of listen and try stuff. You should always try to think about what you're doing there because the worst thing you can do is just do nothing. But if you take the time and try to have a plan, like the plan is not going to work, but the planning lets you kind of like iterate and move fast and actually realize what's working and where you get traction and put more resources there. So I think the stuff that people feel like, oh, they're just copying this playbook or whatever,

It's obvious. There's no secret innovative playbook. It's just stuff that people have tried and got to work. Everyone should be doing it, but it's not a... The key part there is you need an engaged founder that is trying to understand how they're communicating to the users that they're trying to onboard and see if our stuff is...

falling apart or not and like iterate and adjust that message. If you like hand it off to like a consultant team that says, are we going to run this playbook for you? It's going to be a disaster like that, no matter how good this external team is, because they don't understand like that vision and insight that the founder has in their head and how to get like through all 100 different steps to get there. So like,

This is kind of, I would say, like if you're a first-time founder and you're building a company, the key part here is that you're engaged in that first cycle and trying to get the message out and onboard your first users because you're the only one that knows, really understands that vision. Everyone else could be repeating it a hundred times, but they don't truly get it as much as the founder and they don't see all the steps to get there. But the playbooks are like,

There's no magic there. If there was, everyone would be copying it already. I don't think leaderboards or something like that are super innovative.

When you're talking to startups, first-time founders that are building on Solana, what's the bit of advice that you frequently find yourself giving over and over and over again? That impressionist painting, another analogy I've heard is great products are like black licorice, is that most people don't like them, but there's a small group of community that loves it and is willing to...

jump over hurdles to get to it. So those are the products that usually have legs and stickiness. You never know the time. A lot of stuff in the world's

can change, that can dramatically change the total addressable market by a factor of 100 up or down at any given moment. That's really unpredictable. But as a founder, you can identify power users and super users. 10, 20 super users is awesome. For like a seed stage first time product, if you can get 20 people that use your product daily and love it,

like work with them like talk to them like iterate like really really like hone in on like what they love about it and try to understand it and like kind of iterate with them and then the stuff that's unpredictable is that somehow you get lucky and you've hit that bullseye where the total addressable market is large and as you're iterating things go viral and it blows up but like that part is unpredictable and

No founder can really fault themselves for not catching that if they did the 20 users right and got awesome product just built for those users at least. What was the first amazing hire that you made? And what about them was so amazing? I got lucky with hiring because the thing that I was building was just something that I worked on for almost two decades as a professional engineer. So

My first hire was literally my boss from Qualcomm that was like my principal engineer that like taught me almost everything I know about how to design operating systems and stuff like that. I was able to like,

He was on his way to retirement, and I was like, you got to do this. We're putting the band back together. You've got a few more years of pushing code left in you. I was able to get some really, really good folks out of Qualcomm to go build this with me. I think...

Another lucky thing, Raj is not a hire, he's a co-founder, was just meeting Raj through a mutual friend. When I quit my job, I already had kids. My wife had an awesome job. She was working and was able to support us. I was in the Bay Area and I gave myself six months. Either you raise money and you get a team together and this thing gets going or you go back to full-time work because you have to support your family and stuff.

Being in the Bay Area gives you that opportunity because there's so many companies that if you're a good engineer, you can always find work as an IC. So having a spouse that has a tech job, that gives you that flexibility too. Because I had the six months gap, I was just like, "I'm going to pull in everybody I know." Everyone that would say yes could join. I was lucky enough that my closest friends trusted me enough to go do this.

And like we're compiler, like expert GPU expert, like folks like that. And like I randomly met Raj through a mutual friend, um,

And he seemed awesome. And I was like, dude, you got to go build this thing with me. And he said, okay, I'll give you six months to go help you raise and we'll see what happens. The thing is, there was no interview process. There wasn't a way to vet a co-founder. You just kind of have to trust somebody. And because time was such a constraint for me and family and all this other stuff that it was just like...

throwing darts at a board and I just happened to get lucky with a really, really good co-founder. I don't know how to like, how do you manufacture that? Like, I think, yeah. How do you manufacture luck? Why do you and Raj work so well together? What strengths does he have that you don't and vice versa? This is like, people have talked about founder mode. What founder mode meant to me was that

It's easier with engineering because things tend to get logical. But like when you have a lot of options and you don't know what to do, you can argue them to the point where you whittle down to the options that are Pareto efficient. Like I can argue with Raj and if he's willing to argue back with me, we're having a healthy discussion and we get to the point where like,

We've exhausted the arguments and it doesn't matter what you pick. Yeah, both are good. Yeah, right. The two options are left. They're both like, okay, we've eliminated every possible way, every alternative. These two things, whether you do it or you don't do it, it makes no difference. And that...

Process is exhausting, and he was willing to go do this with me. That's what made him a good co-founder. So he was willing to grind through the really, really hard decisions and through all of this stuff until we got to a kernel of truth where like, okay, it doesn't matter what

if we do A or B, but like we at least know that these are good enough. And Tony, any last bits of advice for the aspiring young potential founder out there? Should they even do it at all? What bits of advice do you have? Like I had a side project that always wanted to like start a company and raise money and stuff. It is an awesome experience and amazing and like exhausting. So I would definitely recommend doing it. And like,

If you're an engineer and I see that codes, you're kind of in a blessed position to be able to do this because...

The reason to do it is when you know you can build the whole thing. And the only reason you're raising is that you're just trying to speed it up and hand off work to people that can help you get it done. If you have that idea and you know you can just build the whole thing and you love this product and it's just everything is like obsessive, you're cussing with it and you're really trying to push it through, it's definitely worthwhile to go try it and give it a shot. So yeah,

It's exhausting, but I think the world moves in spurts driven by people with that kind of energy, just pushing stuff forward. So you got to do it. Antoine, thank you so much. For sure. Cheers. Cheers.

Bankless Station, I'm here with Stani Kulikov, the creator of Aave and Lens. After pivoting ETHLend into Aave in 2018, Aave now has over $12 billion in TVL, and it's perhaps Ethereum's largest application. And if that wasn't enough, Stani has also been leading the effort behind on-chain social networks with Lens, making him a two-time successful entrepreneur in crypto, which also makes him a verified crazy person. Stani.

Welcome to Bankless. Thanks, David, for having me here. And such an honor to be again. And we're quite old friends. Yeah. Stani, tell me about the moment that you knew that you wanted to become a builder. Was that before crypto, entering crypto from a very young age? How did you know that building was in your DNA? I started very early.

Essentially, my brother used to program on more of like a Linux operation system level. And I picked up essentially because we shared the computer. I was very young. I started to write in PHP and down the line later in Ruby on Rails and getting more excited about web applications during kind of like a web 2.0 boom. So it was in early teen years. I just liked the idea of

creating something technically useful and seeing other people to use it and also like doing it globally. So being able to like internet enabled building for everyone across the world, as long as people have a internet connection. So I think it was very early in my teen years that

that I wanted to create something. But creating something and building a product and leading a team are also different things. There's a lot of solo hackers out there who love creating software, but the difference between a hacker and a unicorn is also very different. When did you decide to build a product? Was there a spark? Was there a moment? And how did that go? Yeah, regarding building an actual product, so to build a product, it's important to understand first

what products essentially mean. So it's something that...

You build something that has demand, either utility or either some sort of other factor why people want to use it. And it actually has a quality factor that makes it to stand out for people to actually pay for that. And that's essentially what a product is. So realizing that helps you actually get there. I realized first time that I wanted to create product where during the Atlanta, I realized that this is something that people actually see as useful and

being able to earn yield on the blockchain, being able to borrow against your cryptographic assets, and also being able to build interesting things and expand the whole ecosystem. And I think at that point when I realized that

people actually don't see this only as a toy or a tool, but something they actually spend a lot of and invest a lot of time into using, I realized that this is actually becoming a more product to me. And then with our team, we started to actually build towards direction, what could be the best possible experience and best possible outcome for the user, and doing it as

as high quality as possible. In DeFi, the quality essentially means doing things securely, having a smooth experience, and being available to as many users as possible. And I actually, David, think that the product is never finished. I think we at Aave, for example, we satisfied the needs of people who are early in DeFi, are experimenting with the technology and using DeFi.

But there is actually a way, way more bigger pie of users that don't really know that DeFi exists. So we have a product, but we don't have a good enough product to actually attract customers

more users outside of the existing space. And that's where we're actually focusing on. I think, Sani, when you started off your journey building Aave, you started off more on the hacker, developer, engineer side of things, and over time, like had to lean into product skills. Did you learn that products came naturally to you? Was that a hard thing to learn? How did you learn how to be a product person? I find being good at product

incredibly difficult because essentially you have to do a couple of things and spend a lot of time on those things. So one is talking to the people that are constantly using your product or even like not constantly but even like frequently and also talking to people that are

are not using your product. And important there is to actually understand reasons why and why not, and things they like and don't like, and actually understand their user stories, their backgrounds, and then putting that into a bigger set of data, and then analyzing and trying to build

upon features or directing the product to that way that it actually captures a lot of these points. So that's basically what is important. And I think doing that organically is really difficult because first of all, it's very hard to hear feedback, whatever it is on the product side. And what really helps, especially in case of like Aave or Lens is that I use these products myself

ongoing basis so I essentially think also about products in a way that I build them for myself so

So when I master the product itself and I know what's best for me, it might be best for a few other people. And then I try to go outside of that kind of like own bubble and try to understand how other people are using with different profiles our products and also how we can reach the audiences that we don't have as customers at the moment. So it doesn't necessarily come organically, but the fact that you're using your products yourself

actually helps to get there at the first steps. And the next steps is to reach out to people that have different backgrounds and they use the product for different reasons than you might be using it. So Stani, you've been a leader for like eight years now. What advice would you like to go back to young Stani with and tell him back at year zero and year one? What's the advice that you would like to have learned all the way back then? Yeah, probably the most biggest one is that it really takes time to build something

really useful and getting it to a quality that is something that you can distribute.

So I, naively, when I started building, you know, I was always thinking that, you know, I'm going to try something and build something for now and see, like, if it gets traction for the next few months. And if not, maybe I will build something else. But what I've realized over the years is that if you have something really useful and there is that demand, actually building and scaling that product will take time. So mastering the art of product building

It's a really long game and it requires pretty much a full of your investment. Sometimes it actually means that you have to sacrifice maybe some other parts of your life for that moment that you want to really get a product right. And the second thing is that I will guide that a product is never finished.

So whenever essentially it feels that we have something really good and we have traction, that doesn't necessarily mean that your work might stop there because end of the day, that's just getting to a next chapter of that product development. So it's important to constantly trying to understand how to make your product better and how to get a better distribution to new audiences. I think those are the things. And obviously,

Last thing I would say to myself and everyone else is that taking risks and bets is a really healthy thing to do. So just like if you have a gut feeling that some new thing might work, betting on that might be very interesting in your product. Not necessarily jumping from one product to another, but actually thinking like you might have a conviction of something you want to try, you should try it because that conviction

helps you to understand what people might feel about it and calibrate what you're doing. What about when it comes to team management? I don't know how large the Aave companies are now, but I would imagine it grew past Dunbar's number or at least past like 40 or 50, like a long time ago. When did you learn about delegation? How did that go for you? And what did you learn about yourself as you were going through that process?

Yeah, delegation is really hard and organizational design especially is really a difficult area and something that also I struggle as well. It's not something that is really easy to manage, but I would say that

most important is that, especially when you're starting up, keeping it as lean as possible and trying not to hire too many people. In fact, this usually happens through different kinds of events like fundraisings and so forth. And I think especially in our space, we tend to kind of have an approach where you want to hire leadership and you want to hire teams, dedicated teams to different sectors from like growth, engineering, product and whatnot.

But it's all, in most cases, very premature, in my opinion, because end of the day, before you have actually a revenue recurring business, maybe you don't need yet, for example, anyone on the growth side. Maybe you don't need...

any marketing at that point. Maybe you just need to be pretty much product engineering driven until actually you hit a point where your product has good usage and it can actually build revenue. And I think that's the biggest mistake everyone does, and including me, in getting away from that. Avara itself is

quite lean. I mean, we're 70 team members across multiple products. So it's quite lean if you look at all the things we do at the moment. And I personally, I work with every single person in the company and that's why I want to keep it lean because at that point I can go to an engineer and talk about, for example, a new interest rate strategy that we are implementing or new liquidation

strategy or engine that we're implementing. Or for example, on Lens side, a new feature we're essentially building. Or it might be something related to back office as well. So that's kind of like my type of working. So I want to be as

I wouldn't even call it flat, but just working directly with the talent. And I try to also invest in people. So that's one of the important things I learned is that the more you invest in people and culture, the more it actually pays off. And the more you can delegate because you have more trust in people doing certain things a certain way, and you can ensure that it's done with the culture that you've established. So

So I think that's the kind of like basis I have for delegation. As Aave has grown, what are some of the activities or behaviors that you've spent time on unexpectedly? Things that you didn't know that you were going to have to do, but then ultimately became like pretty important to your job and to the effort? I think talking to maybe different stakeholders or different people inside of the community, outside, that aren't necessarily related to your product,

And you kind of feel that you don't really want to spend time on because every second you spend on the product gets you into a better place. But I think Aave is also building not just a product, but technology. And what I mean about that is that it's something new that you can actually build upon. But as a technology, it also means that there's uncertainty whether the technology itself gets developed.

adopted or accepted publicly. So I do spend some amount of time, for example, talking to different governmental agencies. I talk to institutions that are looking into, for example, DeFi, but aren't really doing anything yet, but could be potentially using in the future something like Aave as a protocol and integrating that to their own backend.

And why I think it's important is that you kind of like have to also participate and contribute in those discussions without sacrificing what's the most important for you, which is essentially the product and the users and being able to get better at things.

Stani, this has been great. Any last bits of just general advice that we weren't able to touch on yet in this conversation for builders who are perhaps timid to build but are still interested in? What advice do you have for the marginal builder out there? I think just starting from taking risks and the best risk is just starting and building and

A nice part is also starting a side project that can become something in the future or just taking a risk and building something and getting feedback. And I'm quite open to discussions. And so if you want to brainstorm, you can send me a DM and happy to help there. But essentially, it all comes and boils down to actually taking risks. And sometimes it might be not the case that you...

want to take risks at the moment, but you can also become a founder down the line in the future. And life is long, so there's always a moment for that as well. Sani, thank you so much. Thank you, David.

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Hey, good to see you. Yeah.

I mean, technically, you could call it the third because I had a payment gateway that like, you know, that was my first crypto thing where we're working with all of the Bitcoin brokerages in Australia to allow people to put cash into. Right. And that was before Haven, right? That was before Haven. Yeah, that was like 2014. Okay, so third. Okay, so even more crazy. Yeah, even more crazy. That one, you know, it was more of a traditional startup, though, like investors aboard all of that stuff. This is my second decentralized project.

I guess, right? So yeah, definitely insane. What keeps you going? What about the crypto founder itch? Why do you keep scratching it? I mean, with Infinex, I think I felt like there was this thing that was not done. And I really needed to sort of test out this hypothesis that I had around UX. You know, we built such amazing infrastructure in DeFi and on-chain infrastructure in the last like five years. And I think

But we were struggling to get traction compared to CeFi. And so I just had this idea. I was like, you know, if we build UX first, like if that's our starting point, like I know how to build infrastructure, but if we can start from the UX layer and build down, maybe we can bridge some of that gap. And so I really wanted to kind of

challenge that thesis and see whether it was actually real. So you have three startups. I'm assuming each one is bringing its own lessons to you. Which one has brought the most lessons to you? And what are some of those lessons? I think Haven slash Synthetics, right, is where I learned the most. You know, I was a startup guy from like 2001 was the first startup that I joined or 2000. Actually, I joined a startup in Seattle, you know, a payment.

startup in the first dot-com boom. I learned a lot from a lot of different startups. One of the interesting things, I guess, with synthetics, though, was learning how to build a decentralized

project, right? Like how to build a community and decentralized governance. Everything that I'd done before that had been a company. It was a private company with directors and equity and then the synthetics kind of journey and learning how to, we shut down all of our entities, we fully decentralized governance, we handed control of the community to a decentralized council, like working through that

novel coordination around decentralized governance was probably the thing that was the most challenging for me, handing over power and working out how to operate within that kind of environment. The fact that you needed to do that, was that obvious from the start? Was that something that you kind of stumbled upon? What was some of your thought process as this idea about needing to decentralize synthetics? What were some of the thoughts going through your brain at the time? Yeah, it's interesting because we took this, I guess, very pragmatic approach, right? Like,

Having been multiple time founder when I turned up, right, my view was it's impossible to know how things are going to play out. No one has ever turned up with a startup and been like, I'm going to do these five steps and, you know, it's just going to play out exactly like that. That's not how startups work. There's a lot of uncertainty and, you know, you're operating in an environment of imperfect information. So I took this very pragmatic view of let's build iteratively and like deliver something and then implement

iterate on it. And in order to do that, we needed to have contracts that were upgradable. And back in 2018, that was not acceptable, right? Blasphemy, yeah. And it was crazy, right? There's this old Reddit thread where people are just like absolutely shitting all over Haven. This is the worst thing I've ever seen. These guys are monsters. Like, it's really crazy. Like, it was an ideological, like, you know, sticking point. And what that...

sort of made me realize is, okay, if we're going to do it this way, if we are going to build this iterative thing and not use immutable contracts and not, you know, just deploy something and walk away from it, then we have sort of a higher bar that we need to reach in terms of sort of credible neutrality, right? It can't be owned by a single person or controlled by a single person. You can't have a benevolent dictator, right? If you're going to have this platform, it really needs to be owned and governed by the community.

And so that kind of forced us down this path of like, how do we give control to the community in a sane and safe way? And so that kind of learning experience of like how to hand over governance. And we started with really dumb stuff like Discord emoji votes, right? That was our initial governance framework, right? And then it evolved from there. And as new infrastructure emerged, things like Snapshot and multi-sigs and a bunch of other infra that was invented there.

between 2018 and today, we were able to go down that journey of handing it over to the community. And now it genuinely is controlled by the community. There's a very robust decentralized governance framework that governs synthetics. And no one person or entity really has control over it, which is

It's pretty amazing. It took a long time to get there and a lot of iterating, but it just operates now. And I think even Synthetix kind of blazed that trail for others to follow. It was, I'm sure, a long winding path to go from emoji governance votes to the Spartan Council, where Synthetix is today.

Can you just talk about like, what did it take to get there? We can talk about like the strategy, but I want to zoom out even higher than that. As like a founder going through this process that you were inventing for the first time, discovering for the first time, like, what did it take? Like, was this confusing for you? Like, how did you problem solve? Who did you have to rely on? Any more just like color or illustration about that process? I think.

Something that occurred to me a couple of years into the journey, right? I'd been saying for so long how much I realized and how critical it was to hand over power that I kind of psyops myself into thinking that it was what I wanted, right?

But actually, it's not in my nature, right? Like, I like to be in control of things. I'm a very sort of controlling person. I like to sort of have control of my environment, to be able to dictate what I do and how I do it and why. It's one of the things that I think is so powerful about crypto is this idea that, you know, everyone has this self-determination, right? The right to kind of determine how they will interact with things and, you know, how they, you know, go about coordinating themselves in a broader group of people, right?

And so I spent so long psyopsing myself into thinking that like, no, no, I like giving up power, right? Like this is a good thing. And then like it was a couple of years in that one of the early synthetics contributors was like,

You keep saying this, like, this is not you, right? And I was like, oh, wow, yeah, actually, that's a really good point. And I think that it was absolutely a lesson in like startup life that sometimes you have to do things that are uncomfortable. And if you can find a way to kind of psyops yourself into thinking that it is comfortable, it's much easier to do it, right?

And so, you know, I had this kind of realization that actually, I really would have preferred if it was a benevolent dictatorship for all time, right? And I didn't have to give up power. At the end of the day, though, it's far better off for having done that. So the fact that I was able to convince myself that it was good for me and good for everyone, you know, I think,

worked out well in the end. I think this kind of sounds like a psychological trick of like, there's the hard thing and you psyop yourself into like thinking that the hard thing is actually the thing you want to do and it's actually the easy thing. I mean, that's startup life, right?

right? Like, no one would start anything if they realized how hard it was, right? And yet, like, this is the funny thing as well, right? Like, once you've done one startup, you know how hard it is. It's like having, you know, kids, right? Like, my wife says this, right? Like, you know, six months after you have the baby, you sort of forget the hard parts of being pregnant and, you know, giving birth and all of that sort of stuff. And you start thinking, like, another baby sounds pretty good. And it's like,

What's going on psychologically that you can convince yourself that that was not this really horrendously difficult thing that you did and that actually it was fun and it was fine? There's definitely some psyops in that process. Obviously, startups are not quite as extreme as that, but it definitely can impact your life in a similar way.

What would you tell yourself, the version of Cain that hadn't started synthetics, what would you go back and tell yourself just to make life a little bit easier or give yourself a break? I think that I got really caught up in feeling like...

an outsider in crypto. I built this thing. Australia is an island, right? In a very real sense, it's very detached from the main crypto thread. And so I had people that I was connected to in the ecosystem, mainly on the Bitcoin side, right? Because we were doing a lot of Bitcoin stuff. And I really felt like when I first came into the Ethereum ecosystem, that there was this outsider status. And then I did some stuff, like not doing immutable contracts, that

made it feel even more like, oh, you're not doing the right things, right? You should be doing things differently. This is how we do things. Look at Augur. They locked themselves in a room for three years and come back with these perfect systems, right? Why aren't you doing that? And I was like, well, that's idiotic, right? That's never going to work. So that's why I'm not doing that, right? And yet there was this sense of, no, this is how we do things. And as much as the Ethereum community likes to believe that it's this

open flowers and rainbows you know come by uh you know kind of vibe they have dogma like anyone else right like there's dogma and they have the there's the correct way to be open yes you have to be open but you have to do it our way right and so you know i really struggled in the early phases feeling like haven you know and synthetics even after we pivoted couldn't

get credibility you know with this like group of people you know and so we just kind of operated on brute force and we're just like we're going to keep building we're going to keep doing stuff and eventually people will realize that we are acting in good faith and that we might have a different approach to things but that approach is valid i still feel like they're you know pockets of the ethereum community that just don't like synthetics and you know don't love but even like

I remember in the early days at like DevCon 3 having this interaction with Rune where, you know, it was quite a tense interaction where he was like, we're building a stablecoin. I was like, we're building a stablecoin, but we're doing it differently. And he was like, that's dumb. You guys have no idea what you're doing. And it's funny if I think back to that time, there were like 20 people there who were thinking about stablecoins, right? Like probably fewer, right? It was like probably like 10 people.

we were the only ones in the room and yet like it felt so tense like oh no this is so important like my way is right you know but there was actually a lot of room for a lot of different types of experiments so that was something that i think you know this idea of feeling like i needed validation from the community or something that i would say for a founder especially coming into the space now i would imagine that's present right like that's there that you know

am I doing the right thing? Like, do people think that this is a good idea? Like that kind of, you know, second guessing yourself or imposter syndrome or whatever. I just think that's normal. That's normal coming into a space that is highly developed. And even back then in 2017, where like literally nothing existed, it still felt like there was a, at that time, a very highly developed view of how things should be done. And so if you come in and try and break the meta, it's going to be painful, but it's worth experimenting. I mean,

Over the years of you building your various startups, what are some of the things that you've spent time on unexpectedly? Like things that you didn't realize you're going to have to actually spend a lot of time and resources doing, but ended up like taking a large part of your day? You know, it's interesting because

I think most of the startups that I've run have been like fewer than 30 people. You know, Synthetix even at the peak was like 28, 29 people or something like that. And now with Infinex, we have almost 40 people. It scaled up really quickly. And I think, you know, that like Dunbar's number, you know, you stay under that threshold and

You can sort of just brute force your way through things and it doesn't require a lot of management of like people and things. One thing that I found really interesting with Infinex is that there's been a lot of work and time spent on

the interpersonal coordination and cooperation in a way that we probably didn't have in some of those earlier startups. You know, it was a much smaller team. So there's something about crossing that 25, 30 person threshold where it just gets much harder. And so that's a thing that I'm learning in real time right now, how to manage that, that in the past I didn't really need to. So, you know, in terms of like, where am I spending time? I'm like, why am I spending time on

talking to Jimmy about what Billy said to him and why everything's okay. For those people who are scaling up startups that are going to have 50 or 100 people, I think that's something that I would call out. Expect to spend time and that's actually okay.

Making sure that everyone's happy and friendly with one another. And this is probably something that's different between remote first teams and, you know, teams that are in a single office, right? You know, in an office, there's a lot of room for, you know, this person doesn't clean up their coffee cup, right? And now I'm resentful. And, you know, why did they get to do this? Whereas like remote...

There's less of that interpersonal conflict, but I think it's a good trade in my mind. So expect to spend time on dumb human interactions. Yeah, that's certainly been a theme throughout some of these interviews that I've done. I remember hearing Brian Armstrong tell the story like the early days of Coinbase where he was talking to some of his first investors and his investors were saying, hey, what do you spend most of your time on? He goes like, oh, I'm engineering. I'm like writing code.

And they said, you need to stop and you need to start hiring and you need to start hiring people to write code. And I remember that he said that that was like a flip that switch in his brain where he's like, okay, I need to scale Coinbase. I need to hire people out to do the dirty work. But I think a lot of...

founders start their company doing the heavy lifting and making that choice of when to actually being the talent versus managing the people. When you decide to be type A versus type B and flip into like founder operator mode is like a little bit of an art thing.

Because you can't do it too soon, but you also can't do it too late either. Yeah, it is a very tough one. And, you know, the way I see my role and, you know, even how I started with Infinex, right? Like, I didn't start doing things. I've learned that lesson now, right? So this was the first startup where I started in that role of, like, more managing and coordinating and trying to... And this is the one piece of advice that I think that I, you know, always give to founders that, you know, I speak to is this...

this idea of like questioning assumptions, right? There's so many things that are happening in a startup. You know, there's so much chaos, you know, this imperfect information environment that it's very easy psychologically, right? Talking about in your psychology, right? Like it's very easy to want to lock in and be like, no, I know that the wall to the right of me is blue,

I mean, it's blue and like, I don't have to worry about that, right? Like that's something that I know, right? But if you're in an environment where colors are changing all the time and you lock into that and you're not constantly monitoring it, you can come back one day and it's red, but you have convinced yourself that it's blue and you're not looking at it, right? And so the thing that I really try to force myself to do all the time on like a daily, weekly basis is like just...

zoom out a little bit and be like, wait a second, like, let's look at this problem from first principles. Is this the right approach, right? Are we doing the right thing? And that is one of the most challenging things to do because it's just psychologically effortful. You want to have locked that in. No, I've solved that problem. I've solved that problem. I know how that works. I know this, right? And if you have to walk around questioning, like, do I really know that?

Am I certain that that is the right path? But if you can do that and you can cultivate it and let other people do things, let people get into the kind of grind of like, okay, assuming that is true, then these are the five steps that need to be done.

But if you come in, if you're trying to do that, and then in step three, also zoom out, it's very hard. So you need people who are doing things and you need to be monitoring. And this is something that I try really hard to do all the time. And even this weekend, I came in after spending the whole weekend thinking about how we've been approaching this latest campaign. And I was like, guys, I think we got this wrong.

Like we need to try something else. I don't think this is working. I think we need to, you know, so if it works and you catch something where you're like, wow, holy shit, that wall actually is red. We've been thinking it was blue for a while and it's red. It can really unlock some amazing growth because you're like, wow, like there's actually an opportunity here for us to do something differently. And we were not optimizing it. Okay. And this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for imparting your wisdom today. Amazing.

Bankless Nation, I'm here with Jason Yenowitz and Mike Ippolito of BlockWorks. BlockWorks, one of the leading news organizations that is in crypto. Jason, Michael, welcome to the show. Thank you, sir. Thanks for having us. Let's talk a little bit about BlockWorks just to kind of like lay some foundation just to give the listeners a little bit of a hint as to like who we're talking to here. I mean, talk about the founding of BlockWorks and the vision for it and the motivation for it. Jason, you want to start? Yeah, so BlockWorks is a media and information company. We've been around for going on

almost seven years. Mike and I decided to start building the company in December 2017. We quit our jobs May 2018 and officially launched the business then. The whole thesis of Blockworks, we've got a lot wrong over the years, but we've got one thing right, which was just that the thesis, which was...

Crypto would eventually become this big institutional asset class. And as that happened, the number of people who came into the industry would grow by orders of magnitude. And those people were going to demand a much higher quality level of information. So that's what BlockWorks is. We're just...

an information provider for crypto. We have everything from big network of podcasts, newsletters. We own two of the large conferences in the industry, one of which we work on with you guys called Permissionless. And then we have a research and data platform called Blockworks Research. So we think of it like the information stack. We kind of hit every layer of the information stack.

Okay, so that's the thesis, like data and information knowledge for people curious about crypto. But of course, that has probably taken some convoluted paths on the way there. So Mike, maybe you can talk about just like you had the thesis from the very beginning, but now in 2017, now 2024. How did you guys think about what like business lines that you wanted to focus on as like the crypto industry changed? Talk about just the different decisions that you guys made throughout the years. Yeah, well, maybe this can start to segue into advice for other builders, I suppose, insofar as

Jason and I have advice worth giving. But we built Blockworks actually almost the reverse of the way that most media organizations get built. Most media organizations get built by raising a little bit of money. You use that to hire creators, be that podcast hosts or journalists or newsletter writers or whatever it is. You build some amount of audience, and then a couple years in, you start thinking about how to monetize that audience. Jason and I didn't raise any money in the beginning, so we needed to make money from day one. And we actually started with the monetization, which was

the conferences, and then we built everything in reverse order. And that wasn't because Jason and I were strategic geniuses. It's frankly because we didn't know what we were doing or didn't know any better, and we needed to make money from day one. But I think that's been a consistent through line and lesson in BlockWorks is that there always has to be a mix of strategy and execution. And if you had to pick one, you'd probably pick really good execution because I think there's a bunch of different ways to skin a cat. And yeah, BlockWorks is kind of the story of

I think we've been relatively successful in a lot of the stuff that we've tried out, but I think there's really much more as a result of perseverance and grit than any sort of

genius strategy or anything like that. I think that's probably the bias that your average entrepreneur has when they come into crypto. Especially as a first-time founder, first-time entrepreneur, they're thinking like, how can I raise my first $2 million? How can I just get over to the line of raising my seed round from some VC? And there's a very low number of companies that have just not even taken that path at all. Just started with profitability and built around that. Blockworks being, I think, the biggest example of that. Is

Is that something that you guys would go back and change? Is that something that you guys have like leaned into and doubled down on and just like add more perspective onto that particular choice? I would maybe change some things about how we built the business. Like Mike said, we basically built a media company ass backwards from how you're quote unquote supposed to do it. But I would not change the fundraising. So we didn't.

raise like an outside institutional VC round for six years, right? We just bootstrapped from the beginning. I think the problem with raising at the beginning, unless you're one of the like one in a thousand outlier companies, is you have no leverage. So you're basically, if you talk to a lot of founders, it feels like they're building their company on their heels, basically, because you're essentially getting on the VC hamster wheel where you raise your seed round. You're now thinking about your series A.

And who has the leverage in your series A? The VCs who are leading your next round. You raise your series A, now you're thinking about your series B in 18 months. And who has the leverage in that game? Oftentimes the investors in the series B will have the leverage over the founder there, unless you're one of the crazy outliers. So I, yeah, we did a lot wrong, but I would not change how we capitalize the company. But it depends, David, what type of company you're building. Like if we were building a marketplace at

I don't know. If we were trying to compete with Coinbase, like you got to raise capital. You got to raise a lot of capital. So Mike was mentioning like it's an execution game. There are ideas businesses where it's based around like, can you have a smarter idea than someone else? Media is an execution business. Like a lot of what we've done has just been saying like, hey, Coindesk does this. I bet we could do it better. Hey, like Decrypt does this. I bet we could just do it better than them.

And it's an execution game. So like media, you don't actually need a ton of capital because it's an execution game. Now something like BlockWorks Research, it's an analytics business. Now we're competing again. We have to hire software engineers. So that's why we raised $12 million about a year ago. Because that moves into a different type of business model. So I agree with Jason that it's not a one-size-fits-all. It has to be the amount of capital you raise is dependent on your business model and your strategy.

But I do think that there's a bias towards raising too much money across the board in crypto and both founders and VCs not being as thoughtful about it as they should be. And I don't know if you guys have been seeing this mini narrative about big funds being value extractive for the space. I don't agree with that. I think that the more capital that comes into crypto, it's a net benefit for the entire space.

But what I do agree is that there are many, many situations where lack of discipline, both from founders and VCs, led to oversupplies of capital with certain companies. And it's a problem. And it's a challenge that those founders have to work through. And frankly, you can look at a lot of the... This is especially relevant in L1s. A lot of the L1s that raise a lot of money almost never end up going anywhere. And there's a whole bunch of different reasons for that. But I do think...

pushing founders to think how much money do you really need to execute on your plan and, you know, build yourself a healthy margin of safety, but don't just raise a big round for the heck of it. And don't just be trying to optimize for not getting diluted. You'd be thoughtful about it and maybe take less than you think you have to. Yeah.

Yeah. I really like that idea of raising with or without leverage. Like you always want to raise with leverage, right? You want to have the data, the metrics on your side. And I think that's a fantastic perspective to give some inspiring founders with. Yano, you and me, let's go back in time. We'll bring Mike to 2017. What do you tell your 2017 self? Do the exact same thing, but bet on ourselves earlier. So Mike and I were...

The downside of not raising money is we were so scared about money all the time. We were so scared about cash. We had to optimize for doing things that made dollars. The downside of that was we didn't take the final leap to bet on ourselves.

for like three years. And what this actually means is like around creating content. Like we, our podcast network, for example, people today know it, Xerox Research and Empire and Bellcurve and Forward Guidance and On the Margin and all these expansion, all these different shows and Lightspeed. But our original podcast network was this outsourced network of shows where we'd go to people like Meltem and Jill and Pomp and Selkis and Charlie Shrem and

Scott Melker and say, hey, you create content, we'll do the backend. We'll sell the ads, we'll produce the shows.

And we built that for about three years and spit off a lot of money, which was good. But the downside is we didn't actually own the content. We didn't own the shows. So in January of 2021, we literally had to cut that entire thing, all three years of what we'd built. And we started over. We severed all those podcasts. We sent them to zero and we had to start over. I actually found a screenshot of Mike on a whiteboard in late 2018. And he's like drawing like a blog.

Where he's like, we could create our own content. It took us two and a half years to finally do that. When we launched in January 2021, like our own in-house content. So the only thing I'd probably change is just like bet on ourselves earlier to go create good content. All right, Mike, same question to you. We're going back in time to your 2017 self. What advice do you have? I think the real alpha for founders is to recognize that it's a marathon, not a sprint.

and to prioritize your own mental health. And Jason's always done a better job of that than me, I think. But it's so tempting, especially in the early days. I meet a lot of young founders who are like, all right, I'm finally grinding and you're putting in 90, 100-hour weeks, working both days over the weekend. Jason and I did that for years at BlockWorks.

And then you kind of realize that, all right, we're seven years in. Can you work 100-hour weeks for seven years? I don't know. So I thought going into building a startup, it was going to be a lot about strategy and making the right decisions. And there's definitely a huge element to that. But a lot of it is just a perseverance game and a not giving up game. And to set yourself up for that, you just got to invest in yourself. And Jason and I got this great advice from someone really early on where we actually sat down for a whiteboarding session and

We're talking about Coindesk, the 800-pound gorilla in the time, and we were strategizing, how are we going to compete with them? And this guy just looked at this whiteboard and looked at us and said, maybe you guys just have to last.

And that has still to this day been one of the best piece of advice that anyone's given us. I think our wins that we've had in this space, to the extent that we have them, has been, again, more of a perseverance grinded out thing than anything else. Yeah, you just have to survive. And an industry is volatile and cyclical, but also up only on a zoomed out chart. Sometimes you just have to survive and not overextend yourself when the times are good. Yeah, that goes well with what you guys were saying about don't raise that hot flashy round too fast too soon, right? Do you want to slow burn it and

always like raise with leverage and that also goes along with the side of just like be patient wait for the long term

Over the years, what have you spent time on unexpectedly? And so like, what are the things that you guys ended up like allocating resources to spending time on that you guys didn't account for at the very beginning of Blockworks? So Mike was saying he thought that building a company would be more like strategy and really it's just an execution game. Building a company is just a people game. Like I didn't understand this at the beginning and I'm still shocked by how much time we spend just on like

I think you could categorize it as people problems. They're not problems. They're just like people have their own careers and their own lives. And now we happen to have 70 of those people at Blockworks who have their own careers and their own lives. And so, you know, let's say once a year someone has an existential crisis. Well, if you have 365 employees, you're having one existential crisis a day inside of your company, right? So, and people want to get promoted. And like we, I think a lot of like

The big surprise for me was just how much time gets spent on people and leveling people up and making sure this person communicates to this person and making sure there's a scalable system so this team can function with this team and the power dynamics, making sure they're even and making sure this person got hired later than this person so their comp might be different than this person. Do we need a comp framework? That kind of stuff just takes up a lot of time.

time and mental energy and I actually think it's the reason probably Mike and I recommend to new founders I think there's this thing in Silicon Valley like don't hire an HR person like HR people just get in the way like I could not disagree with that more like go hire a head of people who's a builder and like really really talented and let them own a lot of that stuff yeah

I was going to say the exact same thing. And I think a really strong head of people. We've been lucky at BlockWorks with those people. Although without exaggeration, I think we went through over 100 applicants and not just like 100 people applied. Like Jason and I got on the phone with probably 100 people before we hired our first one because it's so critical. But

People wait for a really long time and you talk to founders like, why would I do that? And the answer is, it's your time. First of all, especially if you're a first-time founder, a lot of this stuff's going to be non-obvious to you. It doesn't come naturally to most people. Most people have had a bad manager and they think, oh, I'm going to be a great manager. And then they find themselves in the position of managing others and you're like, oh, shit. So I think it's...

bringing on someone who can be a really strong partner there. And also, you can hire an outsourced or a part-time head of people when you're younger. They're smaller as a company as well. I think that could be a good option. There's also another big difference as well, which our heads of people have helped me understand, is there's a big difference between recruiting and team building. And a lot of founders, when you talk to them,

They'll say something very similar. We just want to get good people in the door and we'll figure out what to do with it. We'll figure out what to do later. And there's definitely some merit to that. And I understand why people think like that because you're the founder. You are ultimately responsible. The responsibility of bringing great talent in resides basically 100% on you. But once you have all these really talented, extremely ambitious people, if you don't have

a strategy and a structure for how that team is going to operate and you haven't been thoughtful about scoping, you often create a ton of problems for yourself where if you had just sat down and been really deliberate about the roles that you were hiring and the titles you were giving people and the ranks that you were putting people in, you could save yourself not just a ton of headache, but a lot of time. Like you can spend a long time having to undo a lot of the work that you thought you were doing. So I would say there's a huge...

in between the field of recruiting and team building. And founders tend to focus 99% on recruiting and 1% on team building only to hire people and spend 99% of their time on people problems because they weren't thoughtful about who they were hiring in the first place. So I'd say that's another thing

Big lesson learned for builders. Guys, this has been great. Any last messages for the aspiring marginal builder out there? Why should they build in crypto or maybe why should they not build in crypto? I have a message not about building in crypto, but the most shocking thing to me in the bear market was how many companies shut down because of co-founder disputes. And I think...

Mike and I got really lucky because we actually, I mean, we work very well together and we argue and debate all the time, but we typically come to make decisions pretty quickly through those debates. The idea matters, but eventually the idea will change. Like execution matters, but you'll figure that out. Like your co-founder, you can't change. So I've heard some people say like, spend a ton of time upfront on the idea. Make sure the idea is perfect. The idea will change. Make sure your co-founder is perfect, I'd say. And I forget if it's a Naval quote or a

whoever, you know, Ben Graham or whoever made this quote, but it's like integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if your co-founder doesn't have one of those things, like you should probably think about a different one. And I think Mike and I each got really lucky or at least I got lucky here. I feel the same. I think that's a, yeah, Jason and I definitely got lucky with each other. Appreciate you, buddy. I think that's probably the best piece of advice that I would have as well. Just like be really thoughtful about who you're going into this with. It's,

It is a marriage, basically, I think. I actually have a funny story for you. I have an app on my phone. It's like a personal CRM thing, whatever. It's stupid, but it categorizes who it thinks are your best friends and it ranks them. And my wife, I haven't even told her this, my wife is number two and Mike is number one. So this personal CRM thinks that Mike is closer to me than my wife. So pick your co-founder wisely. That's hilarious. I think I remember at the end of COVID, I just was talking to my co-founder, Ryan. I was like,

I'm pretty sure I was talking to Ryan more than he was talking to his wife during COVID. Definitely, yeah. Just like we spent too much time on Zooms and on podcasts together. It's like after 10 hours straight a day for like five days a week, it's like, wait a second. I talk to you more than anyone. Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right, cheers guys. Thanks so much. This has been really, really helpful. This was great. Thanks, David. Thanks, David.

Bankless Nation, I'm here with Kevin Iwaki, the founder of Gitcoin. Gitcoin has distributed over $60 million in grants with over 4.2 million unique donations. Gitcoin also pioneered the use of quadratic funding and has given many crypto projects numerous success stories from companies, projects, and organizations who all got their start on Gitcoin, Bankless included, but also Uniswap, Optimism, 1inch, Tornado Cash, and many, many other brands, companies, projects that you are probably familiar with. Kevin, thanks for joining me today.

Glad to be here. Kevin, you're kind of a builder's builder. You're definitely a code monkey, but you're also an operations guy, an organizational guy, and just a company builder. And then you've also just had a lot of exposure to young upstarting companies as well. So I'm really excited to kind of pick your brain here. Maybe let's just dive right into it. What kind of advice do you have as you've seen so many generations of crypto entrepreneurs come and go throughout the years? What advice do you have that comes to mind first? Yeah, I mean, glad to be here and glad to give you my advice, but I'm kind of like...

advice is kind of like assholes. Everyone's got one. So like, you know, what does the audience want to hear from me? I feel like Gitcoin is not the most financially successful project. Like you're probably going to have really amazing entrepreneurs on the show to talk about things like that. And like, if I was sort of pursuing that direction, I think I'd be starting an L1 or an L2 or a DeFi protocol. Not that all founders that start those things are motivated by money, but if that were the main thing, then I think I would pursue something like that.

I think that the one thing Gitcoin has done really good from the beginning is to be focused on our mission of helping communities fund what matters to them. And as you mentioned, Gitcoin has distributed $60 million worth of funding to some of the top projects in their space. And many of them, the first capital they got was off of Gitcoin. And I'm really proud that we built something that helps people get started in the space and receive their first capital. So our mission is to fund what matters. And

Gitcoin's been around for seven years. We've had different products. We've fucked things up a couple different times. But we always keep that north star of our mission and iterate towards that mission over time. And so I think if any entrepreneurs out there are aspiring to follow in my shoes, I would start with your mission and work backwards from that. How did you develop your mission? Was it obvious and clear from day one? Did it iterate over time? What was the process of actually generating a mission? Yeah, well, I mean, before I was a Web3 founder, I was a Web2 developer.

founder and VP engineering CTO type. And one of the things that I always learned over my Web2 career was over 10 years, everything I built was on top of open source software. Open source software, it's just this amazing thing that you can just take

open source module like a web server, a database server, like a Python module off the shelf and build it into your app. Like 25 years ago, we'd all be like purchasing Microsoft like software libraries and building them into our app and they'd be closed source and they'd have all this DRM in them. And I think it's first off, it's like,

open source is this beautiful thing. And everything I built in my Web2 career was off of open source software. And I was starting on third base with every single new build that we were doing because I got all this amazing software off the shelf. And so when Gitcoin was incepted, our mission was to grow open source software, which is basically my recognition that

hey, now we're going to have open source money, maybe some money that like in the old financial system would have gone to some back office on Wall Street. Maybe that'll go to open source software developers in this new crypto world. And we want it to be the rails through which that capital was deployed to open source software. And that vision actually, I think, largely came true. And then, you know, as I met Vitalik Buterin and started working with him on quadratic funding, he would always talk about this thing called public goods, which is this category of goods that are non-excludable and non-rivalrous, things that everyone wants

depends on but no one pays for. And open source software is an example of a public good. It's a public good for the Ethereum community that people are out there writing Prismatic Labs and Nimbus software, the type of software that secures our bags. That's a public good to Ethereum. And so as I got public goods pill, the mission evolved from grow open source to build and fund public goods. And then the most recent instantiation of our mission is fund what matters. And the reason for the change from fund public goods to fund what matters is that

no one outside of the space really knows what public goods are. And so I found myself at like cocktail parties, like having to give people like an economics lecture to explain what I do. But if I say fund what matters, then you sort of intuitively understand that we're funding things that matter to people. And if public goods matter, they'll naturally rise to the top. So the mission has evolved and our articulation of it has evolved over time. But we've always had the mission as our North Star. And I think that's why Gitcoin continues to live through all of its different iterations towards that dream of

funding what matters. Yeah, Kevin, I've always known you to be a man of memetics, discovering like how to meme things into people's brains. And I think Gitcoin as a whole has also done that for Ethereum. The idea of funding public goods is something that maybe Gitcoin doesn't have like a monopoly over the idea of it, but it has definitely produced a cultural shelling point that the rest of Ethereum has rallied around.

And I'm wondering, as a result of company building, like building the Gitcoin organization, what impact has establishing that cultural like shelling point in Ethereum, has that impacted the Gitcoin organization when it comes to like talent acquisition and team organization? What were the downstream effects of being so mission oriented? Well, I mean, I think the downstream effects of being mission oriented is that you get missionaries instead of mercenaries. And when you can be paying any software engineer 400k a year to work on your project, you're

It sure is more effective to have missionaries than mercenaries.

But, you know, I'd like to say that, like, first off, like, I consider Gitcoin and Ethereum to be shelling points for the hopeful. We're inventing 21st century institutions for funding public goods at the exact time that our industrial age institutions are decaying. It is springtime for on-chain coordination, but it is not about Gitcoin. Shout out to Giveth, Optimism, Dow Drops, everyone else that is working on this mission of funding what matters in the Web3 ecosystem. And my approach to this is about building a movement, not about

building a company. I mean, we are going to build Gitcoin into hopefully an important organization. But for me, it's about the movement of funding what matters and funding public goods. And I want to stimulate and create a selling point for that movement. And by the way, like, I think that the reason that we have this value in the Ethereum ecosystem is Vitalik Buterin and his emphasis on funding public goods.

and inventing mechanisms for funding public goods, like retroactive public goods funding and like quadratic funding. I mean, he's really a once in a generation brilliant mind that is thinking so far ahead and has implanted the public goods culture in Ethereum. And I think that I'm just trying to sort of take those ideas and build a movement around them. And maybe part of being a meme lord is helping people understand them a little bit more tangibly than they would otherwise. But all credit to Vitalik and to the distributed movement of people who care about this mission for building it. I think I'm just

serving as an accelerant and maybe a connector in it. What do you wish that you had known if you had been able to go back to the start of when you had founded Gitcoin or maybe even earlier? What would you tell your younger self? What advice would you bring back in time? Oh man, I'm so modularity-pilled these days. I built Gitcoin like hand to the sky in front of Bankless's huge audience. I built Gitcoin as a centralized monolith and as a company.

in 2017 and it's just 'cause that's all I knew how to do. But oh my gosh, modular software, the Unix philosophy is just this beautiful profound thing in which you build modular software, it does one thing well and it's interoperable with all these other types of programs.

If I just built Gitcoin as a protocol and modular at the start, we wouldn't have had to spend the two years tearing down the centralized platform into rebuilding it into being a modular architecture in the future. And, you know, I see modularity up and down the stack in, you know, the modular blockchain thesis, which you all have talked about a lot to how we're building dApps and how we're building protocols. And I also see it at the social layer. So I'm really a big fan of

each different company in the space doing one thing and doing it well following that Unix philosophy and then building that movement together. I think that in Web 2, we all like the Web 2 playbook, the Fang playbook was to build a fiefdom as big as possible and then acquire your competitors and put everything into the Bezos moat or the Zuckerberg moat or the

the Google mode. And it's just not that way in Web3. We all build little modules that do one thing and do them well. Gnosis Safe, Moluk DAO, Gitcoin's Allo protocol, they're all interoperable with each other. And because of that, we're building a movement that is leveraging these modular building blocks to go faster

each time someone enters the chat. Like if I go into a hackathon for Ethereum, there is so much open source software available off the shelf that I can get ERC20 tokens, ERC721 tokens, Gnosis Safe, quadratic funding on Allo Protocol. Like I get all those off the shelf and I'm starting on third base when I'm building my new venture in Ethereum. And that's why Ethereum is inevitable is because we're creating exponentially more value the more open source software gets shipped

but it can only be done if you start off modular. So listener, if you're going to build a centralized monolith, let me shake you out of it, build a modular protocol. So what should an aspiring young entrepreneur do if they are just starting their company, they're just making their first few hires, they're just thinking about building their first new protocol, application, company, something? What should they know in advance in order to follow suit on that? Yeah, well, I think the thing that you want to do is you want to figure out

who's actually going to care about your protocol and find what's called product market fit or protocol market fit in the Web3 ecosystem. And when I reflect on Gitcoin's journey, let me just play it back to you at a very high level. In 2016 and 2017, I started six failed side projects.

And the seventh project that I started was Gitcoin. And if I hadn't had the learnings from just throwing spaghetti at the wall for those six projects, then I never would have gotten Gitcoin funded and started to build around it. And then when Gitcoin started to get heat, we had six different features that were on Gitcoin. And turns out that the ones that people actually cared about was the fifth one. It was Gitcoin Grants. And then Gitcoin Grants was like a rocket ship. And even that, we ran non-quadratic funding rounds on Gitcoin Grants before we realized

holy shit, if we want to be infrastructure for funding public goods, it has to be decentralized and incredibly neutral because that's our value for what we fund public goods for. And we had to tear that down and rebuild it as a protocol. So like, I guess you can think of like my history of learning in public and building in public is building a bunch of stuff and then finding the thing that people actually care about and have heat and then like pinching and zooming on that and throwing everything else out over time. So it's about going broad and then deep and then broad and then deep until you find something that deeply resonates with the community. Yeah.

Or I don't know, maybe someone more lucky or talented than me will just fall ass backwards into it on the first try. But that hasn't been my experience. Kevin, as long as I've known you, I've always known you as a guy who is pretty like relentless, very high energy, always building, always doing something like eyes up on the horizon and like kind of just tunnel vision on the goal.

Like, where do you get the energy from? I'm sure it doesn't always feel like you have the energy for every single day when it comes to like motivation and morale and just always be building. Like, how do you keep up the energy? Any advice or perspective you have there? I mean, I just try to zoom out when you want perspective, zoom out. I mean, I just think that we're in this incredible time in which the old institutions are failing and clearly industrial age.

institutions for funding public goods in our finance system are not working out. You know, just listen to an Eric Voorhees speech if you need a little dose of inspiration. And, you know, for me, it's what a time to be alive. Our old institutions are decaying and we have a once in a generation opportunity to create a lifeboat to leverage the magical beauty of Ethereum and programmable money. We can program our values into our money. And I

that means that we can build economies that reflect our values. Like this is something that only central bankers have been able to do for the last 200 years. And before that money was never programmable, like, holy fuck, what a time to be alive. And I just think if you grasp the gravity of the moment and the importance of what we're doing, building anti-authoritarian tech, building economies that reflect the values of

we want to have imbued into money. How can you not be motivated by that vision and the opportunity that's been provided to us? I mean, open source software is this incredible thing where we're standing on the shoulders of giants. We have the internet and we have programmable money. It's because of Vitalik Buterin and Linus Troivolds and a

Oh shit, I'm forgetting the guy who invented the internet. But we're just standing on the shoulders of giants. And I think this is our moment of opportunity to do something with it. And that's what gets me going in the morning. Kevin, you've got a book. What's your book about? Yep. So I just wrote a book. It's entitled The On-Chain Capital Allocation Handbook. So basically, the idea here is that capital allocation is something that

we all do every day without even thinking about it. When you buy coffee for a friend, you're allocating capital. When you're paying your bills, you're allocating capital. When you're building an ecosystem in Web3, you're allocating capital. So basically what I did was, and for the listeners who are watching on YouTube, you can see the cover of it. I basically cartographied the different capital allocation mechanisms that exist in Web3. And given the

reader a journey from present mechanisms to future possibilities. So basically, the idea is that we've got an opportunity to rewrite how ecosystems are built and how collective action is incentivized. And so I think that my opportunity to the reader is just to present you all of the different options from Gnosis safes to Moloch DAOs to Gitcoin's quadratic funding

to all of the different amazing opportunities that you have to earn and to build incentivization mechanisms in Web3. So if you're down the rabbit hole and you're looking for a dose of inspiration or to look over the frontier, you can check out the On-Chain Capital Allocation book. You can get it at allobook.gitcoin.co or follow me on Twitter. I'm twitter.com slash Iwaki. I will be tweeting about the book as the launch comes up in the middle of July. Cool, Kevin. Thank you so much. Thanks, David.

Bankless Nation, I'm here with Lucas Bruder, the founder of Gito. Gito was founded in 2021 and is a Solana client that captures Solana MEV, increase Solana liquid staking token that it funnels that MEV into. It's got a market cap of about 1.7 billion. And Lucas here is in the most recent generation of crypto builders. Lucas, welcome to Bankless. Hey, thanks for having me. Excited to talk more about what we've been up to and, you know,

all entrepreneurial related things. Oh, yeah. So Lucas, you started Jito in 2021. I'm pretty sure this was your first startup. You came from a tech background, I believe in Tesla, like low level engineering. So started in 2021, saw success one cycle later. As you were building throughout 2022, 2023, during the bear market, what did you learn as a first time founder, as a bear market builder, as an entrepreneur? What were your big learning lessons and takeaways? That's a good question. I think like Solana,

I mean, the bear market was super rough. Obviously, Solana had a pretty terrible time with all the FTX stuff. But yeah, I think the lesson there was really double down on what you're building if you have conviction. I think it can be easy to think about pivoting and for certain situations, it might make sense. But I think being able to double down and also...

The thing that I talk to the team a lot about is trying to grow the pie. Like, hey, we can't really wait around for anyone else to do anything. You kind of just have to take matters into your own hands sometimes and try to kickstart something in the ecosystem or kickstart your project and so on and really try to grow the pie and get more people excited about what you're working on, especially in these newer Alouans that are coming up.

or even like some of the L2s, like you really need to get the ecosystem started. And, you know, you can see in the past and certainly in the future, there's

kind of these key moments like the Uniswap airdrop and other things that have really kickstarted these ecosystems and just take it into your own hands. What kind of hard choices were you faced with building throughout that bear market? My bear market in 2018 through 2020, I understood that there's just not that many resources. So I'm sure resource allocation is a thing that a founder needs to manage. What were some of the trials that you really went through throughout that bear market? Yeah, I mean, luckily on the resource side,

I think we were much better off than other teams. We had raised, I guess, right at the end of the bull market and did another raise a few months later. So from that standpoint, like, I guess, you know, this isn't the question, but if there's an opportunity for you to raise, then I would take it.

But yeah, I think like there was definitely like a decision on like the ecosystem, like is this the right ecosystem to build in? But, you know, I kind of just answered that, like just double down. Yeah, Anna totally told me this advice, like if there's something you know how to do, then hand it off to someone else. So hiring to, you know, keep...

giving it to your current team or hiring to someone else to kind of help you and you can give them advice on it. I wish I would have hired an operations person much sooner. Brian's are started as biz ops and went to COO. He's been amazing. Just, you know, take a lot of the kind of daily operational work and longer term planning on the finances and people ops and things like that. You always have to be thinking ahead. Like this market is pretty cyclical and,

And, you know, you want to try to not spend too many resources when things are crazy so that you have them for the bear market. And that's when you can really, I think something we did well is like really leapfrog ourselves and like accelerated during the bear. And then also like there were some other teams that kind of

Maybe they're in a similar spot and they kind of slowed down or gave up and, you know, we just kind of doubled down and grew really fast. If you could go back in time to the first like few months of starting Jito, maybe even the first year, do you have any advice for your younger self? What would you want to know back then? Yeah, I would probably have hired a little faster. It's really hard to find good people right now. And the people on your team is like the most important thing.

You want to find people that are smart and willing to move fast and take shortcuts from like an engineering and product standpoint. But I think probably hired a little too slow there.

Yeah, I can't think of anything else. I think just like trying to hire faster. Yeah, so you're a first-line founder and also just like hit a home run your first time around. To what do you give the credit that success with? Like any big like standout reason as to like why your first at-bat ended up in a home run? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say it's a home run yet. I think we still have a lot of work to do, but appreciate it.

Yeah, there's still a lot of stuff to build and, you know, we're just getting started. But I think a lot of the experience in my past, like always loved working at startups, worked at, you know, anything from like, it was like the fourth or fifth engineer at one company on a team, less than 10 people. It's all that great of 40 people.

I worked at another company that was like around 30 people. I worked at Tesla as well. That was much bigger, but still kind of a startup attitude. I think figuring out how to ship fast and take shortcuts and get stuff out there is super important. Yeah, if you look at like bigger companies, they have a lot of infra and nice to haves. And those are things you can't really afford in a startup. So you just got to take shortcuts there.

And then, yeah, I think the team obviously is a big one. Co-founder and all the other people on the team, like having a good team, good attitude, making sure people are super positive. All it takes is one person to drag your team down as far as like having negative attitude and so on. So I think team is super important. And then also just like everyone else in the ecosystem has been super supportive. And I think that is super important to have the support of the ecosystem and make sure everyone

you know, that they can kind of help you out. I think if I went around the Solana broader crypto ecosystem and asked, hey, like, why is Jito successful? I'll get some set of answers and they'll probably be like one to three of the most common answers. But like, what's an answer as to like why Jito is successful that you think is true that most people don't realize or I think is true, like an unsung answer? Ooh.

an underappreciated reason why Judo is a successful yeah I think for a certain community or for a certain subset of the Solana community this will certainly be they will know this but I think there's probably a lot of other people that don't know this it's just like when we started building the Validator client you obviously need Validators to run it and so we were literally hopping on calls like multiple calls a day for weeks and weeks trying to get people to run this Validator client even during like we released it

right before breakpoint 2022. So it was like a week or two before the FTX crash. And somehow we convinced like, I think by like November, December, 2023, there was like 50% of stake running the client. It was doing like a few hundred soul and tips per week or something like nothing that big. I guess for context today, it's doing like 50,000 soul or 40,000 soul a week. And so there's just a ton of like trust building and like,

ton of outreach and like spending a bunch of time, um,

reaching out to people. And I think that's actually another tip for founders. You have to sell the product. I'm an engineer. I like to build stuff, maybe to a fault too much. I like to build too much, but you have to go out there and sell and you have to be hopping on phone calls. And we're trying to build trustless systems, but there's still a lot of trust involved and you have to earn that trust. And we spent a lot of time gaining trust with validators and

in 2022 and 2023. And that's definitely paid off. Maybe this is the same answer to my next question, but maybe you have even more. What kind of time have you spent unexpectedly? Like on different activities that you wouldn't have expected to at the very start of building Cheeto? Yeah, I would say like given the nature of the industry, legal is a big thing. Yeah.

Hopefully we can change that. Yeah, I hope so too. Everyone's trying to figure out what the rules are and play along. And, you know, there's a lot of people that are here for the right reasons and figuring out how to navigate that is definitely a challenge. So that was something I didn't necessarily anticipate when I first started JITO, but I have learned over time is like that takes up a significant amount of time and, you know,

That's certainly where hiring someone like an operations person that really can dive into that can certainly help out and help you as a founder zoom out a lot. Yeah, I would say legal is definitely a big one. I guess another thing as a founder, especially when you're like four or five or six people, you're kind of in hardcore build mode. But when you have a team, I think we're 14 now at Jito Labs, there's just a ton of context switching there.

So you actually spend a lot of time jumping from task to task and that every time you jump, it takes up a significant amount of time. So I would say that's another thing. When you started Jito, was it because you just really wanted to be a founder? You had that founder itch, you wanted to be an entrepreneur? Or did you mostly see an engineering problem that was a good nerd snipe that you wanted to tackle? What was the motivation to become a founder in the first place? Definitely the nerd snipe. I think...

For some people, being a founder could be convincing enough to start something, but I think those people won't last. Once it gets really rocky and rough, you're going to

be pulling out your hair and losing sleep and having a lot of stress. And those people are probably going to drop out. For me, it's mainly the engineering side. I did a little MEV on Ethereum back in end of 2020, early 2021, and just got really nerd sniped by Validare client software and trading and all these things I had never previously got exposed to. And then especially getting into Solana, I studied computer engineering, did firmware, low level. I think Solana is a pretty...

they take the performance of the software very seriously. And so just kind of diving into that and learning more about that. And I feel like I'm kind of getting like re-nerd sniped all over again with Fire Dancer and like the low-level engineering stuff that's going on there. So I think it's definitely like an engineering thing. And obviously, like if you're going to build a company, you can't just be like working on pet projects. There's got to be a business opportunity that you're not getting paid to build code. You're getting paid to solve people's problems. So it's kind of the...

marriage of like there's a lot of cool engineering work to do here but also there's like a massive business opportunity well lucas thank you so much it's been really helpful yeah thanks