Building Stablecoin Infrastructure Through Crypto Winter | The Further, Faster Podcast

You basically went to market about a year ago now. So it's only been one year and you are running something like two and a half billion dollars in transaction volume, maybe looking to exit this year close to six to eight billion dollars. It looks like, how are you seeing that kind of scale? Why is there such demand right now for stablecoin infrastructure? How are you capturing it? And for what's worth, we're probably exit about three times that number, but if anyone's counting. Welcome back to the further faster podcast. I'm Jeff Becker, your host and general partner here in New York City at AMER. This is the podcast where we talk to extraordinary founders about their journey from inception to scale. We also talk to our portfolio founders who are in the middle of breaking out. Today, we have Zach Walsh, the founder of Hi-Fi, a portfolio company that's been with us for three years and has reached $150 million valuation in an extraordinarily short period of time. Zach's building in stablecoin infrastructure and is here to share with us what it's like to build a company in today's environment. Zach, welcome to the podcast. Awesome man. Super excited to be here. I appreciate you coming on. More is a friend. I see you all the time. It's okay. It's hard to get you out of the office. No, I'd say so. This is interesting. I like this though. Before we jump in, I think it's really important to tell people what Hi-Fi is. Yeah, of course. Why do you exist? And what is your creating? Mm-hmm. I know that you're moving billions of dollars across stablecoin right now. And just a short period of time, you become one of circles. If not the largest, one of the largest money-movers on circles payment network. But can you tell people what Hi-Fi is? Yeah. So, you know, Hi-Fi is really financial infrastructure to build out financial products with stablecoin specifically. A great analogy is like strike like APIs for developers to construct various money movement products. So whether that's remittance applications, cross-border payments companies, Venmos, anything like that. A good mental model to think about it is, you know, when you're opening up your Chase Bank app or Venmo and you're sending money to a friend, Venmo isn't actually transferring funds from one place to another. There's back-end processes that they're actually built on top of, and it's really what Hi-Fi is is we allow end businesses like Venmo to move money from point A to point B. Okay. And for people that don't understand what stablecoins are infrastructure, you just describe a customer and what they might be doing with Hi-Fi. Yeah. Of course. So I think first, stablecoins, if you're not familiar with it, have really emerged as I think the killer use case in crypto broadly. I think a lot of the volatility that's associated with digital assets is actually pretty antithetical in terms of what stablecoins actually are. But you could think of it as just a digital asset that's pegged to a US treasure or some sort of asset that has a one-to-one value in it. In layman's terms, as you see Bitcoin going up and down, stablecoin is consistently flat. One coin can always be redeemed for $1. Now why is that important for a payments vehicle? If you're looking to use Bitcoin as sort of a method of payment, it's very difficult to use an instrument that increases or decreases in value between the sender and the recipient. There's the stablecoin something that's highly liquid, always redeemable one-for-one. You can almost use it as just this tokenized form to move in and out of, let's say, a dollar or a euro, anything like that. Mainly what people are building on top of us are these large business payments applications, whether that's a trading desk or a cross-border payments company or some sort of payments processor, to some extent always taking funds from an origination and moving into a destination using stablecoins as a middle-air. It's been dubbed the stablecoin sandwich, so traditionally, how do payments exist today? If I'm going from, let's say, US dollars into euros in a bank, both banks are essentially interacting and messaging with each other at market rates or some sort of like FX desk. What stablecoins does is rather than both banks interacting with each other on some differing market pair, you can take dollars, transfer it into USDC or some sort of other stablecoin, one-for-one, and then take USDC, transfer it on the blockchain, and then essentially sell it for euros. The end result is the same. You get dollars for euros in the payment transaction, but the backend is actually not a traditional FX desk. It's a bit of a complex sandwich, as you would say. We're moving money across markets, across treasuries, building applications on top of HIFI, and you basically went to market about a year ago now, so it's only been one year and you are running something like $2.5 billion in transaction volume, maybe looking to exit this year close to $6 to $8 billion, it looks like, how are you seeing that kind of scale? For what's worth, we're probably exit about three times that number, but maybe if anyone's counting. No, I'd say the first transaction of when we moved, I remember it was a B2B $10,000 payment, was much more exciting than I think even as it exists today. I think first getting the product out into the market, you become a little bit numb to it, and I know the numbers sound pretty significant, which they feel, they definitely do feel like that. You're always, I'd say, there's different ponds, right? You keep a stripe, I think, processes a trillion dollars a year, and so if you look at I think an early stage startup, what we're doing, I think quite well, but if you look at us compared to stripe, there's still quite a ways to go. I think you're always going for the next thing and not necessarily looking at the numbers at face value. But what is driving that demand? What do you see from customers, and why are they adopting stablecoins so quickly now? There's a few different parts of this. First is this idea, I think, of dollarization, and a lot of these emerging markets, their currencies are incredibly volatile. I mean, they're fluctuating sometimes 30% in a given day. So when your currency, for us, we take that for granted, moves 30% in your bank account. What does that mean? You mean, it's very difficult to accumulate wealth. It's difficult to send money, a stable to vendors and contractors. So the market that they're in essentially collapses around this volatility with the currency. So the US$ incredibly in demand all around the world for trading, for commerce, whatever it is. And surprisingly, it's fairly difficult to actually gain access to the US$, like I want to say something like a billion and a half people don't have bank accounts today, which is incredible. So if you don't have a bank account, you can't even get currency and you can't even get the US$. And so stablecoins are essentially this tokenized form of a US$. So even if it's not, look it into it, kind of describe previously, the second use case of the stablecoin payment sandwich. Being able to just hold digitized forms of the US$$ for commerce and accumulate value is incredibly important. We met, sort of, right at the beginning of crypto-enter. So describing what you're describing now to someone back then sounded a bit crazy and you had to indoctrinate a lot of investors, employees. And no one wanted to invest in us, and you're the only one that wanted. I appreciate you remembering that. I still want to keep investing if you let me. Of course. Yeah. I think for real. Yeah. So for the people that are watching, a lot of them are inception stage founders, like maybe like we're winding back a little bit, taking a vision like this now seems very obvious. We're seeing other players in the space, we're seeing lots of traction. It's much clear to people why stablecoins should exist, but if you rewind, people didn't really understand in the beginning. And so maybe you can describe a little bit about like that journey of starting something that feels futuristic, getting people indoctrinated. Yeah, I think the mantra of whatever business you're starting, I think if you can do it at these times of quote unquote infrastructure or platform shifts and sort of catalyze this new category, that's where you see the largest accrual of value. However, with stablecoins, it wasn't making a bet on stablecoins themselves. It was making a bet on rationality within financial services. So what did stablecoins enable? They enabled cheaper transactions. They enabled faster settlement. So I think in the ethos of entrepreneurship, if you can make things that are faster, if you can make things that are cheaper, if you can make things that save people money, it's directionally a good business to build in. So I think stablecoins hit all of those points and so we weren't going after stablecoins with a sake of it. We were more so going after it for really what enabled for businesses. Got it. And you weren't just going at it in 2022. You had decided to leave college, work during the day, sleep on a friend's couch, get into these cool companies, basically without a degree and finish your degree at night, so that you could build up a track record in finance, in hyper growth, Silicon Valley, startups, and you were part of Sequoia backed companies. You got this experience while you were in school that other people did, which gave you what I would say is almost like a decade of experience despite being fairly young. And to me, it struck me that you were obsessed about this for a long time. I mean, does that what it takes to build something meaningful? So when I look back on it, I don't think it was an unstable coin 10 years ago, but it was always in when I unpack it. It was in some form, I guess, of entrepreneurship and, yeah, I think the path that I took in the things I did was more so a byproduct of just wanting to do things that interested in me. Like, I loved being in big offices and the whiteboards and seeing some of the smartest people I've ever been around, you know, just in that environment all the time. And so, you know, it really wasn't like an end to a means to me. It's just, you know, sitting and I think doing, there's lots of talks on this obviously, but whether it's homework or papers, and I think I was always naturally pretty good at school, but I just hated studying, I just hated any sort of effort. It was like the least amount of effort that I could find as a path to get like the best results. You know, I just sit there and be like, I kind of saw the next 10, 15 years in front of me of getting a degree and then just doing that whole consequentially, which is not inherently a bad thing. It just wasn't interesting to me. Yeah, because you mentioned like not wanting to work hard at school, but you're one of the hardest working people I know. You're kind of seven days a week, you're all hours of the night, you're an instant responder. Some days, yeah. I hope so. Well, that's how I've experienced you, and so I'm wondering, obviously it wasn't that you couldn't work hard. You didn't want to work hard at school. But now you're, I would call you quite obsessed with this, and quite hard working. Can you talk to the listeners about sort of that mentality, what it's taking to build? Yeah, I've always had, I think, a pretty strong work ethic or a maniac, as you might say, but I think it was towards things that, you know, it was incredibly interested in, and then I think is, I've gone a little bit older. You realize almost the systems of the type of work that you want to output and the results that you want to get. So it's like, choose the games that you want to play, right? You know, I did, it was like 24 years old, I remember, I was out of college, I think it was making like 275, 300,000, which is a pretty great amount, I'd say, for like someone like early in their 20s, which is what some people want to do over 20 years and climb the corporate ladder. I think after like three months, I was like, this is just not for me, you know, maybe you get a little bit of a bigger apartment, you know, a nicer car, but that's really kind of about it for the most part, which don't get me wrong, is still an incredible amount of money to the average income in the US. But for me, it was always just like thinking in systems of, you know, you have a very short life to live and, you know, if you can almost sort of do things that, you know, really excite you. That's kind of where I want to devote my work and time. So, you know, I kind of got to the peak of corporate world, I guess I don't know, not really. I was 24, not really a peak. You're going to work for like 20 years. But I kind of just saw the path in front of me and, you know, really wanted to just take the plunge. I wanted to cover that first part, because I think helping people understand the mindset and what it takes to start a company and how you think about the future is important. But then, fast forward, one of the fastest growing companies across the entire Amazon portfolio, you're like very clear path to nine, ten figures in annual revenue. How are you thinking about the next stage of building, hiring, product? It's constant context, which, you know, honestly, of very clearly seeing where you want to be in five years, but then also zooming super, you know, super deep to the problems today. So, you know, I'm not waking up and saying, oh, I can't wait to be a tenderly another company where that may or may not be the case, but that's usually just, it's, I think it's impossible to really ground yourself like that. I think if you start to almost like unpack and dissect the goals that you want to be at, like for me personally, in the company in a 12 month period and look towards, okay, what do we need to do? In the next three months, what do we need to do in the next month, week, day, what is the next task that I can do to provide the most leverage to move us forward in that? I think that's a much better way to compartmentalize it. I think if you actually get too much into this like long term audacious vision thinking, it's almost like not really grounded in reality and you see a lot of these like really early stage founders and they're like, hey, I want to go be the next Zuckerberg, but you know, to be Zuckerberg is like level a hundred and there's a hundred levels to get there and you're not even on level one right now. I think you can have that as a motivating factor, but think about what I have to do to get to level two. Yeah. How do the levels change between inception, you raise more than $10 million now, undisclosed, a kind of unannounced, didn't make a big deal out of it, you just kept building. How has it changed from raising that big seed to now thinking about the next level two, level three? I think the anxiety is always there. I just think the problems change and the problems actually get bigger. I think that was actually one of the biggest learnings for me and I'm still learning a lot every day, but capital helps solve problems, but it also introduces bigger problems to you that you have to solve. I remember you told me pretty early on that when you're the CEO, the problems that you just have to solve get harder because the problems that end up reaching you are the only ones that you can solve at the end of the day, so if you have 100, 500 people with your company and a problem gets to you, that means 500 people could solve the problem. So I'm starting to feel like little inklings of that now, which has been pretty interesting to unpack. It strikes me that you are thinking about how do I build a culture? How do I build a team? How do I get the best people around me? Who do I raise capital from? You have a lot of options, which is a good position to be in, so you're making some pretty consequential decisions. How are you approaching that part of the job? I think there's a lot and I think that you can get pretty easily bogged down in the complexity and the anxiety of everything, but I think almost from a cliché perspective, if you go at it from first principles and I actually think about this pretty often, Warren Buffett says, focus on the people first, the product and the profits in that order, and so oftentimes you find people do the reverse, and so this was something I actually didn't really notice as much when we were building the business because it was myself and my friend of 10 years in the co-founder and eventually a few engineers who end up joining us, but you don't really think of the culture and you don't think about necessarily the people you bring in. But as you start to reach 15, 20, 30 people, it's incredibly important. It creates this talent density of the next 50 people who continue to join you as a company. So for me, focusing on the people of I think first, who are we bringing into the company? We have an incredibly high hiring bar. I think Brian Chesky says it's pulling teeth to essentially hire, and it was three years before they got their first person, and that's the mantra that we take. We aren't necessarily as concerned with, hey, this is actually a Google researcher or something like that, or I think the resume, Golden Goose, but I'd say more so. Are they hungry? Are they intellectually curious, and do they want to actually do something around other people? I don't know. Do you have any tricks, any things that you do in your hiring process, or things you're screening for? I'm always really interested in what are their hobbies or things that they're doing outside of work. I think that whether you're like, hey, I was a world-class gamer, or we just hired someone who said, oh, I make furniture in my spare time, and I go the store and I carve out the parts. For me, it's so interesting. If you're actually deeply curious about something and you're very obsessed with it, I think that I can expand into your work. Just like the translation of obsession into the care they put into, exactly how they write or the customers they call them. It's funny. I look for that in founders too. I want to see that obsession. I want to interrogate them on their personal lives. I want to understand a bit more about how deep have you gone on something? How well researched are you? How willing are you to push the bounds of what's possible? This idea that the CEO is always managing the hardest problems, I think requires a combination of resilience and creativity. You have to be willing to solve everything like, no, is not an answer. It's just like one step closer to a yes, and I think that's sort of like what you mentioned you are doing as a CEO of what you're looking for, a bit in the team of like, it's going to be complex. It's going to be endless, but that's the pursuit. Yeah. I'd say finding people, especially every stage of the company is like a different company. That's what we've, I've started to see now, so like the version of us pre-seed versus seed versus series A is the DNA of like how we operate is the same, but the way that we operate is incredibly differently, and so I'd say that the core values of being like humble, being intellectually curious, being hardworking, those are going to be consistent throughout every life cycle or the life cycle of the company, but the things in terms of how we work together. So first of all, when you're like five people in a room and a pre-seed, everyone can just go talk to each other in the room of, hey, here's what I'm working on. When you're at 30 people, it's how do we actually distill information incredibly fast and make decisions? So, even if it's like myself and a co-founder, how do we populate information down to the person who might be lowest in the chain, let them understand what we're doing and why we're doing it, take their feedback, and then funnel back up to the top of the chain as fast as possible. Do you have systems for that and things you built that make it really effective internally? Yeah, I'd say so. So what we do, department meetings every Monday, and we just go back to back, so we go from go to market to compliance to marketing to engineering of, here's what I did last week for the department, here's what I have to do this upcoming week, and if you say you're going to do something this upcoming week, it has to be done by Friday, and don't put something on the Google Doc unless it's going to get done by Friday, or else we'll probably recognize that, or not be too happy, and everything that we have to do has a drive up to our broader goal. Like I said before, if what we're trying to do for the quarter, what we're trying to do for the year, and everything is almost very much systemized, which everyone is working together on their various work streams, but they're rather independent. Yeah, it's so interesting. I think people that are building companies today have a different level of technology available to them, to automate things, be across in transparent, across departments. It sounds like the level of accountability that everybody has almost feels like a very flat organization, and everyone's committing to daily goals, or weekly goals, almost like when you're a small team, there's daily stand-ups. It sounds like that has transcended into the team, and everyone has that sense of urgency. Yeah, I'd say having a method to convey information rather quickly is incredibly important, but I also think having a written culture is something that should be taken seriously by most companies culture. So in terms of the decisions that we're making, why are we doing what we're doing, whether it starts our core values to a product release, or release notes that come out every Friday to hiring docs, I think it's incredibly important for people to actually pull into resources and understand why people are doing what they're doing, and even in terms of emails themselves, long-form memos, I think just help people conceptually understand the thought process of people who aren't like you. It's interesting. It's counterintuitive. A lot of people talk about brevity and cave speak and speed of communication, and here you're like long-form memos, depth of thinking. It's almost counterintuitive to the speed at which people are moving. Why do you think it's so important that people spend time to clarify their thoughts and disseminate them versus just kind of move at the speed? No, so I think speed in efficiency broadly is not binary to written thinking. For example, on a Sunday night, I can send out a pretty long memo in terms of what's on my mind, what are the most important things to get done this week, just what am I even thinking, whether it's the state of the business, things that are happening within the market? So people just really aren't guessing in terms of what is Zach thinking, why are we doing what we're doing? And we want to just reference that and having this culture of radical transparency in terms of like, no, it's written down and that's what we were thinking six months ago and that's what we were thinking last week, I think it's incredibly important. But the decisions that you make are these super close source vectors of are we going to do it or are we going to not going to do it, and that's it. So I think they're actually pretty interconnected. Yeah, slow is moving and smooth is fast. At LinkedIn, I was different nine years, and the leaders there were so unique, they communicated in frameworks. And they talked about, this is how we think about something, a framework for everything. Exactly. And I found that they were basically, and I didn't know this at the time, but in hindsight, it's very clear, they were teaching people how to think, not what to think. They were giving people a framework to make decisions through. And so it sounds like by codifying your thinking by disseminating long form, you're helping the team make decisions in your absence because they understand the lens, they understand the context, and it's less guesswork on what would Zach do in the situation or what should the company do? It's more clarity across departments, clarity across people. And so for that reason, you probably get a great velocity and speed of quality decision-making happening across all people. Exactly. And if there's any objections to it as well in terms of my way of thinking, you know, and absolutely welcome it. You know, leave comments on my Google Docs, you know, respond with everyone's CC into the emails, and then, you know, it's something that we welcome. I think just because we're on a podcast and you're a tech founder and I'm a VC, I should ask you about AI, you're building, like at the end of crypto winter, you're building at the beginning and through the height of this AI boom, there's a lot of noise in the media around these mega rounds. The bar has shifted for what VCs are looking for in terms of traction. Yeah. Does that affect you at all? How are you thinking about the cycles and what's going on in the market? Okay. So I'd say generally yes and no. So generally no in the sense that like we've gone through this with digital assets of meme tokens and shilling at the end of the day, build a good business and focus on good unit economics and products that people want and I would apply that to AI or whatever the next cyclical trend is. I mean, you see some of these articles about like 90% of enterprise adoption of AI has failed and you know, these applications are essentially wrappers on some sort of infrastructure and I think that, you know, focus on I think solving the core problems and fundamentally it works out. In terms of like how it has affected us, yes, I think generally speaking, we've seen like an acceleration of revenues just as higher benchmarks in the market. However, I do think it's a little bit of like a fugacy, right? And we're actually talking about this in the elevator up here too and you do see the lovable in the cursors and you know, it's the only looking like, you know, the Aaron Judges are some sort of like freak of baseball and no, is everybody in the MLB Aaron judge like absolutely not. But you have some really amazing players who, you know, can develop in the minors for eight years and up having, you know, a really fantastic career and going to Hall of Fame and, you know, maybe a weird mistrude, misconstrued analogy. Go apply that to tech startups as well where, yeah, so you're going to have these ridiculous breakout companies, but, you know, I was just reading like the Benobos founders biography in which like no one wanted to do his series B and he'd, someone led the round where the $1 million check and like a $30 million round and so like, if you take like a company, like Benobos, which is less, you know, my store can, you know, really great clothing company and say, oh, they're not going to 100 million in an AR or in a year, are they a failure? No. I think that like the benchmarks is an aggregate have gone a little bit higher, but, you know, we, good for cursors, but like, we don't really look at it as much. For people that are watching this because of stablecoins, because of, you know, do infrastructure, derivatives, where you see things going, what you're hearing in the industry, like, to me, it feels like it's really heating up from the big banks, large corporations are taking notice. Like, what's it like being on the front lines talking to people? It's really exciting. The rooms that we get to be in relative to our size. Yeah. You know, these are some like the biggest, honestly, you know, companies and financial institutions in the world, and some of them have invested into us. And so I think that maybe like 15 years ago, you know, we would have to be, you know, probably five exercise that we are to maybe even just get like an intro conversation. Now the fact that we're going into pilots and have some of them as customers, it's been super exciting. And so there we really are on the cutting edge of this space. Well, do you think those big banks and large customers are moving aggressively into stable coin, or are they going to continue to move slowly the way we've seen? I think banks, relatively speaking, are always going to move at a snail's pace, but I'd say it's a part of their mandate now, and they're really understanding whether that's treasury, whether that's cross-border payments, whether that's accepting stable coin deposits for international migrants, whatever the use case is. There's definitely a lot of exploration and starting to really go into this space, which, you know, these are trillion dollar balance sheets. You know, the entire market cap of stable coin today, I think represents 300 billion or so, which is, you know, a great amount. It's like a top 20 T billholder, but you know, relatively that's maybe a few large hedge funds in the U.S. This is nothing compared to what it's going to be in a few years. You think it's going to eat the entire financial infrastructure? I'd say over the course of decades, yes. But you also have to make a bet on the time horizon if can you go build a stable coin company for where the world's going to be in 20 years? No, you have to build great products for where the world is going to be today in the next few years. What's the next step for high five? Where do you guys go from here? There's a lot that we're going to be doing this year. We're a very interesting card processing, so launching credit cards for businesses in which they can actually use a stable coin wallet to pay for things in real time. So rather than taking like a debit card and connecting it to your checking account, I can actually connect it to a meta-mask or coin-based wallet and start spending with stable coins. That's something that's very interesting to us. A lot of people watching are building their own companies. Yeah. I think there are probably one or two key things that they should know that you probably believe deeply. Mm-hmm. I'm just curious what you're wanting to go to for early stage founders. Yeah, so the first is this like Paul Graham of YC, like some variation of, if you're proud of your product when you launch it, like you've launched too late, I think like get something out there that's super shitty or even just like ask people, hey, would you buy this and go build some version of it and see if they'll even give you money for it? I think that's like the biggest thing. I think people try to, or first time founders more so try and like build this roadmap of like, here's how my business is going to succeed and here's every step that I'm going to follow and here's how my product's going to look and we're going to go out and here's the marketing plans around it. Like, no, just don't think of any of that. Just go try and build something and someone's going to give you money for it. I'd say that's the first thing. The second is that like carry like one mantra with you is that the highs are never as high as they are and the lows are never as low as they are. So like when things are really great and they're riding high, if you zoom out there, they're probably not as amazing in the relative market, not to tear you down, but yeah, it's still enjoy low winds. And then the lows are never as bad as they are, whether that's even like an employee quitting or, you know, some investor telling you no or like a term she getting pulled, like it's okay. Thousands of people have gone through this before and you're going to figure out a way. Yeah. We were talking about this the other day, just like managing your time, running the marathon, managing the intensity of it. Yeah. From the outside, like me and you work insanely hard, but you do talk about sort of being even keel and being steady with your energy, like how do you manage it? I mean, it's something that I think I've probably gone better at over the years. Like definitely, I was like a maybe a hothead in like my early 20s, but from like a rational perspective, like emotion doesn't do anything. And that's kind of what actually gets me, drives me more than anything, where it doesn't matter what I feel about a specific situation. That feeling isn't going to help me find a solution. And so I think that that has actually a lot of my driving for. So whether I'm upset about something or whether I'm super happy, I call it actually with my co-founder, feel the feel. So feel it for 30 seconds, take a deep breath, whatever you need to do. And then after the 30 seconds, compartmentalize it, get to the next thing, try and find the solution to it. Where'd you pick that up? I don't know. It's just something maybe my mom, honestly, yeah, mom is like a well renowned EMDR therapist. Yeah. So when he wrote up, as a side, I always asked rounders now, like, what would your parents tell me about you? Trying to like pick up on their psyche. And I didn't do that with you. At all. I was just pretty enthralled by what you were doing and how you were working. But later after I invested, I did meet your mom and she told me like all these funny and cool stories and everything about like, you know, and honestly, if I just met her, I probably would have invested blindly because she told me all these stories of like resilience and work ethic and, you know, creativity and- That's where it's a mom, though. It's where I low bias. Bias are not, I think, she was right. You know? Everyone, every parent is part of their kid, I think, or most are, but there were stories you couldn't replace. Like, she shared this story about like this basketball team you wanted to make and like hours of shooting in your driveway for like months and months and months and months on end. And like, that's not something a kid normally does, that's unique. Yeah. Yeah, like I said, there was always these, like, take his now as his entrepreneurship, there was all these things that have existed, whether you hear these stories like, you know, Mark Cuban selling garbage bags to people or Gary Vee doing his thing with baseball cards. Like, I think these signs pop up in early age, but you're a kid, like, you don't know what it means. And I think if you take the drive and you put into something in a good way and you understand people and systems, it seems to work out to be a good equation. So why do you invest in me? And this is one I'm most interested in because it's so interesting. Like, it's, you know, I mean, we've known each other now for three years now and I actually remember in terms of like, you've talked about like the life cycle of the company and everything that we're facing right now. My first check was a happier moment than getting like a $5 million check. So you be going a little bit like numb to it, but that first check, it was $175,000, it hit our account. And this was after like two years, like no one listening to us and everyone was like, what the hell is this? And like, my bank account went to nothing. And obviously my loving mom was saying, oh, you're doing a great job. But she's like, I don't know what, what he's probably up to that much and like everything's going wrong. And, you know, someone wires you 175,000 and it's just like the most meaningful sum of money. And I was like, actually, my brother was visiting that office at the time. He saw and I had like tears in my eyes and all that and it's, it's really awesome where you've come to. But, you know, I think for everyone who's wearing amlar, you know, they bring in like 50, 60 founders at a time and, you know, you invest in to us and nobody wanted to invest in us. All the other partners said no, but you silver bullet and you said yes. Yeah. It's funny. I, this is the value, I think, of Antler and the style of investing of being in person with people. And there are just things that are tactile and visceral and however you want to describe it that are irreplaceable in underwriting a team and an operator. And so spending time with you in that office, especially amongst other people that are like objectively highly qualified, the resumes are amazing. They've done cool things in their lives. But being a founder is a different kind of job. And so you like stick all these people in the room and you observe them and you help them and you do it without any exchange of value. Like I'm not, I'm not taking any equity or giving any money. We're just there to help people succeed. But then like in that group, you were much more serious than other people. You were working much harder. You had a real long-term vision of something that was unique. In my opinion at the time was a bit of an end of one. Not many people I was meeting were talking about a stable coin future in, you know, 2020, 2021 time period. They were talking more about like NFTs and some of these like non durable assets. And you're very opinionated. I found you to be someone who like had a vision, had the work ethic. I had to do some deeper diligence. I called some people at polygon. I like, I'd understand what you were talking about. But part of this value, you mentioned the silver bullet, is that at antler, all of the partners can reject it. And if there's one partner who sees something in that person that's special, it's your responsibility to silver bullet it and take that shot. And so, you know, I did take that shot, but I don't think it was, it wasn't like a risky career move. It was like, how could we not back this person? It's very clear in the room that he's going to run circles around people and never give up. You're like emotional forward to your resilience, your seriousness, all those things really shine through. Even though at the time we were working on like e-commerce checkout as a, as a potentially completely different product. Yeah. You mentioned that. You mentioned like building a lot of stuff, shipping it. It's trying to like make moves and take action. You went through a few iterations. What was that like to get to, what is now APIs and infrastructure for anyone that wants to build? No, I did. I appreciate that sentiment. I would say that, you know, we wouldn't be here today. But I mean, we definitely wouldn't not have gotten here as fast as we did. I think without the help of, you know, yourself and antler along the way. Very different than mom than even like YC. So like, you know, people who are in YC are now having like 500,000 revenue and the traction so much more further along like, I had nothing. I was just like super, you know, work ethic as you would say and so it's always very deeply appreciated. Everyone says, you always remember your first investor and so that's always, you know, big reason why I'm here today. In terms of the pivots and I think what you're describing, I think that always that, what I found is that goes to, what is being a good founder is knowing when to pivot, also knowing when to quit. And so I think that's like almost like taboo, look at like Travis Kelantick, I think that you had like 19 companies before he founded Uber. And so I think you have these founders who were like, hey, here's my idea and, you know, I'm going to go work on it for five years and, you know, I'm going to make no revenue in that entire frame and get like two customers, but, you know, I'm never going to give up. Like, no, that's, that doesn't, I think quitting is just one area of pivoting into another different thing. So like a hard quit and a soft quit. Yeah. Exactly. So like we were looking at cards, right? And so to launch a credit card program was incredibly intense, whether you'd be regulated, achieve your licenses, work with a bin sponsor in the US, stablecoin wallet adoption is still relatively low in terms of emerging markets. And so we had all these data points that we found pretty early on. And so we thought, okay, maybe cards isn't the right choice. You know, let's go try and pivot into, you know, various other, you know, payments and so you can call that quitting or pivoting or whatever. And so we were just figuring out like, what is the best direction to go in? Or you could be that founder who's like, you know, I'm going to go build cards for five years and sometimes it works over a long enough time horizon. But I think you just need to know when you need to change things. Yeah. If that makes sense. It does. Brian Armstrong's quote like action creates information. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. This idea that you're sort of like bouncing around this like product market fit for us, like bump into trees, getting our nose, but eventually like seeing where the value was and realizing that there were a bunch of companies coming online that wanted to leverage table coin that didn't have the banking licenses, the infrastructure they needed. And then on top of that large institutions that saw what you saw, which is the ability to save money, do it instantly, really alleviate what is like an archaic infrastructure on the Swift network. Yeah. It's been pretty incredible. You've like now risen to be the number one mover of stable coin on the circle network close to it, you're rising in the tether ecosystem to one of the largest you've created partnerships with Visa. Like you have really a massive amazing accolades as a small company. Like is that is that luck? Is that practice? Is that it? How does that come to fruition in such a short period? So this actually goes back. I think probably to my co-founder relationship, I bet you know, we've known each other for 10 years and probably one of my closest friends, honestly, if not my closest friend. But we're both non-technical founders, so we don't know how to code. In the early days, that's very difficult because historically speaking, you have a technical founder who can build a product, a non-technical founder who can ship it or who can sell it. But you really just have these two guys who are really good at selling, I'd say for the most part. And so we had almost sell to get engineers to come and work and build and you'll really build a team around us. And so we had a lot of maybe like five different iterations of engineers of like going and leaving and it was like very difficult and building like oh, I just wish I knew how to code. But now I think that we're at the scale that we are, we can just go out for so many more opportunities. And you know, he can take core partnerships and you know, he ran the entire Visa deal for us. And you know, I can go lead, you know, our circle relationship and doing all of our interactions with them or you know, we're both going to like the tether off site, you know, speaking with them. And so I think just it goes to show us that we get so much more surface area, having, you know, non-technical skill sets. But still we're, let's say fairly yin and yang to each other with what he's good at and what I'm good at. But I think just like the breadth of opportunities we're able to bring in once you get to a scale approach is actually a force multiplier for the business versus in the beginning. It's very difficult. And that's actually probably like one of my contrarian ideas like why see like oh, two non-technical founders like once you're scaled, it's like a superpower when the beginning sucks. I love that. I never thought about that way. It's interesting. Especially today because you have a relative ease of shipping code and like getting to that first version of proof and and amassing some kind of credibility that there is a product on a market where there's some kind of fit, even if it's not, you know, exit velocity level. But yeah, I don't thought about like that. It's interesting that you guys are like a superpower after you get to the hard parts of building, even the non-technical. Yeah. That's what I'd say. But the first few years are not a little difficult. Yeah. Have you could do it again? Would you change anything? No, absolutely not. I mean, I would change now if I knew the data that we had, like we would get to, you know, our product faster because we have those data points to go on. But in terms of like who I'm building with or anything that sort of like, absolutely not. Like me and Moe could go build five more companies together. I think that probably if you want to like touch upon the co-founder relationship generally speaking, I think yes, you want to have very, almost like, deferring trades to each other, right? If someone's good at selling and someone's good at building. But I think the better rock of all of that is trust and respect for one another. And I think like 70% of the reasons that startups fail is actually due to, you know, co-founder conflict or breakup. It's not, you know, competition taking you out, it's not like lack of funding. It's just because you can't get along with the person next to you who you're spending, you know, 12, 14 hours a day with for years. And so we just have this really strong relationship of just respect and then definitely care for one another. And assuming positive intent where, you know, most of the times we're direction aligned and sometimes, you know, he looks at a problem differently versus how I look at it. But we're not at odds at each other. We're incredibly incentivized in the same manner. And, you know, we sort of like care that ethos with us. And I think that's the most important thing than anything else. Yeah. I do see a lot of co-founder breakups. Yeah. Like co-founder therapy, right, and it's like things are not going so well. So how do we get through this together and like they come to me as opposed to like what you mentioned. Yeah. Going to each other. Like, how do we get through this? What do we do? What's this like optimistic endless resilience kind of approach to building? Yeah. I mean, from my gut, I think it's a little bit like a little kid behavior too. Like I said before about that just like knowing when to quit, like if you're not getting along with this person, you can have direct conversations with them, like maybe going therapy and figuring that out for yourself, but then also find something that works out more suitable for you. Yeah. Don't go to your investor and say, "We're not going to get along." That's interesting way to go about it. I got it. We got a couple of cool tidbits that are like very counterintuitive. The double, non-technical co-founder, the long form writing as a function of disseminating process and thinking and decision making. Are there other things that you are starting to evolve into or learn or adopt as principles in operating a business like this? Yeah. So, in the early stage of the company, you call it a company, but it's not a company, and that's always one of my things that people are like, you're literally sitting with two other guys in this shabby room and your Wi-Fi is not working and you're like, "Yeah, this is the company where I. " You're not at a company. You're almost like a project at that point. But the things that you're working on together are like, "Hey, I'm going to go take out the trash or you're going to go do this," or someone else is going to go write some code. But it's always individual things that we're all contributing. As you start to grow, for the first time, I'm really thinking almost in systems of how can you manage people across in an organization to accomplish things in a super fluid manner. So, rather than me for the first time going out and they're like, "Hey, I'm going to go sell this product. How can I actually build incentives and find the best people and organize them in a way that brings in a wealth of opportunities into the business?" So, if you're thinking at a much more of a high level of moving chess pieces around, as opposed to on the night moving across the board. I think that you are an outlier when it comes to product design, which is a unique trade for a founder. You see some of the best with it, but I think it's something you're really good at. So, as you were talking about org design, I imagine that same OCD of product design translating to org design, if that makes sense. Yeah, but I think as you say, it's probably some dissemination of just being two OCD and little details. OCD as a superpower? Yeah, maybe OCD as a superpower. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, I mean, I have OCD myself, and it's like, it's almost like controls you a little bit. Like, I need this to be straight or organized or this way or clear. I can't describe it, but it's like an intrinsic motor or something. I don't know. It sounds like you share that and have that. Yeah, it's like, you know what it is. It's like when you see something that's out of place, it's like an itch you can't reach, and that's kind of what it's like. You're just really trying to get to that itch, and that's like my best physical version of it. Yeah. It's like a natural, you're right. It's like this natural need to scratch that thing or change it or fix it or make it perfect. Yeah. I've been in your office. It feels like very chill and very calm, but it also feels like everyone is exactly what they're doing and has a purpose. It's interesting setup, and I imagine that's intentional. I was very intentional about the design of our office too. Wanted it to feel like very feng shui, and always against this notion of, you know, the work has to be this labor suffer. I think that if you can make work feel like play as they say, then you're in a pretty good, pretty, you found the equation or you found the solution to the equation. And I think that's like what we've always, what I've always tried, build a company like, like when you're coming to the office, like you're not having your Sunday scaries, you're not dreading them or like I really want to go there and I really want to work. And obviously that starts with the people you're around and that starts with the ideas that you're working on, the problems you get to solve. But it's also your environment, like we looked at the 40, 50 offices before even, you know, deciding on our space with, you know, lots of natural sunlight, and the way that we designed it and carpets everywhere and like looking at, yeah, I want this sort of art on the wall and snacks. Like I think that's really important actually. Yeah. And so interesting. I think that when people, the way people do one thing is the way they do everything. Like if you obsess over like something that seems as small as the art or the way it feels to come to work, for sure you're obsessing like your customers, the quality of your revenue, like all the things that are very meaningful. But to care so much about something that may seem so small to other people, I think is also a sign of how much care you put into the business. Are there things that are below the fold or things that like let those fires burn and they're not important or is everything as a founder, as important as everything else? I'd say like the things that I don't think are as important is that, um, acting like a boss, quote unquote, of like these like how you're supposed to act like I don't really care and I don't really care how people talk or really, you know, emphasize themselves in the office. You're not client-facing and you want to wear sweatpants to work in your grader like I or pajamas like I don't care or like if you want to just like sit across from me and you know, you're like, oh, he was talking about like my, my, my hinge day, like you're supposed to talk about that with your boss, but like who cares? Like I think it's like those little things like focus on the first principles on what needs to get done and you know, I think paying very close attention to the things that actually matter versus like, um, you know, hey, I'm going to be a few hours late today. Um, you know, I have a doctor's appointment or like that's, I just, that stuff doesn't matter. Most of my founders when they raise, they're like, let's go to LinkedIn and tell everybody. You did the exact opposite. Yeah. You've quietly raised over $10 million. You have not announced it. You've just continued to build. Like one, uh, I imagine fundraising was not that easy, but also after all of that, why not announce it? Why not share that with the world? I think there's, there's a few parts to it, but it's wanting to always like be bigger than we are. And it's, it's the perception of wanting to get into rooms where, you know, 10 million is great. So I think like the early stage community, but, you know, where we want to go in the next few years, it's, it's really a drop in the bucket. So like I'm really proud of what we've done, but, um, you know, we still have a lot more to do. And so it's nothing that, you know, we definitely want to, uh, again, our soap box and, you know, really shout out. There's, there's more important stuff to talk about. Yeah. It's interesting because we see all this like valuation, maxing and like LinkedIn, ego games of people sharing their rounds, but I think you texted me a photo. You were holding up like a piece of paper. It's like 10 million. You're like, should I post this? No. Let's just move on. It does great. No. Yeah. There's, uh, like I said, like the journey itself is that there's a hundred different levels that you have to get to. And so, you know, happy of the like level we've gone to, but, you know, it's not sufficient. Yeah. So, if you're a little bit further faster podcast and if you like this episode, please remember to like and subscribe and share this with your friends. There's so many amazing episodes from the founders of superhuman to rent the runway and better cloud and beyond. There'll be many more of these coming your way. So please, uh, like and subscribe and we'll see you on the next one.