EP #305 - Alex Blania: Defy For Global Financial Empowerment

This conversation was originally recorded in November 2022. The best startup ideas sound absolutely ridiculous. If you think through them structurally and point by point, you can actually think of a path of all of this working out and making a lot of sense. Welcome to The Swiss Praner Show, a podcast about startup stories and learnings from experience entrepreneurs. Here's your host, Sullivan. Hey, Alex. Very well. Welcome to The Swiss Praner Show. Thank you so much for joining us from San Francisco today. Thank you so much for having me. You're the co-founder and CEO at WorldCoin, a new decentralized global currency that will be distributed fairly to as many people as possible. Before we talk about this very ambitious and fascinating project, I actually want to start with your personal background. You studied physics and mechanical engineering at university and despite starting to write your master thesis on your bachelor's sixth semester, actually, you then ended up dropping out of your master's. Why did he decide to do so? Because I met my co-founder for WorldCoin, which is a very, he's a very famous figure here in Silicon Valley. His name is Sam Altman. And so basically, I started studying in Germany. So I did two undergraduates at the same time. So as you said, mechanical industrial engineering and physics. And then I started going into the direction of theoretical physics and more specifically, how to use AI to predict quantum systems. So-- And that's what's like back then. It's still like-- actually right now, I'm literally today I'm publishing a paper in this topic. So I'm still working in that field a few hours a week. But it's-- so this was that. And then I went to Los Angeles to Caltech to kind of continue writing my master thesis. And hopefully, at some point, to a PhD. This was the idea. But then basically, Sam reached out and told me about the company, WorldCoin. And back then, it sounded like a hobby project. It was like, OK, let's give it a try. But then, after a few months, it became quite serious quickly. Yeah, and then you had to make a decision, I assume. Was that an easy one for you to say, I stopped my master's and just jumped right into this venture? It was quite easy at that point because I always knew I wanted to do kind of startups. I always wanted to go to San Francisco. And it's kind of-- remember, would have a time capsule if I could just stop time and do whatever I enjoy the most? I would probably do research because it's just-- it's so much fun. It's just cool. It's everyday is somewhat exciting and cool. While being a CEO, you see it was just really, really hard. And it's also fun. But it's just much, much harder and much, much draining. But I don't. So that's why I'm here. And you said you always knew that you wanted to go to San Francisco, that you wanted to have your own company. Where does that entrepreneurial drive come from? Did you have any role models that inspired you to go down that path? My father, I think, played a big role, certainly. He started a company, but also most importantly, interacts with many entrepreneurs. So quite early on, this became a normal part, which is not the case for most people growing up in Germany. The kind of entrepreneurship or starting companies is a normal thing. It's always a little bit outside or topic usually. And so I grew up of that being a very normal topic. And then I built many things when I was younger, right? I built a car, and then I built all kinds of robots. And then at some point, I was doing this kind of science competition and built a bark beetle monitoring robot, actually, that you could put in forests and would predict bark beetle populations. And that then almost already became a company. And back then, I was 16, 17, and then through that, I met another entrepreneur that basically invited me to join his venture while I was still in high school, which was a vertical farming business, a vertical farming company, which was really, really cool. So this is kind of even before I started studying, I did the first company. And it actually went quite well. It was a very cool time, learned a lot. And then while I started studying, I only started studying industrial engineering for two semesters. And then built a lot of apps while doing so. And then also got really excited about physics, and then started studying that too. And then it was a little bit too much to also still do startups. But so then I went all in on physics, basically, for two years, three years. But yeah, it was always kind of the default to do that at some point. Right. And you know, talk about your university days. What was valuable about your time at university and what was not? I have so much to talk here, honestly, because it's-- so essentially, I touched three degrees quite deeply. And it's like very different from a very different perspective. So I did industrial engineering. And then-- so that means you have business. And then you have mechanical engineering. And then I went much deeper mechanical engineering, because I also wanted to be a better mechanical engineering, which is yet another story. But so basically, I did all the fundamental lectures on business and Germany back then. And then at the same time, also, of course, physics. And then also physics and Germany and physics in the United States. And then also physics at university and physics at Max Planck, which is a research institute. So like, many different environments, all somewhat connected to university, but all of them have been very different. And I think physics, for me, was by far the most useful experience itself. Or like, because if I reflect on what did I learn there is just like thinking, to be honest, like, structured thinking. And you do this every day. And you do it for like many, many hours a day. And you just solve really hard problems. And during physics research, I think the biggest thing I took away was the paper I published actually was two years. So the paper I published today took us two years to write. And it was like this huge ambitious project. And I remember back then when I went into this project, it was like basically hitting a wall. Because the thing about theoretical physics, it's like the stuff is so complicated, at least if you begin with it, that you just literally don't understand what you're even reading. And that's an experience you have quite rarely. So in mechanical engineering or business, that's the never experience I had. It's like you just usually you read it, you understand it, and then you repeat it, and you get better at it. But theoretical physics for me was so complicated that it's like you almost hit a mental wall. And you just for weeks, you just sit in front of those few pages and you try to understand the math, and you get better at it. And then you start building a huge project out of it. And you take step by step by step. So I think I learned a lot from my professor. Actually, if I would reflect who are the people I learned the most in my career, it's actually my professor at Max Planck. Because he was so diligently structured in his thinking process. And I don't know, it was just very inspiring to spend time with him. So this I think was my main takeaway. And then also one of the funny part was one of my first business lectures took me from mechanical to soft engineering. Because there was this lecture IT and E business. And basically it just told all of those entrepreneurial stories of founders and Germany and the US and Silicon Valley and so on and so forth. And I always-- I was doing mostly mechanical stuff. So the thing I built when I was in high school were like all robots and et cetera, et cetera. So like I always wanted to build also companies in that space. But that lecture actually showed me the crazy upside and kind of the fast iterations I could get with software. So I went much deeper into software back then. So this was like a very long and diffuse answer. But there's like so much to talk here. No, I mean, clearly university shaped you in so many different ways. And you took away a lot of different things from your time at university. So that's fantastic. It was an amazing time. And then in 2020, you actually co-founded Rollscoin. And before you did that, how did you actually initially first get into crypto basically? I did not. I did not at all actually. So I was in-- so back then I was still doing the research. And this was back then only research. So no lectures anymore. It was kind of you do this phase in between your masters and PhD, where you just wrap up things usually. And kind of-- so I was at Caltech and Los Angeles up in Pasadena, which is a beautiful area. And so I was just literally doing physics all day. This was what I did. And then I got this email from Max Novenster, which was the third co-founder back then of Rollscoin. And he just sent me like a one-pager and said, "Hey, here's this, I'm working on this new company with Sam, and we tried to do this ambitious thing with crypto." Back then, crypto wasn't a total bear market. So as of today, so today is November 15th. And to reflect on listeners, last week there was a huge crash in crypto because of FTX exchange crash. And so people say there's a bear market in crypto. But that's not even close to what were crypto was when I started working on it. Because back then, I remember when I went to Silicon Valley and we talked to people, every one of us had a gap, crypto's dad. What are you even doing in that space? And it's only about Bitcoin and Ethereum and nothing else there matters. So I was not in crypto and I just got this email from Max. And I drove up to San Francisco and went Max and then had an interview with Sam. And then basically over many weeks. So they already started working on it since six or seven months. So they already had some head start. And so-- and I was still deciding should I do that or not? I had other job offers that were much more-- well, I don't know, quantum computing and stuff like that. So much more within the things I knew and also much higher paying and et cetera, et cetera. So I was thinking about it. And so basically just started reading all the books about crypto and all the kind of fundamental literature on crypto and all that stuff. They basically sent me. So this was like a whole process of two months of just sitting in a library and reading everything, learning everything and trying to understand what is actually going on and just doesn't even make any sense. To be fair, when I started working on it, I still did not know if this makes any sense. I was just like at some point, you just need to do a leap of faith because even in eight weeks, you're not able to figure something like that out. And so yeah, then I took the leap of faith and one of my best friends and part of the founding team, Sandro was with me at Caltech, also physicist, and then he joined too. And then three of my other closest friends also joined from Germany back then. We had before that we had like a AI research company next to our studies. So all of those people joined and we started working on it. - Amazing story. What actually gave you the push to say, this is not my field of expertise. I did like a bootcamp, a crash course by reading all the literature. But what initially then gave you the push to say, that's what I want to focus on for the next years, probably to come. - A few things. So one is certainly Sam itself was like a big piece of it because it was like, okay, there's certainly a lot to learn here. There's a lot of patterns you can learn by just like working with some of the best entrepreneurs of our time, which I think he clearly is. So that certainly was one big push of it. And the other big push was, I remember back then, when Sam took a walk with me, he basically told me something along the lines of, hey, if it works, it's obviously going to be a huge technological shift. If it doesn't work, we will just, like we basically took a lot of money of Silicon Valley and distributed with the world and like a very interesting and cool way. And it at least we did something meaningful. And so basically back then I decided for myself, like I have no idea where this is going. I have no idea if this makes any sense, but it seems like even the worst case will make me sleep like a baby in the years after. And so I was looking at a crazy adventure and decided for myself that it's probably a repertoire. And yeah, and then one more actually, which is a very interesting point. There's this article by Paul Graham. Paul Graham is one of the founders of YCompinator, which is like in San Francisco, it's one of the biggest startup incubators. And so since I was, I don't know, 16 or 17, I was reading all of his blog posts. And one of them talks about startup ideas and kind of what are the best startup ideas. And the point is basically that the best startup ideas sound absolutely ridiculous, but you can, if you think through them structurally and a point by point, you can actually think of a path of all of this working out and making a lot of sense. And all of this was the case for me for this idea. I was like, I was looking at this idea. I was like, okay, this is actually a sounds crazy. The sounds so out there, but I can write down on a piece of paper all the things that need to be the case for this to work. And so I was like, all right, probably it always feels like that if you start something like that, right? Is does it feel like a done deal when you start Airbnb? Probably it doesn't, right? It's like in fact, they had a huge struggle for the first two years. So that's the whole reflection of like, what are actually good startup ideas? Because probably it's not the ones that sound super obvious, right? Because otherwise they would already be out there. Exactly. I like this point that it just said, it sounds like a very simple idea, but then when you actually add everything together, it all makes sense. You can lay out what needs to be fulfilled in actually to make it a success. So I do want to deconstruct that a bit by going into more detail. So Rollcoin basically wants to give a free coin to everyone on Earth. That's a very bold vision. So really, you know, talking about going big or going home, how do people actually sign up for Rollcoin? So there's like a few, a few parts to that. And I'm going to start actually where the idea came from and kind of what was the, what was kind of the root cause of it. And so back then we started, when kind of this whole thing started. Again, crypto wasn't a dark phase and people didn't believe there's actually any value and which they actually might do again this week. But you get the point, at least it did not do this for the last two years. And so crypto was very early, but somewhat it was also clear that it's there to stay. And it's something will happen with it, but it was a very, very small industry and still is in terms of just user numbers. So you have, back then it was around 50 million. At this point, you can probably make the argument at somewhere between 100 to 200 million people in crypto. But if you're still, like if you're still a little bit more kind of clear on who is actually using something, you're still like below 100 million. So it's still very, very small. And so Sam was just coming from the idea that, okay, clearly something is here. The technology itself will be transformative, but it did not land yet. And on the other hand, it all seems to be about network effects, right? So everyone still can really always talk about network effects that are redinner, like it's the favorite topic of people here, but there's a big truth to that. In that sense, that's also the case with a financial network, obviously. If you're able to bootstrap a large one, the larger it gets, the more useful it gets. And it's important, it gets more useful non-linearly. So you have some super linear function that increases faster than just a linear function over time. I'm sorry, I always use mathematical terms then realize the problem. People might be confused about that, but so you have a super linear function over the number of users, and there's many discussions what that would be, but it's clear that if you become the largest network, you probably become extremely valuable. And you will be able to solve many, many problems, and that case actually may crypto very useful. And so some simple idea back then was, all right, what would happen? Like what if the big insight of crypto over three is actually this idea of ownership participation? So that you create a network, and you give ownership in that network to your users, and therefore all the value that gets created through that network is not only shared with founders or the company, but with all of its users. So what if that is the fundamental idea? And so that leads you to the extreme of like, okay, let's just start a new network by giving ownership in it to every user we onboard, and let's push that as far as we can, and let's push for billions of people. And so this was like the founding principle of the company is like, okay, we launch a new network, and we give ownership in that network to all of our users, and we clearly aim at billions and scale first. So we scale as quickly as we can in every regard. And he then also came from that part that he thinks AI is changing the world much faster than people realize, and kind of actually participating, everyone in the global economy will become exponentially more important over time, right, because we act like right now we go through, I believe we go through a revolution that is much bigger than the industrial revolution, and it will transform our industry much more than people realize right now. And seeing that from the inside, seeing that within OpenAI and like all of those companies here is actually, it's crazy. So he approached it from that angle too, is like we need to get everyone participated and then try things like UBI in the future, maybe. So this was like, this was the idea. And so if you would state the mission act then it would be something like a K participate everyone in the globally complex. economy is fast as we possibly can because it will be critical to all of us. And do that by giving out ownership in the network through token to all of its users. However, then we realized that the biggest problem to solve as a first step in that direction is identity. So how do you issue everyone, no matter where they come from, an equal identity that is fully pseudonymous and privacy preserving? And the only way to do that to be found back then and still this the case is biometrics. And that's why we build our own biometric device that basically issues you privacy preserving proof of personal. So meaning you can prove to the network that you are actually a unique human being without revealing who you actually are, which is a very powerful question. That's quite mind blowing if you think about it. Yes. Yes. So that was like a short rant of how it came together. And why is that actually so important to then make an equal distribution in it as a second step? So it's actually important if you want to make any distribution with any financial incentive right because if you would not do that. So if you so okay, so let's assume you don't solve that problem, then you will still have an easy run in Europe and United States probably. Like you probably are able to do that in most European countries, actually not in all of them but in most and in the United States that could already be a huge payout for you as a founder financially because there's many people there. However, if you want to take it to take actually extreme and you want to be as inclusive as you possibly can, it also needs to work in places like Africa or Indonesia or like it actually should work for everyone. It should work from no way to Indonesia. And so then you cannot rely on government infrastructure for such an important thing. So that's important. Infrastructural peace because. Let's assume we actually getting close to token launch. So let's assume we launch a token. The token gets a substantial market cap meaning there's a lot of value in the token. And if you basically attack the system and you can create multiple identities and let's say we would not have solved that problem. You as a bot or as an attacker, you can get a lot of money for free. And so then sent if to attack the system is really really high and the infrastructure for identities is really bad and actually for most of the people in the world actually. So it would be quite easy for them to trick us and. Meaning the whole system would probably break down. And in fact, there is many examples from the early days of crypto where people that hundreds of millions of dollars of adrops with that same theory of okay, we want to create a large network as quickly as possible. But it failed exactly for that reason, even in the United States because just people attacked the system either thread in these or the service itself and just created so many accounts that the whole system broke down. So in that case, you're really solving a very, very big problem. The proof of personhood without having to reveal your identity as he said before. Yes, exactly. And the thing is, it's pretty funny. We over time, our early investors were just like those crypto, the very crypto hardcore believers. Back then was one part, not a recent hour with Chris Dixon, which I'm a huge fan of. But later in the last round, there's many of those generally they're concerned about AI risk. And so and that happens because all of those language models, GPT-3 and all those things, they start showing you that in the not too distant future, you will interact on the internet and you will have no idea that the interact with a human or you interact with an actual bot on AI, right? Because right now we are a GPT-3 with an open AI. So for people that don't know that open AI is a research lab in San Francisco, that is also started by Sam, my co-founder and they create basically AI systems. And one of them is GPT-3. It's a language model. So you basically type what you're going to say or what is your question and the model tells kind of just starts responding to you. And it already does that in a really, really tricky way. It's really hard to understand is this now a machine or is this a human being. And GPT-4 as a disclaimer is much, much crazier. And that's only one year later. Right? So relatively soon you might be in a telegram chat and you might totally talk to an AI and you just have no idea that that's actually the case. So this whole notion of proof of personnel now becomes much more essential even just through that development too. Right. And you said before you want to be independent from like government infrastructure, et cetera. However, you probably do need access to a smartphone or a computer to actually be able to participate or have your tokens in WorldCoin, which many people in the world of the geographies that you mentioned still do not really have. How do you plan to solve this problem? Yeah, we will start investing now some resources and I think in the next 12 months a lot of resources and that problem because fundamentally we don't rely on that. It's just like, for example, good example is in Nairobi, Kenya or in Kenya more broadly. There's a payment rail called Mesa, which is actually it's quite known to many people in the industry because it's like it's a crazy case of a whole country suddenly shifting to digital payments. However, that is controlled by one company, SafariCom. And they charge a lot of money. They charge like eight dollars, sorry, 8% up to sometimes even over 10% depending on where you are and how much you pay. And they do that through SMS. You can also use it with your smartphone but also they offer it for feature phones and SMS and etc. So that's one more excuse. So right now our app is very slim and it works for many different phones and it's very backward compatible. Obviously, we are not there yet. It's like a lot of work and we also start up with limited resources. But the short answer being like we just work our way back to kind of the least technology requirements for the whole system to work. I think if you don't have any phone, not even a phone with SMS, then it's going to be challenging because the whole thing is obviously digital. So it's hard to interact with it through paper. But I think that already gives us way more coverage. And that will assume that I actually have my world coin. What will I be able to do with it? So basically the role coin token itself is actually, it gives you ownership and network itself. Right. So if you zoom out and you look over all coin from top to bottom, then there's already many products that actually will create a lot of economic value and some of them already do. So this role ID, which is basically is kind of this identity part that we saw through biometrics. And that is also an open SDK. So use the developer. You can basically integrate with that and use it for your app. If you want this proof of personal or you want this other identity protocol is attached to that. And in the future, like it's actually unclear when this will ship because we don't want it for a long time. At some point, use the developer, you will have to pay fees in the role coin token to just use that infrastructure, right? Because the whole network, it costs money to operate it. And so it's just fair if you use it as a developer that you pay for it. So it's one piece of it. Then we have an app, a wallet, which is a non custodial crypto wallet, meaning the whole thing that happened with the X cannot happen to it because it's just purely based on smart contracts and math. So you can buy other tokens there. You can buy stablecoins. You can buy a role coin not yet, but whenever it launched or Bitcoin, whatever you want, you can send it to your friends. And we also will start working on something like lending, lending products based on DeFi, et cetera. So all of those things are coming. And again, that product will create a lot of economic value and already is. And again, here we will also capture fees at some point in the future through a wall coin, right? So meaning, user-user, you basically get ownership in the network and the network starts growing. It gets more and more useful, more utility. And basically because you join, because you also give the network something, it's basically you're becoming a network node. And you basically get participation in the utility and the upside of the network itself. So that's the first mental model of the token. It's basically, it's this, to be fair, it's like a very web-three and crypto thing, but it gives you ownership in the network itself. So what will happen to the token when it actually gets to scale? We have some ideas, but it's very hard to predict because there's just nothing like that. Because the token is not just like a currency in that sense. You have like, I give you one token or yet another token, but it's based on Ethereum, so you can actually interface with it with smart contracts. But it might totally happen in many markets. We operate in that this might become just a default digital online currency that interacts with smart contracts whenever you use it. Absolutely. And you also briefly talked about, I guess this was like a way complicated, very more complicated answer than you hope for. But oh, it's totally fine. I see the potential more and more now by talking to you. And you also mentioned that there are fees that you might take for transactions, et cetera. Can you talk a bit more about your business model? Because in the end, you're also startup and you have investors and obviously also need to make some form of money to survive as a company. Yep, so we are structured as I think every crypto or the three projects should be structured. And that sends that you-- well, there's also equity in a company, but the big thing that we have and investors have is the token as you as a user have to. So when the token is launched, which is, again, it's not yet. So kind of investors can buy the token in the future. And the network gains utility to token, really reflect that. So that's the only way we make money. So also, for example, we could take those fees and we could wire them to a private company, let's say. And that would be horrible. But that would be a much more direct business model. But what we actually do is when those fees which are getting engaged, they interact with the whole network. So there will be a burning mechanism or something like that for the network itself. So meaning the whole network gets lifted up. And because the whole network gets lifted up, we also participate in that. So there's no actual direct business model, like, through any of that. But it's all through that token, which gives us ownership in that network. And that sounds like a very well aligned incentive structure that you all are in there for the long run for a more valuable token. Correct. That's the main reason. It trust me. It was really, really hard to do that, because many investors believe that's a horrible idea, obviously. So we had many, many discussions around that and many bylaws and et cetera, et cetera, to just make that happen and make that work. And you also talked about network effects, right? As a crucial part of your path to success, basically. And in the end, you probably need the masses, right? You need the volume to establish role coin. To then also not only drive the token price, but really to have adoption and have people using an interact in with your token, your platform, basically. How do you plan to get them on board? Because that's probably one of the biggest challenges, despite the many technical challenges and the logic challenges behind it with the incentives. To get users to actually use the token and get to a certain critical mass, to then let the network effects kick in. So this is the crux of the problem, as you can imagine. And it's in our case exponentially more complicated because we want to be in many places in the world all at once, like if you focus on, let's say one market, let's say we would only go to Nairobi and we have that app in Nairobi and we have the token in Nairobi and we have the identity in Nairobi, then it gets quite, you can actually start focusing on, okay, what payment products would be useful in that market? And what identity provided we want to integrate with, et cetera, et cetera. It gets way less complicated. However, we just given the mission of the project, we want to be global. So that means that we have multiple feature teams and it's like actually like for the next quarter, where we will go much, much deeper in four markets. So meaning I will live in one market, our head of product will live in another and yet two other people will live in, and yet another market and like we will actually start building teams locally on the ground. And the big focus for the first scaling phase, which we think is below five percent local penetration. So you have a total addressable market and you are below five percent of that in that market. In Nairobi, we are already at 4.9, so we quickly will go into kind of phase two, which is then we think up to 20. And so we go in these markets and we basically, you can think of the wallet as a cable bundle. It's like actually someone my team told me this over the weekend, I really like the analogies. Like it's a cable bundle. There's financial services in there and like for every market, there's two or three things that really matter a lot for the people there and might be sports, it might be news. And for a wallet, it's kind of on-ramp to crypto or it might be dollar accessed through stablecoins in countries with high inflation. So there's always those two or three things that are actually are killer and people really want in that market and then there's like 10 other things we can build and probably we'll make it cooler and more fun. And so we have a map of this in every market we're in. We understand what are the three killer things that we actually have to build and what are the 10 other things that might just be fun and cool. And so that's how you basically do that. You go in there and you parachute product teams in those markets, you build those products and then you have a lot of metrics that tell you, do you start seeing the first network effects? Yes or no? And if yes, if you start hitting them which I think we are already there in some markets, then you can start expanding to more and more. - Right and you're also big advantage there as you mentioned, the fee structure right off the existing solutions out there which are enormous. Like 8, 10, maybe even 11 or 12% fees on these transactions that's huge and you will probably be significantly lower due to the efficiency of your network and your setup. - Yes, correct. It's, I mean that problem specifically is the case in Nairobi, I could say huge topic there. And it's very cool right because in Nairobi, for example, we are in every major university. So I think another important point for listeners, like we're still testing so that the whole system is not live yet. So we're gonna launch actually quite soon in the coming months. But so in Nairobi, we are in every major technical university and if you talk to students there, all of them know what crypto is and all of them are excited about it because it actually solves a lot of problems for them on the ground. Like it actually gives them hope of, okay, we can build a better infrastructure, better system that is not only based on one entity that takes a lot of money and so that's cool about the market. - Yeah, right. And then you have a natural pool basically instead of having to push into the market. - Correct. - Very powerful. So when will you actually launch? You said you're currently testing what is your plan to launch? - So the thing I can say is we are in actually in seven days, November 21st, in November 21st, we have a huge internal milestone, which is main net readiness. So that means that all of our systems are technically on green. So product engineering, all of those things are would be ready to scale drastically. And we now also have many of those devices, manufactured and built. So we would actually be ready to scale and go. The only big thing that is still missing is marketing and communications. So we are still quite stealthy. The only podcast I talk to in quite a while many people asked me to show up. So it's like I'm still very stealthy and we don't really talk much. So this is the last big zero to one we have to take is kind of actually marketing, columns messaging, all those stuff. And once that is the case, so we're just assembling the team for this whole project. We will launch, but the thing is, it's actually quite dependent on, as you can imagine, a macro environment. So I was hoping that at this time, I could just announce a firm date and say, okay, we were ready to go because we actually are as a company. But right now it's much more defined by external factors, that internal factors to some degree. - Yeah, that's that also frustrates you to a certain degree because your company's ready. You worked really hard to get to that readiness, but now the market timing is just bad. Is that also a bit frustrating on a personal level that you cannot go at full speed right now? - So there's a few parts about it of frustrating others or not. And so what is frustrating about it is Keith Robo is, which is another, it's a well-known investor, and Silicon Valley, he always says, capital is oxygen, right? And so at times where capital is cheap, you can just run, always, you can sprint and brief as much as you need. And in a current environment, you definitely cannot brief as much as you need. So meaning it's not clever right now to just scale brutally as fast as possible. And capital is just not as cheap. And I remember when we raised our CSV, which is by the way, it's like I think the worst thing at it ever as a CO, I wouldn't ever do this again, but we had $300 million in commitments. So people, like 300 million people, at $300 million of just investors, that just wanted to invest the company in money urgently as much as fast as possible and people's blaming my inbox and all those things. And back then I only took a hundred because I was like, yeah, whatever we were making so much progress, we don't need more right now. Obviously right now it's not as easy anymore to raise another 300 million dollars because just funds are hard, they kind of, [BLANK_AUDIO] interest rates are high, et cetera, et cetera. So this is the annoying piece is like that now you actually need to be cautious of how fast to run. And that's annoying. The general market environment, I think, is actually quite good for us because the most dangerous situation if you launch a token is that you basically see a strong initial spike. And then it drops off. Because then what basically happened is a lot of retail investors invested in the project are excited about it and then lose money in it. And looking backward, if you would have launched a product until now, that would have happened 100% because it was like the last two years where like a very weird time with zero interest rates and just markets pumping wildly. So if you would have launched a token there, now the price would certainly be down, probably 70% or so, or 60%. And it's much, much better for us to launch in a down market, slowly start building and kind of actually grow the network and get better and better and then take the next rise and interest in crypto and markets picking up again. Because it's good upward projected that you want for a project like that versus like a huge pump of dump. So that part I'm really happy about actually, I think that's really good. So for the long term, you know, health of world coin, that's actually a very good thing right now. And despite all the turbulences in the market, that's the perfect starting point. So now if you fast forward a bit and we say the launch happened, what can we expect from world coin post launch? So well, a few things. First, a lot of public attention in the good end of the bad. It's like generally, we always underestimated how high the interest for this project is just given Sam is a co-founder and like the nature of the project itself and all of the investors we have. And so that's why we actually lay low more than I usually, what is a founder because whenever I say something, everyone is listening and that's actually quite stressful if you just want to build and you like you, you still start up, like no matter who's your co-founder and which investors you have, you still have to build products and you still have to build stuff and you did not figure anything everything out already from day one. So that's that that will change because at some point, then you are a public company and you have to explain what you do and in our case, it actually is a decentralized project versus a company, meaning we have to build an ecosystem and we have to get developers excited about it and so on and so forth. So that's one big piece is like communication will dramatically ramp up. And the other big thing is for us internally, it's just all about scale. Scale as quickly as we can as fast as we can in those markets and kind of grow, grow the network. That's the other thing. I hope you will see a lot of exciting numbers every week. We certainly stay tuned for that definitely. So Alex, to wrap up today's conversation, I also have some rapid fire questions for you. I either gave you different options to choose from or a simple question and you have to answer in one sentence. You ready? Yes. Let's go. In a half to one sentence you're saying? Ideally, yeah, ideally. OK. In a pre-world coin world, what was your cryptocurrency of choice? Bitcoin. What does money mean to you? Freedom. When were you last surprised? Last week about the collapse of FDX. Yeah, good example. Money or purpose? How many hours of sleep did you get last night? Six hours and 37 minutes. Oh, you checked the or ring or your eight. Yes, yes, this or ring. Complete the sentence. World coin is key to economic empowerment for billions of people. Nice. And the last one, Germany or the United States? United States. Fair point. Alex, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a pleasure talking to you. We are super excited to see what you're building with Rollcoin and lots of success and all the best for the future. Thank you so much for having me, so this was a lot of fun and I wish you all the best too. Are you a venture capitalist, family office or about to launch your own angels' indicate? Then this week's sponsor could be your next trusted partner. This episode was produced in cooperation with Lever, the leading platform in Switzerland to set up and manage your SPVs and syndicate your deal flow. Lever allows you to set up SPVs from your computer in just five minutes, starting from as little as 1000 Swiss francs. As you know, SwissBner runs its own syndicate and we've been using Lever since our first deal. We couldn't be happier with them. If you're currently setting up your syndicate or structuring your club deal, we recommend you to check out their website www.liver.pe. 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