00:00:36.280 --> 00:00:39.128
Hey everyone, it's Alex Cahaya from the Index Podcast.
00:00:39.128 --> 00:00:45.328
I want to tell you about Mantis, a groundbreaking platform that's simplifying the way we interact across blockchains.
00:00:45.328 --> 00:00:49.517
If you're a developer or just into DeFi, you'll want to pay attention.
00:00:49.517 --> 00:01:01.472
Mantis enables trust-minimized transactions across different chains, letting you trade or execute actions seamlessly while getting the best possible outcome, all without the usual complexities.
00:01:01.472 --> 00:01:11.694
Imagine being able to move assets and settle transactions across blockchains easily, with maximum value extraction, all while staying secure and decentralized.
00:01:11.694 --> 00:01:14.966
That is what Mantis is bringing to the table.
00:01:15.668 --> 00:01:24.447
Mantis is an official sponsor of the Index podcast, and their founder, Omar, and I regularly host a new live stream series on X called Everything SVM.
00:01:24.447 --> 00:01:37.602
We have these live streams weekly and if you want to keep up with what's happening in the Solana ecosystem, especially as it relates to the new innovative deployments of the Solana virtual machine, you should tune into this live stream.
00:01:37.602 --> 00:01:45.355
Check them out at mantisapp and follow them on X at mantis, M-A-N-T-I-S.
00:01:45.355 --> 00:01:46.576
At the Index.
00:01:46.576 --> 00:01:54.683
We believe that people are worth knowing and we thank Mantis for enabling us to tell the stories of the people who are building the future of the internet.
00:01:54.683 --> 00:01:56.069
We'll see you on the other side.
00:02:03.042 --> 00:02:06.859
Welcome to the Index podcast hosted by Alex Cahaya.
00:02:06.859 --> 00:02:13.623
Plug in as we explore new frontiers with entrepreneurs, builders and investors to the Index.
00:02:13.623 --> 00:02:17.247
I'm your host, alex Kahaya, and this week.
00:02:35.000 --> 00:02:45.681
I'm excited to be joined by Ben Ha, co-founder of Orangedale, one of the largest communities of crypto founders committed to fostering the growth and innovation of blockchain startups.
00:02:45.681 --> 00:02:51.413
Ben, we share a mutual friend who has been a frequent guest here and a whole award.
00:02:51.413 --> 00:02:54.949
Really appreciate her referring you here and thanks for being on the show.
00:02:55.539 --> 00:02:55.841
Hey, thanks.
00:02:55.882 --> 00:02:59.205
Alex Glad to be here, so let's just kick things off.
00:02:59.205 --> 00:03:06.961
Can you just, for people who don't might not know, you just kind of give your TLDR story background and then like talk about Orangetail?
00:03:07.462 --> 00:03:07.864
Yeah, sure.
00:03:07.864 --> 00:03:14.187
So right now I am one of the co-founders of a fund that invests in early stage crypto companies.
00:03:14.187 --> 00:03:16.135
We run an accelerator program twice a year.
00:03:16.135 --> 00:03:20.548
We're about 15 companies each and we invest in the earliest stages.
00:03:20.548 --> 00:03:29.544
This community, called Orangetail, came from a bunch of former or YC founders, and so we're all venture-backed, experienced founders.
00:03:29.544 --> 00:03:37.701
Most of us went through YC and we are now building in the crypto space because we feel that there's a need to help other founders to succeed and learn how to grow there.
00:03:37.701 --> 00:03:42.961
Prior to that, I worked at Y Combinator for Sam Altman, who everybody knows now.
00:03:42.961 --> 00:03:50.920
Prior to that, I ran a company called the Cheeseburger Network, which was one of the first companies that ever brought internet memes to the masses.
00:03:50.920 --> 00:03:55.991
So we ran sites like I Can Ask Cheeseburger Fail Blog Know your Meme?
00:03:55.991 --> 00:03:57.681
Technically, I guess I'm one of the.
00:03:57.983 --> 00:03:58.604
OG meme lords.
00:03:58.604 --> 00:04:01.450
That's amazing, it's super relevant.
00:04:01.450 --> 00:04:10.793
I mean, memes have been going obviously nuts this year with Pumped Up Fun and I honestly haven't played around with it at all because I'm just not that much of a gambler.
00:04:10.793 --> 00:04:18.553
You know, I've done a bunch of angel investing too, but always in like things that I understood were products and had revenue.
00:04:18.553 --> 00:04:20.245
You are so rational, alex.
00:04:20.600 --> 00:04:21.925
You're just going to miss out on everything.
00:04:21.925 --> 00:04:23.165
Good luck staying poor, apparently.
00:04:23.165 --> 00:04:27.071
So I'm the same way, right, I'm just like, okay, what is the utility of this meme coin?
00:04:27.071 --> 00:04:30.389
And you know, emphasis on meme, less on coin, right.
00:04:30.389 --> 00:04:32.848
So like, what is it supposed to do?
00:04:33.240 --> 00:04:36.630
And I think there's a lot of interesting kind of theories around it.
00:04:36.630 --> 00:04:52.600
One of the best theories that I've been given is actually by one of our portfolio companies and he was building like a platform for people to like collect meme coins, kind of in a fun, like a game-like way, and his vision, or his theory, is that meme coins are the luxury brands of the future.
00:04:52.600 --> 00:04:56.209
And I'm like, okay.
00:04:56.209 --> 00:04:58.696
So like, what's the value of a Supreme sticker?
00:04:58.696 --> 00:05:02.625
Right, when you see Supreme on a crowbar, what's the value of that crowbar?
00:05:02.625 --> 00:05:05.012
Right, it's the brand itself.
00:05:05.012 --> 00:05:20.338
And he thinks that, because we are living in a participatory financial system now, where ownership and having a piece of it is more important than anything else, that there are people just forming affiliations with brands and affinities around brands and that's what meme coins really are valued around.
00:05:21.019 --> 00:05:23.987
So 99% of these things go to zero like almost instantly, right.
00:05:23.987 --> 00:05:40.069
But there are a few that have hit multi-billion dollar valuations, like Bonk, right, like I knew the Bonk team dude, I've known all those guys, like a lot of those people that started Bonk, for years before they even started Bonk, and I knew when they started Bonk but I was like I don't know about this meme thing and that's like when was it?
00:05:40.069 --> 00:05:42.851
Like less than you know 30 million market cap.
00:05:42.851 --> 00:05:46.644
What I'm seeing happen is like these things reach huge valuations.
00:05:46.644 --> 00:05:49.434
A bunch of the original people make a ton of money.
00:05:49.434 --> 00:05:51.321
Some of them are serious builders.
00:05:51.321 --> 00:05:53.146
Like the Bonk people are serious builders.
00:05:53.146 --> 00:05:56.408
A lot of the guys that helped start that are very serious builders.
00:05:56.408 --> 00:05:59.560
They're building companies around it and there's like a whole ecosystem.
00:05:59.581 --> 00:06:14.021
But then you get things like I don't know and maybe I'm wrong about W, but like with is one that comes to mind right, where it still has a pretty huge market cap, but that one feels more like a luxury brand than like a product meme company, right, or like something that's like got an ecosystem of tools around it.
00:06:14.622 --> 00:06:22.464
And in that case you know, maybe like and I don't know if this has happened or not, but maybe, like the original people, they make tens of millions of dollars.
00:06:22.464 --> 00:06:25.290
They just like sell and take their money and run.
00:06:25.290 --> 00:06:38.189
But then there's like a bunch of people who participated early and there's this like, there's this dynamic where they're like flipping coins and taking profits but also like being a part of that brand and community and they hold a ton of it and they're like rich.
00:06:38.189 --> 00:06:41.807
And so then then you start getting into like okay, what are they going to do with that money?
00:06:41.807 --> 00:06:44.651
Right, like, are they going to invest in other startups?
00:06:44.651 --> 00:06:48.735
Are they going to buy things related to WIF or start things around it?
00:06:48.735 --> 00:06:52.156
I don't know, I think most people are going to sit there and like speculate.
00:06:52.156 --> 00:07:07.985
Maybe some of these things like organically happen, where you start actually getting some kind of brand participation around it and and Bach actually to your point is, or to your friend's point is actually, I think, also like a premium brand as on top of having product.
00:07:08.367 --> 00:07:10.012
We have been conditioned to think about brands.
00:07:10.012 --> 00:07:11.985
We've been marketed to by brands.
00:07:11.985 --> 00:07:15.521
But if you're going to build a brand around the coin, what are you supposed to do?
00:07:15.521 --> 00:07:17.567
Right, like we don't know, there's no playbook.
00:07:17.567 --> 00:07:19.540
You can do the board apes route.
00:07:19.540 --> 00:07:26.910
Right, you can turn into a game, you can make him some utility, but, like, arguably that has that has gone just kind of sideways and not really up for them.
00:07:27.509 --> 00:07:31.975
A lot of that has to do with just the crypto bull cycle and the bear cycle that we're coming out of right now.
00:07:31.975 --> 00:07:44.759
If you're going to be a luxury brand for a generation of people and you can't hold it in public, you can't ship it to someone, you can't tangibly have it in your hands what is luxury?
00:07:44.759 --> 00:07:45.858
Right?
00:07:45.858 --> 00:08:04.629
And I think what we're seeing is that these entrepreneurs will have to figure that out and, just like anything in a crowded marketplace where there's a power law distribution, only like one-tenth of 1% of these tokens will figure that out, but if they do, it'll have really, really good outcomes for whoever is in the ecosystem.
00:08:04.629 --> 00:08:09.028
For the 99.9% of tokens, they're probably not worth anything.
00:08:09.589 --> 00:08:17.630
There's also this weird crypto-specific dynamic that enables the liquidity and enables the staying power of the valuation.
00:08:17.630 --> 00:08:20.564
Some of these things that just go up and then they get rugged.
00:08:20.564 --> 00:08:26.492
And I put air quotes around rugs because I think that term is used super loosely right, some things are actual scams.
00:08:26.492 --> 00:08:30.144
Some things are just failures, right, like I'm sorry, that's not a rug, that's.
00:08:30.144 --> 00:08:32.173
The person who failed is not a scammer.
00:08:32.212 --> 00:08:37.427
They tried they weren't successful for whatever their reason or so, like, what gives it staying power?
00:08:37.467 --> 00:08:40.192
like, why is bonk so sticky?
00:08:40.192 --> 00:08:42.024
Why is whiff and even something more?
00:08:42.024 --> 00:08:43.326
Whiff is like even a better.
00:08:43.326 --> 00:08:45.852
I back to it because I haven't seen any products around it or anything.
00:08:45.852 --> 00:08:55.990
But I kind of get why it's sticky, because there have been builders who worked for free in the ecosystem for forever and then it took off with, like the Sagaphone thing and all that stuff.
00:08:56.299 --> 00:09:01.124
But let's look at the mother of all meme coins Doge.
00:09:01.124 --> 00:09:04.986
Yes, alex, you're on the same page.
00:09:04.986 --> 00:09:06.607
How, how Right?
00:09:06.607 --> 00:09:12.231
Okay, first of all, it's a Litecoin fork, right, it's not even on a chain that people are using.
00:09:12.231 --> 00:09:14.693
It's a Litecoin fork, okay.
00:09:14.693 --> 00:09:16.254
Most people have no idea what the hell.
00:09:16.254 --> 00:09:19.076
That is right, because Litecoin doesn't really even exist anymore.
00:09:19.076 --> 00:09:23.182
It has no utility.
00:09:23.182 --> 00:09:25.006
It has no supply cap, right, like?
00:09:25.006 --> 00:09:26.111
You can just keep minting Doge.
00:09:26.111 --> 00:09:29.554
You can inflate that to as big as the blockchain can get.
00:09:29.554 --> 00:09:33.716
Yet here it is, with the world's richest man pumping it.
00:09:33.716 --> 00:09:35.312
Like what the hell is going on with that?
00:09:35.312 --> 00:09:43.714
So if whatever the Doge playbook is, which is just talk about, it seems to be the most accepted method right now.
00:09:43.714 --> 00:09:44.537
Just talk about it.
00:09:44.537 --> 00:09:47.293
As long as people are talking about it, people will buy it.
00:09:47.293 --> 00:09:49.087
That's what we've come to at this point.
00:09:49.087 --> 00:09:53.817
That's like generation one of meme coins we haven't figured out what the next generation is.
00:09:55.865 --> 00:10:05.537
I do think it's something like Bonk, though Like Bonk they've got like eight products that are some of them like BonkBot, which I think is a separate team is you know, they're making millions every month on that.
00:10:05.537 --> 00:10:07.292
I think their revenue is pretty serious.
00:10:09.644 --> 00:10:10.326
Can you sustain that?
00:10:10.326 --> 00:10:11.730
Is there a competitive advantage to that?
00:10:11.730 --> 00:10:13.294
Can they hold onto it Holding bonk?
00:10:13.294 --> 00:10:13.956
What does that do for you?
00:10:13.956 --> 00:10:17.852
If you're an OG bonk holder, does that make you feel better?
00:10:17.852 --> 00:10:29.249
It seems to me right now the meme coin market is generally around speculation and feelings than it is about utility, and so it feels to me that if you're going to generate utility, it can't be hard.
00:10:29.249 --> 00:10:30.730
Like you can't make them work.
00:10:30.730 --> 00:10:36.173
Like a lot of the DeFi coins from the last generation, like let's look at OM, for example.
00:10:36.173 --> 00:10:40.596
Like you had to do a quest to get OM right.
00:10:40.596 --> 00:10:47.903
You had to like jump through hoops and part of it could be fun, but there was a lot of like you know mental math that people are doing.
00:10:47.903 --> 00:10:50.332
It's like it kind of works like this and I'm like does anyone really understand?
00:10:50.332 --> 00:10:58.370
Like it was pretty funny to watch from the outside going why are people trying so hard to get this thing, and is that the value?
00:10:59.264 --> 00:11:00.831
I think it is part of the value.
00:11:00.831 --> 00:11:23.056
But I think in the case of Bonk, just like sticking with that example people who hold Bonk maybe like the OGs, they are incentivized to build things around it that are sustainable businesses where Bonk is not necessarily a utility of it, it's just part of the brand, like BonkBot's branded Bonk, and maybe it has some buy burn thing or like if you hold stakes in Bonk you can get a discount or something.
00:11:23.056 --> 00:11:48.437
But like, really it's just a useful product and because it's a self-sustaining brand in and of itself, it spreads bonk awareness because it's related somehow, like even though, even though it's not directly related to, like, utility of bonk, it's a sustainable business that's branded bonk something, and therefore, the more of those kinds of things that you have, the more attention goes to bonk.
00:11:48.437 --> 00:11:55.509
What if it was bonkfun and it was like a pump fun thing, right, and like millions of people were using it and it generated 350 million in revenue?
00:11:55.509 --> 00:11:56.793
It probably would help Bonk.
00:11:56.793 --> 00:11:58.437
It would help Bonk for sure.
00:11:58.945 --> 00:12:01.851
Step one is like catch lightning in a bottle, right.
00:12:01.851 --> 00:12:07.471
So for Bonk, having gotten to this situation like they did something right, they got lucky, and all of the above.
00:12:07.471 --> 00:12:11.538
The next step is like okay, how do you capture the second lightning in a bottle?
00:12:11.538 --> 00:12:14.332
You have to figure out like, okay, we did something good.
00:12:14.332 --> 00:12:17.352
Now that people have high expectations, I've got to exceed those expectations.
00:12:17.352 --> 00:12:18.115
What's next?
00:12:18.655 --> 00:12:20.509
Yep, and I think that's the thing you're talking about.
00:12:20.509 --> 00:12:23.993
That's still getting figured out, like phase one capture lightning in a bottle.
00:12:31.884 --> 00:12:35.904
There are some people who know how to do it and even have done it repeatedly, and there's everybody else who's just kind of like in the trenches, you know, launching a random coin.
00:12:35.904 --> 00:12:42.782
And I also think that, for the vast majority of people, people see just how the what the outcome was and then they copy the outcome right, Because that's the easiest to see.
00:12:42.782 --> 00:12:45.668
We have a token that looks like this, with this logo, with this type of name.
00:12:45.668 --> 00:12:51.638
I'm going to make a fork of it on whatever mean point platform and I'm going to actually distribute it to my people.
00:12:51.638 --> 00:12:55.049
If you're a repeat entrepreneur, you know that it's actually backwards.
00:12:55.049 --> 00:12:56.413
You got to figure out the distribution first.
00:12:56.413 --> 00:12:59.221
How is this token going to get to market before you even create what it is?
00:12:59.221 --> 00:13:08.957
You can design the token for the distribution, not the other way around, and what 99% of people do is they think about okay, success looks like this at the end.
00:13:08.957 --> 00:13:12.751
Let's copy the end, and it's the beginning that you have to figure out.
00:13:13.504 --> 00:13:16.599
Yeah, I think it's something that people don't think about at all.
00:13:16.820 --> 00:13:25.331
Like a lot of founders are not thinking about distribution and I mean, dude, it's one of the reasons why I have this show is it's like it's my own distribution channel to a big audience.
00:13:25.811 --> 00:13:28.274
I actually know a guy who I think has really figured this out.
00:13:28.274 --> 00:13:46.091
I'm not going to say his name publicly just yet Cause he hasn't like announced it yet, but this guy has helped launch a number of tokens, not just like meme coins, but also just regular, like utility tokens for projects, and seems to have, you know, repeated success at getting like pretty solid, stable valuations out of the gate.
00:13:46.091 --> 00:14:17.698
Right, like these are not things that go like to a billion dollars I mean, you have to be a really huge project to just like launch and go to that and stay there but these are things that have launched as mediums or utilities and gone to like a few hundred or a hundred or whatever and like stayed within a range right For like a new project to do that and sustain a decent valuation over time with like a little bit of liquidity, is, like, I think, the goal, and a lot of people think that it's the opposite right, that it's like, hey, let's get as huge evaluation as possible, and in my experience, it typically ends pretty badly.
00:14:18.059 --> 00:14:24.587
A bunch of people thought it was going to be something else than what you intended to be, or you intended to be something that you couldn't deliver on.
00:14:25.089 --> 00:14:42.331
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like a stable launch is like the market has realistic expectations and more of a long-term view of what you just launched, which is what you want, yeah, and I think one of the interesting things, too, about going back to the meme coin example, though, too, is it's like I think we're starting to see a pattern of two things.
00:14:42.491 --> 00:14:56.950
One is like bootstrap companies that have raised almost no money, like maybe they did a small angel round, but typically they have done nothing and they're more founders are not necessarily specific to crypto, but just generally speaking, are building bootstrap businesses.
00:14:56.950 --> 00:15:10.033
And then the other piece is that, if you're doing a token, you're doing as much as little like VC allocation as possible and getting distribution of that token as fast as possible and as broadly as possible.
00:15:10.033 --> 00:15:27.894
You see this like a narrative about Solana right now, with, like the overhang of these unlocks that are coming and relatively they're tiny compared to like some of these other up and coming chains and also from what's happened in the past, but it's still kind of like psychologically hangs over the market, and so instead, you just like rip the bandaid off.
00:15:28.306 --> 00:15:30.972
It's like the saliency bias right, because you can see it coming.
00:15:30.972 --> 00:15:33.792
You don't think about the things that you can't see coming right.
00:15:33.792 --> 00:15:41.596
The 1% unlock is going to be minor compared to the 20% unlock that you don't know about, or 20% dump that people are going to do who aren't under unlocks.
00:15:41.596 --> 00:15:44.855
But it's just like you're going to hyper-focus on the thing that, because the data is real.
00:15:45.254 --> 00:15:54.302
All right, let's go back to OrangeJow, because I think this knowledge that you have, that we've been talking about, directly reflects on how you can help founders right, because founders need to think about this stuff.
00:15:54.302 --> 00:15:57.989
So how does that work in your community, in the accelerator?
00:15:58.491 --> 00:16:01.023
We have open applications right now for the accelerator program.
00:16:01.023 --> 00:16:05.956
We write up to $300,000 into the company, whether it's into tokens or equity.
00:16:05.956 --> 00:16:11.639
Like we're agnostic, whatever helps the founder the most and what we're trying to do is figure out what you've got.
00:16:11.639 --> 00:16:16.363
What insight do you have about the business that you're building and can you actually ship code?
00:16:16.363 --> 00:16:17.003
Can you ship product?
00:16:17.003 --> 00:16:17.886
Can you get distribution?
00:16:17.886 --> 00:16:21.356
What traction can you actually create in a short amount of time?
00:16:21.356 --> 00:16:26.889
Right, because we've seen over the years as founders you know I founded multiple companies.
00:16:26.889 --> 00:16:40.376
I've, you know, been a part of Y Combinator, both as staff and as well as like going through the program what shows me the potential of a founder Is their ability to navigate kind of hurdles and do them quickly.
00:16:41.024 --> 00:16:54.690
Yeah, it's a really tough thing to do and I think, like small teams my experience small teams who actually ship product like rapidly and kind of regularly and that's the thing that you're seeing get marketed, those are the best ones.
00:16:54.690 --> 00:17:04.659
Like, the longer I've been doing angel investing, the easier it's been to recognize that pattern of like hey, are these guys just like a bunch of ideas or do they actually have, you know, working?
00:17:04.680 --> 00:17:05.361
The ability to execute.
00:17:05.884 --> 00:17:06.930
Yeah, the ability to execute.
00:17:08.185 --> 00:17:10.592
Do you know about the whole two pizza team theory?
00:17:10.592 --> 00:17:19.074
No, okay, so this was like, popularized by Amazon, and the idea is that your most effective team can be fed with two pizzas.
00:17:22.098 --> 00:17:26.576
Yeah, you know who else actually told me basically that same thing is Eric Schmidt.
00:17:26.576 --> 00:17:27.478
He's not bad at all.
00:17:27.478 --> 00:17:30.827
Yeah, it's funny Like I met him through a mutual friend.
00:17:30.827 --> 00:17:39.155
We had lunch one time, which is like not meant to be a flex or anything, it just happened and uh and I've like never actually talked about this publicly.
00:17:39.175 --> 00:17:50.157
But he said two things to us and one was like you need that team, that you can just like lock your team in a room with a couple of boxes of pizza and they just like ship a product, Like that's basically it.
00:17:50.726 --> 00:17:51.951
You know what my favorite team is.
00:17:51.951 --> 00:18:02.366
It's like I turn around and I'm like, hey, the throughput of data is super high compared to the amount of words I'm using, right, so, like you know, you're in a good place.
00:18:02.366 --> 00:18:07.618
When you turn around to team, it's like, hey, I think that thing blah, blah, blah is like needs to be a little bit this.
00:18:07.618 --> 00:18:09.204
And they're like oh, yeah, okay, hold on.
00:18:09.204 --> 00:18:10.891
How about this Cool Done?
00:18:10.891 --> 00:18:13.500
Like it doesn't need to be perfect.
00:18:13.500 --> 00:18:15.003
You don't have perfect information.
00:18:15.003 --> 00:18:17.108
What needs to happen is now.
00:18:17.609 --> 00:18:22.247
And, like, as CEO, the hard challenge is like knowing when and what is the most important.
00:18:22.247 --> 00:18:35.309
Because if you look back on, like your career as CEO right, you do a lot of stuff, you make a lot of decisions, but what made the company successful is actually like a tiny subset of decisions.
00:18:35.309 --> 00:18:39.309
Everything else was like just exploration or noise or like help to get there.
00:18:39.309 --> 00:18:53.204
And like I can look back at my career and probably look at like 10 decisions I've made that really made my career and everything else was like kind of irrelevant right or just like had marginal effect.
00:18:53.224 --> 00:18:53.846
I think about that all the time.
00:18:53.846 --> 00:19:04.605
I mean I look at my decision to come to solana back in uh 21 was exactly that you know yeah, what great people I've had some people tell me like, oh, you know, you got lucky, and I'm like, no, that's not at all what happened.
00:19:04.866 --> 00:19:09.276
Like you, spent years trying to figure out what is going on here.
00:19:10.117 --> 00:19:31.614
Yeah, accumulating information and connections to the point where, like when I was like deciding to, I was at this company called Orchid and I was running my advisory and investment firm with my partner, brian at the same time, and I was like you know, I'm going to leave Orchid, I'm going to go find another home to like do you know most of my work, and I was going to just run the advisory firm in an L1 ecosystem and try to work with teams and invest in them.
00:19:31.614 --> 00:19:43.772
I researched really heavily a bunch of the L1s and I kind of narrowed it down to Polkadot and Solana and I had met Raj and Toli a few years before, and this is late 2020, early 21.
00:19:43.833 --> 00:19:45.154
So yes, this is unclear.
00:19:45.154 --> 00:19:49.248
It's very unclear at the time, right because polka dot yeah, so polka dot looked good.
00:19:49.509 --> 00:19:56.832
I talked to maybe 50 teams in each between each ecosystem and also the.
00:19:56.832 --> 00:20:11.394
You know the people leadership at polka dot and and like went through the whole like recruiting process and stuff and then and then talked to raj and toli and a few others at Solano labs and I, just where I landed, was like Polkadot, the barrier to entry for builders was way too high.
00:20:11.394 --> 00:20:15.820
You know, with the, with the parachain auction process, like there were some seriously talented people.
00:20:15.820 --> 00:20:17.125
I loved all the founders.
00:20:17.846 --> 00:20:27.493
Yeah, Cause cause the thing about founders a lot of them are not put off by the difficulty, but what happens is that if the difficulty is too high, like your average user or average developer won't do it.
00:20:27.493 --> 00:20:50.588
My general partner at the fund, Don, and I kind of have this term called schlep blindness, Like schleping the term for like just grunt work right, and so a lot of founders are like we don't care about the pain of like what the work is, because we know the destination is important, but we only make up a tiny fraction of the market and so people like us who have schlep blindness will look at Polkadot and be like cool, no problem.
00:20:51.431 --> 00:20:56.847
Yep, it's like a badge of honor, right, and it's part of the Solana ecosystem's branding.
00:20:56.847 --> 00:21:03.208
It's like chewing glass right, there was always this meme about chewing glass, but the big difference was, yeah, some of the things are hard.
00:21:03.208 --> 00:21:06.090
Learning Rust is actually not that hard, but people thought it was hard.
00:21:06.090 --> 00:21:12.676
So it was like good branding to attract like the founders and builders with like the chip on the shoulder wanting to do like new, innovative things.
00:21:12.676 --> 00:21:22.817
But the reality was it wasn't that hard and over time, they just did a great job in developing the ecosystem and they had the right balance of like shipping product aggressively.
00:21:22.817 --> 00:21:27.549
And actually we're seeing it play out on the timeline right now where people are talking about I had my live stream yesterday.
00:21:27.569 --> 00:21:38.241
We were talking about this how, like the Onza team is like kind of self-deprecating right now about like Agave the validator because it's a mono repo, it's a huge amount of code and it's kind of hard to work with and stuff like that.
00:21:38.241 --> 00:21:42.108
But the thing they did was ship in public in an open repo.
00:21:42.108 --> 00:21:47.084
That got everybody to market, got them to market, got the network to market, got the builders to market.
00:21:47.084 --> 00:21:50.172
And yeah, they may have sacrificed the perfect thing.
00:21:50.172 --> 00:21:53.528
But the opposite side of that is like you just never ship anything.
00:21:53.528 --> 00:22:01.644
That's another thing to watch out with founders and like startups is like yeah, these people can live on two boxes of pizza but like are they letting perfect be the enemy of the good?
00:22:01.644 --> 00:22:13.981
And I think sometimes you can't really fully see that until they've gone through like a pre-seed stage because you got to get them working to like really know, it's like a very hard thing to suss out if they're going to be that team or like the Tolly and Raj team.
00:22:14.162 --> 00:22:18.152
You're putting the finger right on like the crux of what makes our job hard.
00:22:18.152 --> 00:22:22.968
Orange has invested in like the very earliest stages, sometimes like they don't even have a company.
00:22:22.968 --> 00:22:28.327
We're waiting for them to be incorporated so I can give them money At that stage, especially if they haven't done anything before.
00:22:28.327 --> 00:22:32.208
There's no track record for us to look at that is actually relevant to the type of company that you're building.
00:22:32.208 --> 00:22:45.765
They might have worked at a company that gave them experience in that, but shipping code on your own in your own basement at 3am, that's a different type of human being and we don't know that.
00:22:45.785 --> 00:23:00.884
And what the program does is like we make sure that you have a goal at the end of the three month program so that when you're going to be on stage standing in front of hundreds of investors, that you want to be the one of the top performers of that class in terms of like moving, your whatever metric that you wanted to deliver on, whether it's like customers or revenue or like.
00:23:00.884 --> 00:23:17.140
You know you've got to hit a bunch of milestones, but that social pressure, that peer pressure to compete with your classmates who are your closest friends, now to actually go build something and ship, it is incredibly motivating and it's long enough, right, it's like three months is long enough.
00:23:17.140 --> 00:23:22.270
That you not become this like you find a gear that you didn't have before, right.
00:23:22.270 --> 00:23:34.566
But when we're letting people in, when we're evaluating them that's one of the questions we ask is like what have they shown in terms of their buildership and can they find a new gear when they're in the program, or is the pressure going to crush them?
00:23:35.429 --> 00:23:35.569
Yep.
00:23:35.569 --> 00:23:37.744
What is the program actually like?
00:23:37.744 --> 00:23:38.788
Is it in person?
00:23:39.308 --> 00:23:41.045
It's hybrid, so it's partly in person.
00:23:41.045 --> 00:23:43.967
It's usually in person in multiple locations because of the way crypto works.
