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Peanut Protocol Co-Founder, Konrad Urban - Find the LFG energy
17 Plays24 days ago
In this episode, I spoke with Konrad, Co-founder of Peanut Protocol.
Konrad gave brilliant advice on choosing a co-founder and explained his process. He also gave great advice for anyone fundraising. He discussed Peanut Protocol in detail and gave great advice for anyone looking to build a career in Web3.
This episode is for anyone trying to choose a co-founder, raise funds, or learn what it takes to become a founder in Web3.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Peanut Protocol
00:00:00
Speaker
Konrad, welcome to the show. How are you? Hey, good. I'm doing good. Thanks, Jack. Thanks for inviting me. No problem at all. Konrad, for people who don't know who you are, could you give us a bit of an intro, please? Yeah, for sure. I'm the business co-founder of Peanut Protocol. We make sending tokens or transferring value as easy as texting. um Just send a link and you can transfer whatever you like.
00:00:29
Speaker
That's cool. Could you take us back to way before you got into Web3? Take us back to the start of your career and talk us through the journey that's brought you here now. it's Yeah, it's perhaps a slightly unusual one. For the first time, I heard the term smart contract was in a philosophy department in about 2013 or 14. And we had a reading group called smart contracts. It was full of post-docs and very smart people. And then me, one lone undergrad, he was curious about it from a crypto anarchist perspective. And they all talked about the future of law and jurisprudence and um yeah automatic execution of legal contracts. um This was around the time the theorem-wide paper came out in 2014.
00:01:26
Speaker
um And yeah, these philosophers who are all very, very theoretical. We're very, very excited about the future, ah primarily from a legal perspective. not I don't think anyone back then thought about things like DeFi.
00:01:42
Speaker
or meme coins. But yeah, that's how I first heard about the Ethereum ecosystem. I've heard about cryptocurrencies before. um But yeah, that was perhaps slightly unusual intro to the space.
Early Startup Challenges
00:01:59
Speaker
For sure. And then you you started off your career in academia, right?
00:02:03
Speaker
Correct. So, well, I was meant to, I thought it for my entire life that I would become an academic. um And yeah, and then at some point I was writing some papers and then suddenly I realized there were maybe two or three people in the entire world who kind of cared about, who might have cared about what I was writing. um And at that point, I thought, well, that's maybe, maybe that's, it's nice to be on the cutting edge, but maybe that's not um the only way to be at the cutting edge of
00:02:44
Speaker
um you know, building a better future. And um yeah, I then did a bunch of different things in my life, but decided to quit academia. um As one would, i my first step was actually to be a teacher. um So for a very brief moment, I taught. um It was a very fun time, but also the current educational system wasn't a place for me.
00:03:13
Speaker
And yeah, later I found startups, thanks to my ex-co-founder, who's actually also in crypto now. So it feels like everyone's in crypto now. We did the B2B SaaS completely unrelated to crypto. And that was a business before Peanut Protocol that you were a founder of back then? Exactly.
Finding the Right Co-founder
00:03:36
Speaker
So we built a
00:03:42
Speaker
like a tool that would let you host virtual events that were more like cocktail parties and would allow people to network. So obviously during Corona, this was really valuable for all sorts of institutions from smaller companies to even universities where, you know, like in a normal, if you have an office or a building or a department, people will meet at the water cooler, they'll have these casual conversations,
00:04:11
Speaker
yeah meet one another and make friends. And suddenly with Corona, you couldn't do that. All you had were these really tightly preplanned Zoom calls that usually had an agenda. And that's not the way to build a community.
00:04:27
Speaker
So we tried to ah fix that with all sorts of like you know like mingling and virtual cocktail party features and stuff like this. But yeah, a I guess virtual events didn't take off the way that a lot of the space anticipated they would. Maybe fortunately, it's really nice to fly to places and actually meet people in person. um But yeah.
00:04:51
Speaker
It's certainly not the most efficient way. yeah So was that was that a Web3 project as well? No, like meeting in the this was Web2 purely. So you were doing Metaverse, but Web2, Metaverse. Yeah. i yeah it was like So the only project that is worth mentioning that survived this whole wave of um companies was Gathertown.
00:05:19
Speaker
that exists still, I think. um And that was like a direct competitor to us. They let you have these um calls where you can randomly mingle with in small groups. And that's way that way it's much more casual, much more like a cocktail party. Nice. I'll have to check it out. haven't so I haven't heard of them before. I'll have to i'll have to look into it.
00:05:43
Speaker
so well Yeah, i think it's I think this whole idea is a bit dense, to be honest. No one seems to use this, I think. um Discord and it's very simple tools like this are way more efficient in building communities.
00:06:00
Speaker
Yeah, I know a few a few companies who organize like the odd kind of coffee, coffee break, coffee meeting with employees to try and build that sense of of like team building and and and that kind of thing. um Just to give people that little bit more social interaction that isn't work related. But again, I'm not sure I don't think I've never asked to be honest, if they use particular platforms to do that, whether or not they just schedule it as a as a meeting or as ah a Zoom or Google Meets or something like that. um Yeah, there are many approaches. um they They generally don't seem to like very well. I think we don't see many companies adopt these. So then you then you moved on to co-create ah Peanut Protocol.
00:06:45
Speaker
When when you when you first started, um I'm presuming not to this question, but I noticed this question. But when you first started, did you think? you know i I always want i want to be a founder of a business. you know It's your plan to someday and found different startups and and everything. like what Was that your your end goal? and you Yeah, it was. So I was on a very systematic hunt for co-founder. I was part of Entrepreneur Fest, which is like a co-founder matching accelerator.
00:07:18
Speaker
um And yeah, I was there for three or four months um trying to find someone to work with. um i I was pretty sure it would be crypto. um Either crypto, maybe something defense related, but I think these were the only two things that I really cared about. And yeah, um yeah, and then there were not too many people who were in web three,
00:07:48
Speaker
um so a And I matched with Hugo using Y combinator co-founder matching. And yeah, we started working pretty much immediately. That's cool, that's cool. Could you give, ah do you have any tips for someone who might be listening who's going to try and find a co-founder? Because it's a really hard thing to do, right? Because you have to be really brought into the person, know you work well together, be really brought into the ideas and this kind of stuff. It's quite a difficult thing to to organize.
00:08:19
Speaker
Yeah, I get asked this a lot. um And really, like, it's a really, really, really hard problem. And because it is such a hard problem, it requires a system systematic approach. So you need a system. um Just the way you would try to hire someone, you need a really good system and iterate on that system for finding a co-founder. And I guess the biggest mistake I see is people um hedging too many bets and um waiting for too long. So what I see happen a lot with people who want to co-fund something is they um they will be talking to three or four or five people at the same time. um And with all of them have like a Google Docs open, putting in research questions and doing kind of like a half-assed
00:09:10
Speaker
job at pretending to be like iterating on ideas or ideating. And I think that generally renders very, very poor results, because you can't really ideate unless you're deeply in one problem space. And you can't really ideate with someone who you haven't get to know very well in terms of they how they take how you communicate with one another and so on. So my recommendation is just have an exclusive relationship where you try to build one thing, like have very, very clear terms. i Say, and I'm gonna put in 20 hours this week if you have a and job. If you don't have a job and you're doing this full time, put in 50 hours.
00:09:54
Speaker
um and just do it with that one person for one entire week and then after the end of the week, see how you feel about it. If you feel drained, if you feel um that it wasn't a productive week, try to analyze like why was that? um Was it because you guys didn't click or was it because the problem was badly defined? Can I change anything about how we idea ideate?
00:10:16
Speaker
And then just iterate through as many people as you can. And I literally had a CRM for my co-founder match search. And I talked to over 100 people find what iphon before I decided to co-found with Hugo. And so did Hugo. Hugo also had about 50 people in his pipeline. um So it's...
00:10:37
Speaker
Yeah, it's ah it's require it requires a system and you you can't just, I think I've seen, I have so many friends who are like co-founding and ideating for a year or two where they, but where there are no results essentially. They are like trying something out with one person for three months, but there are no clear terms, expectations are not clearly set. And then another recommendation that I always give is there are some really nice lists and you can find one of them on my sub-stack where It's just very simple questions about values and the type of work you want to do and areas of responsibility that you kind of have to go through. A lot of them are very simple, like, who will take care of fundraising? Or are we going 50-50? And yes, you should always be going 50-50.
Essential Founder Skills
00:11:23
Speaker
This kind of stuff, that's where you can flag um potential causes for conflict very, very early and see whether you are an actual fit.
00:11:35
Speaker
um And it only takes 15 minutes. And I always surprise, like, I meet people who've been working with someone for three months, and they haven't even discussed the equity question yet, because it's too awkward. Well, it's going to be only more awkward ah the deeper you're into it, right? And that's why you're there, right? You you found companies together to work on the equity, like, to turn the equity into... Correct. Yeah. ah That's crazy. Did you... So when you when you were going through those lists of questions, were you trying to find someone who...
00:12:05
Speaker
was very similar to you? Or were you trying to find someone who maybe filled in all of the gaps of things that you either didn't want to do or or maybe don't have the knowledge to do? How did you work? How did you kind of figure that out? Yeah, I optimized a lot for two things. One is what I would call let's fucking go energy. So after having had so many calls and so many botched relationships where we would go on walks and coffees and have these hour-long Zoom workshops where there was no result, no tangible result other than like a Google Doc with some bullet points. um I really wanted to, like I really optimized for someone who was like hacky and knew how to launch something in a day. Because this is what I expect from a technical co-founder. I expect the ability to
00:13:01
Speaker
essentially ship something that's half broken but like is good enough to test a hair a hypothesis. right indeed That's the most important part. You're building in like in a pre-seed stage. You're building an iteration machine. You're building a machine that's going to iterate on various ideas. And so this was like extremely important. And then the other factor was fun. like Do I actually enjoy um shipping with them? Or does it feel like like do I want to wake up and have a call with this guy or a girl for the next like three years of my life every day at like 9am and that's where like all these things like values come in and like what what do you care about right um but yeah I think a lot of people also have optimized for those right like for example
00:13:55
Speaker
Your political beliefs probably don't matter, but what might matter for your business relationship is whether you're motivated by just shipping things fast or maybe maybe your life goal is to have a Lambo but before you are 30, right? These are probably very different personas um and come with very different work styles and ethics and so on. Yeah, definitely. I think that's really interesting.
00:14:22
Speaker
Interesting thing to understand and you said that people can check this out on your substat. You've written a yeah, correct Yeah, kconrat double K kconrat substat or kconrat.com. There's like I think 15 Thing I call it. It's based on something else. I just shortened it um And made it like into a 15 minute thing, but it's like I think 50 questions you should ask your co-founder Okay today or something like this Nice. Well, yeah, if anyone's listening, ah thinking about finding their projects and trying to find a co-founder, go and check it out. um This might be quite a difficult question. Do you think that everyone can be a founder of projects? I think many people don't want to, and that's really, really legitimate. I used to not fully understand that.
00:15:10
Speaker
um
00:15:13
Speaker
But with some of the struggles of foundership, I understand like maybe sometimes it's really nice to wake up and exactly know what to do. um And I think that's a choice, right? like Do you want to wake up and know exactly, okay, I've been giving this direction, now I'm going to solve some puzzles for like this overall direction that I'm being given, or do I want to take responsibility of a whole team?
00:15:39
Speaker
and actually set a direction, even though sometimes that will be completely clueless. That's also a big burden, especially when it gets ugly and maybe you're running out of runway and you have to start firing people and so on. um That's like something not everyone will want in their lives. It's just more stress. Yeah, yeah for sure. They're difficult, difficult conversations to have those those conversations. I remember the first time when I when I first moved into management a few years ago,
00:16:10
Speaker
having those difficult conversations. The first few that you have are nerve-wracking, to be honest. You have to really plan out like what you're going to say and how you're going to approach it and this kind of stuff. I don't think they particularly come naturally. And then after a while, you you get kind of used to being in uncomfortable environments and situations, right? So you can kind of, ah yeah, get through them well and and and deliver things like that effectively and that kind of stuff. But um but yeah, quite tricky things to do.
Effective Sales Strategies
00:16:40
Speaker
Yeah, 100%. Are there any um like real key attributes or key skills that you think could make a really successful founder or maybe skills that you've picked up and learned that really helped you now you're growing on a building peanut protocol?
00:16:59
Speaker
I think I can only share what I think made me that's a founder. um I don't know, like probably VC would be like with a very broad portfolio would be someone who might suss out some characteristics that successful founders have.
00:17:13
Speaker
in common, like maybe someone from like YC or something, but for me what what really changed in me I think is um starting to timebox things more drastically.
00:17:29
Speaker
um I think it's very easy to get lost and it was generally a mistake in some of the, like if if I were to distill The biggest mistakes I've made as a co-founder, most of them would be distillable into something like wrong time boxing or like not having a clear idea how to falsify a given business hypothesis. um Yeah, I think i think that that's one that's helped me a lot and that wasn't super clear initially that will actually even
00:18:08
Speaker
And when I say time box, I don't mean time box like responding to emails in 10 minutes. I mean, like, let's time box this specific sales experiment. This is our go to market. And we'll give it two months to try to sell to five people in this specific market. And if not, we're moving on to the next one. Because it's very easy to be in a situation where it kind of works. Some something is kind of picking up.
00:18:36
Speaker
um But yeah, you are just climbing the wrong hill. How do you know when to call it a day on something like that? Oh, I don't. I don't. It's really important to like have a plan initially and then like try to stick to that or like wake up that you've been you've been climbing the wrong hill. I think that's the that's the most important one. And that's what keeps your iteration machine running. Because if you're just keeping to one plan all the time, then you're not iterating.
00:19:06
Speaker
you're not testing anything new. That's a good, yeah, I like that. That's a good advice. That's a good way of of of looking at it. Is there any other maybe harder skills that you've learned that you think have been really, really beneficial over your time? o Good question. um Not sure. It's so many small things always. I mean,
00:19:30
Speaker
fundraising isn't a hard skill. um But it's hard. It's hards but it's not hard. It's definitely the soft side of skills, but it's hard. Do you have any tips on that? Good question. um
00:19:51
Speaker
Yeah, I think I think people overthink it a lot. um Again, it's like this LFG thing that people should do and and be more conversational. This is advice that everyone always gives. But generally, like it's essentially a little bit almost like a sales call. So you want to also understand what is in their mind. You shouldn't be constantly in pitching mode. guess if you are and But you also shouldn't like just try to kind of match whatever the VC wants. That also makes no sense. But just like genuinely try to understand their concerns because they will have some real concerns about your company. They will probably have some kind of matrix, some kind of list. They'll be like, okay, yeah, solid team, like good credentials.
00:20:39
Speaker
um Shipped an MVP super fast. um But their go-to marketing their their go-to market strategy sucks, right? And they will probably not tell you. They will not tell you because the incentive structure is set up in such a way that they just want to keep in touch.
00:20:56
Speaker
and then maybe drop in once like there are more commitments to your round. So they will like never tell you until it's kind of until you don't need them anymore. But you can still suss it out by just having a genuine conversation with people. You can still like learn what they think about a given go-to-market strategy. And then you can see how it works. Actually, that's my weak point. That's the weak point of our whole thing.
00:21:19
Speaker
just as an example It sounds like one of the skills that you've really developed well is the ability to question or ask questions effectively and really understand how to evaluate certain situations and things. um Because you mentioned about like questions for your co-founder and going through that systematic approach around how to really um nail down what you want and then about questioning whether or not that particular hypothesis is going to work and evaluating on whether that is the right thing and then obviously asking the right questions to people in that fundraising or in those fundraising conversations and things. It's that ability to question. Sounds quite key. If you're a founder, you've got to be able to ask the right things at the right times by the sound of it. Yeah, I guess that's a really good summary and the ability to listen in that.
00:22:12
Speaker
And it can be tiring sometimes, especially in networking events where you meet a specific type of founder who's a talker, and they just bombard you with their pitch. ah Super annoying. But also, they never learn anything, right? like a Some of the best ideas and use cases come from just well having a conversation listening a bit and I think we all do too little of it. Me personally I for sure do too little of that like having way too few calls to actually listen and um do that but um yeah still trying. Yeah for sure it's that whole like active listening
00:22:53
Speaker
skill, isn't it? So really trying to pay attention to what a person says and kind of deep diving into certain things they talk about or maybe certain things that you're curious about and like really trying to understand their point of view and the things that they're talking about. I think it's really, really key key skill. It's a key skill, fully agree. And
Peanut Protocol Features and Benefits
00:23:13
Speaker
it's a key skill in every area from um every area that a founder needs to be at least decent at, right? So hiring,
00:23:23
Speaker
Same thing, it's so surprising to me, I haven't done much hiring, but um it's so surprising to me how honest people are in the answers, as in I thought, well, people would try to game the system and try to give you what you want from them. But usually if you ask them directly, like, for instance, why are you leaving your current job or why are you looking for something new, they'll give you a pretty good answer that will actually be super relevant to to um your your search. Of course, provided you didn't give away exactly. um you didn't You weren't like, oh, we look for people who want to be in a small team of three to five. um What kind of team size do you like? That doesn't work. But hey, i'm leaving my I'm leaving my company now because I feel like I'm just a cock in a giant machine, and I don't feel I'm making enough impact.
00:24:22
Speaker
Perfect, right? Or maybe, oh, I'm leaving this company because the work times are super unbalanced and I'm i never i'm expected to respond on Slack um at midnight.
00:24:35
Speaker
Um, that's another one that you could suss out like, okay, what, what do you need them for? Like maybe if it's a customer support person, then probably they better be responding also at midnight if that's their job. Right. But maybe if it's an engineer and they work best, if they have their own async time, maybe that's.
00:24:59
Speaker
that's the best thing for them, right? And then like, does it fit the team? What what were your experiences with this? I mean, I'm sure you do a lot of these, you have a lot of these conversations too. Yeah, for sure. I think um i think it depends how well on the how well the other person is prepared for their interview, to be honest. I think a lot of the time if you ask people completely direct questions, then it can it can throw some people off sometimes which then makes them give you a really honest answer because they're maybe not expecting such a direct a question on certain certain things or um yeah again I think it depends I mean I've seen it go the other way as well where someone talks a really good game and then they get into the job and and it's completely different and they were you know really well prepared for the interview and a completely different person turns up on the first day
00:25:54
Speaker
ah So it can vary quite a lot. But I always find that that if you have that skill to be able to deep dive into topics or really actively listen to the other person.
00:26:06
Speaker
So really really try and hear what they're saying as opposed to maybe talking over what they're going to say afterwards or even just leaving pauses at the end of them finishing sentences and they may then add more things or just just learning like more things like that when you go into that whole questioning kind of phases can can really help you open someone up when it comes to really understanding their experience or what they bring to the table or what they're looking for or what their true motivations are.
00:26:33
Speaker
Um, yeah, so yeah, I've seen it, I've seen it go both ways, but it's, it's, yeah, it's a good skill to have even in everyday life. It's not just from a recruitment standpoint or a work standpoint. I think just when you even start speaking to some of like friends or family and you really want to get into conversations, not really actively listening to what they say and just being curious around certain things that they say or the way they say things and and this kind of stuff can really just, yeah, you just start to understand people on a much deeper level, really.
00:27:02
Speaker
Yeah, that's ah true. Active listening really helps you to connect. I also really like what you said about the pausing. like I think it one of the surprising things to me was how silence can be your friend in sales. Generally letting the other person, ah giving them a lot of room to talk you through their problem will be probably the most efficient way of you know understanding whether you can help them or not and and then help them. um And it's a bit counterintuitive because we have this pop culture image of a salesman who's you know loud and convincing and dominant, but um it's actually exactly the opposite probably.
00:27:53
Speaker
Yeah, I've read a new really interesting book called The Challenger Sale. I'm not sure if you've heard of that book before. So it talks to the different types of of salesperson um and who is actually the most successful. And it talks about being someone who is a lone wolf about how they don't work well in the team, they're left to their own devices, they'll do it how they want. i um They just sell, sell, sell, go, go, go, go, go. go they' They're not a team player necessarily.
00:28:18
Speaker
And then you have the relationship builder who is there to foster those relationships long term. They take quite a softly, softly approach. Then you have the challenger who goes in from more of an insight perspective and they'll listen to their customer and then try and consult them and maybe challenge them on things that they believe or things that they say and try and suggest better ways and that kind of thing.
00:28:38
Speaker
and and a lot of people think that the the relationship builders the best salesmen but actually the challenger, the person who listens and and really consults and challenges and teaches people about what they're trying to sell or trying to do. That's quite an interesting book if you like sales and and yeah you like to understand the psychology behind sales and things it's quite an interesting book to read. and'll have ah I'll have a look at it. I mean intuitively it seems to make sense because If you built a relationship, okay, cool, you've made a friend.
00:29:09
Speaker
But maybe for an unimportant business decision, they will refer to you just because it's the easiest because you're their friend already and they can trust you. But for the most important ones, i.e. the ones with the highest value, and they'll probably will be optimizing for the the best solution. And if you haven't listened actively and understand their problem really deeply, you simply won't be able to offer the best solution. Makes a lot of sense, logically.
00:29:38
Speaker
Have you had to do much sales when it comes to Peanut Protocol? Have you had to get out there and build partnerships and VDE and sales and that kind of stuff? Yeah. At Peanut, we were we until recently, we were extremely focused on an SDK that um other projects could integrate and use our feature set. So what Peanut lets you do is it The protocol lets you deposit any kind of token and gives you a link or QR code that you can then send to your friends. So essentially it lets you text people with value, like with tokens, with an NFT, with table coins, anything you like. And that's especially useful in a wallet. So imagine you have a wallet and then you can input the recipient's ENS name or their wallet address.
00:30:31
Speaker
But maybe if you don't know that, you can just input their phone number, or their email, or just generate a link and send it on WhatsApp. And that's exactly where we thought the product would live really, really well, was in Wallet. So that was our initial go-to-market. And it's only now that we are also building a more consumer-facing app.
00:30:58
Speaker
because we saw some traction on actual end consumers using us directly. um And generally, wallet integration cycles are very long. um So you're like, well, why why wait? We can have users directly on the app. That's a good that's a good idea. imagine and I just ah just imagine how much crypto has been lost and people inputting the wrong wallet addresses in.
00:31:23
Speaker
Whereas if they could generate a link and send it to someone without needing their wallet address, that could have saved a lot of people a lot of headache probably. Yeah, absolutely. So not just losing, I mean, going to the wrong address, just, I mean, there's there's this famous case of 20 million being sent by the OptumSim Foundation, I think, sorry, ne them I don't remember, this was like over a year ago now, but um they they got the address wrong because it was a multi-sick and they worked different across chains. um And I mean, there's lots of smaller anecdotal cases like this.
00:32:02
Speaker
But also, I think a really, really important part is in this, when I try to send you 10 bucks, I just want to send you 10 bucks. And currently in crypto, it's this whole long conversation of like, what's your address? That's one part of it. And then which token, right? Imagine there's three, three popular stablecoins, USDC, USDT, XDAI. And there's more coming. And then there is like 10 popular L2s, right?
00:32:32
Speaker
Plus mainnet. So already we have a fragmentation of like three by 10, where you would have to coordinate that. And you have to say like, oh yeah, USDC on polygon is OK. Oh yeah, what's USDT work or whatever? And then you have to probably bridge it yourself or like swap it yourself. Super annoying. With peanut, you just send a link, and the recipient can claim on whichever chain they like.
00:32:59
Speaker
And very soon now at ECC we will be launching Offramping. So you will be able to just claim directly to your bank account without even having to care about the whole process. So now this unlocks completely new kind of case of value transfer where I as a crypto native with crypto holdings can send money to literally like my mom And she'll be hand-held, like she'll get the link, and then she'll be hand-held through the off-ramping process directly to um her bank account. And all she needs to put in is her I-BAN.
00:33:40
Speaker
and then pass a very quick KYC check. Literally two minutes and she only has to do that once. And then we're good, right? And now from now on, I can always send um crypto and she can always offer ramp it directly to the bank without even having to touch the crypto at any one point, right? She doesn't even, like it just says a hundred bucks and it says one hundred bucks. And then in a small form that says USDC in USDC on optimism, let's say.
00:34:07
Speaker
um And then where do you want to claim it? Iban, wallet address, ENS, like whatever you like. That's cool. Is that going to work with every every country you target in specific regions to start with? Yeah, we're starting with Europe and the US, um just two really large markets. And we really want to expand very quickly into emerging markets as well, because there's a really, really strong need. So for instance, I think in Europe and the US,
00:34:37
Speaker
I probably don't need it as much as someone from, let's say, Argentina right now. Because we have Revolut. Like, Revolut works well. and It's not crypto, but it works well. It's fast. It's seamless. Most people have it. um In the US, you'll have Cash App or Venmo. Those things work really, really nice nicely. But in a lot of countries, especially with unstable currencies, people have been um hedging, but they have been escaping their own currency to stablecoins. I know they are holders of stablecoins, but they can't do much with it. And I think now is the time where that can get unlocked, where finally they stablecoins are not just a store of value, but they can be used directly for transfers.
00:35:27
Speaker
Yeah, that's cool. I'll be keeping a close eye on ah on peanut protocol. It sounds good. Yeah, it sounds like it can unlock all sorts of things for all sorts of countries, to be honest, and and probably help a lot with with the whole. um Obviously, there's a lot of of people out there who send money home, right? They might work in a particular country and then send that money home and do that whole like remittance thing. I guess that can can really help and solve a lot of that problem rather than people paying huge fees on on remittance through ah the traditional remittance companies and that kind of stuff. I'm guessing that's a market you guys might be looking at or are considering. that we're Yeah, we're looking at this market. um Ideally we would partner up with like local companies that
00:36:12
Speaker
already have some kind of payments systems. So um yeah, um that would that's the ideal thing. So if anyone's listening from like a more radical payments app, hit me up. um We can also bootstrap these the um consumer bases. One interesting story I had last week, I was at my hairdresser's and he's from Peru. Peru has a very stable currency, generally,
00:36:40
Speaker
quite stable economy, like everything's going well, they haven't had any big two digit inflation or anything like that. But ah so in this guy, he does three to four remittances per month. And he gets ripped off 10% on the remittance.
00:36:59
Speaker
10% for the transfer. To me that's crazy. absolutely And he knows of course about PayPal and Venmo and all these other things, but his use case is that um he wants it to be cashed in the local currency. So I think a lot of this lot of the stuff that's going to happen in crypto for these emerging economies is it's going to go through kiosks who will still have to charge something because it's an expensive service to have someone there. But it will have to go through these kiosks that you have, for instance, in Turkey or in Georgia, um where there's literally a currency exchange shop that will also let you sell
00:37:46
Speaker
um or by usually USDT and from the EVM chains usually on on Polygon or Mainnet. Yeah. Yeah, it was ah it was a remittance project that got me into Web3 originally actually. Yeah, back in
00:38:21
Speaker
Not just that, they also, I think they're launching their own chain shortly and they've got their own exchange and that kind of thing. Their whole thing is basically bringing banking to the unbanked. So in yeah in developing countries, they have ah connections with all of the telco providers in those countries so that you can actually text each other ah crypto. So you can just use the use the products and just send an SMS to your friend and then it has a link and they can then ah get the crypto themselves, you know, where people find it really difficult to get bank accounts and this kind of thing.
Startup Decision-making vs Academic Research
00:38:51
Speaker
um That was the first ever project I ah bought into actually way back when. oh That sounds very like very similar to Peanut. i I'll actually reach out to them because maybe there is something we can do with EVM chains for them as well. So I'm assuming they have their own L1, right? They will be shortly, actually. I don't think it's launched yet, but in the next two, three two three months. Got it. So yeah, yeah check them out. um Well, yeah.
00:39:19
Speaker
did ah Did your mindset have to change quite a lot? Or how did your mindset change from moving from academia into running a tech startup? like How did that transition go? Because they're two quite different things. Yeah, it's a bit faster. The whole crypto thing. Yeah, it's a very different work style where you don't
00:39:49
Speaker
especially as a founder, I think you just don't have the time to dig dig super, super deeply, um which, well, you do in academia, that's literally what you're supposed to do, right? You're supposed to sit there in the library and then digest hundreds of papers and then produce maybe one paper. um I think in Web3,
00:40:11
Speaker
like anywhere in tech when you're a founder you begin time box um your decisions to like relatively short decisions they should be informed but you just you don't sit around researching other companies or stuff like that you you have a brief look at the landscape of your competitor landscape and then you you pick something and then you go yeah nice yes I think that's a really interesting thing to understand. because
00:40:43
Speaker
I find it quite fascinating how people can switch from different careers into them becoming a founder or even coming from web two into web three to be honest it and the difference between how people or the different mindsets which I guess that the people have had and obviously everyone handles that differently or approaches it slightly differently. Did you just go you know what I'm just going to go into the deep end and and get chucked in and worry about it afterwards or did you kind of prep yourself for it or did you do much research around it or just just go for it and see what happens?
00:41:11
Speaker
we So when we decided to co-found with Hugo, and this goes back a little bit to co-founder search advice as well, we started team first, problem second, and that's generally a recommendation. i would Because problem is if you if one co-founder comes in with a very strong idea, um there's only a small subset of founders who will um still feel a very strong ownership about that. So it's best if you come up with some kind of problem solution um set together
00:41:52
Speaker
And with Hugo, we've been iterating for something like five months, I think, on different projects. So what we did, our approach was very Web3 unique because only in Web3 do you have hackathons that are that juicy. um So we just went for every possible hackathon we could find and then just randomly hacked stuff. And usually these weren't even usual things. Most of them were just like fun things.
00:42:21
Speaker
um But this really exposed us to the tech stack, um to the technologies and to the narratives that were there.
00:42:32
Speaker
um And it was also then when we got exposed to how annoying it is to actually make transfers. um And it was surprisingly annoying. And it seemed EVM uniquely annoying because, well, Bitcoin was meant initially as this peer-to-peer cash system, digital cash system. So it was cash. It had transfers. That was the base idea. It wasn't like store of value. It wasn't like peer-to-peer network for store of value. No, it was peer-to-peer network for cash for replacing coins. We even call them coins.
00:43:08
Speaker
um And it was kind of shocking to see how how annoying it was to make a simple transaction, especially an EPM where you have this whole explosion of L2s and a lot of adoption of different, very different stablecoins. um You don't have that. I mean, on Bitcoin, you don't have that at all.
00:43:29
Speaker
Maybe you have the the difference between lightning and non-light lightning transactions. And then on Solana, it's just one chain and maybe two stablecoins. um so yeah And then Tron and so on, it's also usually just one stablecoin. So much, much simpler there. Still annoying and still too hard to use, I think, for a newbie, but um less annoying than in on EVM chains.
00:43:56
Speaker
um And to answer the question, um yeah, this was so so this was how how we started how we started to look at different problems and then just kind of fell in love with one of these problems.
Navigating Web3 Startups
00:44:12
Speaker
Nice, nice. And what's it really like then building a web3 project from the ground up? Because on the outside looking in, obviously it can come across as really good fun and Pretty innovative and and you're at the forefront of technology, quite c glamorous in some ways as well to be you know a founder in Web3, which I'm sure it is all of those things. But then actually day to day, the things that people don't see and what's it really like, boots on the ground, day to day building of a project.
00:44:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think we should have more boots on the ground, to be honest. I think getting to ECC is not really boots on the ground. You end up talking to the same people about the same problems, people who shell the same bags. um And boots on the grounds, because we have all this talk about, like, emerging economies, banking the unbanked, all of this. It's all good, but like we should we should be fair.
00:45:12
Speaker
um We should probably be amongst other things, right? Like it's it's not the only cash isn't the only use case for crypto But it's definitely very very very strong one that is very under explored Or at least hasn't reached massive option yet And yeah for that you should probably have true boots on the ground as to what it's like um I think it's very fast moving, and a lot of the playbooks are not well established. And the meta changes all the time, right? So when you run a B2B SAS, you can go to a VC and ask them, hey, what's ah for this kind of industry, what's a good customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratio? And they'll tell you something. They'll give you a number. And then they'll give you five case studies on like similar things and how they've done it.
00:46:07
Speaker
um in crypto like the whole points meta came out what maybe half a year ago a year ago the whole airdrop community airdrop thing with like l2s was less than two years ago right like that's and that's like the meta now it's points and then and now points are kind of slowly fading out. I don't know what's happening to points. but like And this is an extremely fast cycle where there's just innovation, top of innovation, top of innovation, um which you just don't he wouldn't have an in Web 2. And then another thing that I find really, really fascinating is this really, really strange mix between
00:46:57
Speaker
Seeming transparency and then incredible obscurity actually because in web 3 it seems on paper it seems that everything is so transparent because you Everything lives on the blockchain and you can just fire up the dune dashboard and then see what's happening to a given protocol but because of all the VC money and the huge incentive programs that most of these protocols bring in and you you end up with a huge mix of mercenary users who are ad rep farmers, who will boost metrics,
00:47:31
Speaker
um um who are like, rent a user almost, um and genuine users, which the two you can't distinguish at all, right? um Until after the ad rep, let's think.
00:47:45
Speaker
and And that's a really, really weird combo, where it's really, really hard to suss out. like You can't just do a normal A-B test like you would on a large e-commerce store. Or maybe like that's what people do, but you can't do it as an outsider of a company. You can do that in terms.
00:48:02
Speaker
So it feels like everything, like on paper, everything should be so open and transparent. But actually, it's really, really, really hard to make sense of any of the metrics that we see. And and most of them are probably being used to boost some kind of valuation. um So that's a really unique thing that you don't have. but You have that in Web2 as well, but not to that extent.
00:48:23
Speaker
Is there is there any anything else that you'd love people to be aware of? Because that sounds like quite ah quite an important thing that people need to be aware of before coming into the space, right? That you don't have the ah don't have all of the data there from 200, 300 companies that have tried this particular approach in that particular market before and this is how it works well for this type of consumer and and and things. So you don't have necessarily that that data. You might be trying things out for the first time or one of 10, 15 startups that are approaching a particular idea or maybe less than that in some some places. Is there anything else that you think people need to be really aware of before joining the space, before coming into the industry?
00:49:06
Speaker
Yeah, good question. um This was the thing that I found most surprising. um And then and another one that I still find surprising is how much funding there is for infra, um where a lot of the infra, and especially middleware, seems to be very replaceable. It seems to commoditize very, very, very quickly.
00:49:30
Speaker
um and yeah whereas whereas the classical vc mode right um uh usually very weak network effects like usually very like on vc like on paper it wouldn't seem like vcs would want to invest but they do it because of some tokenomics usually and that's also a whole thing to navigate that is very surprising, I think, to someone who would come from a web2 startup background, especially with like a YC mindset and stuff like that. That's good to that's good to know. It's good to get the insight from a founder building in web3. I haven't heard that one on the podcast yet, so you're the first one to to make people aware of that situation. um what are um What are some other things or some other surprising things you've heard?
00:50:22
Speaker
ah so the common thing Some of the common things that come up are people being aware of the the community feel of the industry, about how everything is is almost being built out in the open, sometimes the pressures that can come from building with a community ah that they might not be used to when when joining from from Web 2. Getting the speed and the pace that everything changes and being able to stay up to date with everything ah in Web 3, new things popping up every single day, it feels like.
00:50:52
Speaker
ah The trends change in the industry then pivots and points in a different direction. And then one day everyone just decides, nope, we're not doing that anymore. We're going to look at something else. And I think you have to be able to to deal with that change quite quite rapidly. ah like So you have to deal with that rapid change. Well, what else is quite a common ah quite a common thing?
00:51:17
Speaker
I think those are the main those are the main ones, really. Yeah, they make sense. I mean, yeah, fully agreed, especially if you... Like a lot of my crypto marketinging cryptonative marketing, crypto native marketing is all about building some kind of excitement for like some future rewards. It's a very tough place to navigate because um you can't overpromise but you want people to get as hyped up as possible so it's really really tough yeah yeah it's hard i think there's another one as well that people ah need to be aware of is that there are scam projects oh yeah in this space oh yeah that's that's you don't know you don't get it you don't get you know completely yeah rogue projects that
00:52:05
Speaker
ah that will just kind of pull the rug and and disappear in all sorts of different scams and connect your wallet to the wrong the wrong contract. And yeah, your wallet's drained, all this kind of stuff. You just don't have that type of thing, really. I suppose you have like fishing scams and that kind of stuff, right? But not not to the same extent, maybe, as Web3. And they're not projects. Like, yeah, fishing scams, it like it just it's a scam, not a scam project. A guy in his bedroom. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. yeah Yeah, it's again, that's the tricky thing to get head round and almost being able to do your own research on particular projects, especially if you're a person looking for a job in web three, like really trying to do your background on the founders and the actual project itself and who the backers are and the funding and really trying to understand that side of it is probably
00:52:54
Speaker
research that a lot of people have never had to do before if they're coming into the three for the first time, it would be completely unnatural really.
Ensuring Candidate Authenticity in Web3
00:53:02
Speaker
yeah Yeah, same for a hiring perspective. I mean we have an open applications form on our website and I would say that 20% of the applications are very very obvious attempts at scams. Usually the scam works by um trying to get you to, well, trying to infect you with some malware that will scan for seed phrases on your device. So whether that is a repo that is being shared by a prospective, like someone who pretends to want to work for you and then shares like, oh, just trust me, run this code locally. and It will show you this amazing project or like some like weird PDFs and stuff like that.
00:53:44
Speaker
um Yeah, I would say like really 20%. They are quite obvious. But yeah, I can imagine people who are not aware of the extent of fishing and um malware um fall for some of these.
00:54:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's tough. And as a recruiter as well, I mean, you get sent CVs all the time, right? And you just assume naturally that you're going to open a CV when you click on a PDF or a Word doc or something like that. um Yeah. So yeah, that's quite a tricky thing to navigate as well, really. But um yeah it's hard. It's hard to know when to open them or when not to. Yeah. what General advice, I think,
00:54:29
Speaker
ah It's quite hard to infect computers from a from within a Chrome tab. It's definitely possible with a PDF, but there's way fewer vulnerabilities than in something like Adobe Acrobat Reader, whatever.
00:54:45
Speaker
um So yeah, but yeah, I mean, oh, and and with recruiting as well, just like it's a completely different space because In Web 2, you have LinkedIn. And LinkedIn is like your proof of work. It's like you your people like you people lie on LinkedIn, but they don't lie blatantly. No one's going to lie about, or very few people will completely lie and make up a story about having been to Harvard, ah but not having been. People will lie about the grade they got, maybe.
00:55:21
Speaker
um But the big picture will kind of line up, at least the names of the companies and so on. I think it's relatively rare that people just completely invent a bio. And in crypto,
00:55:33
Speaker
Because people are averse, like people, I don't know, don't like LinkedIn because they try to be cool or something, I don't know. um they They will hide stuff. um People try to moonlight all the time, like one engineer working at three companies at the same time.
00:55:52
Speaker
and all the time and yeah generally big red flag I think if people don't have a relatively up-to-date and LinkedIn profile but are not like a C-level founder then it's probably or like a founder someone C-level or a founder then like there's probably something fishy at least that's been my finding what was yours I mean you look at way more profiles than I do again, I've had it both ways. So I've had there's a there's a real trend in in web three, four, even to be honest, I think it's even going into web two now as well, to be honest, but um people just creating like fake LinkedIn profiles. And then they'll message you and they almost read I'm nervous to give away the secrets in case they change their tactics if they read if they listen to this, but it'll always be like
00:56:40
Speaker
guys some similar sorts of of of area of the world and they'll always read the same script and they always put like a background on their desk screen so you can't really see where they're from and they might say they're living in one particular country you'll ask them just for a single word of that language and they say they've been there for like a year and they just don't know anything. um There's like there's a lot of red flags but but they all just read like the same script and when you jump on a call you can instantly tell within the first 10 seconds that this person is a fake profile just trying to get a job and then they'll even send someone else through to do the technical assessments if they're an engineer for example. um And then ah and then yeah then someone else will turn up on the first day of work and then they'll just collect a salary for a couple of months and they might do that. hundred I don know yeah don't know how many people they they they um companies can do that with. but
00:57:32
Speaker
um But yeah, that happens all the time. They have a full LinkedIn profile, even say they work in particular businesses and this kind of stuff. um So I'd say from a hiring perspective in Web3, like now I always ask people to actually name the specific projects where they've delivered work or who they've worked with.
00:57:47
Speaker
um because the space is so small that through maybe like one degree of connection you know someone's connected to someone and you can just say look can you help me out here I don't know if this person is quite real don't know if they've done what they said they've done like can you just help me out and most people will say yes because they've either fought They've either known someone who who that's happened to or you know they might be hiring themselves and they've had a bunch of the same things happen and this kind of stuff. So um yeah, having up to date profiles and references and people that um that you can speak to, I think he's key.
00:58:21
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, pulling it's tough. It's tough to cross check everything, right? Yeah, yeah is that's what you need to that's why you need to work with good recruiters probably so they can take all that off yeah off you play.
00:58:37
Speaker
um But I've even had it the other way. And I know some great people who don't have LinkedIn profiles at all. You wouldn't find them anywhere. And I've been introduced to them through Telegram or something like this. And actually, to be honest, there are people I've been introduced to through people I trust, actually. And again, it's that whole kind of trusted referral network and that kind of thing, which is massively key in Web3 from a hiring perspective, anyway.
00:59:05
Speaker
and where they've got no nothing anywhere. You won't even tell them. They might have a Twitter or an X profile that will say something completely random as the handle, and you'll have no idea that this person is doing what they they say they do and this kind of thing. um And they've turned out to be some of the best engineers that that we've come across and stuff, I guess. So it can happen both ways, but I think the whole the referral side of it. I wouldn't trust it. If i if they weren't referred to me from someone that I trust, then you just wouldn't speak to them, right? Yeah, you just can't do it. And I don't think anyone's quite cracked the proof of work, ah proof of CV, proof of person, digital identity yet, so that you can actually know if that person is
00:59:51
Speaker
you know, ah really done what they've said they've done and and this kind of stuff. so Yeah, I don't think you can easily do it. Yeah, like it's not what needs all of the like,
01:00:07
Speaker
You would need all of the job jobs essentially to somehow attest to you having done something and you would have to convince a lot of people to to switch to like some non-linked in technology.
01:00:25
Speaker
Yeah, LinkedIn got a bit of a bit of a monopoly as well.
Problem Solving over Solution Fixation
01:00:29
Speaker
Yeah, that whole market. But, but come on, to finish up, I mean, you shared some brilliant insight today into what it's really like to be a founder. And yeah, really enjoyed listening to your your journey and how you yeah, how you moved into the web through space and came up with the idea of peanut. Knowing what you know now,
01:00:51
Speaker
about ah business ah business, technology, leadership, ah hiring teams, whatever it might be. If you could go back to the start of your career, the academic when you first started, ah any advice that you could share for your younger self? Yeah, really good question. um
01:01:16
Speaker
Yeah, I think i think
01:01:20
Speaker
kind of related to what I said earlier about timeboxing whole hypotheses to test, like not getting attached to, and it's very, very hard. I think that's the one of the biggest struggles is to fall in love with the, and it's a cliche, but fall in love with the problem, not the solution.
01:01:39
Speaker
um And it's it's a huge cliche, but it's really, really hard because once you've started building something, you get acquainted with it, you you start feeling comfortable with it, you maybe feel a sense of pride. It's very, very hard to then get away from it and not treat it as just like one of the many hypotheses that I tried to test. Whereas you your task is not to like At least at pre-seed and seed stage, your task isn't to bring something magical into the world that you envisioned, but just to iterate through as many hypotheses as you can. And only at Series A stage, your growth stage, is to make that happen on a big scale in the world, in the real world. And I think that's something that's super overlooked because a lot of... When you listen to all the fundraising advice and all the startup advice, there's so much emphasis on vision.
01:02:38
Speaker
um But it's not about like your vision and your personal thing in that world. It's like really just going through um as many tests as you can run as quickly as possible, um being as scrappy as you can. I think this is something that I would have. And that you have many shots, in fact. You have a certain runway if you're funding.
01:03:04
Speaker
And you can divide that up into like however many hypotheses you want to test in whatever resolution and depth you want to test them in. um I think it's very easy to get fixated on like one one thing. um And that's a struggle of that I think is really, really hard and still is for me, despite having this learning. I like that advice. Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Yeah.
01:03:30
Speaker
I like that. You need that on your wall in the background. There needs to be a quote behind you. Yeah, that would be nice. We'll add it there, sorry. Yeah, you should. but um Well, Kamrad, thank you very much for taking the time to have a conversation today. um Yeah, i've learned I've learned a lot ah from you about your journey and and your approach. and Yeah, I'm going to listen back to this episode and take a bunch of notes myself. and ah You've already got me thinking how long I've been spending or maybe I was just spending too long on certain things ah that I do and maybe I need to Yeah, cut cut that short and trial something else um buts um But if if anyone's listening and they've got any extra questions they want to find out more information on on peanut protocol or even a
01:04:13
Speaker
maybe pick your brains about about ah you know being a being a founder or maybe they are thinking actually you know what it sounds like a really interesting technology and they will want to explore maybe integrating it with with their project and looking at partnerships and stuff and where's the best place to reach out is it LinkedIn is it Twitter Yeah, Twitter or LinkedIn both work, so it's keyconrats.com for any of the personal stuff, and it has a bunch of links to my Twitter, Farcasters, and whatever, all these things.
01:04:43
Speaker
um and LinkedIn, and then Peanut Protocol for anything like payments or integrations, stablecoins, any emergent markets. Also always happy to just chat and and learn from you, like if if there is there's anything you think might be interesting or insightful um about this space, like super happy to just, yeah, just jam on it.
01:05:09
Speaker
Sounds great. Sounds great. learn yeah Comrade, thanks again. It's been brilliant to speak. Thank you. Thank you, Jack. I'll catch you soon. Take care. See you. Bye.