How to Build in Crypto: Lessons from 8 Leading Founders | Jesse Pollack, Jeremy Allaire, Anatoly Yakovenko & More

welcome to bank list where we explore the frontier of Internet money and internet finance and today on Bank list we're exploring the frontier of being a startup founder are you startup curious do you think you have what it takes to become a Founder have you always been curious about the challenges difficulties and skills that come with building a company today in the show bankless Nation I have a goal a goal for the marginal Builder who's out there who just needs a little push over the edge to start building something in crypto on the show today we have some of crypto's

most successful most famous Founders and Builders each with about 15 minutes of time giving you the wisdom that they've gained from their time being a crypto Builder we've got Jesse Pollock from bass Jeremy a from Circle Anatoli from salana stonnie from a Kane from synthetics Mike and Jason from blockworks Kevin aukee from gitcoin Lucas from jto and each one has their own perspective their own scars and hopefully by listening to this episode you listener can learn from their lessons and acquire their wisdom and gain the confidence you need to venture

out onto your own Frontier and maybe one day on the bankless podcast let's go ahead and get right into this episode but first I want to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible bankless Nation I'm here with Jesse from base Jesse's time at coinbase seems to have been marked by a destiny of figuring out how to get coinbase on chain and he finally did it with the arrival of Bas last year since then bass has grown to almost a million active addresses on Bas uh with over 4.2 total transactions and over $6 billion in tvl Jesse welcome back to Bist thanks David glad to be here Jesse were you

always a builder uh were you born that way or did you like learn to be a builder uh I mean I started at a pretty young age uh thinking about how to build things was different you know like started with small businesses I uh ran a snow shoveling business and a yard work business and then I learned how to code when I was in my senior year of high school my last year of high school uh and that really opened up the world for me um where I was like oh I can build apps and put them on the Internet and people can use them and that's kind of like this open and crazy imagination space for me um so started building apps

my first year of college started company my second year of college dropped out after that uh and built a company for five years and joined coin base built the consumer products for for five years and now I've been building base for the last couple years okay so I'm going to go with definitely was born born with it uh what is that um so you always saw yourself as something like something building something what would you go back to if you could go back to your college self or when you're like first getting real serious about becoming like a real professional career builder any

advice for that younger version of Jesse what would you go back to him with first I think the the first piece of advice I would give is find something that you're excited about like a domain that you're excited about and then find the smallest possible thing to build and start with that um you know like I I think I spent a lot of time early on in my career like trying to find the perfect idea or um like the perfect project to work on and I think what I've seen uh over the last few years is that the place that people like generally find the most impact is through uh kind of Discovery process

where you get started with something small um that's something that align to your interest align to your area of expertise and then over time that can grow into something bigger um and so you don't have to have the perfect idea you don't have to start with something that you think is going to reach billions of people you can start small build your skills build your intuitions uh and kind of gradually build to something bigger and bigger I think entrepreneurs will probably be able to like be listening to this episode and and know whether or not they have the entrepreneurial spirit in them but being an entrepreneur being a builder comes with like other skills that like must be cultivated so I think

maybe to parse that apart there's like the natural skills of just like you know you're a coder you like to build things that's great and then there's like the skills that kind of like the job requires and whatever you build is going to both lean into your natural intrinsic strengths and then also require you to hone some like secondary skills that are just kind of required for the job what natural skills did you lean into and how does that kind of like Mark your time as a builder yeah well first thing I'll say is that anyone can be a builder you know coders are Builders they can build apps but you can build community uh you can build your art uh you can build your

identity especially on chain really everyone has the opportunity to Builder and the tools are getting better and better so you can build really cool things without any of the kind of technical knowhow that would have historically been required um so that's that's kind of the first thing in terms of the skills that I think um kind of like naturally themselves to building um one is just like a mindset a mindset of optimism and determination um there's a lot of difficulty in building you're going to run into roadblocks uh things are going to get really hard people are going to tell you you're dumb because you're doing something that no one's

done before and having the resilience to just keep building and keep putting one foot in front of the other I think that's a really really important skill and mindset for people to build um another one that I've seen uh help uh people be successful is finding a way you like to communicate about what you're building doesn't have to be the same right some people are going to like to be on Twitter all the time some people are going to write like to write Long blog posts some people are going to like to go to conference talks and give conference talks but finding a way to tell your story I think is really powerful because that's going to let

other people come in um and basically help them join your journey uh and help them want to support you and then that will all help you be successful so that's the that's the second one uh and then the third one I'd say is an ability to kind of like put things together uh that um you know kind of transcends anyone's skill set right like maybe if you're a developer uh you're going to naturally spike in kind of the ability to build an app but if you can only build an app that might not get you that far and so

being able to think about okay how can I use this you know kind of like strength as the center of my skill set but then add on other skill sets like oh I'm going to figure out how to get the first bit of distribution oh I'm going to figure out how to you know collaborate with someone else on it oh I'm going to figure out how to build little team um I I find that the best Builders are Scrappy kind of t-shaped um individuals who have one area where they're really deep and have a lot of expertise but then they're also Broad and they're able to think kind of holistically and put together the pieces um even if they're

not an expert in anything to get things done what about the skills or activities that you just know you have to do because that's what is required of you but you just really don't enjoy uh so like any like solo founder is going to have to do like taxes at the end of the year or like accounting uh and that's going to likely be very adjacent to the skills that they have that are making them a builder in the first place uh just like the burden of responsibility of being a Founder can can be very large how have you navigated this I mean I'd say first off like to start you have to just grid it out like there's no there's

no one weird trick right it's like you doing all that stuff by yourself um and learning the skills enough to be able to get them done uh in a scrappy way I think is a super important part of one's journey and um that was something that I did for a long time I mean I filed all my crypto taxes for like 10 years and the super complex took hundreds of hours um and so I think that that's like one really important starting point is like you there's no easy way through you just have to grid it out I think once you grd it out and you have done it for a while

and you have an understanding of what it is and you have an understanding of how much it costs you then as your business grows or you know your your your kind of lifestyle and how much your earning grows I think you can start to reason about about where does it make sense to take the things that uh you really don't like doing uh but you know need to get done and you have a clear understanding of what's good looks like and Outsource them to other people and so some of that's going to be like you could hire an accountant to do your taxes um you know you could uh hire someone to help plan travel like there's a bunch of different pieces that you can put

together that will let you exchange um uh money or more time but I think that if you jump to that too soon you can get like kind of caught you know a situation where you're you're paying a lot of money and you're not getting good results and that's because you don't actually know what good results are in that early stage of like doing the hard work that's unglamorous that's annoying that you don't like I think is a really important stepping stone to build that understanding so you can successfully kind of progress to being able to say okay now I'm going to make a trade for more time with a little bit more money spending Builders and entrepreneurs one

of the like critical Make It or Break It skills that they have is just being able to like manage their time most effectively like especially in the early stages of a company doing the most high leverage thing uh possible is and identifying that high leverage thing is going to make her break your company uh and I think perhaps that's where a lot of Builders fail is that their instincts aren't tuned to identifying what the high leverage thing is maybe maybe there's a very obvious low hanging fruit and they just can't see it uh how have you navigated like identifying what is the

right way to spend your time in like what opportunity zones yeah that's a good question um well like one forcing function that I I've had tried to have for me and my team is like how do we just make sure that we're moving fast in whatever we're doing right like we shouldn't be measuring our progress especially early on in months or quarters or years we should be measuring our progress in days or hours and weeks like Max um and so even with the base team the size it is today like my push to everyone is like what are you shipping this week literally what are you shipping this week that's going to

have an impact on our business and you know of course there's always going to be projects that go out longer but I I think one of the one of the things that Brian Armstrong has of coin Mesa said a lot to me is this idea that action produces information um it doesn't have to be the right perfect thing that you're working on but it it's the worst thing if you get stuck in indecision or you get stuck in doing something for a really long time that you're not going to actually be able to learn from the the thing that's going to accelerate you is having a really clear feedback loop where you can ship something quickly you can learn from it you can ship something quickly you can learn from it and you

can use all of that to improve your kind of judgment and intuition because like you said at the beginning of the question you know a especially early on you're not going to have the best intuition and judgment cuz you've never done this before but if you can get you know like uh 50 or 60 reps in a year from Shipping something every week you're going to build that intuition so much faster than if you ship one thing in the first year uh because then you're only get one set of learnings yeah so building with speed kind of enables like a meta skill to emerge around of course there's always like you know caveats and you know exceptions where maybe you

really you know a certain type of product needs a certain different way of building but I think for the most part as a general rule like figuring out how to ship quickly uh so that you can learn really quickly as well is super important for early stage folks during your time uh just building how have you spent your time unexpectedly in ways that you like you actually didn't uh see coming that's a good question I mean what one way that I think I've spent my time unexpectedly just in the last year and a half is I would say that I am spending an unexpectedly large amount of time on Twitter and forecaster um in my

role as like you know leader of Bas you know if you'd ask me like what is what's going to be required in order to make Bas successful maybe two years ago I probably wouldn't have said like spending a lot of time on Twitter and forecaster but I think one thing that's really shifted for for me is as as we built Bas what we've realized is that we're building an economy and the most important part of any economy is the people and platforms like Twitter and forecaster have a really powerful uh uh role which is that it lets me reach the people at a massive scale and so for

instance like here's a here's a little anecdote you know we launched Bas names a couple days ago and you know there's already 200,000 of them minted but I I tweeted like hey um share your Basse name if uh you know you you uh like got a bass name and um people started sharing photos of their bass names I went through not every single one but probably like 400 of the photos that people shared of their base names and just said based and then whatever their name was and that like you know if I put on like traditional you know CEO hat um

you know it's like is Jesse spending hour is like replying the same WR thing to 400 people like the highest leverage thing you maybe not but what I what I think I've realized over the last year and a half is in building an economy and building a community onetoone direct recognition of people and uh uh uh the taking the effort to see people and say you are a part of this thing that we are building is super super important and so if instead of thinking about this oh this is like Jesse wasting his time on Twitter it's like oh no these are

actually like the most uh Avid fans and supporters and builders on base and they're all publicly proclaiming their pride in building on Bas and the recognition from me of saying I see you you are based you are part of that is going to have a massive impact on their feeling of like being a part of it and their desire to build further and so I think that that's like a good example of you know something that you know I think the traditional world might say that's a waste of time but it's definitely something that doesn't scale like you can't scale that like having Jesse reply

to things but it's a place that I've kind of identified oh this is actually High leverage because it creates this feedback loop that then has a bunch of like follow-on Ripple effects that go out through our community Jesse this has been great any just final words of wisdom bits of advice that you have that that comes to mind yeah I mean if you're Building on Base uh we like to say keep building and stay based and when we say stay based we really mean a few things we mean work hard like there's no shortcut for hard work uh we mean stay optimistic uh because the future is going to be great if we build it uh we

mean push boundaries with creativity um because if we're not pushing boundaries through creativity like we're not going to create anything special and then finally we mean put the team over the individual we're not going to get that far if all of us are just looking out for ourselves the way we get far the way we build a new global onchain economy that increases Innovation creativity and freedom is by lifting up the community in the world over the individual or the single company or the single country and so if you're listening to this and you're thinking about Building on Base I

would say keep building and stay based thanks Jesse thanks everyone bankless Nation I'm here with Jeremy air the co-founder and CEO of circle circle as I'm sure you all know is the company behind usdc the $33 billion stable Coin Company founded all the way back in October 2013 and is on a mission to revolutionize the form factor of the dollar using crypto rails Jeremy thanks so much for joining me today thank you David awesome to be back so Jeremy jumping right into it what do you wish you knew at the beginning of your

entrepreneurialship history if you could go back in time uh before you had become an entrepreneur what what would you tell yourself what did you wish you knew back then it's a huge question in some ways right it's simple question but a huge question um you know Circle uh as you know this is my third uh startup and the first two companies um you know I I I help co- found and grew and and eventually ipoed and hopefully uh we'll see that happen with circle to but I I think um you know what I wish I knew um you know back when I was in my 20s and

starting my first company or or or even as I like worked on different projects including circle like there's definitely like major things I've learned along the way um I think um one major thing like and and I talked to Founders about this uh a lot is I think there's a tendency uh to to to kind of feel like to win you have to basically um kind of overpower uh people or or like it's all about like all the energy that you bring

and um and I feel like a huge lesson that I've learned is that like at the end of the day um uh achieving success in a business or product whatever it's it's about the people that you have around you um it's not just the founder and your passion and and your energy and I I think there's a risk of kind of being megal maniacal or or or whatever as as a founder and I think um the biggest lesson I've learned is just fundamentally it's about having a group

of people who are better than you um constantly finding people who are better than you in many domains um and and giving them space um to to create and giving them space to communicate and so I think like from early on where I think I was like the kind of classic like hard charging a lot of strong attitude Etc to kind of where I am now I I've definitely like had a huge amount of learning in terms of just how to work with people um

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

baggage and stuff and it's like failure is actually good um and you know as long as you can quickly learn from that um so sort of planning for failure is is also a a really important You Know lesson and then um and maybe the third thing with which I wish I had known was um is really about uh the importance of values and the importance of of having values that are people are are kind of held to um and again like I think that the the earlier

stages of my career I think you just kind of the energy is like it's it's this Allin energy and and you're you're not thinking in a maybe a disciplined way about like what it is you want from the people that you're you have around you what kind of value system that you want to have but I actually think like having a really strong value system and really making that a core part of like who your company becomes like I think of a company as an organism or you know

whether it's a a protocol project that's open source or an actual company company like the kind of character of the people and the and the DNA that's expressed in these values actually has a huge impact on on how on how your kind of corporate form or organism you know works and grows anyway th those are just like a few high level things and there's there's a very long list of of things that I wish I had known uh but I've come to appreciate all all three of those are great do you remember any like story or

aha moment uh that goes along with any through any one of those three uh different like um priorities or or learning lessons that you brought to the table yeah you know I think um um I mean just like take one of the last ones right I think I have been burned many many times by um kind of the there's there's sort of a philosophy that is an alternative philosophy which is sort of um uh kind of SK you know skill Trump's culture or

culture Trump skill and and there's sort of this philosophy of like well this person's really a dick and they're just an [ __ ] but God they're really smart and they like and they and they they do stuff I've been tricked by that um philosophy op and I've been burned by that many times because even though you might have someone who's like really really brilliant but they're just a complete ass and you like if you if you have people are complete [ __ ] like I'm sorry it just takes you down so I've dealt with that and you know I think um you know that that kind of thing you

know sometimes it's hard to like it's hard to interview for that always you might have an intuition like um I'm not so sure but God they're really smart and then you kind of get into the you know you get into the actual working relationship ship and you just start you know having complaint after complaint or other things or you're you're you're dealing with that and you know this is actually another lesson I've learned which is high slow Fire fast so you know take your time and be deliberate about hiring um because it's like it's it's a it's a major thing um but if you get it

wrong and you figure that out like take care of that like just take care of that um because the the again in the organism metaphor right if you let that virus in right it will it will infect right and it will have that impact and that the the cost of that on Morale on Effectiveness and other is really really high um so that's something like that sort of fits within those those lessons um that that's there and then I think on the on the kind of fail fast um philosophy I mean I cannot tell you how

many times you've you know there are sacred cows and you know there's like maybe the founders really passionate about this idea they have and we're going to do this we're going to keep pushing on it but the data just tells you something completely opposite it's just not working and there's like a a kind of like Blind Faith that can happen like we'll eventually figure this out but then the rest of the organization knows like this is not working like this product is not working and like there's competitors that are crushing us or like the amount of capital that's going to be needed is too much or we're just spread

too thin and like we're just not focused enough and like that kind of thing is really common extremely common and I think um you just have to be willing to like cut your losses and and you know what it's just realize like it's not the time for that you might actually come back to something later like that's happened as well in my own career is like building something and and then being like you know what even though we've put millions of dollars into this or we've pushed on this really hard it's just not it's not the right time and so a lot of times the outside world will look at like you shut down a product or

you you know you you whatever you you you know sold off a business or whatever that is and they'll say oh look at that that company's failing actually they're wrong I think circles been a huge uh you know uh demonstrator of this like we've tried a lot of things we've built a lot of things we've built things we've bought things we've sold things we've shut things down we've built things up we've done a lot of things and it's and actually um that's a sign of like uh I think like a healthy a healthy um organization that you can actually just make those decisions and like and make

those make those hard decisions and cut things off and realize that for the people who are like have a vested interest in it or really passionate about it or the actual employees that are working on it you know like they'll be happier if they're moving on and working on something that is part of a winning team or like something that is getting the whole attention of of an organization and so you you can actually improve morale by by by making those hard choices yeah I'm I'm getting a lot of priority from you about just like the the health of the system like you're talking about the the company as an organism I don't have the numbers in

front of me but I'm guessing uh Circle has a sufficiently large number of employees that you have no longer hired all of them I think you you've probably delegated off that role to to somebody else can you talk about when uh when that choice was made to like when you decided to not not be in charge of hiring every single person and like bestowing that trust on somebody else or a few people like how did you know the time was right how did you know you needed to do that and how how did you actually feel like making that call to to trust somebody else to do the hiring on the to you which is like putting like

different DNA into the company yeah it's a great question and so if I think about the kind of current growth cycle that circles in um in in um about four years ago we had 60 people um and now we have almost a thousand people and we went from like 60 to 120 to like 240 to like 400 to 800 like and now we're almost a, right so um there's been a lot of growth every year and I think um you know when

we were 60 people and that was actually after we had had gone through like the last major rally and we we had a number of other products we had gotten as high as 400 or 450 in an earlier version of circle and then we like sold off businesses restructured spun out companies and like got down to 60 so it was like you know quite a quite a credit shift um I think um you know during that like when we were 60 and we were hiring people I met everyone like I met everyone that we were going to hire and and and actually 60 wow well when when

we were 60 uh when we had gone up to 400 and some I had not been involved in hiring every person right there was a certain point where that dropped off but if you take this current cycle that we're in when we were 60 and we were hiring I was meeting every person um for sure and and and actually it was at that time that you know my my Chief Operating Officer Elizabeth and I like we really doubled down hard on our values and we like really pushed like we have to know that the people were hiring like fit this hold these values right and can and can

do that and so you had to be super super close to it cuz you're you want to make sure the DNA of the organism in that metaphor right is in fact happening and thriving and so like that very Hands-On uh take was really key and then I would say probably above a hundred um is when I started to delegate more but I had a lot of awareness I wanted to know like who's in the pipeline who are the top candidates why are you focused on this person Etc and I would always basically offer to a hiring manager like I will I

will be involved in any recruiting that you ever want me in and it's still the case if there's a single manager in circle that wants my help talking with someone or or wants my view like I'll do it I'll make it a priority I'll make it a priority the same day if they want me to talk to that person the same day that's really important but I would say um like during this scaling that we've done the rapid scaling that we've done over the past few years you know in that kind of higher slow Fire fast uh philosophy I spent a huge amount of time um hiring the Executives into the roles

that they're in like my CTO my chief product officer my CFO you know all these lots of these roles um I spent a huge amount of time figuring out like who are these people and really making sure that like the fit was deeply strong and that these were people who like I would trust to build teams and in fact I was hiring them to go from you know a small organization like our say our risk and compliance organization you know and and scale it into you know hundreds of people and like know that they know how

to do that and that they bring those values in and so I think um now like I'm at a point where I I will definitely be involved in hiring of of any any leader in the company like you know any any leader in any major role like I I want to be involved but like I feel so much more confident now that like we've got a foundation that that we can really scale with and and I think if you talk to people who work here um you hear pretty consistently about like the values that

the company has and how those show up for people and and and and what it's like to to kind of work within that so Jeremy uh most of the uh the entrepreneurs that I'm going to have on this podcast I will only be able to ask this question once to them but I'm going to ask you this question twice because this is the question of what do you have for aspiring young entrepreneurs but since you've been in the uh build companies outside of crypto and inside of crypto I'm hoping to get your perspective on building companies in both of those context so generally like what is what advice do you have for young entrepreneurs and when you add crypto to that sentence

does anything change do you have any like advice specifically for the crypto context as well yeah you know they kind of build on each other like I think generally as an entrepreneur like one of the things that you have to be kind of eyes wide open on is that basically everyone's going to tell you that you're wrong um everyone's going to tell you like you're nuts everyone's going to always be asking you like skeptical questions like I don't know like isn't that problem solved like why would anyone need that like being being an

entrepreneur is really lonely because you're you know you're you're doing something and there's like for whatever reason in society or in business or in in the media there's like there's like an inherent skepticism about anything new um there's also a fascination with the new so it's it's it's it's multifaceted I don't want to paint like a totally black and white picture but new is weird yeah exactly yeah but like it's one of the interesting things with like PR actually if you look at PR is that like early stage startups find it

really not easy but like there's you get a good VC round and like you got a news story and it's amazing and like you're someone's covering you but then you go into like this like long period where no one actually really cares because you're not scaled you're not at scale you don't have huge product Market fit so they then they kind of ignore you that's a very lonely time um is is that is that period and um and so I think the advice is is kind of like you know you better have like really deep personal conviction about what it is that you're

doing because you're going to face skepticism every single day you're G to find it you know in most cases really really hard to like raise the money that you need over and over again like that's hard because like generally people say no and so you have to like accept a lot of rejection you're going to have a lot of people who join and then they're going to quit and you're going to take it really personally you're going to be like oh my God they don't like me they don't like this I'm a failure like there's like a lot of these personal narratives that go on that are hard and

so you know you have to just also realize and this is I think an important lesson um that that I also think I've learned over the years which is like that founder passion and that like vision and like driving that that lasts like that's a very lasting thing that you can hang on to and build there will be many many people including people who are really key people people that you hire who sit right next to you who are going to quit and that doesn't matter like an institution as you build it and and so on like it outlasts anyone and

ultimately it outlasts the founders as well depending on on what you're you're building and and how how large it gets but like I think that's also a thing that I have learned is that like you know there there's like a heavy heart when it comes to like people coming and going and I think that's in some ways it's valuable because you want to feel empathy and want to have connection but also you have to kind of be Steely eyed about it and just be like you know what just going to keep going and like the organization reconfigures and you keep going um and and so that's that's also

something that that I've I've definitely felt so I think like that's like a general common is like you you have to you have to kind of hold on in that way as a as a Founder um and and realize those things and I think for crypto it's even harder I mean basically like you're asking for punishment right because you know like literally like if you think you know I'm starting a you know a social media startup that's going to do I don't know whatever like some e-commerce sharing or whatever the hell it is right like people would be like yeah okay I kind of know what that is