E162: CoinGecko CEO: The Truth About Getting Rich in Crypto (you won't like it)

25:53But I don't think every single thing will be a fungible token data. They will be, as part of this billion token world, a large part of them will also be non-fungible tokens and I think kind of NFT is kind of like going down now no one's talking about it it's kind of very bold it's been beaten up quite hard but I think it's going to come back at some point and the reason I say this is because if you look at the real world most of the things are actually non-fungible assets properties real estate they sound very similar it's an apartment in New York City for example or apartment in Kale or house a terrace house in Kale a house but a house is not the same.

26:31Every single house in that same neighborhood is technically non-fungible. You can't just go to your neighbor. Hey, let's swap our houses. Maybe his house is broken. His hasn't been maintained for 20 years, for example. But if it's the same, it's fungible, then you can. But that's fungible tokens. Non-fungible tokens, you can't. So reality is, you have Pokemon cards. Not every Pokemon card is the same. You can't just swap them, for example. A lot of assets are non-fungible. And I think NFTs are going to come back again and going to represent a lot of different things. And I think RF, NFTs are going to represent a lot of real assets out there as well.

27:03And that's why I'm so bullish. Obviously, how will NFTs change in the future? We're still not so sure yet, but I don't think NFTs are going to disappear. What would you bet on? I mean, you probably have some bets, right, for the future. Like, what do you think about, I don't know, a budget penguin, a crypto punk, a board ape? or you think like the real winners are in terms of asset appreciation, right? Are something completely different that maybe doesn't even exist yet? Yeah, I think the second part, like what doesn't exist yet may be a big part of it because the reality is if you look at the tech industry in general as well, you know, you could always go back, look, I wish I was there in 1999 to participate in the tech evolution right?

27:56Well, if you look at it, back in 2000, you don't have Uber, you don't have Airbnb. If all these companies are out there, not even built yet. And I think that in crypto, the Ubers and the Airbnbs hasn't arrived yet. So you just got to keep our eyes open on what they will be. And when they come, I think the growth rate for a lot of companies these days are growing faster and faster. The path towards a billion dollars or path towards a billion users is so much faster these days compared to what it was a few years ago. So it doesn't mean that the old assets will die away and the Bitcoin is going to be here, for example.

28:30But I mean, will the Pajipank Queens still be around in five years' time? Will the CryptoPunks still be around in five years' time? You know, who knows, right? It's anyone's guess. But like, if I may fathom a guess, like CryptoPunks are like the first NFT collection. So maybe they have some historical art law that may stay on. You know, Pajipank Queens, at the end of the day, it will still largely depend on the execution of the team. Execution risk, yeah. If the team disappears, for example, or Lucas is entangled in some sort of drama, for example. Then, where's the wife? Who knows? You know, maybe he gets sold to a new owner again.

29:03But it's a lot of execution reasons. But there's always new things in crypto as well. And that's one of the... So, it's anyone's guess. Like, I mean, I don't really have a crystal ball, but it's just to stay nimble, I suppose. Yeah. You started Konioko in 2014, 12 years ago, which is an eternity in crypto. Yeah. People think about 12 days. long-term thinker to think about 12 weeks two guys a hundred dollar each and a dream what did this first 200 coin gecko version look like yeah so um really actually the cost was uh just us buying a domain coingecko.com and having some money to pay for servers uh and then was just our time and our skills in building the coin gecko um you can go to internet archives and click on a website from 2014 and see how it looked like.

29:51Very different. Back then, we kind of wanted to come up with a GECO score. We kind of evaluate coins, not just on price, market cap, but also on the social developer activities and so on. Kind of get a 360 view of a coin. But over time, we kind of realized people want the price and market cap. So we kind of simplify the website and sorted by market cap and and that's what people want and we we kind of change the way we we we deliver the website um so yeah quick one i want to thank our partners who help us make this show possible thank you treasure my favorite cold wallet to store my crypto and make sure i sleep well at night if you want to order a treasure wallet and sleep well at night too you can use my promo code WSH10 to get a 10 % discount.

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31:22You said before we kept our jobs. Yes. You kept your job as a digital marketer for the first three years. Five years, actually. Five years. Yes. Until 2019. 2017. Yeah. So you started in 2012. Well, so started my job in 2012, late 2012, heard about Bitcoin crypto in 2013, started working on the first discussion with TM in late 2013, launched CoinGecko in April 2014. Yeah. And then for the next, yeah, I guess three years, I suppose, after that, then I was still working in SimeW. I had a scholarship bond. So they paid for my education in the UK. and one of the deals was to come back and they moved for five years at the company and I, you know, when I signed a contract, I tried to, you know, do my best to fulfill my part of the contract and they paid for my studies in the UK and I know the right thing to do was to, you know, work that five years even though doesn't make sense but, you know, it's a good thing, it's a blessing as well.

32:21I learned some things. Again, it sounds like this Malaysian values, right? I mean, I would say good values like I'm doing the right thing even if it doesn't make sense I said I'm gonna do that my word is my bond and I'm just doing it which is so important so important so basic I would say in life and in business but you put your head 99 % of the people if you do that my word is my bond because people are not like that it's crazy and in this industry it's a complete disaster it's like so it's actually easy to be taken seriously if you just like do what the fuck you said you're going to do, right?

33:02What you said you're going to do, right? You know, it sounds easy. I mean, I always like to quote this, bring this quote back to life. Warren Buffett used to say this thing, right? It takes 20 years to build a reputation and only five minutes to ruin it. If you know what you do, you live life differently, right? So like 20 years. So it's like, you know, I think there's so much short-term thinking in crypto that we just got to start playing long-term games with long-term people. I think the easiest and fastest way to make money is to grieve in crypto. Yes, of course, you can make this much money instantly, five minutes or one year.

33:36A lot of companies are one cycle company in crypto. But to survive multiple cycles and to play long-term games with long-term people, it's very rare. It's very hard to find such people. But when you find such people, you know that other guys playing long-term games. So these are the guys that, you know, trust their words. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. It's so simple. And it's not many. so people find each other even at all this time there's not many where they're like hey let's pay the long term yeah it's not easy I guess it's just too easy to grieve I mean look I mean if I wanted to make easy short term money I would have done it a long time ago like what would have you done?

34:12why would I do it? like I mean I would have ruined my reputation entirely I wouldn't build in this space I wouldn't build you know CoinGecko wouldn't be where it is today you never had the temptation? I don't need that much money to live in Malaysia things are so cheap here as well Yeah. I mean, what's the point? Look, I also believe this thing called karma as well. You know, fast money come by. If you get it from the wrong way, wrong sources. It's going to go. It's going to go away as fast. Absolutely. And you've seen these stories in crypto all the time. People make. Look, I mean, on hyperliquid these days, people lose$100 million overnight.

34:49You either lose it in the market or if you manage to cash out, then you start spending it on clubs and hookers and so on. And before you know it, one year later, they're back to where they are. So, you know, at the end of the day, you got to have the right intention, the right mindset. And then you got to have like earning money is one thing, but keeping the wealth is another thing altogether.

35:12So the reason you went all in late 2017 is not because of this market craze and FOMO, it's because your five years were over. It was both, it was both. So like, you know, my bond ended sometime towards Q4 2017. If you remember at that point in time, it was the ICO bull run as well. So, so much projects. TM and I were keeping CoinGecko on maintenance mode. And then TM left his job sometime earlier in 2017. And then like, because we get so much traffic, we had to kind of build and kind of put more work. The site is calling more of time. and I think we was making so we were maintaining the website keeping it up and then the revenue that we were making during the ICO years as well were also good and then at some point it wasn't a very hard decision like okay you know what it's making enough money it pays us it can pay our salaries it pays us enough to hire people as well so it was just the two of you yeah it was two of us and we had a few contractors here and there and in 2017 when I quit my job and we just went full time and then started building it started growing the company and in 2018 we started hiring after staff and then started growing it.

36:20So despite big market crash 2018, 18, 90%, you're just like, oh, it's a no-brainer now for us to be... Because the market has proven that it is big enough to support. And I think back in 2013, 14, 15, 16, the market was really small, really tiny that, you know, I've seen so many companies kind of close down back then because it's just market timing. They raised money from VCs in 2014 and usually when you raise money, you got 18 to 24 months window to kind of make it work. So you hire and you build everything and try to find product market fit, but the market wasn't ready. And then they shut down in 2016.

36:58And then 2017, the ICO bullrunners start coming up. And then a lot of companies would have survived or would have thrived if they kind of stayed on a little longer. So that's one of the lessons that we learned as well, right? So we started seeing how it wasn't very obvious back then about this four year Bitcoin cycle is the highs and lows of the crypto market and volatility of the industry but now it's very obvious we've sort of seen this over three cycles now probably entering the fourth cycle. You still believe in that? It almost seems like we're living through a simulation like that right now I mean like I mean Bitcoin's not doing well and like is this the lowest point I don't know man I mean if you go by the four year cycle we still got some way to go below and and and it's tough it's tough i think i think a lot of companies they don't have enough runway i think having a 24 months runway is 18 24 months runway is not sufficient in crypto you need at least three to four years runway because if you go by the four years cycle two years is just pure absolute brutal just no matter what you do there's just no growth uh which is burning churning users and so on but then when the bull market count everything you do suddenly becomes uh suddenly takes off for example.

38:08So it's an industry that's kind of built to kind of how do you take advantage of the bull market and make money. And for us, it's how do we build during a bear market such that we can take advantage during the bull market. But during the bull market, it's like bears going to hibernation. How do you save the money and prepare for the bear market eventually again? So we're a conservative company. We never overhire. We always kind of make sure we have sufficient funds to kind of sustain the next bear cycle. What was the tipping point for CoinGecko? I think the tipping point for us was in 2001. 21?

38:4621, yeah. So in 21, I think we did a lot of things that year. I think one of the things that we did really well was we tracked the DeFi market. So I think that was the pivotal shift from an entirely centralized exchange economy to decentralized exchanges playing a bigger role in our crypto ecosystem. So CoinGecko and all the other competitors were historically built to track prices from centralized exchanges. And then in 2021, Uniswap and Curve and Balancer, they all launched. And then there was a lot of coins that's launching on Uniswap. And then people were hungry to track the prices for these coins on Uniswap.

39:25But then these coins were not traded on the centralized exchanges because centralized exchanges back then were like, pay me money to list your coin, right? So none of them want to list any of these coins. Even the small exchanges didn't want to list any of these DAX coins. So TM did the hard work to do the R &D to track Uniswap. I mean, we asked the Uniswap team or other DeFi protocols, hey, how do we get your data? Because we want an API. And then they said, just get it on-chain. On-chain sounds very easy until you try to get it. There's no support line to call to kind of like, hey, can you give me the API?

39:59You got to do the hard work to try to figure out how to do it. eventually we found subgraphs and some ways to do it but eventually now we kind of run and get the data on change directly ourselves but TM did the hard work, managed to track Uniswap and eventually he worked hard to track Curve, Balancer and managed to track all the DeFi tokens and I think that kind of made a big difference to us, suddenly everybody in crypto all the serious guys in crypto said that CoinGecko is a place to be, it's a place to track all the coins that you want to track because it's not found anywhere else for example and kind of iterated on there we had like a good six months, one year advantage or so, and then kind of that solidified our position as the, it's a premier destination for crypto.

40:41We always say in entrepreneurship, going from zero to 10 employees is a certain business. Going from 10 to 20 is another business. 20 to 50 is another business. 50 to 100 is another business. You need people for that. People who are capable of going to the next level. and some of them, they're perfect for the previous growth stage, but they don't really work anymore. And often, or sometimes even the co-founders, right, they're not able or capable to go to the next level, which is something that is not really something people think about when they build their first company or when they don't build a company, they don't think, oh, they think, oh, this person should just be able to evolve, etc.

41:25Tell me about the Koengeko story and the most painful moment in the early years of scaling this, having this success and scaling this company, but realizing that there might be some people who don't really fit the big picture anymore. Yeah, yeah. It's one of the big challenges, you know. I'll start off with this, right? Toby Lutke, the CEO of Shopify, he has this quote, in a company that's growing 20, 40 % a year. every employee including himself needs to be growing at that same rate just to re-qualify for the role so that means that if the company is growing fast and a lot of crypto companies are growing fast the hard part is can you keep up with that pace of growth it's actually very hard even for the ceo and and the rest of the executive team as well um eventually the law of large numbers some people will struggle uh with it as well i think increasingly getting harder uh as a company gets more people because you have more coordination work as well so one of our challenges that we face a lot of our a few not a lot a few of our ics you know it's natural you want to promote your your best performance you know for the loyalty for the hard work for the good work that they've done into a people managerial position to lead a team right because that's like the next stage of growth for a lot of people.

42:50That was one of my biggest lessons that I learned last year. I thought that, I thought, maybe naively, that I thought everyone's a natural leader. Everyone can take into, I can step into leadership role, want to step into leadership role, want to step in and lead a team. Maybe I'm a natural leader. I thought it was a normal thing. In schools, you have all these clubs and societies and so on. I usually, at least for me, I take on a lot of these leadership positions back in school and I thought it was very normal. But what was normal for me may not be normal for a lot of people. And that's what I learned.

43:21Hard way. When I started thinking and reflecting back, I realized back in school, you know, I have friends like, hey, do you want to be the, I don't know, the president or the secretary or the treasurer of this club? And I started realizing a lot of them like shy away. Not me, not me. They start pointing fingers to all the other classmates and friends. And I realized that, okay, now that I look back at that behavior, okay, I can see why. Like, look, if you, if you take your best individual contributor and say, look, now you're the team leader for the team, you may not have the skills or may not have the willingness or the ability to lead the team and may struggle after that, right?

44:00So, I mean, I made a few of these mistakes. So you promoted people, you're not kind of really them agreeing or? No, I mean... I mean, they're probably saying, oh, yeah, I'm going to be the boss, so why would I not be the boss? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then a lot of people didn't realize. So what I realized after that was, the transition from an individual contributor to a people manager is a big transition. Previously, as an IC, you just lead, you are responsible for your own output. But as a team lead, and it depends, in a fast-growing company, first you are team lead of one person, then you get team lead of two, five, eight people.

44:33Suddenly, you're responsible for the output of all these people. How do you manage them? How do you coach them? How do you bring them to perform to the best level? that's something that can be challenging. And if your team lead is not good, then suddenly everybody in the team is not performing at the level that is expected as well. Suddenly becomes a challenge, for example. So you need to find ways to do it. So, and then I started realizing that what do we do to kind of

45:06have these people managers be better at what they do, right? So started reading out managerial books, for example, and we started assigning this book, Julie Jouaw's book, The Making of a Manager, to all these managers. Okay, you know, read and try to be a better manager, for example. What I realized as well is a lot of people are also very afraid of giving feedback, especially negative feedback to their team because it's uncomfortable. It's not easy. Who wants to be the bad guy to say, look, their work's not up to standard. Maybe I can accept this. I just do it myself. But then every time you accept a certain amount of work that is not up to a standard standard that means you're lowering a standard and you are end up going to pick up the slack because the work comes to you if not up to big they fix it because i'm not going to accept the work so the manager ends up burning out for example because they have to fix everybody's problems so so that that's one of the issues like how do you kind of keep the bar high my job as a founder to keep the bar high and then and then and then and then you know my team needs to the manager needs to find ways how to give feedback i think is also maybe an Asian thing as well.

46:11A lot of people are very afraid of rocking the boat, for example. But then something is a very much needed skill as a manager to be able to tell feedback. It's a lot of things that we're facing as well. How do we manage performance when you're a small company, 10 people, 20 people, you don't need a very formal performance management framework. But when you're 50, 80, 100 people, now we are, you need a big, I mean, I'm introducing things that are corporate bureaucratic in nature. How do I measure performance? Everybody's got a year-end performance review. What score? Even you have 100 people, there'll be a bell curve.

46:50It's unlikely that everybody's a high performer, right? It must be somebody that is not as strong as your colleagues, for example. How do we measure that? Putting all these changes are some of the challenges that I'm facing and I'm trying to... I'm learning on the job as well. I don't know if I'm going to screw things up. Hopefully not. And I guess that's kind of what makes the job fun, I suppose. What do you end up doing with these people that were amazing employees, doing their own thing, but became managers and didn't really fit the job? Yeah. So, I mean, some of them we had to... I mean, there's a couple of things, right?

47:29Some of them we had to just have a conversation and say, look, I mean, probably it's going to be a hard talk and then maybe they're better off in another role, maybe it's an IC or somewhere else, or maybe in a smaller company. I think in a company that's fast growing, then there's multiple challenges, right? First, you're being a people manager for the first time and then managing a team of, a small team to a larger team as well. So adding more complexity. And then the company is growing 20, 30, 40%, or maybe actually even 50, 60%. And then you have all these challenges at one go. It's not an easy job.

48:00I think eventually what we realized is, try to learn is um if we can hire someone with proven skills as a manager at least one part is because this guy has been a manager before he at least knows how to have this conversation we can test him but the first time is always very hard but doesn't mean that not all first time can't be a people manager they are good thing but when they do we want to try to provide them with the support and um yeah so some of them we just thought so some of them we just want to for those of them who are still we try to provide support we try to guide and coach and and hopefully uh get them up to speed as well how do you have a conversation with people who've been here for many years and you say hey it's not going to be you it's going to be this person who comes from outside you know take this role yeah it's a tough conversation but i just got to do it um i think one of the mistakes as well a lot of people make is i think um giving out titles as well i didn't realize it early it's very easy when you're a small company to say like you look there's only 10 of us why don't you be the head of whatever department right but then later on when you start growing a company you start needing to add more people look I mean he's taking up the head of X for example how do you downgrade yeah how do you tell this guy look I mean I need to layer someone else above you so that's hard yeah or like your title needs to change to something lower so that I can hire a head of X, for example.

49:28It's not an easy conversation. So, I mean, one of the things that we did in the last few years is we started doing all this leveling as we were level 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7 levels, you know, and started to try to define the job description and competency. But we still made mistakes. And I think the initial mistake was like we put people in the wrong level. They should be at a lower level. But once you put it up, then it's very hard to bring it down. You too high. Director of marketing, president of marketing I don't know what comes next but yeah go out of marketing and actually you ask any startup founder about this and I'm sure he will of course people don't think this person is probably doing that for the first time ever like they're figuring things out right absolutely you're the co-founder and CEO of CoinGecko explain CoinGecko to your mom yeah so in simple terms We are the Bloomberg of crypto and we provide data to retail and institutional users.

50:30So that's like a simple way to explain. And crypto has a lot of data, price, market cap, trading volume. And we are the place where people use our website to get information and data. Why is CoinGecko called CoinGecko? Yeah, that's a good name. Good question. good question I mean geckos are surprisingly found everywhere in the world they are in all continents except Antarctica and they're very diverse as well there's over 1500 geckos out there they're also very fast and very adaptable as well they can be found in all kinds of habitats and desert mountains rainforest and so on they can move vertical gecko can move 15 necks body speed per second so those are some of the good qualities of get-go's but also in early days you know TM and I I remember this call at 10pm or so at night we just had a call what should we call our company we know what we're going to build so we go on this name shape or some other domain go daddy you know trying to find domains and back then in 2014 early 2014 the trend for crypto companies to call it coinsomething.com you know companies like coindace.com coindesk.com cointelegraph.com very serious sounding names, right?

51:50And I thought like, why do we have to be a serious sounding crypto company? We can have a coinsomeanimals.com, right? So we thought like, it's quite a fun and then you can, you can have very accurate data or have a fun name and you can use this mascot to kind of brand this thing. So we found a few different, you know, animal names and then what were the available.coms and then coingecko.com was available and cointeddy.com was also available actually. Cointeddy. Yep. teddy bear sounds like fun until you think that actually you know it's probably not a very good idea it's like nobody wants to be in a bear market right a coin bull would have been nice but like I think it was that's cute yeah so gecko is kind of neutral and all these good properties like oh yeah why not let's just go with geckos and that's kind of how to leave it on how different crypto would feel today if we all checked coin bear or coin teddy every day I don't think anybody would check because like because like ah I hate you guys forever causing the bear market and all.

52:49Yeah. From day one, Kongreco made some value decisions that most crypto companies didn't. Tell me more about this Kongreco philosophy and values. Yeah. I think for us, we try to be community-centric. We try to be open. We try to be transparent. I think those are things that we believe that if we do the right things for a long period of time, And people realize that and will see us and they'll trust us with this work. So earning user trust, again, comes back to the quote that I shared earlier on Warren Buffett. It's not easy to earn the trust. It's not easy to build a reputation. You've got to do the right thing over an extended period of time to kind of earn the trust of people.

53:32And how do we earn the trust of our users, right? So we do what is right for the community in how we track our data. And to track the data, we have a very independent, a transparent way of methodology, for example. So we do what we can to kind of track and listen to our users and beat what they want. Where do these values come from? Where do these values come from? I mean, it must come from the co-founders, right? The co-founders are not open. They're not transparent. They are grifters at heart. You can't have these things, right? You must have this crypto ethos. So you come from the co-founders, TMNI.

54:13Yeah. Give me some concrete examples where you apply those values against potential huge short-term benefits for the company. Yeah. I think I would probably quote an example. There was a time where coin list things is always a very fraud case. There was a time where people tried to bribe out employees. They were like, hey, why don't you list my coin because I list my coin and be on CoinJetco and then they start doing whatever what they want to do, right? And there was this guy. So we, back then, our listing methods were not that robust yet. So we placed a lot of trust on the individual employees to approve or rejag the listings.

55:01We didn't really have QC checks and all, so back then as well. So what's a QC check? Quality control or checks on tests and so on. so we started hearing some community members complaining hey you know what why is this coin listed it seems a bit dodged and suspicious and like you know we're hearing the rumours that your people are taking money for example when was that how was this 2016 17 maybe not actually maybe not no it can't be 2016 17 because I wasn't doing so we had our employee in 2018 so maybe 2019, 20 maybe? 2019, 20 maybe? I can't remember the exact years. 2020 perhaps. So,

55:51eventually we collected our evidence and then we realized actually very high likelihood that this guy is actually taking money for listing coins. We confronted an employee, look, do you do this and this? And then he admitted and then he offered his resignation and left after that, thankfully. But then after that, we kind of put in place a no-gifting policy. So, you know, to make it very clear to everybody, look, you shouldn't take money from anybody. You shouldn't receive gratuities. And if you do, then please report them so that we know what you offered. And we've also been making our listing processes more robust.

56:27We started, over the years, we started implementing a listing form on CoinGecko to start tracking. And then if a coin is approved, we have internal node, why is it approved is it rejected why is it rejected we have a log of who added this coin previously we couldn't really tell as well we added who approved who edited all this information and then I started obviously using now we started using AI as well to kind of like track if there's trademark infringement or some low liquidity to kind of improve our efficiency and I think one of the big things as well we started doing quality control checks for example so the operations lead for example we'll start taking a sample of listings that are approved and rejected each month to make sure that look is this following our standard operating procedure um if it's yes then okay mark if it's not then like just to increase the level of quality for all these things so i think those are some of the operational improvements that the team has done over the years to make sure that that we are doing what we say we are doing as well how long do you think this last this lasted this employee could get away with that yeah i think for a few months actually yeah yeah but you know the market is you know because we are very community centric at heart we are very always available on telegram for example right so like you know it's not that hard for people to kind of drop me a message but they didn't drop me to my colleagues message and kind of investigate and kind of check on what went on for now but like I'm always available as well yeah I've heard some rumors I'm not saying they're true yep that some big exchanges head of listing job is probably one of the best jobs in the world.

58:15They take like 500k for pushing a listing through. It might be true, it might not be true. I view that from teams who try to list there, etc. It might be true, it might not be true. I don't know. How do you explain that this is happening? Actually, it's the same thing as well. A lot of people ask me, you know, a lot of people are charging and being listing agents for CoinGecko. You know, I always tell people, look, I mean, listings on CoinGecko is free. There is no fee that we charge. Of course, now we have a FastPass service. If you want urgent approval or urgent checking within 24 hours, you know, you have to pay for attention, for example.

58:58So there is a FastPass priority to jump the queue. Which is that? on CoinGecko it's$1 ,000 to kind of take a look at this urgently especially during periods of like bull market like look I really really need this information updated or added so then you cannot wait for the free option then there is a way to cut the queue this is$1 ,000 it's not$500 ,000 yes so coming back to this$500 ,000 or these exchanges I don't know if it's a good job or a stressful job to be the head of listing of an exchange, right? Because you have so much power, but also so much scrutiny. If you screw up, because everyone's going to try to offer you bribes.

59:44So that's the official exchange. They want you to pay the right way. But also there's all this under table money as well. And no matter what you do, your boss is always going to be suspicious. Are you honest? Or do you try to take money from someone else? And then you get scrutinized from your team and your internals internet and you could be framed as well but how i'm just thinking about human beings human psychology i mean we've seen all this fraud in the u.s right how do you prevent an entire department or even more than that from being bribed yeah it's like you know the boss might be have a lot of scrutiny or the boss might be in on the thing at some point and if they're all in one they're going to be all in 100 times, right?

1:00:33And then the whole thing is kind of rotten but at the same time this is how it works. It's hard. I think I'd like to call back I think a lot of these people in these departments are actually subjected to a lot of insider trading rules as well, right? So there's a few ways how you can kind of make profit from your position, right? One is you obviously take money for listing. That's the most obvious one. One is if you know the token is going to be listed on Binance for example or Coinbase for example you can use you can buy the tokens before the announcement is made as well how can you even check that on another if I go on another exchange or I go on a decentralized exchange or if I go on a hyperliquid that lists the things I don't know like how yeah so I think I think for the second part I would probably argue that this is where the insider trading rules laws come in place so like you might not be caught or may not be caught but it's still illegal and you should not do it because if you're caught doing it, you'll be fired immediately and you'll be sent to the regulators, for example.

1:01:36And I think OpenSea had an example, right? A couple of OpenSea employees was caught or maybe one or two for buying NFTs before it was featured on the homepage of OpenSea because the NFT price is going to pump. So, and I think I like to quote that. I think Netflix, for example, as well, they're a public traded company and the profit and the revenue number for the quarter cannot be shared until it's publicly announced, right? But they share these numbers with their employees. So technically, if they know the revenue, if it's a good quarter, the stock price is going to go up. But they care to the employer.

1:02:12Look, we trust you. And Netflix is a big company. They care to all their employees. We trust you. And if money works, trade it for money works. So at the end of the day, it's about finding the right people with their integrity and trust that they don't do the wrong things. and if you do the wrong thing then you take very strong action against these back actors but yeah it's always a very hard thing to do for these things not an easy problem to have no I think what exchanges do is they probably separate the job into multiple different people like someone probably does just the research of 10 tokens on which one to potentially list but they don't know which one's gonna list and when and then someone to potentially kind of list it and then someone to kind of pull the trigger on when the announcement goes out so that at least you kind of know central authority central person to kind of decide I don't know I'm not really involved in the exchange but my guess is that's one way to kind of reduce the risk so CoinGecko never accepted money for token listings no we just for the fast pass yeah integrity is expensive in the short term when did you realize that it pays in the long term

1:03:34I don't have an answer actually. It goes back to your upbringing actually. You just need to know like what's the right thing to do. When you're young, you know what is the right thing to do and what is the wrong thing to do. So it's when you grow older, that's when things start getting, the black and white start getting greyer. And then it start, I think the hard part is how do you not start taking one wrong step? Because once you move down, then it's very easy to say, okay, I do this. I make an exception for this one case. And then I make a second exception. Third exception. Before you know it, you dug yourself into a very deep hole and you can't dig yourself out.

1:04:11I think that's probably what happened with SBF and FTX, right? Probably like, let me touch the user fund this one time only to cover a hole. And I will cover back before you know it, to dig a deeper hole. And before you know it, it's a hole that's too big to be covered. So there's always a slippery slope with regards to these integrity things. Ask the following question to Brian Armstrong. And feel like it's relevant to you because you're also crypto OG, OG builder. What does it take to build one of the most known crypto companies during 12 years by doing the right thing and taking no shortcuts?

1:04:51It's got to play a long-term game. It's never easy, but... But over time, people will see, will realize who are the short-term people in the industry, who are the long-term people in the industry, who are the one-cycle companies, who are the multi-cycle companies. And then they will realize. And that's how you build trust over time. It's not an easy thing. In the short term, you look like you can't beat these guys. But over long time, over long term, if you do the right thing continuously, because trust compounds. eventually people realize and start supporting you. Absolutely. At some point it becomes your moat, right?

1:05:34Almost like the trust compounds and it becomes almost undestroyable. I mean, to vitally don't do shit, right? Art is always destroyable anytime. But, reputation is easily destroyed. Yeah. But again, it makes you stand out from all the other shit, which is just some shit. I mean, for us, for us, that's how, that's how B2i is, all these guys just came because of that. They're like, oh, you've been doing this for multiple years. You can better and better. You filter the signal from the noise. You don't do all these shit-coiner-ish things. We don't, like, nothing, right? And so, people always come, ah, can we pay you in token?

1:06:16Can we, you want to invest? No, no, no. We're a media company. We don't invest. We're the VC. Because I know there's going to be problems, right? There is many other media companies doing, like, the the VC game, the thing, but then you're pumping your own token and then it's like the beginning of the poem. We don't do that. We're probably going to miss out on some amazing investments, but we're boring. We just try to do the right thing. That's it. But then people recognize it. B2A is like, oh, I love what you're doing. It's amazing. Can we do something together? Mia was one of the big early believers.

1:06:48Just like, it's amazing. It's amazing. And I was like, okay, it's just, and I realized is just by doing the same thing and the right thing over and over again and compounding this trust, right? People like to say, like, what's the secret sauce and all, right? The reality is you've done it. It's a boring secret sauce. Yeah. It's doing the same thing day in, day out for how many months or how many years and, I mean, for you, over three years? For me, 12 years? 12 years is crazy. That's the grind. People don't want to do the same shit for 12 years. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Most people don't want, actually, it's everything the same.

1:07:26The health, the fitness, the business, the followers, all this shit is like, oh, you just do this. And you outlast everyone. Yeah, yeah. Because like anybody can start, but can they last? And life is a marathon, right? And how do you kind of build the processes in your life to kind of write habits to kind of sustain long haul, right? You know, everybody can sprint 100 meters or one kilometer, for example. but can someone run a marathon, a 40-kilometer marathon? And, you know, you've got to have great determination in you and your company and build this in the company to kind of go the long way.

1:08:03Absolutely. You survived multiple crypto winters. What's the playbook to survive all this cycle? The cycle playbook. Yeah. I think it's always, you know, never get liquidated. Absolutely. Yeah. it sounds easy right but I think everybody's out there chasing fast money and so on the more you're out you're out you always want to stay alive right be dead in your trading P &L or for your company you want to be a I mean in company building we have this thing or maybe it's more Chinese thing actually more Asian thing I don't really speak much Chinese but they say this being a cockroach in a in a company building a cockroach company right because cockroaches are uncillable unkillable right so how do you make your company unkillable for example you know if you have money you have to cash enough to pay your all your expenses your payroll technically you can go out as long as you're not out of money you're not out of business right but if you're overexpander you overextend yourself you only have like a six months runway and the moment the crypto market switch all your revenue disappears for example can you still survive that's when you know like and you need to make fast decisions as well.

1:09:22So how do you make your company survive the long haul? So you stay alive so that you can stay alive for the next bull market. Never get liquidated here. Very good one. What almost liquidated CoinGecko but made it stronger?

1:09:40I don't think we had much... Okay, now that you're asking what almost liquidated it. So I would say that I remember now back in 2016,

1:09:54saying Mike Hearn, a Bitcoin core developer, he went on, he published a blog post saying that Bitcoin is a failure. So many of you won't know who Mike Hearn is, but it's like the Anatoly of Solana or Vitalik Buterin. Maybe not at that stage, but one of the core developers behind Ethereum and Solana. And for a core developer to say like, look, this industry is over. It's like, why am I building in this space as well, right? And I think the industry back in 2016, nobody was growing. A lot of companies have pivoted out into fintech. Actually, very similar to what we're seeing right now. A lot of crypto devs, crypto companies pivoting to AI.

1:10:36Not wrong. It's the right thing to do, maybe. Go after what's the growth because there's not much growth in crypto in the last one year, for example, especially after 1010. And actually we asked, we, you know, we kind of put out a filler as well, a friend, like see if anybody's interested in taking up CoinGecko to buying up CoinGecko, for example.

1:11:00I guess everyone else was also in a bad situation. And we didn't manage to do any transaction back then. But actually that experience taught me a lot of things back then. So my friend put out some fillers and was like, who wants to buy CoinGecko, for example, but we did some mini data room. So 2016, you said, hey, Koengeko is up for sales. Yeah, yeah. So obviously to a few, a few internal folks as well. I mean, few external parties and all. So a couple of things that came out, I think, back then in 2016, we didn't really have any staff as well. We had the brand. We had TM and I working and we had a couple of contractors.

1:11:39But to sell a company at that stage is very different, right? You don't have a team. So a lot of things that we realized that look, if you want to sell a company, need to have a kick-ass management team, right? Because otherwise, there's always Bobby and TM. So how do we build a company that has so much good talent at top and also at every level? So build a strong management team. That's one of the things. So eventually, or the last after that, we started building up a team and building up management and growing up the team as well. We also learned that

1:12:14we were making money only for advertising back then and a lot of people were not really interested in advertising look at it, it's like, eh it's that recurring, will the money still be here next year but one of the things that we learned over the years is how do we build a revenue line that is recurring so that's kind of how we grow our API business that's one of the main things that we have right now one of the main revenue drivers, API business, powering a lot of crypto developers. And then also like, how do we diversify our revenue, revenue stream as well. So a couple of things that we learned in the early days has like kind of helped guide our decision over the years.

1:12:55So I guess, blessing in disguise again, like I wouldn't be here solving this challenge if things turned out differently back then, but I guess life happens for a reason. and but it was very tough in 2016 a lot of people left and a lot of companies went bankrupt or just shut down in general thankfully we survived that year and now the market and the industry is a lot bigger and you can survive and grow together as well what broke that you didn't expect would break what broke what was hard that you didn't expect would be so hard?

1:13:46I think what is hard in crypto is the sheer volatility of this industry. So

1:14:01in a lot of companies, you can do annual forecasting and you can kind of plan what your next year's cost or next year's revenue is going to be. But in crypto, if it's a bull year, then like whatever target that you set, just 2x or 3x that for the year. But then you don't have the sufficient resources. Your team's going to cry. Like, look, there's so much work that needs to be done. How do I get all this work done? But then like, then you're pressed to the challenge. How do you not over hire during the bull years? but then they have all this work that needs to be done now because it still takes like three to four months to find a good talent and then during the bull years everybody's hiring everybody's paying top dollars to everybody all the talents going around

1:14:50how do you retain your people during the bull years how do you because there's so much work as well how do you plan for the headcount and resourcing but what's also worrying is how do you not over hire during the bull years and then you'll be forced to cut just six months later or one year later. Then during the bullies, how do you forecast for a bad year? Like, just take six, four months ago, for example, October, November, December last year. How do you forecast what the, how would I know what 2026 is going to be? Would it be a good year? Would it be a bad year? If it's a good year, how do I forecast my revenue?

1:15:25How do I forecast my cost? How do I know how many people I should hire this year such that I don't run out of money? or how do I know how many people I should not hire so that we still have enough work. So that's always the very hard thing. I don't have an answer. We're trying our best. But I think that's more the hardest thing in crypto, trying to predict. I mean, of course, we can use the four-year cycle as a guideline. In which case, this year is probably a bad year. But then people are saying now it's moving to a two-year cycle or three-year cycle because the institutions are here. Or some people are saying it's super cycle so there's never a down year.

1:16:00Who knows, right? even from month to month as well, like, there's so much volatility as well. Is this not getting easier or a bit less hard? I don't think it'll get easier. It's just as hard as what it was. Yeah. I think the stakes get larger when you have a larger hit count. So we have 100 people, you know, we want to expand. We decided we're going to expand 30 people this year. We're going to have 120, 130 by the end of the year.

1:16:31the stakes are higher, right? Compared to when we were 10, 15, maybe 20 people going to 30 people, for example. Now we have a lot more mouths to feed. We have to make sure that we're not running out of cash. We have the sufficient financial power to kind of pay. But I think if you are like a bigger, I mean, if you have like 1 ,000, 2 ,000 or 10 ,000 employees, like more of those bigger exchanges and so on, then like, what do you do as well? And I think one of the things that, you know, saying that, you know, when the market shifts, then you've got to, if you have to cut do it early do it once do it deep it's always very hard I think what's worse is to always cut multiple times because morale is bad like oh what's gonna happen will the next layoff happen a few months later four months later and I think you see some companies I think Coinbase did it well they did it once really early in the in the in the previous year cut deep and they was it once I think some of the companies, they did multiple rounds of layoffs, and I think employees just got really traumatized.

1:17:34Yeah, for sure.

1:17:39We're recording this conversation from KL, Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. You built it here. You built the company here. You never left. You never moved to Silicon Valley. Why stay in Malaysia instead of relocating? Yep. How can you build? had this conversation with Wiki actually from virtuals. How do you build a global company from Malaysia or even Southeast Asia? Yep. Yeah. I mean, I'd be lying if I didn't say I want to move to Silicon Valley. I wanted to back in 2016, no, 2014 and so on when I started CoinGecko. There was only one playbook which was move to Valley, move to the Valley, move to San Francisco go and build a company there.

1:18:27If you're not there, you're not in tech. But I didn't really have the opportunity. I have a bond that I had to serve. So the question is like, how do we do it? Can we build it out of KL?

1:18:44I mean, it's a website after all, right? So we tried. Can we market it as a global company? Turns out we could, right? Just use back then Reddit, the CoinTalk forum X and so on and just market it eventually people know about it but I think today like this playbook is it's clear now we don't need to be in the valley in fact you probably disadvantages to be in the valley especially in crypto at some point maybe not so these days at one point when the US was very anti-crypto it was disadvantageous to be in the US now maybe it's advantageous to be in the US again but like I mean the US is Silicon Valley is a wonderful place because it has so much money that you can raise as an entrepreneur.

1:19:29We never raised any money. Probably one of the reasons as well we didn't need to kind of talk to a lot of VCs. We chose not to raise money from VCs. Play a different game. Why?

1:19:42In the early days we spoke to VCs and all. Nobody really understood what crypto is. Especially VCs around here. Then we thought like okay these guys don't know what we're talking about. and then we actually went to the US as well we went to we had a government program from Malaysia where they sent us to Stanford people out there with entrepreneurs we spoke to some Stanford folks and some people from the Valley and like it's what we do they dismiss us and look at us like what is this crypto thing making money for advertising it's not going to work out it's like okay fine if the Silicon Valley guys themselves don't really see maybe obviously there are obviously BCs in the space in the valley that kind of understood it, but it wasn't very obvious.

1:20:27You know, people like BootsVC, they had a very good reputation for supporting crypto founders in the early days. But we didn't really raise. We kind of kept things lean and kind of bootstrap. It was kind of fun to run as an experiment to see how far can we bring it without raising money. And I think not having money, not having the financial capabilities is a creative constraint. Absolutely. it's a constraint that we put on ourselves because we didn't have all this money from VCs the good thing is we didn't have VCs forcing us to spend money to grow at all costs but the other thing is we have no cash so how do we promote ourselves how do we market ourselves how do we tell the world about CoinGecko without all this money to splash around I can't go around conferences sponsoring parties and so on I have to find ways cheap ways creative ways to get our name out there and that actually kind of provided a lot of discipline and rigor to our marketing team to, back then it wasn't really a marketing team, marketing strategy to kind of grow and find ways to get cheap ways to grow.

1:21:34I mean, SEO was one big way for us to grow at a very cheap cost. But there's many other ways to kind of bootstrap our ways. But yeah, it forces you to be creative without we see money. You said before you invested in Pudgy Penguins and probably invest in other businesses and you talk to entrepreneurs. What do you recommend then? in terms of raising money? Would you do the same again? Or would you raise money and try to grow faster? Yeah, so it really depends. Come back to the question on the co-founder one, right? You both need to want the same thing and we both were okay growing at a slower pace.

1:22:13So raise money if you want to grow fast. But if you're okay with a slower pace of growth, then you don't necessarily need to raise money. and you can grow at your own pace and control your destiny. This, I mean, a good thing about not raising any money from VCs is that we never really need to write any investor updates. I mean, I don't face any pressures from VCs to, hey, my fund's ending the 12-year, 10-year cycle. I need to pay back my LPs. Can you please liquidate the company because I need to pay my LPs back? I never get any external pressure from that front. But yeah, I mean, raise money if you need to grow fast, if you need to validate an ideal.

1:22:59But I would say raise enough plus a little bit more, just enough to kind of de-risk a certain level and bring it to the next level. Raising too much money too early is not good because then you end up having too much money and not discipline. It's 10 ,000 ways how you want to splurge your money and you end up overhiring or doing all kinds of funny things. Let's say you sell Koengeko. We'll talk about that later, but let's say you sell to Konegeko and you start a new company. Yep. Would you go out there and raise some money? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not. It depends. I don't know, actually. There's pros and cons.

1:23:37I mean, raising money helps you. There's a certain strategy, right? Because we didn't raise money, we couldn't take a lot of risk in how we operate as well. So we had to run the company in a very conservative manner. If you want to do a risky business, then I think it's probably better to raise money because you're not betting 100 % of your money or your time onto it. Around 100 % of your money onto a project. So maybe if I do take on a moonshot project, maybe I take money, but also VCs also may open up doors, for example. They may have their partners, their connections that they can help you on your journey as well.

1:24:22so it's not all against VCs. It really depends on a company by company basis and I think for CoinGecko for the amount of for the kind of work that we do and the kind of risk that we take I think we are okay without funding and then we had we had revenue sources that allowed us to to kind of generate the cash flow needed to kind of keep the company running but if we couldn't generate the cash flow needed then we needed cash from the VCs to kind of fund operations that's a different story as well so everything's different I would say. Yeah. CoinMarketGap has pretty much always been number two behind CoinMarketGap.

1:24:59Is this frustrating or motivating for a builder? For us, we are

1:25:11trying to do a good job for the community. And I mean, the numbers don't lie. It's number two. We try to bid and we do what we can to beat it.

1:25:26Is it frustrating? Maybe. But that's life. But it's also a source of motivation to work hard because the job is not done. Yeah. When is the job done? I think the job is... I mean, obviously, we can beat CMC, but it doesn't really matter as well because we are playing the game of trust, right? We are trying to do what is right for the community. And as long as they're doing what we're doing right to be the place for the crypto community to get the data that they need, then we've done our part for this industry. And I think for a large part, I mean, looking back 12 years, what have you imagined?

1:26:06Like being at this position, having such an impact in the crypto industry. Now, what I wanted to do was just like not watch this industry grow and without me playing a part. And I think looking back, I'm very proud to say that I played a role in this industry. I helped shape it in a direction that I think is the right way. And would I have done this without my co-founder, without my team? And it's an interesting journey because it's always more fun to build and shape this industry instead of just watching it go by. You said number one is not the most important because we're playing the trust game.

1:26:48does that mean that CoinMarketCap the number one is not playing the trust game or is playing another game? I mean they're owned by Binance so at the moment I would say that their main goal is to be a user acquisition player for Binance and what does that mean for someone who is like me? potentially hesitating between should I use CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko as a user? What do I need to understand in terms of the game that both companies are playing and how it impacts me as a user? We do what we think is the right thing for the community. And we try to add the right kind of data for the user as well.

1:27:42So I think a lot of users, they stumble upon CoinMarketCap from SEO. and then we also have a strong SEO presence but they have slightly better SEO presence than us and then eventually yes they spend enough time in crypto they grow they realize that actually CoinGecko has that slight edge in terms of data accuracy we have more coins on CoinGecko but increasingly we also started building Gecko Terminal as well and we have a lot more coins they order on-chain tokens on all the different DEXs on the different chains as well. And then a lot of developers, they use our API. They realize that we have far better reliability and accuracy and uptime.

1:28:28And the small minor things like the metadata, how we curate the listings, how we check the updates information. For normal casual users, you might not realize it, but for the professionals in the space, they realize it and can see the difference in CoinGecko, in the work that we do. Where do you think CoinMarketingUp is better like CoinGecko? Oh, they're definitely better than us at SEO. That's for sure, right? So they started 11 months before us and they got a lot of media mentions about them and generally media being mentioned in media causes you to get all these backlinks which help you with your SEO position and then the next time you're generally going to write an article they search for the token and they find CoinMarketCap and they start writing it so they kind of build a virtuous cycle over there we're trying to beat the SEO game but it's not the easiest thing as well trying to dislodge an incumbent so that's something that they are very strong at in terms of SEO.

1:29:38So they don't put in any effort in terms of trying to work with journalists and so on, but they get all these backlinks. But you try to do it, but I think doing it at scale is a different challenge altogether. So yeah, that's one thing that they have very strong at incumbency. Yeah. You tried a lot of things for the last 12 years. Many things worked out. Probably even more things didn't work out. And there were some big bets that you took. Let's talk about one that didn't work out. You acquired a company called Zash. But it didn't work out as expected. Why? Yeah. So I think we were bullish on NFTs.

1:30:26So Zash is an NFT, on-chain NFT data aggregator. So we have an NFT website on, NFT page on CoinGecko. but it's mostly focused on the NFT floor prices. So we track the prices on OpenSea, Blur, and so on, Magic Eden, and so on. We thought that during the NFT bull market, there were a lot of NFT indexing company. And we thought that NFT continues growing. We should probably play a role and start tracking all this metadata on NFTs as well, all the images, all the rarities and so on for NFTs. So Zash promised that they have, so Zash offered this opportunity for us. So at the end, it boils down to three things, right?

1:31:19And whenever you look at opportunity, it was always, do you buy, do you build, or do you partner with someone? So for example, this is a new capability, NFT indexing, data indexing. do we build this ourselves internally? Do we buy a company that already have this capability? Or do we partner with somebody and not make this a core capability of CoinGecko? So there's this question that we ask ourselves. We didn't go around hunting to buy a company, but one day a broker, a banker called me up and said, look, there's a company Zesh that could be available. Would you like to take a look? So we took a look, did some DD.

1:31:59It was a very small team, two founders and a couple of contractors.

1:32:06We purchased a company, not very large sum, can't say the amount, but we tried to build it, tried to take over the code and tried to make this. We see how we can make this as a feature on CoinGecko and also to, importantly, to kind of offer as an API for our API users. But after six months of, six plus months of kind of make this work, we decided to shut it down. and we didn't proceed with it. So the main reason actually what we realized was as we dug deeper into NFT data, we realized that the NFT data is extremely complex. So the way the on-chain indexing data is done for Punks or BAYC or Pajit Penguins just on the same chain is very different from each other.

1:32:55And also then when you start looking at different chains, Solana, Bitcoin Ordinus and so on, then it becomes a whole level of complexity. But that's fine, right? That's a technical challenge that can be solved. There's a lot of HKs that require us to really engineer things as well. But I think the bigger problem for us was we didn't really have a team in place to take over from the previous founders and team from Zest. So the previous founders stayed on for three months as a grid in your contract. And then they had a couple of contractors that can take over as well. But we needed a lead internally to kind of supervise the development and the vision for this NFT.

1:33:29And we don't really have a lead identified at that point in time. And we have a junior engineer working on NFT, but just one junior engineer working on the NFT floor price. And for him to kind of take over is just a bit too much work. So that means we were pulling out resources from our even senior management team to kind of look into this. And this was 2024 during the bull market. And we were short of resources. so we had to decide do we kind of pour more resources into Zesh to kind of make this work or focus on the other core parts of our business which were also requiring a lot of attention because during the bull market everything just sort of starts breaking and a lot of demand from customers to improve this and that and so on we decided that and we couldn't find the right talent to kind of lead this development as well so we decided that look we're going to cut our losses and shut it down we're going to come back to NFT at some point again in the future also like the other parts were back then meme coins and so were more booming at a much faster rate compared to NFTs unfortunately NFTs is still on a down market like from that time 2024 until now 2026 it's just been Havis Room really had a renaissance again since the 21 or 22 bull cycle and actually we start seeing in fact like even like Nifty Gateway Gemini announced Nifty Gateway shut down this year even OpenSea is like focusing more on token trading these days instead of just NFTs kind of have no choice because the NFT market is not picking up and we thought that yeah, it's just unfortunate but that's just life.

1:35:10The NFT is it's a very fragmented market and we haven't it's growing at a much faster rate as we are at that point in time there were much other standards coming up so it becomes a lot more effort needs to be put into kind of invest to really track this well.

1:35:30What do you think are some of the red flags that founders miss in acquisitions? Yeah.

1:35:43I think during the DD process, the due diligence process, like we were, and the broker was kind of moving us along, I guess, and we wanted more time to kind of due diligence, the code base and so on but I guess we move along and we thought that it will be fine but I guess after that then we realized that there's a lot more work that needs to be done to really fix the HK so it looks good on the surface until you start digging after the acquisition and so on we didn't really manage to discover that during the due diligence process

1:36:22I think also one more thing the big mistake that we made was um i think the founders wanted to trust i think they wanted to do something else so they were looking to sell us the code base of the of the of the company and they were willing to do a three months transition three months is a very short time to kind of transition the knowledge and uh that was our mistake we agreed to that terms and we should have just walked away if we if we didn't want to because i mean three months is short i I think it's okay as well if we have, I think it's still tough, but it would be helpful if we have an internal lead.

1:36:59So I think because our team was already operating at 100 % across all our product development swim lanes, we didn't have any more spare resources that we can to allocate to this. I mean, we had our CTO looking into it, but he was really stressed looking into all this work and all because no one else, who else would have done it if it's not him, right? So my TM and my CTO was looking into it. I think to do acquisition right as well you need to have an integration team that is ready to kind of plug in and try to integrate whatever is acquired obviously I'm not I don't really have much experience I've only done one not so good one but I guess if we were to do it again then probably finding the having the core team stay on having our team internally there be ready to integrate I think those will be careful things to kind of not repeat the same mistake.

1:37:55Talking about acquisition, let's address the elephant in the room. There was a recent speculation about CoinGecko being potentially sold for$500 million. What can you or what do you want to tell us about that? Yeah, I mean, CoinGecko is a profitable, independent, bootstrap growing company.

1:38:20we regularly evaluate our strategic options. You know, in the early days, do we raise? Do we not raise? And I constantly get calls from VCs. Hey, you should raise money. You should raise money. Just we regularly have these conversations. Now the conversation may be slightly different. So, I mean, the industry is changing. We are looking to see what's available, what's out there in the market. to kind of see our options and then see what's best to position CoinGecko to make it better and stronger and to provide the best products and services for our users and customers in the years to come. We don't comment on specific cases like this, but I mean, we just regularly evaluate options.

1:39:09What's the right moment to sell, if ever? It's never a right moment to sell. No. Timing is to some extent luck as well. Can't really time the market. Everybody says it's very easy, right? Buy low, sell high. Only life is that easy, right? So, I mean, there's no right timing. At the end of the day, it depends on both co-founders or the founders of the founding team and what's right. And then at the end of the day, companies get bought, not sold as well. There's no buyer, then there's no transaction. Yeah. when people write the history of crypto infrastructure what do you hope Coindeco represents yeah Coindeco is there doing the right thing for the crypto community providing tracking all the the growth of the meme coins and all the meme coins out there in the market yeah thank you so much Bobby for doing this thank you thank you for coming on after two and a half years and thank you for what you're doing, showing people that you can do the right thing, take more time and that doing the right thing is actually the right thing.

1:40:23I think it's an amazing example for all these builders that think or that might have the wrong incentives and that also might have the wrong examples. Right? So the right way is the right way and you guys have been showing that and that's amazing to see that there is good people who are doing the right thing in this industry. It exists. And that's why they are featured on this podcast. That's what we do here. Thanks for having me. It's really a good conversation. As you probably know by now, I host some of the biggest names in Bitcoin and crypto on my podcast. But a lot of the best stuff never makes it on air.

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