E72: Monad CEO: How a Quant Trader Built one of the Largest Crypto Startups in the World

32:44the value prop is a very simple one. like the story is a very simple one like evm is still not very performant right now and everyone wants performance everyone wants more transactions everyone wants cheaper cost per transaction like i'm reminded of this commercial that i saw when i was a kid that i really liked um which i think was a commercial for like um like broadband internet or something and as these two turtles called the slow skis and they were talking about how they like switched to broadband and they were really unhappy because now the internet was too fast and so it's like the you know crotchety old turtle grandma talking to her husband saying like oh this internet is not for me like i don't like it it's too fast literally no one is like that like everyone wants more performance so it's like a simple thesis and then that combined with the fact that where we are right now is just so inefficient compared to what we know computers are capable of means that fixing that problem is definitely something that people easily understand is useful.

34:00So that's the tech. But then I guess to your point about how do people know about it, I think the second factor is the community. Monad's community is incredibly strong. we have um yeah just a number of incredible community members who are really creative really fun um who make the community a really enjoyable place to hang out um it's just fun to be a monad community member there's a lot of great art a lot of amazing memes um and i think that yeah my other reflection is just that um our team is you know pretty in touch with um like the spirit of crypto twitter uh and and just like not taking us and by that i really just mean like not taking ourselves too seriously like being willing to make the let the company account like post a bunch of like initially initially purple pepes and then later as like the lore expanded and the Milondack, the Purple Hedgehog, and like a bunch of other just stuff started to arise, just like leaning into that.

35:10But it was all just community driven. And so, yeah, the contribution of the community members have really helped spread the message far beyond what, you know, just like, you know, our team could spread by itself. How do you bootstrap a crypto community? Let's say you're building the best tech, right? which is one of your goals but still as we said before is not enough and a lot of potentially amazing projects are suffering from that how do you how do you bootstrap community where do you even start yeah i have a lot of thoughts on this um i think number one would be it's never too early to start building your community um we started i think in like november 2022 uh feels like a long time ago now the best moment to start a community in crypto yeah right yeah literally i think we opened the discord on november 1st and then on november 7th um the ftx collapse happened so yeah everything's path dependent i actually feel like the the fact that there's a bear market helped because you know it's just like people who were really still like very true to crypto like cared a lot about crypto and wanted a place to spend time with other like-minded people um ended up finding the monad community and finding it to be a a great home um and contributed a lot to help make it make it a really fun place that's like more possible in the bear market than in the bull market but you know like i said there's still never a better time than now to just to start it but that's also that was a little bit controversial only in the sense that you know i also you know feel bad about like like starting to quote-unquote market before the product is live like the the instinct as an engineer is to be like okay well you know we should build the damn thing first and then we should go like tell people about it and if we start telling people about it before it's done then that's putting the carpet for the horse so there's that that's a very engineer mindset right if you think about pure entrepreneurship what is advising entrepreneurship is the exact opposite it's hey like go sell something and then figure out later i mean obviously it's blockchain so it's a it's a bit more complicated let's just figure this out in a day, right?

37:44But go sell something and then create a momentum and then build something and sell your product from that. So you actually follow the I would say like advised startup process. Right. And I would add also that in crypto marketing is really just community building or at least effective marketing is It's really just community building. There's a lot of ineffective marketing that happens as well. But I think the only path to successful marketing and crypto is community building. And the good thing about community building is it's actually fairly flexible, fairly resilient. You're not, well, I mean, you are talking about your vision.

38:38You're talking about why it matters. or sharing details about what is being built, but it doesn't have to be completely done. People understand that. And, you know, the crypto community in general is like kind of amazing in that there's tons of people who care about things before they're perfect, before they're live, like compared to in traditional tech where you put out a announcement about like a new product release on Twitter and it gets like two likes and the two likes are from like you know your mom and your your dog like nobody in traditional tech there there's very few products in traditional tech where they get the level of community support maybe like apple is like the only example tesla and apple but you know it's just so amazing that we have such a strong community of people that are passionate about decentralized tech and memes and fun and, yeah, just like all the new stuff that's coming out.

39:45So why wouldn't you try to tap into that and use that as a way to energize and push the project forward? Absolutely. And another aspect we haven't talked about is basically the token launch, right? in crypto, it's really often used, I mean, as one of the biggest marketing, right? Kind of, it could be seen, I mean, obviously the founder is probably not going to think like that. But for a lot of the people, token launch is kind of like the ultimate goal. And so we should get excited around that. But again, you guys managed to build this super strong community super far away from this token launch, which is pretty incredible.

40:32how did you do that how do you get because crypto is an extremely opportunistic industry we have to manage that it means people are there for something else how do you do that right I mean I think it's you know with anything there's a variety of people that are interested in the project and definitely some of some of them in any project monad included are probably more financially motivated and you know we see that in our community because there are you know tons of people who are now you know posting on twitter like how how do i farm monad and then getting frustrated when they find out that there's no there's no way to farm it like there's no no like thing you can automate to just send a bunch of messages or to send a bunch of transactions or whatever in order to farm points for Mono.

41:36That doesn't exist. So I think, yeah, in any project, there's going to be some people that are very financially motivated. And there may be some people who are maybe, it could even be that they initially start out financially motivated, But then, you know, over time realized that there's there's more to it in in this case than than just people farming for an airdrop. There's also a lot of fun, like a lot of people that are making friends with strangers on the Internet, just, you know, from having shared experiences, shared lore. um one other thought i have is like you know when when you meet your best friend your best friend is not you know it's like not like you ran an optimization algorithm and you you know optimized from all the kids in the playground and picked out the one who had the best like best friend qualities that's not how it works like it it's literally just like the first kid that you met on the playground and then you end up you know like developing a friendship and developing all this shared these shared experiences shared lore you grow together um so i think that a really good community is like that as well where you know maybe like people didn't know each other initially it didn't maybe they even like checked out monad initially because they just heard it was like uh you know a promising project but then over time like you know some people end up just sticking around because of the friendships that they made and all the fun that they had and then that can become infectious where other people see that and they want they want to be a part of that too because um you know crypto can be like it's you know connects us but it can also be very lonely like starting out um there's a lot of small accounts out there that you know want to like become part of something bigger absolutely ladies and gentlemen as you probably know we are teaming up with astar network on this show ASTAR Network is a decentralized blockchain platform that aims to bring billions of people into Web3.

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44:29So the Monad community is extremely strong. What's your message today to all the people who believe in you and who believed in you already before you were a very promising project? um i'm just incredibly grateful for the trust and the support um every day i laugh so much from all of the incredible memes and um all of the all the jokes all of the creativity um i know it sounds like you know it sounds like i'm making this up because it's like hard in this context where we're just talking to each other to like go and if i could show you all of the um just incredible like artwork and memes and fun but i think for any listener like they can literally just check out like monad discord or just search for monad on twitter and you'll you'll just see like this overwhelming amount of purple stuff um i can see the smile on your face anyway we talk about that so yeah there's just mean something there's an incredible amount of creativity there's like people are making like um comics um a community member hosted a karaoke night um the last weekend and like 300 people tuned in and a lot of people were basically like lining up to sing a song uh for everyone else um the poker games there's a limit of 300 people because that's what i think poker now caps out at um and they've been like at you know over subscribed for the past like i don't know four or five months um voice chat during the poker someone and then uh we have a dj like a community member who's dj who plays a set every week during the poker game um there's just an incredible amount of different things going on is this mostly in new york um no it's it's completely decentralized um we have yeah like tons of of great contributors from all around the world.

46:35We've seen Athena doing a brilliant token launch lately. We have Guy tomorrow on the podcast. What are the few key things you're going to focus on to make sure your token launch lives up to its expectation? I think I would expand your question to just say the mainnet launch. How do we make sure that when Monad's mainnet goes live that the high expectations that exist for the Monad mainnet, given just the incredible community support, all the excitement, all the money we've raised, et cetera. How do we exceed that? I think about that every day now. I'm confident that we can do it. I think when it came to community building, we did not just follow the playbook of community building because I think the playbook is like, you know, hire some moderators to run the discord, maybe outsource, like hire an agency to like manage some of the socials.

47:44Like you can't just follow the playbook. You have to want to create a really quality product and then do whatever it takes to make that happen. In the context of community, we said on day one, the community is the product. That was the mantra. Of course, we're also building the product product, which is like the blockchain. But when it's December 2022 and the main net is still quite far away, like people who are focused on community building in Monad need to think of the community as the product and and have a very clear mindset that the job is to make that product as good as possible. Like make that product addictive, make that product something people enjoy consuming.

48:35So, you know, you can't do that by like outsourcing to a third party agency and, you know, like kind of like delegating all of the decision making, all everything to, it's not going to be like a world-class product. It's going to be an average product if you do that. so you know just not following the playbook but just using common sense trying to apply that to the launch as well i think that's just like that's my biggest thing is i don't want the monad mainnet to just be like an average mainnet launch i know things that are table stakes like table stakes is having you know a great decks having a lending protocol having some nfts and nft marketplace oracles some tvl some liquidity incentives like that's all that's what you would you would certainly expect monad to have that on mainnet so we will of course have that but you got to go much beyond that there has to be there have to be experiences like have to be apps basically that are completely new, like new experiences for users that drive them to go on day one, try it out, be like, wow, that's pretty cool.

49:52That's very interesting. You're saying we don't want to follow the playbook. We want to think logically what do we need, right? It's not like, hey, what works to get this valuation or this thing? It's more like what actually needs to be done. Do you have some examples of, because the playbook is what you said, right? We need the DEX. We need equity. We need NFT. Yeah. And just to be clear, I'm not saying we don't need that. Like we do need that. And it's important, but we can't be satisfied with just that. What's something that, I mean, I don't know if you can or want to share, but an example of something out of the box, but that makes a lot of sense to you when you're just thinking, why do all the other not have that when they launch?

50:39that you guys are going to focus on and that probably people will think, man, why do the other don't have that? I'll tell you a couple of things.

50:56But maybe first, you know, an example is I think Frontech was a very good example of a unique app that drove a lot of success for base. you know we could debate about like sustainability of the brentech key prices and so on although back on the upswing again i think but that was a completely unique idea that didn't really exist anywhere else and after the fact then of course there were like copycats on every other blockchain but it's like people still remember the original one they associate novel experiences with base and that then drives more innovation in that ecosystem. So, well, one thing is like, probably there'll be like a social app of some sort, whether that's very Frontech-like or quite different.

51:55That's clearly like one of the other pieces of the puzzle. But what I'm saying is more like, I want to work with ambitious builders who have those unique out-of-the-box ideas. They don't have to make sense. I think if I told you about Frontech ahead of time, you might have been like, well, why will anyone buy those keys? Or 10 % fees are too high. People won't end up wanting to trade those. There's a million ways to be pessimistic about any idea. We can't know ahead of time which ones will be successful, but we have to try. And so, yeah, I'm just excited about people that are building things that are ambitious and are unique or not, you know, something that we've seen before.

52:44Jordi Alexander told me that one of your key differentiators as a person, you know, between you and other crypto founders is that you're just boringly consistent in the last two years. And it feels like, from what you're telling me, right, It's just, hey, let's not follow the playbook. Hey, let's just think critically and just think logically and just do the same day in and day out, right? Do you want to elaborate on the importance of just being boringly consistent, both as a builder but also in life in general?

53:24I don't, yeah, I definitely can't claim a monopoly on consistency. I think that I've learned a lot over the past couple of years about building startup, about building community. I don't think we know everything right now by any means. We're still learning a ton. Now I sound like Chamath talking about being in the arena or whatever. But yeah, I guess what I would say is uh we yeah we're we're all very privileged to be in an industry that's like generally well capitalized and you know has so much so many supporters like in the attention economy the fact that crypto gets so much attention is actually um something that's very unique so that that means we should make the most of it and i guess consistency means like just like keeping that in mind every day and um therefore being i guess a little bit grounded about the privilege that we have to be building in this space at this time what is it that they say like born too early to born too late to explore the continent or to explore the world and too early to explore the stars but born just in time to explore decentralized applications um so yeah i don't know i guess i'm just saying like yeah there's we have privilege and then that means we should take advantage of it every day and just chip away at um you know toward getting toward our goal another thing i think about is like when we started community building for the first like six months or so it wasn't like a massive massive success like it was it was solid like we had a good community um over we're slowly like attracting more and more like creative high signal um you know really special people but it wasn't like an instant like massive success it wasn't the link marines on day one so i think like yeah just just knowing that you're going in the right direction and then being able to be positive about the progress that you see and then knowing that sometimes the speed of like acknowledgement the sorry the amount of acknowledgement that your project is getting could accelerate very quickly due to things that are out of your control because everything's so path dependent.

56:15As long as you're going in the right direction and just keep chipping away every day. That's the only thing you can do. What's one of your most important values? Humility. I think that, you know, in the last cycle, um it felt like almost everyone who was you know got over their skis in terms of hubris ended up having a fall um whether that's you know suzu or sbf or um alex machinski or um yeah i mean it's just did i forget oh do kwan sorry um uh richard hart maybe um yeah anyway it's just like yeah i think that's that's the biggest danger is like you know you become high on your own supply um people in crypto are very smart um i do i do really sincerely believe that like they're not stupid um and so if you start puffing out your chest and like projecting too much um it's hard because like you know and in marketing like there there is this notion of like you know wanting to show a strong exterior or whatever it is but you know people go way beyond that and it seems like it always ends very poorly but i think a big part of that is that because people in crypto are very smart.

57:59They are very judgmental as well. And so, you know, if you make a big claim, you better be able to back it up. Otherwise, it's really going to hurt you. Yeah, people will find out very quickly, right? Because of both, I mean, the blockchain, right? And also the speed at which information moves on Twitter. I've heard that you are extremely, extremely detail-oriented. every detail counts almost too much how do you scale yourself if you're so detail-oriented um well i think as a you know i've said this a couple times but like in trading you have to you have to be able to zoom out and you know have perspective and not um reflect too much on bad outcomes if you thought that the decision process for making those decisions was the right one um and it's yeah i guess that well all that is just to say like well you know being detail-oriented is quite important because quality matters setting a very high standard of excellence for the whole team is crucial um i think like not you know the other aspect of detail-orientedness could extend to like just becoming overly obsessed with the past um overly obsessed with like you know mistakes that we made in the past and just knowing to like not not dwell too much on that and and to zoom out and think about the bigger picture i think is that's how i would i would say there's a balance between detail-orientedness and scalability.

59:50There is a part in this podcast where I ask every founder what their favorite two or three projects and teams are in the space and why. If you have to think about some of the teams that you think are building something amazing out there, who are they? And why do you think they're doing something that good?

1:00:14i mean there's a lot of teams that i'm i'm a big fan of um i like the oh baby games team uh because i think they really exemplify so just to you know recap it's like their first game is uh um it's a mario card it's a carding game with characters that are actually drawn from crypto lore. I think they really exemplify the idea of building a great gaming experience and also of building community and just like tapping into that. Just like the amount of fun that you have from having inside jokes with your friends and doing that in a scalable way. um they have really high attention to detail everything that comes out of their team is really high quality as well um i think that's essential to to mass or to really to any like amount of scale and success you need that high level of attention to detail um i'm a big fan of the solana team i think that i know i've said this before already on this podcast but building everything from scratch, kind of like sticking true to their principles, not taking shortcuts, generally speaking.

1:01:41That's, you know, resulted in a product that's quite good, that's very differentiated, and has staying power. I think in the depths of the bear market, the most recent bear market when Solano was at like$8, um they're still an incredibly strong vibrant builder community um and that you know was one of the reasons why now solana's had a huge resurgence but i guess if you looked at that at that point in time you could see like because that community is so strong because they're so um connected and like they're there for a reason they believe in like the mission of solana the values, performance, that's a community that's going to stick around that will be able to really outperform when the conditions are just a little bit better.

1:02:37If you could talk to your 18-year-old self, what would you tell him? Okay, yeah. So if I had to talk to my 18-year-old self, I'd probably just encourage them to take advantage of the opportunities to spend more time with friends in college. You know, like 18 is a really fun time. I do really miss sometimes like high school and college, like the social aspect of just being like around your friends 24-7. um it's hard because like you're balancing like you know a lot of work um you know i was really ambitious back then you know a lot of a lot of people are really ambitious back then and it's tough to like balance studies and sleep um with the social life especially you studied two masters right finance and engineering at the same time which is not very common or is it in the u.s Probably not.

1:03:44I don't know. Yeah, probably not that common. But you still manage to spend a lot of time with your friends compared to now, I guess. I mean, yeah, now I spend a lot of time with like industry friends and there's a lot of opportunities to, I guess what I'm trying to say, if I think about it more, is that quality time is just important to like feel like all time is being spent well. Um, but yeah, like spending time with friends, you know, I have, um, some friends in, in New York where I think in college, like one time I just randomly decided to host a party in my, uh, in my dorm room and like ordered these flasks on Amazon and then, uh, gave them to everyone and we had a little flask party.

1:04:36That was a, you know, we still like reflect on that, that one time, like when randomly decided to do that so i think those just like maybe having enough perspective to be like yeah this is like something that's probably going to be something i look back on it was a good use of time um so what we're saying is yes you can build the biggest startups or the biggest blockchains in the world you can raise hundreds of millions but at the end of the day and obviously it's part of your happiness and your drive because you want to wake up every day with a mission that's one of the most important thing for happiness, struggling, working towards a mission, not necessarily the success itself, but more like waking up every day with a goal.

1:05:17But one of the key things that makes you really happy and probably everyone is the simple things. That's true. Yeah. I mean, I'm very, very blessed in my life. Have a great group of friends who've been really supportive, family that's been really supportive. but yeah it just means that you know with all those advantages like there's no no reason to be like discouraged even when like there is occasional like hardship just have to keep going what's your biggest prediction for next 12 months what's the biggest prediction

1:06:08I think that more people, more projects will start to acknowledge the importance of community and will incorporate that more into their strategy. Do you think that's not the case enough yet? Correct. Do you think that most of them don't realize that, hey, this is actually key? And it's not just a meme, right? hey you should have a community but actually you should focus on that first and primarily yeah i think that i think that people know that it's important but it's it's tough like in the prioritization of things um and i feel like a lot of people probably you know don't prioritize highly enough to the point where it's actioned on um so you know i think that that the number of projects that sort of re prioritize it to the point where it is like something where they make a hire they they do like focus real effort on it founder time on it like things like that i think that probably goes up i mean i realize i'm leaking alpha by saying this um and i mean that in a sincere way i feel like whenever people say they're leaking alpha they're not um but i think that is actually true here.

1:07:32It's a big difference between actually talking and doing, right? Because it's kind of easy to say, oh, yeah, the community is important. We're doing some things for the community, community, community that. But actually, hey, like, are you really prioritizing the community? Are you organizing a lot of things? Are you offering the infrastructure that's needed? And, you know, for them to then start their own thing, each their own sort of events or, you know, different thing that you talked about before. Yeah, I think also there's, I think right now there's a lot of, there's a lot of projects that are trying to, trying to prioritize the short term.

1:08:16And there are various reasons for that. My guess would be that one is that people feel like we're in a bull market right now, but maybe we won't be forever. um there's also like this yeah there's this feeling there's this feeling of like um i'm just acknowledging like what i perceive by the way i don't i actually don't believe this at all so that's another prediction i have for 12 months is that um there's a little bit more focus on on longer term thinking longer term planning because the reality is like mate perhaps that crypto goes in cycles but you should be building something that lasts multiple cycles anyway um you know starting something is a big commitment um in traditional tech like when you found a company like they tell you like are you ready to or maybe they don't but they should tell you like are you ready to spend the next 10 years of your life doing this and so if it's 10 years of your life you know in crypto that's like multiple cycles so where's the problem like why are you worried about what part of the cycle we're in right now like that's that's kind of dumb it makes sense but you can also if you're very empathetic you can understand i mean the problem is there is this kind of short-term kind of gain greed or whatever you call that that is i mean we see it in the market a bunch of products trying to build long-term things focusing on the right things and And then they're not in the right narrative when the bull market comes.

1:09:52And because they're not in the right narrative, they don't raise the money or it's hard. And then they just end up pivoting into the right narrative instead of focusing on the long term because otherwise they will die, right? So there is different elements that make this, let's say at least these cycles really make the long term thinking more complex. And there is reasons to understand why. I think I understand, but I would also say if the original idea wasn't... The real issue is that the original idea that you picked was not the right idea. The issue isn't that you need to pivot to focus on a really hot narrative because that's what will enable you to not die.

1:10:41The issue is that you picked the wrong thing, so that's going to cause death if you don't pick the right thing. So the right idea will raise money. I think so. That's what you're saying. I think so, yeah. I mean, so there's a couple of other things I think about. One is that there's a lot of pressure from investors to launch the token fast.

1:11:05And the job of the founder is to kind of ignore that, to do the right thing for the project, not to just let these investors who are short-term profit-driven to dictate the pace of the project. That's sort of the first thing. There's some great investors out there who are much longer-term thinkers, and I think that over time they'll prevail, and they're going to be recognized as being more and more important. So I think over time it'll correct a little bit, but there's always, you know, probably going to be a lot of money in crypto that is like pretty mercenary in nature and is fast in the sense that it's willing to throw money at projects, you know, very willingly.

1:11:57But then, you know, at the on the other side, like, you know, is very just going to apply a lot of pressure to, you know, to give deliver a short term result. so you know as the industry matures i think that you know at least for me like i will put i'll be a force for um you know longer term thinking in the rest of the industry amazing man thank you so much for being there that was a great conversation thank you

1:12:36Thank you.