E90: Sei Labs CEO - Why 99% Lose with Ethereum (And How to Win)

27:52And I'll just be able to like work on different hobbies and like get better at them incrementally. Turns out that wasn't the case for me. Like I still had this like feeling of like not really being able to make an impact, especially during my later tenure at Robinhood. So I was like, okay, I think it actually is work. Like the thing that I have been spending, deriving value from for most of my life, maybe I think that actually is what is driving value, like will continue helping me feel fulfillment. Um, and I think in that case, I like kind of went back and forth around that, but I do think that forcing yourself to reflect and then coming to a final decision, um, is much better from like coming out of one of these big life events.

28:34Are you happy today? I am. Yeah. Why? I think that the stuff that I'm working on right now is it feels fulfilling. It feels like I'm working towards something bigger. And I think that's like one of the most important things for me. Um, day to day, there's tons of friction. Like there's maybe if a hundred things happen, there's like five things that have, that are like good things. 95 things are like just things that need to be that I would like to avoid. Um, but I think overall, as long as there's like a North star that I'm going towards, um, it makes it, yeah, I just feel much better about like what i'm working on you're only 28 years old right yeah i turned 28 a couple of weeks ago now i feel like a boomer it's not the first time i'm wondering what am i doing with my life already happens often there are many youngsters of i can say our age because we're not that far apart or even a bit younger right who might be struggling with their own happiness and fulfillment what's some element of answers that you can give to a guy or gal in their mid-20s who are looking for happiness?

29:48Where do I start? Yeah, I think that there's going to be a different answer for everyone. I think the first step is to start exploring. And like, even if you haven't even considered this question before, I don't think you're going to have an answer. So I think you really need to look at the different parts of your life and like what brings you longer term fulfillment. I definitely don't think things that like lead to short-term gratification are going to be things that like will lead to long-term happiness like one of the ideas I was toying with is like okay what if you just adopt a very hedonistic lifestyle where you're just like really optimizing for the short term I don't I think some people are you trying no I didn't really try that much but like yeah like just taking this to an extreme like if you just like start taking drugs all the time.

30:34Like in short term, that'll make you very happy. I imagine the long term, that's not going to lead to a fulfilling lifestyle. So I do think that you probably will want to be thoughtful about like what really moves the needle for you. And I think for different people, it could be work for other people. It might be like relationships and family for other people. It might be like certain hobbies that like they really derive this meaning from. And for other people, it might be some vertical that I haven't even thought about. Um, but I definitely do think just the first step is like, start exploring.

30:59In the industry with Bitcoin, right? Low time preference, delayed delayed gratification same concept you worked at robin hood before building say protocol and say labs what did you learn there that you could not have learned anywhere else

31:19yeah that's not something that i've reflected on before now is the time yeah so the thing that i liked i would say the most about working at robin hood was... Well, I mean, I think it's going to end up being the people that I end up working with. In terms of the more specific, tangible things that I learned, yeah, I mean, it would be tied to scaling these systems that are growing really, really quickly. And I think at any given time, there's not really that many companies where you can solve these really hard technical problems. Because at any given time, there's only a handful of companies that are really experiencing that 10, 100x growth that you see at companies like Robinhood.

32:03So one thing that I have noticed is that if you really want to make a strong career in Silicon Valley, getting in early to one of these places like Robinhood or like Uber or like Airbnb, that is critical for really seeing that growth happen. And that's... If you're just spending your entire career working at one place where there's not that much change happening, then the amount of things you learn is very small. Whereas if every single month, there's a new set of really, really beefy problems for you to deal with, I think your growth curve just ends up being much more exponential. So like back in 2017, when I like had interviewed at Robinhood, that was kind of my decision making where it's like, this is probably where I'm going to end up learning the most.

32:43Because at that time I was considering going back and staying like basically staying at school for a fifth year to get a master's degree. Or it was like this job offer that I had from Robinhood. And in hindsight, that was like a fantastic direction to go down. Because I think I just got exposed to a lot more stuff than i would have back in back in college were you still working there uh during the meme stock oh man yeah yeah can you tell me a bit more about like how it felt like if i was a fly on the wall during this uh yeah that was that was an incredibly chaotic time in my life um i think so there's like the more engineering focus so i was like an engineering lead back then and there's like the engineering focus side of this where it's like it was actually pretty cool because there were a bunch of like huge amounts of traffic that we're seeing we needed to like deal with that and like handle all this technical complexity and technical load um but then the other part of that was more just like the entire way that it was handled from like a customer trust side um so i guess for any listeners that might not remember like there was a set of like a dozen stocks that are like the meme stocks back in the day was like uh gamestop amc um and like some other stocks and And all these stocks were just like, retail was really buying into them.

33:56And these stocks were ripping straight to the moon. Like the price action on these was insane. Like it's kind of similar to like what you see with some meme points, except these were like legit stocks that people are trading. And then there were a bunch of like institutions that started shorting these stocks because they were, I mean, they were like, this isn't rooted in fundamentals anymore, which candidly probably wasn't at that time. They're like, we're going to short this because we think the price is going to go down. And then people just kept buying it more and more. And whenever there's a bunch of short interest and the price keeps going up, it eventually leads to a short squeeze where the people that have these short positions, they need to close their short position.

34:34And closing a short position requires buying that asset. And that just creates more upward price action. So there's a short squeeze that happened. And then everything was just like, it was just complete mania. And then just one day out of the blue, Robin had turned off buys. and that is just so why like do you know yeah i mean i think it was done for legitimate reasons i don't think it was because they were like trying to screw over the customer in hindsight um it was done because they had like these capital requirements with these uh i guess institutions that when there's more short like when there's more volatility on a stock the capital requirements you need increases so they were like okay we can't meet these capital requirements if people keep buying these stocks.

35:15So we're going to decrease the amount of the assets that we have, or at least not prevent them from growing. The normal retail customer is not going to understand these nuances. The normal retail customer is like, I want to buy stock. Stock cannot be bought. So it was just infuriating to people. And as an insider, we didn't understand, as an engineer, I had no idea what the nuances around this were. The communication lines from Vlad and Beiju to the rest of the company were non-existent. We found out about things at the same time that they came out in the press. But we were also like, all my friends were messaging me like, yo man, what the hell is happening inside?

35:47And it just makes you feel so freaking powerless when like, you are kind of the face for this for a lot of your friends. Like it's your reputation on the line. It's like you that people are hitting up and you have to basically justify what Robin is doing without really even knowing what's actually happening. Um, and yeah, man, that's, that's shit. So that made me, I mean, much more bearish on like whenever there's like two, dudes in a room that are like calling the shots. Like that's not a good model to be having. Ideally, if you are giving people your money, you want it to be like trustless and you want it to be verifiable.

36:21Like you shouldn't be trusting two dudes. You should be able to like look at everything yourself and be like, yeah, this checks out. And that's when I became much more bullish on just like having systems where like you don't have like just two dudes calling the shots. What's your relationship with Vlad, the co-founder of Robinhood today? And I'm asking that because you're the founder of a pretty substantial crypto protocol. And now Robinhood is actually coming pretty big into crypto, right? Yeah. So do they just like go out and reach out to people in previous employees, alumni in the space or what's the...

36:51Yeah, I mean, I don't have an antagonistic relationship with the Robinhood team at all. I'm still holding a good amount of my Robinhood stock as well. So I think that I want to see them do well. I think that the way that they handled that was mishandled to a large extent. I think the communications around like transparency around the entire GameStop episode could have been done in a much better way. And I think that there is a pretty big opportunity for someone to build something like Robinhood, except build it in a trustless and verifiable way. I think that there will be a pretty big company that emerges from that in the next few years.

37:22But yeah. So you don't think that the fintech front-end, blockchain back-end is the way? Or you don't think that the current like Revoluts or Robinhood are the ones that are going to take over? I think in the short term, they will have more activity happening on decentralized platforms, I think in the longer term, there will start to gradually be a shift where you start to see more and more trading activity happen in a decentralized way. I think that technology is just strictly better when you're doing things in a decentralized way. And there's a lot of issues around things like verifiability that you, I mean, just fundamentally get for free with the blockchain.

37:58So yeah, I think in the future, we'll be moving in that direction. It's not going to be like a month from now, Robinhood will be displaced by some kind of decentralized exchange. But I do think that it'll be like in some, developing country, it'll be, that's where it starts taking off more. Like, and that's, that'll eventually lead to more and more, um, of that transition happening over the next like 20 to 50 years timeframe.

38:24Do you have any plan on helping Robinhood in the future or working with them? Uh, I think our foundation team is in touch with them. So I can't really comment on anything around specifically Robinhood. I do think that we'd be more than happy to work with all kind of major fintech players because I think it ends up being a very beneficial thing for customers if there ends up being verifiability and stuff happening on chain.

38:53You said before the Robinhood story kind of made you bearish on two guys in the room, right? Making decisions. But you got into crypto before that. How did you get so fascinated by the world of cryptocurrencies? Yeah, that is quite the story. So I initially got more exposed to crypto in a meaningful way back in 2017. So at that time, I mean, I was, 2017, I was a junior in college at the time. My friends that were seniors, they were getting software engineering new grad offers from Facebook. so at the time facebook would give new grads 100k signing bonuses this is basically literally is just like what it sounds like so you sign a piece of paper and then they give you 100k um and my friends say some of them literally took that entire 100k signing bonus and they just put that entirely into ether and this is just one thing sorry but like you do an internship for that or you just like get hired and then if you say yes you get okay welcome here is 100k yeah if i guess if you don't leave within i don't know a year or two or what's the kind of like yeah so the specifics around that um i think to get the 100k signing bonus you needed to intern there and then qualify for return offer um i think if you were just interviewing and you hadn't interned there before it was a less it was a lower signing bonus i think somewhere in like the 50k range i don't remember the exact numbers in that scenario anymore, but they were still pretty generous in terms of the signing bonus.

40:29Just handing out money to people who just sign up and just... Yeah. And it was extremely profitable for them to do that because if you have a company where the hiring bar for a new grad is like, I mean, honestly, very high. Like these people, these new grads, they're like 22. They have like, their life is work and they tend to be extremely productive because they're already very qualified as like software engineers by the time, at least in terms of like being able to like crank out new features. So from Facebook's side, it's like a very, very strong investment, especially if that person stays for longer than a year and like they progress and then you already as well.

41:02So yeah, I mean, you can't really fault Facebook for doing that. Like it was extremely successful for them to like give out these signing bonuses. Obviously, new grads, like they see that signing bonus. They're like, shit, this is so much money. So like they ended up having a very high rate of accepting those offers as well. I actually only think I had a couple of friends like turn those offers down And they ended up becoming founders because they wanted to like build something that was like bigger or like be part of like a bigger thing than I guess they'd be able to at Facebook. So, yeah, I mean, my friends, they invested that.

41:35They're like, shit, the hundredth kill is just buy some ETH. It was an amazing decision for them to do that in hindsight. But I don't think I personally would have had like the balls to pull the trigger and like take that entire signing bonus and put it into a cryptocurrency back in 2017. But yeah, I mean, these guys, they did that. And then afterwards, they started taking on like much more speculative bets. So I saw them like invest into other things. Eventually, I think they lost most of their money on Bitcoin Cash because like Bitcoin Cash, they like bought it before it was going to be trading on, I think it was Coinbase back in 2017, 2018 timeframe.

42:12And then they halted trading for Bitcoin Cash. My friends had a limit sell for like 9k, halted at like 8.8k or something. And then afterwards, it never recovered. So yeah, I saw them write it up, write it down. And I think I learned a good number of lessons from that, just watching it play out. And yeah, that was like my original initial kind of foray into crypto. And then for more of the development side and like actually understand how the technology works, it was 2018. So at that time, my roommate... So I had interned at Pinterest before then. And my roommate from Pinterest, he ended up... He was a master student at Stanford at the time.

42:46So he ended up starting his own blockchain company. And he was going through Binance Labs. And that's when I got much more exposed to smart contract development, like how blockchain works, consensus mechanisms, all that good stuff.

43:01you said you bought uh ten thousand dollars of eith in 2020 in march yeah you bought like pretty much the bottom like you told me like a hundred and nine dollars or something like that but you sold in may sell in may and go away yeah for an 8k profit which is 80 percent right most people would be very happy with 8k 80 % profit in two months. But as we both know, you missed out on nearly 50x on E right after, right? What does this teach you about conviction? Yeah. So I think that's probably been my biggest investing mistake. Thankfully, it hasn't been like huge losses. It's just been huge opportunity costs tied to selling an asset before like it went up.

43:50But yeah, March of 2020, I made a 10K investment. And at that time I was like, okay, I believe in ether, I believe in Bitcoin. So I'm going to be investing in ether, which at the time seemed like that had more upside. Um, and it ended up growing much faster than I expected. Like in two months I was up, I think I got in at 109 and sold it like two eight or something. So a little bit over 80%. I was like, shit, this is like a good amount of cash. So I'm just going to like cash out because I don't know if it's going to have like that much more upside from there. Um, turns out it had a huge amount of upside.

44:21So I think, uh, several different lessons that I learned from that. The first thing is like, I mean, first of all, you should cash out, but you shouldn't cash out everything. I think if anything, you should try to cash out whatever your initial investment is and do that slowly over like a much longer period of time, especially if it's something that you have conviction in rather than just trying to get out of it all at once. The second thing is this idea of like winners win. It's like if something is going up a lot, then there are very good chances that like it's going to continue going up more.

44:51And I think in traditional finance, in stocks that are part of the S &P 500, for example, I think this ends up being even more pronounced where you see that with stocks like Nvidia, for example, where it's just going and having these insane runs. But there's generally something that is justifying this kind of price action, especially for these higher liquidity, higher market cap stocks. So you should be quite thoughtful about what it is that's justifying this valuation. And if it's at the early part of like some kind of spike then more likely that than not that spike is going to continue because there's like something really justifying that so you should definitely hold on to those winners and like cut out your losers basically there's a sort of meme in crypto which is i mean let's take whatever solana solana at a hundred dollars is uh cheaper than solana twenty dollars right and actually we talked about that with uh daryl wang who you know right from tangent yeah who is much more of a trader than jason right and so i asked him exactly that i was like how do you know how do you double down on a winner right how do you know when to cut losses and double down on a winner and it's exactly that it's a very counterintuitive concept for most people they're thinking oh i see this chart is like wrecked he's gonna go back up right this one is already up there's less upside but Actually, usually it's not what happens.

46:16What happens is people kind of double down with their winners. In crypto, but also in inflation and investing, right? And the ones that are dead, they are dead for a reason. No one cares about them. Exactly, yeah. It's all about attention. So, absolutely. What are you the most convinced about today? In terms of crypto, I think that one thing that is just like undeniable to me is that as at least an asset, I see it performing exceptionally well in the next five to 10 years. Like the overall market cap for just, I think crypto assets in general right now, it's like around two, two and a half trillion dollars.

46:52That's like less than one of the top like S &P 500 companies. And that's like for all of crypto. And that's like, just if you look, if you compare that to a company, it's less than that. And then there's like all these other things that are like not even tied to stocks, like bonds, for example. So it is kind of a no brainer to me that is an asset, like a lot of these cryptocurrencies are going to do exceptionally well in the next five to 10 year window. Why? So I think there's like different things that are going to contribute to that. One part of that is like just more adoption will start to happen.

47:22In terms of like what that adoption specifically will be, I think that's a much more difficult question to answer. I think that there's like some things that are like, yeah, this is definitely what is like what blockchains are being used for, for example, payments, for example, trading of assets. But I do anticipate there will be more use cases that emerge in the next five-year window. So I think there'll just be more of that transition happening. I think there's also going to be more systemic things that push people towards using crypto. One part of that I think will be using crypto as a hedge against whatever your local currency is failing.

47:53And I think that might not happen in the United States, but I do think in several other countries where the financial system is weaker, there'll start to be more of a transition away from that failing financial system over to using cryptocurrencies and more specifically i think stable coins will end up being that like initial mechanism that like people will be using for um like payments and value transfer but i think that'll lead to people making use of blockchains more directly and i think also it's like a store of value like people are going to start holding assets like bitcoin um in much greater quantities moving forward like once there starts to be etfs once there starts to be like just more institutional recognition and like more ease of access for institutions to get involved, I think there will be more capital inflows as well.

48:32So overall, I think that it's going to be definitely trending in a very positive direction for the financial side of these assets. I think the big question ends up becoming like, okay, there's these things that I mentioned before, like payments, like trading that are like very clear use cases for crypto. What is it that's going to like, what are the other things that like crypto is uniquely good for that'll enable more real world adoption of stuff happening on chain. And I think that's like still one pretty big unanswered question at the moment. So in a nutshell, you think crypto is much higher in five to 10 years, right?

49:05From a financial side, yeah, for sure. Why could you be wrong? I think regulation would be one of the most clear answers over there. Yeah, I mean, especially the United States, I would say legal system. Like, however the US treats crypto, I think that would be the most clear answer for like, if crypto were to become irrelevant five, 10 years from now, it would be because of US regulators. But even then, I think it's still, you'd need coordination between different, different governments for that to really play out in practice.

49:39Why did you go all in into crypto and start a crypto protocol? I think there's multiple different reasons. Like one part of it is, like definitely after going through everything that I saw with Robinhood, But after seeing my co-founder building a crypto or my friend building a crypto company back in 2018, I was very bullish on the idea that crypto had the potential to change the world. I think that there's a ton of really interesting technical problems that emerge from building a blockchain as well or from basically building any kind of decentralized distributed system. At that time, it was undoubtedly the most exciting thing to be doing.

50:13I think even now, even in the bear market, it's still extremely exciting to be in crypto. There's new stuff that happens basically every week, every two weeks. there's like some pretty big kind of thing that happens. You say even now, even in the bear market? Even in the bear market, yeah. Are you saying that we're in a bear market now? I think that right now we... It's tough to like exactly say like, yes, this is undoubtedly a bear market. But I think the sentiments right now are different than they were back in like December, January. Like back in January of this year, it was a very different kind of euphoria that people had.

50:44I think right now it's in much more of a muted state. And compared to like November of 2021, that is completely different. Like November of 2021 was just totally different type of euphoria than we're seeing right now. Which is weird because the prices are almost similar for Bitcoin, right? Yeah, for a lot of assets, the prices are similar. But I think that people, I mean, as time progresses, people are expecting there to be more advancements. And when those advancements don't happen, then like they become a little bit more pessimistic. I think also once like things are just going up, there's obviously more euphoria.

51:15When things have gone up and then come down a little bit, that results in more pessimism. So you launched Say Labs and the protocol was Say Protocol. What is Say Protocol? Yeah, so Say Protocol is a layer one blockchain. We're building the first paralyzed EVM and it's currently live on Mainnet right now. What is Say V2? Yeah. So when we got started, let's say it's been like a huge kind of progression in terms of like what we've learned. Um, at the very start, we wanted to build a decentralized Robinhood. This was like at the end of 2021, we're like, we saw this shit go down with Robinhood. Let's build it in a decentralized way.

51:57Um, so we're like, let's more specifically build a central limit order book based exchange on chain. Um, so 2021, we like explored the options. We're like, none of these really make sense. So that's when we're like, okay, we'll just build an app chain instead. So initially, we wanted to build something similar to like DYDX v4, if you're familiar with that. This was before DYDX v4 actually even announced. So I guess we didn't know that they were doing that. But yeah, like we wanted to build an app chain, then we kind of went through the entire learning process around that. And we realized that building an app chain is actually exceptionally difficult to get right.

52:30And it's very difficult to grow an ecosystem around that. So that's when we transitioned over from an app chain to being a completely general purpose chain. And that's what Savvy1 was. So Savvy1 went live on mainnet in August of 2023. So over a year ago now. And it was the fastest chain in existence. It still is at the moment. Seeing 390 millisecond block times, which makes it 10x faster than Solana and many other chains. The biggest thing, though, that was an issue for Savvy1 is that there wasn't really much developer activity happening. And after chatting with a bunch of developers, we realized it's because we don't support the EVM.

53:06And that led us down that entire process of like, understand like, okay, everyone uses the EVM. These are limitations. So this is what we're going to start to do. And that's ultimately what led to us putting out a blog post for Save E2. This was November of 2023. And as soon as we put out that blog post, like we were like, okay, we're going to start working on this. Then we're going to put out a governance proposal. There was just extreme excitement around that. But everyone was super, super excited to see the first paralyzed EVM come to life. And I feel like that's when this entire vertical of a paralyzed EVM really got minted.

53:39Before that, I don't think there was really, from a public standpoint, this perception of a paralyzed EVM being a vertical. I think that's when that entire vertical got started. And I think that's when it became very clear to me that 2024, there's going to be a ton of innovation happening tied to performance of blockchains. And I think at the moment, that is undoubtedly true. like a lot of the biggest chains a lot of the biggest infra projects that are like pre-launch at the moment they're all focused on higher performance specifically through parallelization and i think this trend will continue because at the end of the day like no one wants slow chains like everyone wants to have cheap fees everyone wants to have fast infrastructure so by default i think in the next two-year window like everyone's going to be using a fast chain if they are able to do so what is parallelization yeah so parallelization is i guess maybe for morphin uh eli 5 explanation like if you have let's say that you're cooking something and there's three different things you want to cook you want to make um what do you eat for lunch today you didn't that's the worst question i had no breakfast no lunch at 7 p.m i still haven't eaten anything okay usually it's not uh usually it's not the case but today i i couldn't because i told you i took this medicine yesterday kind of fucked my brain and i was like if i eat more it's probably gonna make me even more like tired and i have this interview with with mike novo and then with you i was like fuck it i'm just not gonna eat it so i don't i don't interfere with my brain more yeah but yesterday for lunch i probably had this thing called sweet green you know sweet green is like a healthy i eat that all the time.

55:17Yeah. So let's say that you want to have a salad, right? So specifically you want to have chicken in that salad, which you're going to need to bake. There needs to be the vegetables that you need to wash and then cut up as well. So one way that you could do it is you could first get the vegetables ready. So it might take you 10 minutes, like wash the vegetables and afterwards cut them up and then like put them aside. And then afterwards you start cooking the chicken and cooking the chicken. It might take you like, let's say 30 minutes, 40 minutes. and you do that after you're done cooking the vector cutting the vegetables now the other way that you could do it is you could put the chicken into the oven at the same time that you start cutting the vegetables and that way you're able to cut the vegetables while the chicken is cooking so that's the core idea around parallelization which is that you can do two things at the same time in this case it would be like cutting the vegetables and cooking the chicken you're doing those at the same time um in the case of a blockchain it's if i'm if i'm blockchain processing two transactions, like one from me to you, another from Mike to Chow you were mentioning.

56:19These two transactions are completely separate transactions. They're not touching each other at all. There's no overlapping state. In that case, you're able to run them at the same time. And that allows you to finish running them. Transaction execution happens much, much faster. And that's the core breakthrough with parallelization. It lets you take the hardware you already have. Most modern hardware right now has multiple cores. So it's able to process multiple work streams simultaneously. So it lets you take that hardware to be able to get more out of your software and be able to process more transactions per second.

56:54What is Say Protocol Holy Grail Vision? Yeah. So our mission is to scale the EVM. And I think moving forward, that's going to end up being like, we just want to be the default place where people do any kind of on-chain activity. I think that's a very lofty vision. And I think there's several other projects right now that are doing a pretty good job at supporting that. But I fundamentally think Solana is probably one of the most clear protocols right now that is doing something like that. I don't think Ethereum L1 can really handle the kind of skill that we'll need in the future. And I think Solana is probably the closest example to a chain that is trending in the right direction.

57:32But with that being said, Solana doesn't support the EVM. And it doesn't natively support the EVM. And I think in order to really grow any kind of infrastructure project, you need there to be a ton of killer applications. killer applications will come from a lot of developers that start building there and developers typically only go with the evm right now and that's why i think that it's exceptionally difficult to grow let's say solana i think solana has the biggest shot over here of like becoming bigger in the future but if you look at like any of the move based chains for example i think it's going to be exceptionally difficult for them to get market share against chains like ethereum how do you think like how do you think that solana managed to become so big without uh having this

58:14native support of the EVM? Yeah, I think, I mean, FTX made it like a very different scenario. Like the support from FTX is something that you don't really see with any other chain. So I think that was like a very special case that like allowed them to become a lot bigger. I think they were also one of the first chains to market that had this like super high performance that was able to, like, if you have this high performance, if you have this good tech, and then people come and start building on it because of maybe FTX support, and then there end up being some killer applications that get built, it suddenly makes it much more likely for new developers to come in and want to start building on your chain.

58:48Because fundamentally, developers want to win. And winning to them can mean different things. For some, they want to make as much money as they can. For others, it's like getting the most number of users. But if you're in an ecosystem that has the most users, the most TVL, the most liquidity, it's a no-brainer for developers to start going over there versus trying to get developers to start building in some kind of pre-launch ecosystem that's using a different virtual machine. So yeah, I think all of that is to say that there is an aspect of winners win with blockchains. And I think the EVM right now is like it has won so far.

59:21And that's why it's a no-brainer to continue using the EVM and improving on that versus trying to create an entirely new virtual machine. Ask the following question to Keoni from Monad and to Adeni from Sui. So let me ask you the same question. do we really need another layer one oh 100 why so i think that if you look at the existing landscape of especially like ethereum is where most of the activity is happening if ethereum is not able to scale um then like you want that to be happening on some other type of infrastructure if your goal is to have top-end performance then you basically need to be making use of a layer one if you have a modular chain where there's like a separate execution layer a separate settlement layer a separate DA layer, it introduces much more complexity into the overall system.

1:00:08And if there's any kind of issue that happens, let's say that there's a bug in the settlement layer and then settlement layer has an issue, then it introduces a lot more failure scenarios you need to be handling at, let's say in this case, the execution layer. So if there's any innovation that happens with the modular stack, you can combine all of the different parts of that modular stack into just one monolithic chain. That one monolithic chain will be able to have better performance, less sources of complexity, because it's all the same actors that are going to be controlling it. So I think that that's going to give you the best top end performance that you would want.

1:00:39There's a part in this podcast where I ask the guests their top two or three favorite crypto teams. Obviously, I'm not talking about prices and tokens, recommendation. Teams can have no token, doesn't matter. It's more, what are your favorite teams and why do you like them so much? so yeah i mean kind of in line with what i was saying before i would say one of the teams for sure is solana and i think that's not necessarily a super contrarian answer by any means at this point but i think being one of the first teams to really say that okay we're going to focus more on performance via parallelization instead of trying to take the approaches around like consensus or many of the other approaches that are taken being that are being taken back in the day um i think that is extremely respectable and like the approach that they've taken i think has been just incredible like they've been crushing it um so i really respect totally i really respect the way that their team has approached the problem um so i'll go with solana is another one uh there's no other team that i guess like instantly comes to mind um but yeah i feel like overall there's a ton of projects that are like overall doing pretty cool things are you also an in so the the 10 ,000 bucks you bought in ETH, right?

1:01:54Are you also an investor in the space? Like a private investor? I would say more liquid. Private, I would say probably, right? Yeah, yeah. I have some private deals that I've done. I try to avoid putting too much liquid money into crypto, but I do have, I think right now, my biggest positions are tied to, one of them is actually Athena. So I'm still getting, I think now the yield has dropped quite a bit, so I might want to reconsider that. But I think back in the day, the yield was much higher than like 5%. So you have your cash? Yeah, yeah. Cash on Athena? A little bit of cash on Athena. And then Ether, Sol would be the other two big assets that I'm holding right now.

1:02:35No Bitcoin? No, I never got back into Bitcoin. Like 2020, before buying Ether, I'd actually bought some Bitcoin and then I got out of that. And then afterwards, I haven't gotten back into Bitcoin, but maybe that'll be something I do in the future. I also feel like as a founder in crypto, like you're already pretty tied to the crypto space and not just the actual like financial side of it, but also all your time is being invested into that. So it's probably a good thing to start diversifying as much as you can. Where do you diversify? I mean, it'll just be stock markets for the most part, like S &P 500.

1:03:08And like, I actually went through this at Robinhood where I was like, okay, I want to learn how to like start starting to invest better. Yeah. Initially, I started like trading options because that's what everyone at Robinhood was doing. Turns out that's a... Nice start. It's the same as leveraging, leverage crypto shit coins, miners, right? That's how you start crypto. I think you can lose your money faster in many cases with, well, it depends on how much leverage you're taking. But with options, like if you buy a zero day expiration options, like by the end of the day, you could just lose all your money.

1:03:36um so yeah like i remember like i bought like one this is right after i started started working full-time and robin did not give me any kind of fat signing bonus it's like i i bought like a five thousand dollar amazon call so that was like a lot of money for me back in the day um i guess it still kind of is and i was i saw it went go up from like five thousand dollars like twenty thousand dollars i'm like holy shit like this is insane and then afterwards it went down to zero i'm like oh shit that was like pretty fucking stupid um but yeah like after going through that I was like, okay, I want to start like learning how to like actually invest from the fundamentals.

1:04:09And that's when I like read a book called A Random Walk Down Wall Street. The best one. The best one. I read three or four books. And this is Burton Malkiel, right? I don't remember. I believe so. Yeah. So Little Common Sense of Investing. I read at the same time Unshakable, Tony Robbins, Money Master the Game. And then this one, this one is like amazing. Yeah. Because it's a mix of theory from a professor and practice, right? Yeah, exactly. And I think, I mean, my core takeaway from that was like, okay, you don't really, you shouldn't necessarily even try to beat the market unless you really, really know what you're doing.

1:04:43Like in the long term, the market will beat you unless you're like Renaissance or whatever, like unless you're like a fucking God. So it's better to just be diversifying as much as you can. And that's the kind of overall mantra that I've been taking, like just diversify or like hold like really high market cap kind of stocks that are like already fairly reflective of the market. I think he's saying, I think the takeaway of this book is a monkey throwing random darts is going to do better than you, right? Do better than me and do better than like most people on Wall Street as well that are actively managing.

1:05:19Yeah. And that's why like after reading that, I became really confused about technical analysis. Because even in crypto, it seems like there's a lot of people that are like preaching technical analysis. And like after just reading that, I'm like, this seems like it's not going to be working. um and i guess that's why most people that like do ta they don't necessarily make um long-term returns from that they make money on the courses that they sell exactly yeah that's that's it i mean i found that technical analysis can be really helpful to enter into a position in a bear market right oh is there confirmation etc like so it's kind of like a mix between fundamental and technical but like the influencers or chaos whatever you want to call them right they make money on the courses that they sell and they need to have content right every day and the TA is great because every day i can chart some some stuff it also makes you feel like you're doing something like if you're just passively investing it's like you don't feel like you're doing anything and like your mind is always like what what could i be doing with this time and TA like really makes you feel like you're doing something to make money i mean for most people you lose money but yeah difference between between uh trading and investing or between gambling and investing right yeah investing i think in those books that we mentioned before they just say investing should be like uh watching paint dry it's boring as fuck right yeah like but that's how that's what works so you buy an s &p 500 or nasdaq actually that's an interesting conversation to challenge you a bit uh that i had with raul pal for two hours and a half on the podcast and his entire framework is S &P 500 doesn't beat the 12 % hurdle rate, right?

1:06:57Hurdle rate, 12 % is basically 7 or 8 % money printing plus 4 % inflation. If you want to outperform the hurdle rate, you need to do at least 12%. 12 % is S &P 500. If you invest in S &P 500, you're not making any money. So basically flat since 2009, bottom, it's up 650%. I think S &P 500, but you're basically flat because you don't beat the hurdle rate. Next one is Nasdaq. The only one that outperforms the hurdle rate is Nasdaq and Bitcoin, or Nasdaq and crypto. Nasdaq is 17 % annualized, so basically you're outperforming by 5%, and Bitcoin, 140 % annualized. And therefore, his entire framework is you should have most of your money or your liquid network, which he has, in Bitcoin.

1:07:45And then you can go down the rabbit, the risk curve. Yeah. Bitcoin, ETH, SOL. etc right so that's an interesting point actually does it make sense i'm thinking about the same at the end of the bull run i mean or in the middle whatever whenever you take profit what do you take profit into i personally would not be taking all of my profits and putting into something that's extremely volatile and i personally think of bitcoin as being more volatile than like i can stomach for like a larger portion of my portfolio um i think that's probably true for like nasdaq as well. Like, I also think there's a pretty high correlation between NASDAQ and like crypto assets.

1:08:22I think that it is much more focused on tech than the S &P 500. Although to be fair, I think the S &P 500 also is pretty strong correlation at this point with crypto assets. But yeah, overall, I'd want to be putting it into something that I view as much safer. But it really depends on like what the investment goals are for that particular person. Like, I could definitely see a world in which you view Bitcoin as like the stable amount that like, you're comfortable with that volatility and you would just invest all of it into Bitcoin in that case. Do you use Robinhood to buy your S &P 500 every day or week or month?

1:08:54Yeah, I have. In the past, I have set up recurring trades on Robinhood and it's actually incredibly convenient to not need to go and buy it every single day manually.

1:09:04So you have these rules on the financial side. There is some rules you have on other aspects of your life, health and food. which we talk about kind of like the 20, 80 rule, right? You spend quite a bit of time optimizing your health and food. How? Yeah. In general, I think that for many things in life, if you just spend 20 % of the time, you're going to get 80 % of whatever that ROI is or whatever the value it is from doing that thing. Specifically, I think one thing that applies to everyone is going to be things tied to sleep, things tied to nutrition, things tied to exercise. Like every single person is going to have some aspect of this in their lives.

1:09:44When it comes to sleep, I read the book Why We Sleep, which I think is like a pretty common book that people are like mentioning on like self-improvement videos. And that was really interesting because I hadn't really thought about sleep from like a scientific perspective before then. Like back when I was in like high school and college, I had extremely bad sleep habits. Like I'd basically go to sleep at 2am, wake up at like 7am and like, I just like power through the rest of the day. Turns out that was like really bad for me. and in hindsight like I noticed like the difference between how I feel nowadays when I'm getting like seven hours of sleep versus when I was getting five hours of sleep so why do we sleep well I mean we sleep for from the body standpoint I think it's to help with like recovery um and this would be like muscle recovery like removing like I guess gunk I forget the exact terminology but like improving your brain function solidifying memories um so overall I I would say that it helps with a variety of different things.

1:10:40In my case, I've noticed that it helps a lot with my mood and my mental functioning. So from a very practical standpoint, it's undeniable that I'm just sharper when I sleep well. So I think from the founder perspective, it's much better to be trying to get at least seven hours of sleep. I try to target 78 hours of sleep. One thing that I found to be helpful is actually using a sleeping app to track how much I'm moving as well. With your watch, it's able to track whatever movements you have. And from there, you're able to... Like even if you spend like seven hours in bed, you might only be sleeping for like five and a half hours.

1:11:11So it's like good to give yourself more time in that case. How well are you doing at that? I would say that getting seven hours of sleep has actually been much easier to do now. Back when I was... Back in like the earlier days of stay, it was a lot harder to do that. Because we'd have like late night calls and then afterwards early morning meetings as well. I think now we're able to get into a much better kind of cycle around that. We're like, we're able to work from like more traditional hours. Um, it might go into the evening, but it doesn't require like sacrificing sleep. So I think that's been one thing that has been just fantastic for my overall quality of life.

1:11:45Uh, the second thing I would say tied to exercise, I personally ended up getting like much more into exercise and I think beyond like the baseline, but I think just from purely the baseline, there's like a minimum number of days they recommend like doing cardio, minimum number of weightlifting sessions. And if you just do that, I think it's like really, really good for you. What's the minimum? Uh, for cardio, I think it's, they recommend doing like two to three days of cardio and like two to three uh weightlifting sessions a week um what does that represent cardio 20 minutes 30 minutes an hour i think the exact numbers are like 150 minutes of like stuff like walking each week or 75 minutes of like vigorous exercise so this would be they consider like jogging to be vigorous exercise um so it's not like going super hard it's like just being like zone two zone three kind of workouts um so in my case, I ended up actually just getting really into running.

1:12:34Like in my case, I was like, I want to improve my health. So I started running, running ended up being really difficult for me. Like, I don't think for me personally, like my genetic predisposition and like my body type was like ideal for running at all. There was just really fucking hard. And that's actually kind of what made it enjoyable. Um, because it was like kind of every single time I did it, it felt very satisfying versus like when I went weightlifting, it just felt like something that I did versus something that like made me feel like i was doing something like super meaningful um so yeah running was hard and what was satisfying is it seeing the progress every time or is it like actually you don't want to but i went oh i feel great now i think initially it was just not wanting to do it and then doing it anyway like if you're able to consistently do that i think you're able to like kind of get control over your life in a way so that was like i mean this was also after my dad had passed away.

1:13:25So I was like, okay, I want to get control over my life. And I think that really helped out from that perspective. Um, then once you're consistent in anything, you start seeing like improvements and you're like, oh shit, like my 5k time went from like 29 minutes out to like 26 minutes in the course of like a couple of months, like I should try becoming even better at this. Um, and then from there it just became like this gradual progression where it's like, okay, I'm consistent now. Like how do I optimize this even further? Like, okay. That's when you like read the literature. It's like, okay, there's like different types of workouts, like interval workouts, threshold workouts, like long runs, easy runs, like all all that stuff.

1:13:54And then from there you can start like going down even deeper into that rabbit hole. So I think that's like, um, been pretty fun to dive deeper into. What are you looking for exactly now when you're going for a run? Um, so I tend to be a very numeric person. I just want to get to like a certain 5k time. And then I want to get to like certain weightlifting goals and kind of just like, that's what I'm aiming for right now. I don't know what I'll do after that. I might just like kind of plateau over there because i view that as like healthy enough or it might be like trying to continue optimizing by like trying out different events or something um but yeah i think right now it's just going to be like a certain 5k time and then certain like squat deadlift and uh bench pressing goals you said going for a run is not enjoyable right especially for you at least it was not in the beginning yeah there's another thing that's not enjoyable in the beginning starting a company what's the parallel between running and starting a company i actually think at the start is kind of a honeymoon phase with the company so i think it's actually completely different in that sense because when you have like an idea it's like you're kind of like holy shit i'm a genius like this is going to change the world um so the initial part of it is like really easy to have enthusiasm and like excitement for um but continuing that going i think like the first few months, like honestly, even the first six months is easy.

1:15:15But it's after that when it starts to become more of like, I wouldn't say a slog, but it's like more like a job where you have to continue showing up. And like that consistency, I think is one of the things that differentiates like people that do really well versus people that like just give up at like, before they even really have a chance to succeed. And I think most founders like, they give up way too early in a way. Like if there's like co-founder drama, whatever, like sure, that's like reasonable. But a lot of times they just don't have PMF and they're like, okay, I'm going to give up now.

1:15:42And I don't think that's the right way of approaching it. Like if things aren't going well, you should just continue being relentless, like continue changing the approach that you're taking. And as long as you're putting yourself out there, I think there's a good chance that you will get lucky in some ways and whatever you're doing will work out. Absolutely. I mean, easier said than done. But if you never stop at some point, luck should find you or you should find luck at some point. I mean, provided you're not too stubborn and you're like very receptive of feedback and everything, right? Yeah.

1:16:11Like I have some friends that like after graduating from college, they spent like five to seven years working on the same idea. And I think after a certain point, you need to be willing to like change your direction. I think ideally having like tight feedback loops is like critical in terms of finding product market fit. But I do think that like luck is probably the most important thing for a startup to succeed. And good founders, they're not people that are like 100 % guaranteed to succeed. I think they put themselves out there. they have like something that could work and then a lot of conditions align and then things are able to take off at that time.

1:16:45And these like super big companies, I think they have multiple events like this. But if you're not putting yourself out there, there's like no way in which you're going to end up getting lucky. What's your definition of luck? So I think in like Say's case, for example, like there was Say went live with V1. There was pretty clear market feedback that like developers did not want to build on V1. we took that feedback. We're like, okay, what is it the developers want? We'll put out this V2 announcement. And once we put out the V2 announcement, there was suddenly a lot of excitement around Say. And then we went live.

1:17:18We're like the first parallel EVM to go live. There's been more opportunities from luck based off of that. Like right now there's like some pretty big name projects that are going to be launching on Say. And I think that because we're the first one to be live, like we're able to benefit from these lucky coincidences where like they got involved in the ecosystem early and now they're going to be launching like pretty significant things. So I think in our case, it's just been like continuing to put things out there, whether that's like putting out things that we want to be building or putting out like actually shipping things.

1:17:46And then a lot of times like that might not matter, but sometimes it does result in like a ton of excitement and a ton of traction just tied to that.

1:17:59Everyone can step outside of their home and go for a run. They should. should they do you think everyone can start a company if starting a company and going for a run is similar so i think everyone if they believe in themselves they should try i think there's probably certain personality traits that i would be skeptical of but one thing that i've learned is that it's close to impossible to judge whether someone's going to succeed. Um, and I think that, yeah, I mean, I think in our case as well, like most VCs turn us down when we're getting started. So like by the canonical definition, like we were not someone that we were not people that were on track to like make it or whatever.

1:18:48Um, but I think still, I still think things worked out like pretty well for us because we believed in ourselves. I don't think if other people, like, I don't think other people's belief of you should really matter in that equation. It's more like, do you think that you believe in yourself?

1:19:04that's so interesting because there is quite a few people would say there is a kind of playbook to go and raise money there's a kind of playbook to build a company i've heard also and i believe the same right i used to be my first company i built when i was 23 so i used to be more cocky and think there's one way to do things and if someone comes with an idea and i think it's not a good idea i'm gonna think like there's no chance i should tell them right what i learned with time is i have no clue how how they how could i even like out there i give you a feedback other this feedback from a friend lately uh he's building a new company and he was like yeah kevin i'm really disappointed because all my friends other friends they came with an with advices and everything and you don't say anything and i'm like listen i'm not saying nothing because i don't have time I don't care.

1:19:57It's just because if it's your idea, right? First idea is worth nothing. Execution is worth everything. How could I be so entitled or feel that I'm so different or amazing that I could tell you that this is going to work or not? I think you should just go for it, right? Yeah. You should go for it. Like the only advice I can give you or you're looking for feedback is go for it and you'll figure out and you might just be able, like I might have done some things not well. I might have done some things well, but it's because it's the thing that I felt was the right thing to do. You might have the same feeling in something that I have no idea about.

1:20:33We talk about that with Jason Choi, the Ninkruger effect. Right? Like, how can you think that you are knowledgeable in one space because you're doing well, but then think that you're, therefore, you're good in other fields or areas? You don't. So if you come to me with an idea that might sound crazy or stupid to me, I don't even know the industry or the space or the, I don't have your experience of trying to solve this problem that you experienced. Right. So I can't tell you if it's good or not. The only thing I can tell you is go for it and see. Yeah. Right. Yeah, no, I definitely agree with that.

1:21:08Like I, when I'm giving feedback to my friends, I try to give them feedback, but also be like very open-minded to that and make it very clear to them that like, it's very difficult for anyone to really be a judge on whether something's going to succeed until they actually try it. Yeah. I also think that a lot of the people that try to have like, this pattern recognition, they end up being investors that are trying to apply this pattern recognition to make investments. I think most investors in crypto are pretty bad, honestly. A lot of them have been able to have good returns because they've just gotten in early.

1:21:38And the overall beta for crypto investments have been pretty good in the past five, seven years. But in general, I think most VC investors, they are pretty poor judges. Most of their investments do not work out. And based off that, I think that if VCs say no to you, that's not a reason for you to be discouraged. If you believe in yourself and you're willing to take feedback and keep iterating, you still need to be good. There's no doubt about that. But I think that VCs saying no doesn't really mean very much. What's a good investor? I think that in our case, we got pretty fortunate that Multicoin ended up leading our seed round.

1:22:14I think they've been... I mean, they have a stellar reputation, like, I guess, being the main VC firm behind Solana. So they have a ton of experience like supporting teams like ours. So I think they've been great. Yeah, Jason from Tangent, Jason and the entire Tangent team, they've been fantastic as well. So I would say that they've both been very helpful from the very beginning. What characterizes a good investor? Yeah. So I think that first of all, being involved, like there's a lot of investors that are like pretty hands-off. And I think that being hands-off is like, it makes you kind of a five out of 10 investor.

1:22:50I think the worst investors are the ones that are trying to be hands-on, but then they end up kind of interfering. So between being like hands-off versus actively like being negative, I think it's better to be hands-off. But I think the ones that are like hands-on and are offering very valuable feedback, making strong introductions, like just helping you from like the different parts of the company that you need help on at any given time. So this could be tied to recruiting, like introducing you to potentially good hires. This could be tied to like the sales cycle, like introducing you to good founders that might be like building on top of your product.

1:23:21Or it could even be like strategy advice, like, okay, this is how you should think about your position in the market. These kinds of things end up being extremely helpful. And I think VCs are like uniquely good at a lot of these things because they both have a big network in crypto or just in whatever industry they're in. So they're able to make a lot of good introductions. and they've also just been able to see like get access to like a ton of different founders and like the way that they've approached the problem so they have a much larger data set to base their feedback off of versus a one individual founder might have a much smaller data set which is their own experience you have a girlfriend i do yeah in crypto there is a joke that now that vitalik buterin has a girlfriend it's actually bearish for ease you don't agree with that Yeah, I think that's honestly pretty...

1:24:10I think in Ethereum's case, they're looking for something to pin the blame on in a way. I also think it's largely just a joke. Like people are memeing about it. I actually think that... Maybe this is a hot take, but I think investing in founders that are in stable, committed relationships is... That should become... Maybe not the norm, but I think that's a positive green flag that you could see with people. like if someone's able to maintain a stable relationship then that's probably indicative of them as a person being someone that's like um able to be good in like some types of like interpersonal situations and i think that as a founder like you're going to have to be working with your co-founders you're going to be after working with investors like several different people and that will be like yeah if you're good at people skills in one aspect i think that can potentially translate over in other aspects as well.

1:25:04Should investors and VC look at the relationship status of a founder as a key factor? I am sure some of them have considered that. I'd be very curious with the kind of outcomes around that are. Another one that I've also thought about is like just people that are like exercising and like consistent with things. My hunch is that if someone is like consistent with exercising, like, I mean, it's kind of like people that are like athletes in college, like they end up being just really intense and like very like driven for whatever they want to do. So I think those people end up making very good employees, very good founders.

1:25:34I think it's going to be the same with like exercising as well. Absolutely. But yeah, I'm curious if they've ever done studies around that, like the founders that are like exercising every day, whether they outperform founders that are... The main question is probably like these people who make these investment decisions, they probably, to include that in their own... process of investment they probably need to also walk the talk right hey that's true that's true like am i fit do i have good relationships or like do i just expect that from other people but i'm not walking the talk right yeah and i mean there's always pretty big counter examples for all these things like i mean elon musk for example i guess he's notorious for having like trouble with his relationships so maybe that might not be the best signal like you can still be a very successful entrepreneur without necessarily being in long-term stable relationships yeah for a long time yeah you could say that the geniuses have pretty twisted minds and therefore it makes it very very hard for them to to be in relationships right absolutely yeah i mean it's kind of like the whole founder mode um discussion that's been happening where like some people are perceiving founder mode to be someone that's like just very um kind of in the weeds but also like overly nitpicky around things that are happening like very micromanaging um and i think that a lot of times the founders that end up doing very well they might actually have those personality traits that might make them less easy to be around um but those end up being things that are actually good for the success of a business because they're just very obsessed with it so david is in the details right exactly yeah that's very controversial but it's actually very it makes so much sense right yeah because the small details compound over time so like if the more you are i don't want to say perfect but like near perfection like the more yeah but on the flip side i mean i'm reading the book called the founders which is about the paypal mafia and elon musk for example like at least based off the depiction that the founders had it seems like he wasn't necessarily he was very involved but he was making a ton of bad decisions which was eventually what led to basically everyone colluding to like oust him as a ceo back in like whatever 2000 2001 um so i do think that more likely than not, like being a good founder means being active and present, but you should still rely on the feedback that other people are giving versus assuming that like, you know, everything and like dictating things based off that.

1:28:00What's a bad decision? In the case of, let's say PayPal, for example, I think the two pretty negative decisions that got Elon ousted, according to the book, at least, first of all, was like tied to the technology. Like he was basically telling people to make use of a certain tech stack that they didn't believe in. This led to a ton of issues. And he was basically, he became this single person who was in a way responsible for these issues. He went against Max Levchin and a lot of the engineering team at the time. And yeah, he single-handedly was in a way responsible for that. Another thing is just being very stubborn on things that are in a way, to a degree, inconsequential.

1:28:36In his case, he was very stubborn about the x.com naming at the time. He wanted to use x.com instead of PayPal. So I think there's a lot of these things which is going to be affecting people's perception of you. And if you're not getting by and that's going to be just very negative. Do you think this is being wrong or making bad decisions or being misunderstood? Because arguably, if you look at Elon Musk's success afterwards, he just kind of went against the odds multiple times and was very successful at it. So maybe the people around him just didn't understand him. I think in the case of PayPal, based off my understanding, it seems like he was wrong in that case.

1:29:12It also seems like he took that as an opportunity to learn how to improve. I think it's very possible that like he did not like it was actually just poor decisions at PayPal but that led to him improving and like making better decisions in the future because I do think when you go through these traumatic experiences like being on your honeymoon and then being ousted by the board and then having to frantically fly back like shit like that hardens you as a person and it makes you really think about like how you've been approaching life and I think it is possible to change yourself based off that Do you want to get married and have kids?

1:29:42I do yeah Why? I think that, um, I mean, one part of it is just societal. Like this is what I've been accustomed to be believing. Um, I actually don't know how significant the idea of a marriage is, but I think in terms of having kids, I definitely would want to have kids in the future. Um, yeah, I just feel like it would be like, I don't know. There's just like something very primal about wanting to have kids and then helping them like be the best versions of themselves that they can be um that sounds like something that i would enjoy you said i'm not sure about marriage itself right why it's entirely a societal construct and i do think that i would probably still get married just because of like my upbringing but i do think it's one of those things that doesn't really matter like it's more just like a title versus something that's like more fundamental and innate to humans probably matters much more to a woman especially based on her i'm saying like the the celebration and like the kind of like dream day of being the having that one day right that's true like a dream of the probably most women out there yeah it's like i don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing but i do think that that is like one of the peak life milestones like everyone i mean i think little girls especially like dream about um so yeah i think it probably matters more for for girls and guys what's something you believe in that most people would not agree with uh there's been a ton of debates i've gotten into on crypto twitter um yeah i can't think of something i could just give a crypto twitter example if that's that's good go ahead um yeah one thing that's been extremely controversial that I put out a few months ago, was basically this idea that we don't need to have very large validator sets.

1:31:43The direction the industry is going in is to have much smaller validator sets that are like maybe 50, 100 nodes. And that'll be like where we end up on in the future. Can you explain that for normal people? Like what does that mean? And why is it important or not important? Yeah. So the idea of a blockchain is to be a decentralized, I guess a distributed ledger. It's like a decentralized entity where like a lot of different people can partake in that The way that most blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana have approached this Is by making it possible for anyone to get involved as either a validator or a miner So they have like thousands, tens of thousands of different people that are like Just rerunning transactions for every single block that comes in This is the kind of default mode that most blockchains had taken in the OG days what started becoming starting to become a lot more common now is either having centralized sequencers which is what a lot of rollups are doing which is basically just like one node that is determining the ordering of transactions or what you see with most modern l1s which is having a smaller validator set of let's say less than 200 nodes and with the smaller validator set you're able to get much better performance and it's also much more sustainable to run the network because if you have like 10 ,000 different validators that are all re-executing the same transactions, like let's say a block comes in, it has a hundred different transactions.

1:33:03There's 10 ,000 validators. They all need to rerun those transactions. And that's just extremely redundant. Like they're all rerunning the same shit. And that's extremely bad because people only run validators if there's enough money that they're making from emissions from the network. So it basically becomes a cost on the network. If there's 10 ,000 people, that suddenly becomes like hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars that you need to be, as a blockchain, paying these people to run their hardware. Now, if you have a smaller validator set, then it's cheaper to run that because there's less nodes.

1:33:32And it's also possible for these nodes to be higher hardware, like have higher hardware requirements that are able to get better performance overall. So that's why I think that's the direction the entire industry is moving towards. I think it's controversial because that goes against a lot of things that Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin community believe in. But I think there's very clearly writing on the wall and that's the direction that all of us are going in. Because it's more practical. Much more practical. You get much better performance. It's much cheaper. So I think the entire industry will start adopting that in the future.

1:34:01What's your biggest prediction for the next 12 months? So, yeah, in terms of infrastructure for blockchains, I think that it is kind of inevitable that everyone is going to start moving towards higher performance blockchains. Like if you can choose between getting 10 ,000 transactions per second on a chain versus 50 transactions per second, it's a no-brainer to go with a chain that offers 10 ,000 TPS. Which is why I think over the next 12 months, you're going to start seeing more and more clients being made, more and more execution clients that support higher performance. One of them is Se, and I think in the future there'll be others as well.

1:34:37And the entire industry will start migrating more and more towards these higher performance infrastructures. What happens to the legacy ones? I think that people transition away from those. So those legacy execution environments will become less common. So like a vanilla EVM, I think will become less common than using a high performance like paralyzed EVM. And I think the projects that are not willing to adapt to that, they will start having less traction, like less activity. And yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say that they will die out, but I think that they will start just becoming less and less relevant.

1:35:10You said you hold ETH and SOL, right? Why do you hold ETH if you think that way? So I think that ETH has, it is where all the activity in a way is happening right now. Like that's where there is the most TVL, the most number of users. And even if things don't happen on Ethereum L1, if they're able to go in the direction of having a roll-up centric roadmap, then in theory they will be happening on a level above that where they're using Ethereum for settlement. Maybe they'll be using Ethereum for data availability in the longer term as well. So I think there will be some amount of value that goes back to the base layer.

1:35:46thank you so much for doing this Jay that was a great conversation thank you man this is fun