I’ve done really well for myself over the past 2 years. In some ways, better than I could have ever expected.
When I wrote smart contracts, I realized there was a problem; smart contract interactions weren’t visible to those signing the transactions, resulting in phishing being trivial, as users were just blindly signing a hex dump.
I flew to NYC in 2022 to hack on this idea; I ended up winning a hackathon with a 12m seed round from Paradigm, and did transaction security for clients such as Phantom, WalletConnect, Brave, Family, etc.
In total, the industry that I invented raised at valuations of over $250m:
- Blowfish ($65m)
- Blockaid ($100m)
- Pocket Universe ($25m)
- Walletconnect ($10m)
- Defined (Unknown valuation but raised 11m)
Eventually, I grew frustrated at Blowfish. I wanted to have control over the product directions; I had tons of ideas but chiefly that we should build a consumer extension to sell the API, but also that we could have better value capture on the consumer side. The founders didn’t listen, and we only built out our consumer app 6mo later, by which time, another project I’d talked to, called Pocket Universe, already had the lions share of the mindshare. We never clawed back our market share. I had a ton of ideas though, and so when Blowfish got acquired by Phantom, I joined Pocket Universe as first hire again; this time, on the consumer front. Pocket Universe first talked to me to see if they could use my hackathon idea; I said yes, and we kept in touch since, I always advised them with the ideas that I couldn’t implement myself at Blowfish.
I had much more fun on consumer; I would get an idea for a growth hack, we’d do it, and we’d instantly get feedback. The iteration cycle was super tight, and we grew extremely quickly, up to 190k users now. We did well; within 6 weeks of me joining full time at Pocket Universe, we went from 1m in revenue, and then we exceeded blowfish’s lifetime revenue within 2 months. At one point, we were redirecting 10% of Uniswap’s frontend fee to our own wallet. But we started to hit the ceiling of users; almost everyone who would use us was already using us, and so we sat at 190k for ages. We were growing weary, and it was clear that the founders were jaded by crypto; they’d only wanted to work in it because it was the most lucrative at the time, but grew weary over time.
I wanted to build more products to leverage our userbase; perhaps an AA wallet where one cannot get hacked, or staking abstraction, or any number of other apps that utilize our distribution. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be, and the cofounders decided to depart, so it’s just maintenance only.
Throughout Blowfish and Pocket Universe, I learned the same lesson; I’m extremely capable and high agency, and my ideas truly work. But it always ended the same way; me being sure that something would work. After leaving Blowfish, I got my opportunity to prove that I could singlehandedly change a company and improve the world. And now it’s time that I do it all myself, exert my agency, and be a founder.