Fabio

1. How is Blowfish, how is Phantom after the acquisition? I met with some Phantom guys last night at Arcana in SF for their happy hour
2. Is there a
3. I’m making a decision right now between EIR/being a founder and joining succinct as their first lead/management hire, and you were someone that I thought of as a great leader, who also had EM experience before being a founder. From your perspective, do you wish you had become a founder sooner, or was the 0x EM experience core to your abilities?
   1. Oskar and Kim wanted to go back to being an IC, they were done with the management stuff, and Fabio wanted to stay leading a team. The reason was that when you’re an IC, you’re focused on how, than what. And you’re focused on “i need to ship this project”, so what you’re thinking about is focused/less that’s much more concrete. As a manager, you’re thinking more about the overall goals of the company, and what are we trying to achieve, and from the what, how do we measure the what and how do we track what we’re doing and from there, from there flows what should we build. Birds eye view vs on the ground running. Very used to operating at the higher level of abstraction and working on multiple projects and pushing it all forwards.
   2. I haven’t been put in the hot seat of what we should build and why, at Succinct.
   3. More people management. A lot of company building vs product building as a startup; he learened at phantom was he could have doen better at blowfish was setting very clear expectations, what do you expect the people that work on your team, andn setting a high bar wrt execution, collaboration, productivity, and creating the environment such that people can achieve those expectations.
   4. Every stage of a company is unique; there are unique challenges, and the things that work with 2-3 ppl doesn’t work at 10, and 20, and etc. it always evolves. Wouldn’t join a company that’s too big if I join a company, it’s too far along the line that I’d hit those conditions and I might learn the wrong things. Last biggest was 38, now 100.
   5. Would Phantom be helpful in the ultimate pursuit, you see what a high functioning high output team is. There’s a lot of best practices that they got right. There’s a lot more effort and time in communication overhead/team alignment — so from an architecture/infra perspective it has to be cohesive.
   6. Try and emphasize something that excites me. When we’re excited we do our best work.
   7. Who am I going to be working with, do I respect my coworkers/can I learn from/do I respect the leadership.
4. There’s nothing like doing it yourself. It’s not pleasant but you grow and you learn a lot, it’s much chewing glass.
5. A lot of timing risk; use cases have not been discovered yet. Are the dev platforms/infra layer going to be capturing the value or is it going to be the app layer?
6. Wrt EM @ 0x:
   1. He was a really shitty manager when he first did it; there will be a lot to learn, and he transitioned from IC to EM, so he spent too much time IC’ing as an EM, and it took a big mind shift
   2. His big unlock was “even if i code all day, i’ll have the output of 1 engineer, max 2 if I don’t sleep, but there’s no more than that, but if i can delegate, there’s more work being done than if I did it myself.”
   3. Fundamentally a pretty different role, a lot more time thinking about product, impact, metrics. Doing more product requirement/speccing, and then technical scoping has some control but he only reads them and doesn’t author. More and more of the technical work is delegated to the team. To be value additive, you still need technical background and understand if the design is going to hit any roadblocks. Needing to clear the road for engineers and sanity check them. Making sure that the project runs smoothly.
   4. Pace setter, quality bar, expectations setter, goto person for issues whether technical or personal. Problem solving at the collaboration layer. Liason between leadership and the rest of the company.
   5. Everyone at phantom is a product engineer who makes product decisions. Engineering product leads are very valuable.
   6. He learned a lot at 0x, and being an EM; he wished he had more mentorship wrt being a good manager. Who will be levelling me up and holding me accountable? One of the conditions is I want a management coach or someone who can help. Management coaches are super helpful; it’s better than nothing but less good than having another manager at the org that we’re a part of mentoring. Raoul the Phantom EM is the highest performing, he’s got a lot of experience.
7. What is the job of a founder actually? What do you need to be good at to be a successful founder?
   1. A lot of it is finding product market fit. Finding the right opportunity with the right product to build, and proving that out.
   2. Once you figure that out, you can hire people who are experts at anything, and you can tell them. And then execution, there’s a lot of people who are good at that.
   3. There’s very few people who are good at spotting/creating the opportunity. That’s what’s unique about being a founder.
   4. Joining phantom/succinct doesn’t make sense through this lens; join a repeat founder as early employee or doing it myself.
   5. There are people that are really good at this; first principles thinking and doing the research and talking to people to get an accurate representation of how the world works, and what is the problem/why, even Blowfish didn’t do a good enough job at this; recognized the problem, but didn’t ask ourselves critically enough as to why that problem hadn’t already been solved. Assumed that it was just technical, “it’s a hard problem technically so ppl said they didn’t wanna”. But the real problem was that there was an incentive alignment; the entity that could do something about it wasn’t the ones that were suffering. The wallets weren’t losing money, the users were, but the wallets could solve it. Things that are hard to measure fall through the cracks.
   6. Who’s the best at this, who has a strong track record, work with them on that journey. Everything else falls into place.
   7. Francesco said it well; “building phantom was me doing a shit job at everything, and hiring people who could do a better job at everything than I could.” it’s a massive privileg you have if you have product market fit.
   8. It’s hard to know who is good at this; but even with repeat founders, have to be careful and think if they did it right the first time, and if it was really them who did it or if they were along for the ride.
   9. Maybe it’s recency bias on being jaded by b2b, but maybe look towards b2c. there’s less decision makers between you and the problem as b2c, and you don’t need to convince the world, you need to convince 1 person and that they want this thing, and they’re not deciding on this on behalf of a company, where there’s incentive misalignments on “principal agent problem”. This is way bigger problem than he thought. The principal is the agent in b2c. There’s shorter sales cycles, which is dead time in which you can fool yourself that this is going to eventually succeed. With consumer, it either works or not; do they want to use it or not. Friction to adoption is lower.
   10. It’s hard.
8. Do some soul searching and figure out what do I want to do and why do I want to do it? It can be easy to get swept up in “starting a company is good for status” or “it’s one of the hardest things that I could do it because it’s hard” but it’s a long journey and a big commitment so it needs to be driven with a love for the craft and really deeply caring about building something that’s going to take on a life of its own. If you doi t for the wrong reason, you’ll run out of steam so the only way is to have intrinsic motivation that doesn’t go away when the going gets tough. Are the reasons going to carry me through the whole journey.
9. The world tells you no, things, don’t work, and so much doubt and pressure and anxiety and stress. It’s the mental olympics staying sane and healthy. Sticking in the arena.
10. After selling blowfish, he’s still working full time and doing the same things, but weight lifted off and he feels lighter w/o having the responsibility of leading a company and initiative and having investors and employees that he’s responsible for.
    1. He had this fallacy in his brain where if he wasn’t stressed/anxious/worried, that meant he didn’t care enough; caring and worrying was one in the same in his brain, and he’s now disentangling about these things.
11. Jim posen, brandon, francesco, talk to them through Fabio, walletconnect founder/cto,
12. Hard to go wrong, will learn a ton going either way, but spending short stints at a lot of other companies gives you a window into different ways that things can be done. And can accelerate the process of “that’s way better than this” and getting more examples on how to do things and picking the best of each. As opposed to trying to reinvent the wheel and make all the same mistakes again. Doing customer research/getting pmf/figuring out the problem/why solve it/why can you capture value, that’s still core.
13. Another visa route, start a us company, incorporate one in canada too, have the canadian company owned by the us entity, hire myself to the canadian entity, and then the canadian entity needs to exist for 1 year and I can apply for an L1, and there’s no cap, it’s guaranteed, it takes 1-2mo