How to BUIDL a Crypto Startup - Rune Bentien

hello everybody i hope you're having a good time people a bit tired been a long week long night well listen um thank you so much for the organizers uh to invite me to talk about how to build a crypto startup um and also thanks to you guys for attending people in person and from afar but um anyhow my name is roon i'm one of six team members at the move which is a firm investing in projects building on near and uh that gives us focus we only focus on the near protocol aurora and octopus and so forth but you could probably ask yourself like why am i here to talk about how to build a crypto startup and i was asking myself the same question because really we should find some unicorn or you know even bigger number founders uh to come and talk about how to build a successful crypto startup but it was a suggestion of a theme from the organizers and i was just like let us see how we can address it um and give you some useful input or at least some perspective on things and how we look at the world so um you may be disappointed if he's not going to talk about crypto economics or anything like that but we're just going to focus on three themes and um you could probably argue that from our team we are looking at a collection of yeah thousands of data points from working with founders in web 2 and web 3. um but yeah here we go so i think one of the if not the determining factor for building a successful crypto business whether it is crypto or not is probably secondary right is really speed speed of decision making and speed of execution and we'll come back to that in a second we're not only talking about shipping products fast and failing here and we're not talking about drugs or the movie called speed but we come back to that the other one that we think are really important to address if you want to build a great company is the culture right we're building the culture and the values knowingly or unknowingly as we go from day one and especially the founding team are critical in this component the third one might be the odd one but that's brief and we'll take that in the end okay so i try to keep these sort of themes high level symbol there are three things you do not i do not expect you to agree with all what we say but at least if you listen you know and we get you to reflect a little bit and then you can throw it out the other way that's all fine right like but i would really say the most important thing that we tell our founders the determinant factor for you guys to be successful and be a category killer is speed right make decisions fast and also um actually execute on them fast and i don't know if you know dave gerrard who is the ceo of and founder of upstart but he did a really nice article on first round capital about building out speed as a habit right and i would recommend you to take a look at that you can use your preferred search engines to find the article it should be very easy um but i think the one sort of one of the key points to stood out to me when when going through that and sort of sharing that as some sort of advice with founders is it's more important when a decision is being made then actually what decision is being made because most decisions can also like always be you know changed or reversed um but you do have to consider like whenever you make decisions the type of decisions you make like how much resources is needed and actually also try to put an end date on them right and that's often something that is forgotten when you enter meetings and so forth with the team like when do we actually do stuff it's easy when you just do people or for people maybe right but when you grow the team you need to consider these things to create that sort of habit of speed in the organization anyhow the next one is culture so i spent nine years at google and the one key learning i had was it's all about the people you know google is an amazing still company it's a conventional company now but still an amazing company when it comes to the culture and i think the sole reason or i strongly believe that the sole reason for them being so successful is the fact that it built this very very strong culture and i think the point here is um it's not about hiring per se right but it's really about the culture you're trying to you know create in an organization and um you could look at uh actually jenny who is our people partner she spent 14 years at google in various hiring roles and um you know the founders letters was a really important thing right like larry and sergey actually came down and said we want to not we do not want to build like a conventional company also the way they did the ipo and so forth as some of you might know back and forth uh 2004 um but anyhow like when when the founders sort of stood back and left the company i suppose you could say she was just like this is turning into a conventional company i'm probably going to see what i can figure out else and i think the the founders probably don't think about it that often but you are building those values that sort of represents the culture like from day one how you interact how you engage with people how you hire or fire people that needs to be done in a good way regardless of what the situation is um but i think like um you should really try to sort of if you're founding teams like think about like if someone mentions my company name what is the one word or value or like you want to be associated with that right i think that's a nice way to sort of try to simplify to get because culture can you know it's hard to put a finger on right it's not like numbers so um yeah i really encourage you to think about that and when i look at the as you would know by now the near ecosystem and the near protocol um in my experience also coming back to the speed thing like they are the best team in terms of technical execution right and uh humble people all around obviously bullish on the technology um but they also expect you to work right you can't just sit at your excuse me your ass and uh wait things to wait for things to happen right um and i think like there is that strong which is becoming more and more evident when we see the near ecosystem grow there's an exceptionally strong focus on building right and getting builders who want to come in it's not just about the financial returns like from upfront right but actually you want to create great products that have value for others and impact um and i think those things are really really like can be really guided or come through partition i suppose if you have a strong false culture with the values that you know are important to you anyhow so the last one is brief so you know the last two years i mean you had a little around the cobit when that sort of started to frighten everybody like in the early the spring of 2020 you know funding and so forth stopped for a quick while but like then you know it just went through the roof in general when it comes to the venture and startup ecosystem and then you had crypto which was just like on steroids right and you know the space is moving so fast and um obviously that's where also the speed piece comes in but as a founder you're wearing several hats all the time and i think strategically you would as a founder want to work towards a position which will take years where you can have the freedom to focus only on the activities or the work you want to do so you can have the most impact right but that's not possible in the early days right but in order to get there you also need to take a step back and actually breathe right and just get that mac review right so i'm actually going to ask you to do a little exercise with me here don't please don't think about anything right just close your eyes you know and take one big deep breath yeah and do it two times more as deep as you can and exhale slowly and i'm sure if you do it properly i mean we all know this right but because we forget about actually breathing it's just something we don't think about but actually if you're conscious about it you can feel it in your brain i'm sure some of you can feel that you've got more oxygen to your head right now but you know taking a step back many years ago i spent a couple of years in the military and one of the ways that luckily i was never in combat but when we were doing like field exercises you know basically we were looking i mean i'm from denmark and if you've been to denmark the highest mountain is called the sky mountain and it's 165 meters high it's just a hill so this is somewhere in austria but the point i'm trying to make is you know i was trying to visualize myself standing you know i have a map i know we are going to go that way we don't know that we know that it's not going to be a straight line and we know we need to sort of navigate our way through the exact same thing in startup world right there will be tables there will be changes external factors and so forth but therefore it's so important for you guys to actually just take a step back once in a while and founders and actually try to figure out where you're going and that can be hard because you're in full execution mode all the time and i suppose you know you also need to look back and um whether it's to see why did you arrive where you arrived right and that can be it's easy to forget because we move as fast as we do but i would highly recommend you guys i'm really bad at it but capture notes whether like understand where you're going like you know create some kind of diary create a weekly internal newsletter you have your investor newsletters which also really useful right but try to capture whether it's you know qualitative also quantitative data so you can actually understand how you're progressing because that's you know the only way for you to learn and understand where you should go next and um yeah i think like uh on that like traction in terms of metrics just as a sort of a side note or a fun fact um you know i think it's super important like who you are like which company are where you're at what stage you are at uh in the the metrics you need to measure against obviously differ and um i think my the best example i could come up with is um sitcom silicon valley as i'm sure some of you or many of you have seen when they are like to have this celebration as i remember it's celebration party and have this big counter on a big screen and the downloads of the apps is just going through the roof and then they realize there is zero actual usage of the app and um just make sure that you track the right things as well depending on where you're at and that's where i think like just try to breathe once in a while and you will actually get a better feel for whether you're in the right direction or not um yeah so three things speed culture breathe right think about them if you remember one of them you don't need to agree but like take them with you and i'm hopeful uh it will have a little bit of impact anyhow if you also alarm on near we are actually hiring someone who can help us do technical due diligence on all the projects we work with so if you're interested come and talk to us email jenny she's here somewhere as well and yeah i just want to say thank you so much and enjoy the rest of the conference thank